Who’s lobbying whom? When it comes to alcohol, tobacco, food and gambling firms, we’re in the dark

November 13, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jennifer Lacy-Nichols, Research fellow, The University of Melbourne

Alcohol, tobacco, food and gambling industries are among those that lobby government ministers and their advisors to help shape public policy.

But when we looked for details of who’s lobbying whom in Australia, we found government lobbyist registers largely left us in the dark.

In our recently published research, we found these registers were time-consuming to navigate and not detailed enough. The registers couldn’t give us a comprehensive picture of who’s lobbying whom, and how often. Most registers weren’t set up to do so.

We’re concerned about this lack of transparency and the potential for business interests to have undue influence over health policies. This has the potential to diminish trust in government, a risk to democracy.

Why are we concerned about lobbying?

In Australia, anyone can lobby governments and has a right to represent their views. It’s an important part of the democratic process. Yet not everyone has fair access to decision makers.

Some individuals and businesses have outsized and undue influence on government decision making. Lobbying is one form of such influence.

For instance, in the past ten years or so, the alcohol industry has lobbied to delay implementation of pregnancy warning labels.

The gambling industry, which has funnelled millions of dollars into both major political parties, has lobbied to weaken gambling regulations.

The tobacco industry sued the Australian government for its plain packaging laws, after concerted lobbying had failed to derail plans to introduce them. While the lawsuit was unsuccessful, this has deterred other governments from implementing similar laws.

A deep dive into lobbyist registers

Understanding who is seeing which government ministers or their advisors and what they are meeting about is the first step towards protecting against undue political influence and fostering political integrity.

So we decided to look at lobbyist registers to see what they tell us. These registers are like digital phone books, with information about lobbyists. The aim of these registers is to guard against undue or unethical political influence.

Last year, we systematically extracted information from all lobbyist registers in Australia. All jurisdictions, except for the Northern Territory, have one. We:

compared the disclosure requirements of Australian with international registers
mapped the population of lobby firms, lobbyists and clients that were active in each jurisdiction
identified which lobby firms represented tobacco, alcohol, gambling and ultra-processed food organisations.

Here’s what we found

Compared to international lobbying registers, Australian registers provided little information. In the United States, for instance, companies must disclose how much money they spend on lobbying.

Only four jurisdictions (federal, Australian Capital Territory, Victoria and Queensland) provided information about whether a lobbyist had previously worked in government. We need to know this to gauge whether there are any conflicts of interest.

Of the registers that provided this information, few provided enough detail to identify the specific position or the exact date a lobbyist left government. Of particular concern, 96 lobbyists said they both had and had not worked in government, raising questions about oversight of these registers.

Which industry hired the most lobby firms?

Of the four industries we explored, gambling organisations hired the most lobby firms, followed by food, alcohol and tobacco.

Tobacco companies hired lobby firms in six jurisdictions, potentially contravening Article 5.3 of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which warns against the tobacco industry lobbying governments.

Most registers are a directory of lobbyists rather than their activities. So, as most registers did not require disclosure of lobbying activities, it is unclear what service the firms provided for the tobacco industry.

What’s missing?

Registers only provide information about “third party” lobbyists that work for professional lobby firms. This excludes many lobbyists working in Australia, such as those working directly for tobacco or alcohol companies or industry associations. In practice, this means a great deal of lobbying is hidden from the public.

Except for Queensland, registers did not provide a record of lobbyist meetings or contact with government officials. This information is important to understand who meets whom, and why.

The lobbyist registers hold no information about how much money is spent on, or received for, lobbying activities.

Lastly, we cannot see which individual lobbyists worked for which client. For firms that represent organisations with different interests, this raises questions about potential conflicts of interest.

Greater transparency and oversight needed

In the past year, Australia has created the National Anti-Corruption Commission and recommendations about reforming political donations. Lobbying reform is the next logical step to ensure an integrated and coherent approach to political integrity.

The Australian government, like others, has a lobbying code of conduct with rules about ethical behaviour. It also stipulates that former members of government are not allowed to work as lobbyists for a “cooling off period” of 12 or 18 months (depending on where someone worked in government).

However, in the lobbying code, “lobbyist” is only understood as those working for third-party firms (such as the ones we analysed). It places no restrictions on ministers or government officials taking jobs with companies they used to regulate, or the consulting sector. Expanding the definition to include all forms of lobbying would help close this loophole.

We also need better enforcement of the rules around lobbying with sanctions and fines imposed to improve compliance.

Jennifer Lacy-Nichols receives funding from the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation. She is a member of the People’s Health Movement, Healthy Food Systems Australia and the expert advisory group on commercial determinants of health for the World Health Organization. The findings of the research reported in this article, and the views expressed, are hers alone and not necessarily those of the above organisations.

Katherine Cullerton receives funding from the NHMRC and the Children’s Health Foundation. She is on the executive of the Food and Nutrition Special Interest Group for the Public Health Association of Australia.

– ref. Who’s lobbying whom? When it comes to alcohol, tobacco, food and gambling firms, we’re in the dark – https://theconversation.com/whos-lobbying-whom-when-it-comes-to-alcohol-tobacco-food-and-gambling-firms-were-in-the-dark-216835

We need a global treaty to solve plastic pollution – acid rain and ozone depletion show us why

By The Conversation -

November 13, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deborah Lau, Ending Plastic Waste Mission Director, CSIRO

After years of discussion, international negotiations on a global plastics treaty resume this week in Nairobi, Kenya, at the UN Environment Programme headquarters.

The third session of the UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution will take place from today until Sunday November 19.

The committee’s goal is to develop a legally binding agreement, finalised in 2024, to address the full life cycle of plastics – including their production, design and disposal.

Involving 175 nations, the treaty aims to transform plastic waste management, paving the way for new technologies and industries.

The problem of plastic pollution is too big for any one nation to handle. That’s why we need a global approach. It’s worked before with the ozone layer and acid rain and it can work again with plastic.

How we repaired the ozone layer

At CSIRO I lead the Ending Plastic Waste Mission, which aims to change the way we make, use, recycle and dispose of plastic. Our work aligns with the aims of the proposed UN plastic treaty, so I have been following the negotiations closely.

Multilateral agreements have helped create significant change in the past. The Montreal Protocol shaped environmental and industrial landscapes globally. Enacted in 1987, the protocol’s objective was to phase out substances causing ozone depletion.

The protocol is widely recognised for its global ratification – everyone got on board. And countries continued to adhere to the changes. This ongoing work has not only contributed to the tangible recovery of the ozone layer, but also prevented millions of potential cases of skin cancers and cataracts.

The protocol also sparked chemical industry innovation. Industries had to transition away from ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs to more environmentally friendly alternatives.

The earliest replacements – hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs – were quickly recognised as a potent greenhouse gas, resulting in the 2016 Kigali Amendment to the protocol to phase them out too and use climate-friendly alternatives. As a result of this global process, we now have safer chemicals for refrigeration and air conditioning.

Global legislation can deliver real change

Clean air legislation is another example. Acid rain became a prominent environmental concern in the latter half of the 20th century. It happens when sulphur dioxide (SO₂) and nitrogen oxides are released into the atmosphere, typically from industrial processes and the burning of fossil fuels.

Once in the atmosphere, these pollutants react with water vapour to form sulphuric acid and nitric acid. As they fall to the ground mixed with rain or snow, the high acidity harms aquatic ecosystems, forests and even human-made structures.

In response, various countries enacted clean air legislation. For instance, the United States Clean Air Act of 1963, amended several times in the following decades, motivated change in industrial and automotive sectors.

The laws forced industries to transition to cleaner technologies and invest in advanced pollution-control equipment. This paved the way for a widespread adoption of catalytic converters and more fuel-efficient engines.

How multilateral agreements can force change

Regulatory tools such as multilateral agreements introduce restrictions. Instead of doing business as usual, these restrictions then foster cleaner, more sustainable practices. They blend environmental responsibility with business imperatives. As a result, the regulatory changes open up new market opportunities.

Additionally, global collaborations driven by these agreements often encourage the transfer of technologies across borders. This speeds up the adoption of cleaner technologies.

Multilateral environmental agreements can drive technological progress and industrial innovation. By establishing high standards and fostering global collaboration, these agreements blend environmental stewardship with industrial evolution.

Now for the UN plastic treaty

The global plastic treaty will address the pervasive challenge of plastic pollution, which affects our oceans, marine life and carbon footprint. It is expected to usher in transformative regulations on waste management, reduce the use of single-use plastics and advocate for the circular economy principles of eliminating waste and keeping materials circulating in use.

We are already seeing a shift in plastics manufacturing towards more sustainable, biodegradable, or recyclable plastics. Industries are developing more circular business models that emphasise the reuse and recycling of products and reducing waste.

To reduce single-use plastics, the packaging industry is transitioning towards reduction, reuse and recyclability. Advanced recycling technologies and better bio-derived plastics are expected to emerge as industry standards.

The multilateral treaty and its implementation will help to reduce problematic and unnecessary plastics. It will also speed up the removal of harmful chemicals from product supply chains.

The UN plastic treaty is set to be finalised in 2024. If we can get a global agreement on this, we have a real opportunity to significantly reduce plastic waste for a sustainable future.

CSIRO’s Ending Plastic Waste Mission is funded through contributions by CSIRO, industry, government, university, and other organisations to develop cutting-edge science and innovation to tackle plastic waste.

– ref. We need a global treaty to solve plastic pollution – acid rain and ozone depletion show us why – https://theconversation.com/we-need-a-global-treaty-to-solve-plastic-pollution-acid-rain-and-ozone-depletion-show-us-why-207622

Why are my kids good around other people and then badly behaved with me?

By The Conversation -

November 13, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Trevor Mazzucchelli, Associate professor, Curtin University

Parents may be familiar with this scenario: a child is well behaved at school and polite to their teachers but has a meltdown at home in the afternoon.

Or they say please and thank you at a friend’s house but are rude with their family. They follow the rules if they visit a neighbour but have to be constantly reminded about not slamming doors and raiding the pantry at home.

Why is this so? And is there anything you can do about it?

Children learn early their behaviour matters

Even well behaved children misbehave from time to time.

A child jumps on a couch — Children may misbehave just to see what happens.
Ksenia Chernaya/Pexels, CC BY-SA

When young children get tired, such as after a play date or a long day at daycare or school, they can become irritable and disruptive. Children are also naturally curious and may misbehave sometimes just to see what happens.

However, some children seem to behave consistently worse at home than with other people. To understand this phenomenon, it’s necessary to understand why children behave the way they do.

From the very beginning, a child’s behaviour produces results or outcomes. For example, babies soon learn crying is a very effective way of signalling they are in distress. Parents quickly learn to change a wet nappy or feed their infant when they cry. A smile often results in an adult smiling back, cooing or cuddling the baby.

So children quickly realise their behaviour can be an effective way of controlling the actions of others.

The bad behaviour pay-off

Children’s behaviour, whether desirable or undesirable, is influenced by the consequences it produces.

Sometimes, the reactions of parents or siblings can accidentally reward misbehaviour, and children learn undesirable behaviour has a payoff.

For example, children may learn that when they don’t do as they’re told, they get extra attention from their parents. This attention may be reasoning, discussing, arguing, nagging or repeating instructions over and over. It may not be seen as a “reward” to adults, but children are getting more attention from mum or dad.

Children may also learn when they whine and complain for an electronic device they are more likely to get it.

Unfortunately, in this scenario, the child is rewarded for whining and the parent is rewarded for giving them the iPad because it stops a highly irritating noise (at least in the short term). As both the child and the parent are rewarded, this interaction is likely to occur again.

A child lies on the floor on a pile of clothes. — Parents can unintentionally reward misbehaviour.
Ketum Subiyanto/Pexels, CC BY-SA

Why are kids better at school?

When children are with less familiar people, they do not know how others will respond or what behaviour will result in a payoff. In these circumstances it is common for there to be less undesirable behaviour, at least temporarily.

Children can also behave better at school than at home because teachers have very good systems in place. Children are kept busy with a variety of engaging activities, expectations of children’s behaviour are clear, and the payoff for desirable behaviour is reliable. Teachers are well practised at recognising and rewarding desirable behaviour through attention, praise and sometimes token reward systems.

Children also tend to imitate their peers’ behaviour, particularly if they see it gets results, such as attention from the teacher or access to prized activities.

A classroom of children raise their hand, looking at the teacher. — When it comes to a child’s behaviour, school has the benefit of set routines and positive peer role models.
Arthur Krijgsman/Pexels, CC BY-SA

How can parents help kids to behave better at home?

The good news is if children behave well in one setting, we know they are capable of doing the same at home.

Parents can value children’s need to relax at home while still expecting them to be polite and follow rules. By making some small changes, it’s usually possible to see much improved behaviour.

Here are some practical things parents can do:

establish routines. Have a routine for when your child gets home from school or outings. This might include allowing your child to unwind and relax, giving them a healthy snack, and then setting them up with an engaging activity. Routines make it easier for everyone to transition from one setting to another. It is even better if the routine includes activities – such as colouring-in or a run around outside – that are calming or burn off energy.
set simple house rules. Have a few simple rules that clearly communicate to your child how you expect them to behave. For example: “use an inside voice” or “keep the toys on the floor”.
notice good behaviour. Let your child know when they have done the right thing. Do this by describing what you are pleased with (“you two are sharing the toy so nicely”). This will make it more likely the behaviour will occur again.
spend small amounts of time with your child regularly. This is especially important when your child approaches you for help or attention. It shows you’re there for them and they do not need to become louder or act out to get your attention. Spending small amounts of time – as little as one or two minutes – often throughout the day is a powerful way of strengthening your relationship with your child and preventing problem behaviour.
have realistic expectations. Change is easier if you focus on one or two goals at a time. Also, when striving to improve behaviour, expect occasional setbacks. No child (or parent) is perfect!

Trevor Mazzucchelli is a co-author of Stepping Stones Triple P – Positive Parenting Program and a consultant to Triple P International. The Parenting and Family Support Centre is partly funded by royalties stemming from published resources of the Triple P – Positive Parenting Program, which is developed and owned by The University of Queensland (UQ). Royalties are also distributed to the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences at UQ and contributory authors of published Triple P resources. Triple P International (TPI) Pty Ltd is a private company licensed by UniQuest Pty Ltd on behalf of UQ, to publish and disseminate Triple P worldwide. He has no share or ownership of TPI, but has received and may in the future receive royalties and/or consultancy fees from TPI. TPI had no involvement in writing of this article.

– ref. Why are my kids good around other people and then badly behaved with me? – https://theconversation.com/why-are-my-kids-good-around-other-people-and-then-badly-behaved-with-me-217279

A 360 camera, 1℃ weather and an ambitious VR documentary: what I learnt as cinematographer on Sorella’s Story

By The Conversation -

November 13, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gilberto Roque, Lecturer, Filmmaker and Cinematographer, School of Creative Arts, University of Southern Queensland

How does one successfully navigate obstacles such as extreme weather, a tight deadline and a spontaneous shot list in a foreign country as a solo cinematographer on a 360 project?

In December 2019 I was in a group of Griffith Film School master’s degree students who travelled to Hungary and Latvia to create an immersive short documentary film using 360 virtual reality (VR) technology.

Sorella’s Story, written and directed by Peter Hegedus, associate professor and filmmaker at Griffith University, showcases re-enactments based on photos of atrocities committed against Jewish people during the Holocaust in Latvia.

The shot schedule was ambitious. We had five exterior scenes to be shot in only a few hours because of the limited daylight. We had a crew of about ten people.

I was director of photography and the only cameraperson. A daunting task in any filmmaking situation, it was made tenfold more challenging by being a 360 project that no one on the crew had experience working with.

New technology brings new challenges

Viewed through virtual reality lenses, 360-degree films offer the viewer an opportunity to watch a video from all angles.

Unlike traditional cameras with a single lens, our 360 camera looks like a soccer ball, with six small lenses placed throughout the body.

It was a new technology for me and I was curious to see how it was going to change our approach. For example, the six lenses film simultaneously, so the operator and crew need to ensure we have a safe spot to hide to avoid being caught in the frame.

Split screen: women in white, two people in coats. — The documentary film featured re-enactments based on photographs.
Author provided.

The distance actors appear from the lens is especially important in 360 filming. This is because the images are “stitched” together in post-production. If the subjects are too close to the lenses, the images can’t be combined to create the appearance of a single shot.

After our test shoots, we gave actors marks to hit in and out of frames and the maximum and minimum distances they could be from the camera. These modifications enabled us to capture the action from all 360 angles.

We needed precise blocking and rehearsed co-ordination between actors and crew to capture the entire scene. Every time a scene was recorded, the director would call action, and the sound and camera crew would have a few seconds to run and hide out of frame. Only then would the actors begin to move.

360 inherently brings with it technical challenges, but Sorella’s Story had the compounding issues of weather, a remote location and myself as a cinematographer without a crew and limited time to learn the technology.

Shooting plan

Prior to filming a conventional project, directors and cinematographers break down the script into a shot list – a written breakdown of every shot that will be undertaken – and storyboard, visually symbolising those shots through illustrations or sketches.

Both tools help the filmmaking process and ensure the creative vision is realised on set.

Storyboards are less important in 360: you aren’t considering how different angles will be used in a shoot, and there is much more spontaneity in the actors’ movement. There is so much action to capture at once storyboards would just confuse the issue.

Instead, a shot list and script were followed in some moments, but were used as only a guide.

A film set. — The cast and crew faced cold and icy conditions.
Author provided.

Obstacles and problem-solving

December is one of the coldest months of the year in Budapest, Hungary, with average temperatures of no more than 1°C. At this time of year the days are short, the nights are long, and icy weather conditions are expected. Those conditions brought another challenge: the battery life of electronic devices.

I quickly learned cold weather drains the battery. I tried to reduce cold exposure on the camera by covering the camera with my beanie, with limited success. Battery life that was usually two hours was down to 20 minutes.

Because of the limited budget, we had only two batteries for each device. Ideally, we would have one battery in the camera and the other plugged into the charger.

However, we had no power supply on set. Every time a battery ran out it would be 10 minutes to the nearest power supply, plus at least 30 minutes to recharge.

A beanie on a camera. — Gilberto Roque protecting the camera from the snow.
Jemma Potgieter

Shooting in this cold climate, ensuring I was invisible on set and maintaining the delicate balance of the distance of actors from the camera demanded a complete re-evaluation of my filmmaking approach. It forced me to be agile in my workflow and engage in real-time problem-solving.

Despite the inherent challenges, working on this project provided me with invaluable experience in this cutting-edge technology. With the current interest in immersive experiences, 360 cinematography has a part to play in cinema’s future.

Gilberto Roque was a master’s student at Griffith Film School when working on Sorella’s Story.

– ref. A 360 camera, 1℃ weather and an ambitious VR documentary: what I learnt as cinematographer on Sorella’s Story – https://theconversation.com/a-360-camera-1-weather-and-an-ambitious-vr-documentary-what-i-learnt-as-cinematographer-on-sorellas-story-212699

NZ workers have few protections if their employer goes bust – fixing the Companies Act would help

By The Conversation -

November 13, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Trish Keeper, Associate professor in Commercial Law, School of Accounting and Commercial Law, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

When independent supermarket startup Supie went bust last month, the company’s 120 employees were told they wouldn’t be paid for their last two weeks of work, or receive any of their owed annual leave pay.

The subsequent appointment of voluntary administrators again highlighted New Zealand’s limited protection for employees when their employer becomes insolvent.

Supie’s employees are not the first, nor will they be the last, to lose out when their employer goes under. In 2019, staff at restaurant chain Wagamama were owed NZ$50,000 when the company went into liquidation.

In both cases, the wages were eventually paid out by someone outside the company. In the case of Wagamama, by the franchise head office in the United Kingdom. Supie staff received their wages from an anonymous donor.

While the loss of money for any creditor is difficult, the double impact of losing wages as well as a job is particularly hard for employees.

So, what is it in New Zealand’s current legislation that puts employees in this difficult situation? And what can be done to protect staff when businesses fail?

The current pecking order

In terms of corporate insolvencies, there are three options: voluntary administration, receivership and liquidation.

Liquidations are the most common form of corporate insolvency process. When this happens, the company ceases to trade and a liquidator is appointed.

Under the Companies Act 1993, the liquidator’s role is to sell the company assets to repay unsecured creditors. In practice, only those assets not under a prior legal claim by one or more of the company’s creditors (for example, collateral used to secure a bank loan) are available to the liquidator to sell.

Once a liquidator has sold the company’s remaining assets, the Companies Act sets the order in which the debts are to be paid.

Preferential claims are to be paid before the claims of other unsecured creditors. Employees are considered preferential creditors.

There are five classes of preferential creditors in the Companies Act. Costs relating to the liquidation, including the liquidators’ fees, are ranked first, followed by the payment of unpaid wages and specified other amounts owed to employees.

Accordingly, amounts owed to employees are paid out after liquidation costs have been sorted – and only if there is any money left from the failed business. There is also a cap on what each employee can claim – currently set at $25,480 –regardless of what they are owed.

In practice, this means there is no guarantee employees will receive their unpaid wages when a business fails.

It all depends on whether there is enough money after secured creditors have accessed the assets used as collateral and the liquidator has paid their own fees. And this is often not the case.

Liquidators can take company directors to court for breaching their duties, such as recklessly trading. But this sort of action takes time, and there is no guarantee it will increase the amount of money available to unpaid staff. It took a decade for liquidators to secure a final judgement against the four directors of failed construction company Mainzeal.

Law changes could protect workers

New Zealand’s approach to protecting workers compares badly to other countries, where government schemes bolster the protections for unpaid employee debts. Such schemes operate alongside the preferential creditor rules in corporate law.

For example, in the Australian Corporations Act 2001, unpaid wages, superannuation contributions and certain other payments owed to employees are classed as preferential debts.

However, there is also a nationally-funded scheme that operates as a safety net for employees, which allows them to claim up to 13 weeks of unpaid wages, annual leave and other entitlements.

After the scheme makes a payment to employees, it then takes the employees’ place as a preferential creditor in the liquidation. A similar scheme operates in the UK.

Other options adopted in some countries include granting employee claims (capped or uncapped) “super-priority” status, which means they are paid before secured and other unsecured debts.

The previous New Zealand government, with support from Business New Zealand and the Council of Trade Unions, proposed introducing a social insurance scheme.

This would have paid up to seven months of wages at 80% of salary for most workers, funded through employee and employer contributions. But Labour eventually put the policy on ice, and the National Party has opposed such a scheme.

Because the government doesn’t collect the data, it is hard to say how many employees receive all or part of the amounts owing to them as preferential creditors when the company they work for fails.

But what is clear is that the current approach of labelling New Zealand workers privileged creditors does not guarantee they will see any money if their employers go into liquidation. The situation would be improved if New Zealand followed the best overseas examples.

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

– ref. NZ workers have few protections if their employer goes bust – fixing the Companies Act would help – https://theconversation.com/nz-workers-have-few-protections-if-their-employer-goes-bust-fixing-the-companies-act-would-help-216811

Jewish groups ‘highly concerned’ at Wong’s Middle East comments, as Marles says Australian Jews don’t feel safe

By The Conversation -

November 12, 2023

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

Jewish organisations have criticised Foreign Minister Penny Wong over her latest comments on the Israel-Gaza conflict, while Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles has said Jewish Australians “have never felt less safe”.

As pro-Palestinian demonstrations continued in the major Australian cities at the weekend, Wong on Sunday called on Israel to “cease the attacking of hospitals” in Gaza.

She said steps towards a ceasefire were needed but it could not be one-sided. “We know that Hamas is still holding hostages and we know that a ceasefire must be agreed between the parties,” she told the ABC.

“But we can also say that Israel should do everything it can to observe international humanitarian law. We have seen a harrowing number of civilians, including children, killed. This has to end. We are particularly concerned with what is happening with medical facilities.

“International humanitarian law does require the protection of hospitals, of patients and of medical staff. We do call on Israel to cease the attacking of hospitals,” Wong said.

“We understand the argument that Hamas has burrowed into civilian infrastructure, but […] the international community, looking at what’s occurring at hospitals, would say to Israel, these are facilities protected under international law and we want you to do so.”

Wong’s remarks follow mounting international pressure for a ceasefire and a strong call from French President Macron for Israel to stop bombing Gaza.

But in a joint statement late Sunday the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry said they were “highly concerned” at Wong’s comments.

“The Foreign Minister stated that ‘we all want to take the next steps towards a ceasefire’, while noting that no ceasefire could be ‘one-sided’. But unless and until Hamas is removed from power, a ceasefire will inevitably further endanger Israel,” the statement said.

In relation to her call for hospital attacks to cease, the statement said under the Geneva Convention hospitals lost their protection if used for military purposes – as Hamas did.

“The libel that any Israeli attack on Gazan hospitals from which Hamas operates would amount to war crimes only serve to demonise the state of Israel and its supporters. These libels are central to Hamas’
objectives […] and are reverberating across the world in a new wave of antisemitism,”the statement said.

It said the Australian government “should not be lending any credibility to this false and harmful narrative.”

Amid rising fears about the division in Austrlaia the conflict is inflaming, Marles condemned Friday’s demonstration in the Melbourne suburb of Caulfield.

He told Sky the demonstration “on behalf of Palestine in the heart of the Jewish community was unacceptable.”

Late Friday, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel supporters clashed, and a nearby synagogue was evacuated.

The incident followed a fire at a burger shop owned by a man of Palestinian heritage, although police did not believe the fire was related to the man’s attendance at an earlier pro-Palestinian rally. Organisers, Free Palestine Melbourne, apologised for using an area near the synagogue.

Marles told Sky:“I think it’s fair to say that right now Jewish Australians have never felt less safe, and that is a real problem and we need to be moving to fix that. Clearly, anti-Semitism doesn’t have a place in our country and it’s very important that we are able, no matter what is happening elsewhere in the world, to maintain social cohesion here in Australia.

“Clearly people have a right to protest what’s happening in the Middle East. What’s happening in the Middle East is an unfolding tragedy. And people have the right to put pressure on their country’s government, on us, but there shouldn’t be demonstrations which are aimed at other members of the community. And Jewish Australians, as all Australians, clearly have a right to feel safe within their country.”

Australia has voted for a UNESCO resolution, drafted by Arab countries, that invites the governing bodies of relevant UNESCO conventions and programs “to assess the deteriorating situation in Gaza and develop measures to address its repercussions across UNESCO fields of competence”.

But Australia’s ambassador to UNESCO, Megan Anderson, recorded that despite its support, Australia believed the resolution incomplete because it did not make reference to the Hamas October 7 attack.

The motion passed 96 to 8 with 33 abstentions, with the United States voting against.

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

– ref. Jewish groups ‘highly concerned’ at Wong’s Middle East comments, as Marles says Australian Jews don’t feel safe – https://theconversation.com/jewish-groups-highly-concerned-at-wongs-middle-east-comments-as-marles-says-australian-jews-dont-feel-safe-217522

Australia’s offer of climate migration to Tuvalu residents is groundbreaking – and could be a lifeline across the Pacific

By The Conversation -

November 11, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane McAdam, Scientia Professor and Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW Sydney

For many years, I have been calling for the Australian government – along with other governments – to play its part in assisting Pacific communities affected by the adverse impacts of climate change and disasters.

Our region is already experiencing some of the most drastic effects of climate change. Pacific communities are showing enormous innovation and resilience in the face of these challenges, but as a matter of international solidarity and climate justice, additional support and cooperation is needed.

One way of providing assistance is by creating migration pathways for people who wish to move. Australia’s recent Pacific Engagement Visa is one such example – enabling up to 3,000 workers and their families from the Pacific and Timor-Leste to migrate permanently to Australia each year.

In addition, the new announcement this week of a Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union Treaty is groundbreaking. Under this deal, Australia will provide migration pathways for people from Tuvalu facing the existential threat of climate change. It is the world’s first bilateral agreement on climate mobility.

How the new visa program will work

Based on the principles of “neighbourliness, care and mutual respect”, the treaty is a result of a request by Tuvalu for Australia to support and assist its efforts on climate change, security and human mobility.

According to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “developed nations have a responsibility to provide assistance” to countries like Tuvalu that are deeply impacted by climate change.

Under the treaty, Australia will implement a special visa arrangement to allow Tuvaluans to work, study and live in Australia. This is not a refugee visa, but rather will allow up to 280 Tuvaluans (from a population of around 11,200) to migrate to Australia each year – presumably on a permanent basis.

They will be able to access Australian education, health care, and income and family support on arrival. This is a welcome development that will provide people with both legal and psychological security. Despite longstanding “promises” that Australia would not sit by as disasters continue to affect the Pacific, this program provides the long-awaited security that many have wanted.

Historically, most Pacific visa programs in Australia (and the region) have been tied to labour mobility. And none has specifically referenced climate change as a driving rationale. In contrast, the measures announced this week are deliberately framed in the context of climate change and – furthermore – are not tied purely to work.

Indeed, it remains to be seen just how far the special visas may extend. Beyond “work” and “study”, the treaty says Tuvaluans can also come to Australia to “live”. This implies the visa may potentially provide a humanitarian pathway for people who want – or need – to move. This would include older people, who would not qualify for existing Pacific labour migration programs.

Despite the threats posed by climate change, however, most Pacific peoples do not want to leave their homes. Being dislocated from home is one of the greatest forms of cultural, social and economic loss people can suffer. It can often lead to inter-generational trauma.

The treaty itself recognises Tuvaluans’ “deep, ancestral connections to land and sea”, and pledges Australia will work with Tuvalu to help people “stay in their homes with safety and dignity”. At the same time, people want to know they have safe options to move if they need to – with dignity and choice.

How novel is the new treaty?

While there are other programs in the Pacific that facilitate mobility, this is the first to do so specifically in the context of climate change. It also operates differently from arrangements implemented by New Zealand and the United States.

As part of the “realm” of New Zealand, for instance, people from the countries of Niue, Tokelau and Cook Islands are considered New Zealand citizens, so they have the right to move there if they wish.

New Zealand has also long had its “Pacific Access” visa category and the Samoa quota resident visa, which together enable around 2,400 people to move from the Pacific to New Zealand on a permanent basis each year.

The United States, meanwhile, has compacts of free association with the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau, which enable eligible citizens to enter the US visa-free and live and work there indefinitely. However, those migrants do not have access to many government benefits and can easily fall through the cracks.

Last year, Argentina announced a special humanitarian visa program for people displaced from 23 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean due to disasters. Unlike the Australia–Tuvalu treaty, which allows for migration in anticipation of climate-related disasters, access to the Argentinian program is only available after displacement has occurred. As yet, no one has used the scheme.

For at least two decades, Pacific governments have made perennial requests for special visa pathways or relocation to Australia for their citizens.

In 2019, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd proposed that Australia accept people from Tuvalu and other Pacific countries on account of projected climate impacts – but in exchange for “their territorial seas, their vast exclusive economic zones, including the preservation of their precious fisheries reserves”.

He was shot down by the then-prime minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga, who labelled it “imperial thinking”.

What could come next?

Last week, Pacific Leaders endorsed a world-first Pacific framework on climate mobility, which has gone relatively unnoticed, despite the Australia–Tuvalu announcement.

I had the privilege of working and consulting with Pacific governments and communities to draft the early versions of the framework. It will hopefully inspire the creation of further visa arrangements and other concrete mobility mechanisms to ensure Pacific peoples have dignified pathways to move when they wish, as well as support and assistance to remain in place when possible.

Earlier this year, Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa suggested the Pacific could create a European Union-like entity, “based on cooperation and integration”, that would enable free movement across the region.

If enacted, it would follow a similar agreement signed by leaders in eastern Africa that specifically allows people in that region to cross borders in anticipation of or in response to disasters.

Though this is still a long way off in the Pacific, the agreement between Australia and Tuvalu could help pave the way for similar mobility pathways across the region and – ultimately – a broader regional scheme. If, and when, that time comes, the choice, agency and dignity of affected communities must be front and centre.

Jane McAdam receives funding from the Australian Research Council. In 2022, she was commissioned to lead the drafting of the world’s first regional framework on climate mobility for Pacific governments. In 2018, she co-led the drafting of the International Law Association’s Sydney Declaration of Principles on the Protection of Persons Displaced in the context of Sea Level Rise.

– ref. Australia’s offer of climate migration to Tuvalu residents is groundbreaking – and could be a lifeline across the Pacific – https://theconversation.com/australias-offer-of-climate-migration-to-tuvalu-residents-is-groundbreaking-and-could-be-a-lifeline-across-the-pacific-217514

The High Court has decided indefinite detention is unlawful. What happens now?

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mary Anne Kenny, Associate Professor, School of Law, Murdoch University

This week, the High Court of Australia ordered the release of a Rohingya man from immigration detention where he had been for the last five and a half years.

Commentators and human rights groups have been celebrating this decision, which indicates the court will overturn a 20-year-old precedent.

The court has stated it will release its decision at a later time. It is important to wait for that judgement to determine the full implications of the decision and how it may limit the government’s power to detain non-citizens.

But here’s a brief rundown on the background of the case and some considerations of what could happen next.

What laws did the case focus on?

The laws in question are in the Migration Act, which states a non-citizen who does not hold a visa must be detained.

Currently people in immigration detention do not have the right to have a court determine whether their detention is necessary, reasonable, and/or proportionate. These assessments are undertaken by departmental officials and the minister.

The law considers detention mandatory, irrespective of the individual’s circumstances.

In the case of Al-Kateb v Godwin, the chief justice of the High Court described the need for detention:

A person […] might be young or old, dangerous or harmless, likely or unlikely to abscond, recently in detention or someone who has been there for years, healthy or unhealthy, badly affected by incarceration or relatively unaffected. The considerations that might bear upon the reasonableness of a discretionary decision to detain such a person do not operate.

The detained person must remain so until granted a visa or is removed.

Removal, if it’s needed, must occur as soon as “reasonably practicable”.

Over the years, many cases have tested these laws, and until now, the High Court has upheld them.

The lack of time limits on detention, and the inability to challenge it, have made Australia an outlier internationally.

The laws have also been heavily criticised, both domestically and globally.

Such has been the egregious nature of the system that the High Court allowed the UNSW Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law and the Human Rights Law Centre to argue the international human rights dimensions of the case.

Despite this, the policy has had bipartisan political support for decades.

Who was at the centre of the case?

The Rohingya refugee at the centre of the case is referred to as “NZYQ”. He’s around 30 years old.

As a Rohingya, he had not been able to obtain citizenship of Myanmar and was stateless.

He had arrived in Australia by boat in 2012. He had been granted a temporary visa, but this was cancelled in 2015 after he committed a criminal offence and was sentenced to a term in prison.

Still unable to get a visa, he was transferred to immigration detention once he’d served his sentence.

Australia accepted the man could not be sent to Myanmar, and instead tried unsuccessfully to have a number of other countries take him via their refugee or humanitarian programs.

Having found there was no country he could be removed to in the “reasonably foreseeable future” and his visa refused, the man was facing the prospect of remaining in detention indefinitely.

In light of this, the High Court found his ongoing detention was unlawful and they ordered his immediate release from detention.

Law that comes with a cost

There is an increasing number of people in detention who remain there for long periods of time. Some are stateless, and others who can’t be returned to their home countries due to risk of persecution.

Over the past five years, the average length of detention has increased from 445 days to 708 days. Some people have been detained for more than 10 years.

One of the many criticisms levelled at this system is that it’s extremely expensive.

Between 2020 and 2021, the average cost to the Australian taxpayer for one person in an immigration detention facility was $428,542.

That’s not to mention the significant physical and mental health toll on people.

There have been close to 3,000 incidents of self-harm, real and threatened, in detention over the past five years.

So what happens in the short term?

As a first step, the government may be facing the prospect of releasing a number of people who have been detained for several years.

It is estimated there may be 92 people impacted by the judgement.

The government has stated the Rohingya man in the case has been released on “strict conditions”, but we don’t know what sort of visa he might be on.

It is not clear what those conditions are, but legally, a person can be released from detention on a temporary “bridging visa”.

The Department of Home Affairs can impose conditions on a bridging visa which could include:

where the person lives
reporting regularly to the Department of Home Affairs
that the person “not engage in criminal conduct”
that they comply with a specific “Code of Behaviour”.

This, of course, should be accompanied by a range of psychological and social support services, which are currently very limited.

There will need to be consideration for better pathways to more visa certainty and permanent residency, especially for stateless people.

Legislative reform on the cards

We need to wait for the judgement to determine what, if any, legislative reform may be needed, but the government will be considering a number of options.

We should use this opportunity to ensure our laws comply with our human rights obligations.

International standards specify that a person detained for immigration purposes must be brought before a judicial authority “promptly” and that their detention must be subject to “regular periodic reviews”.

There is a substantial body of evidence demonstrating that hasn’t been the case for far too long.

A key legislative reform should be to make detention discretionary instead of mandatory. People should also have access to independent review of their detention.

There has been a wealth of inquiries, submissions and examples from overseas which the government could look to, for a start.

More will be revealed about this case in the coming weeks and months, but there are many things the government can start doing immediately to better balance this unfair and punitive system.

Mary Anne Kenny has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council and sitting fees from the Department of Home Affairs

– ref. The High Court has decided indefinite detention is unlawful. What happens now? – https://theconversation.com/the-high-court-has-decided-indefinite-detention-is-unlawful-what-happens-now-217438

About 1 in 6 older Australians experiences elder abuse. Here are the reasons they don’t get help

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eileen O’Brien, Professor of Law, Discipline of Law, Justice and Society, University of South Australia

Each year, many older Australians experience abuse, neglect or financial exploitation, usually at the hands of their adult children or other close relatives.

A recent national prevalence study revealed one in six older Australians living at home experiences elder abuse. This may encompass various forms of abuse, such as emotional, financial, social, physical and sexual abuse, or neglect.

Despite elder abuse being such a common problem, older people often don’t get the help they need. With the right responses, we can make it easier for those working with older people, and the wider community, to support them.

Our new research reveals the key reasons older people experiencing harm do not receive the support they so desperately need.

Our study included a survey of nearly 700 service providers throughout Western Australia. Respondents worked in diverse fields including healthcare, law, aged care, financial services and law enforcement. We found four key obstacles to people getting help with elder abuse.

1. Older people are too scared to report abuse.

Older people are often afraid to report abuse because they fear repercussions both for themselves and for the perpetrator, usually an adult child or other close relative.

These concerns can mean an older person endures abuse for a long time. They may only seek help when the situation escalates to an extreme level or when someone else notices the ongoing mistreatment.

Equally important, they may fear other negative outcomes of reporting abuse. They may fear having to leave their home and enter residential care. They may fear increased isolation and loneliness, or that the abuse will get worse.

All these fears combined create a formidable barrier to older people promptly reporting abuse and getting the help they need.

2. Older people don’t know where to turn for help

Elder abuse cases are often complex, involving long family histories and complicated relationships. Older people trying to improve their situation may need support from multiple service providers. The challenge of accessing the right services and acting on their advice can be daunting.

Addressing complicated matters may require intensive support and advocacy for an extended time. In the words of one experienced advocate,

People don’t need to know the next ten steps. They need to know one step, maybe two, and then see where they are at.

Helping older people feel empowered to seek help requires simple, accessible channels of assistance, promoted through multiple formats and outreach efforts.

3. Government-funded responses to family violence are more focused on intimate partner violence and child protection, leaving elder abuse out of the picture

Most programs targeting family violence prioritise intimate partner violence and child protection, inadvertently sidelining elder abuse. Services such as shelters and perpetrator programs are not always compatible with the distinct characteristics of elder abuse.

Additionally, the gendered nature of family violence responses fails to address the diverse demographics of elder abuse, which includes older men. As a result, older people, regardless of gender, may struggle to access supports suited to their needs.

A refuge manager explained:

When a bed becomes available we have this awful job of deciding who’s more high-risk and who gets the bed. If an older person needs the bed, as opposed to a single mum with a newborn, unfortunately we would go with the mum. That really presents a barrier where there isn’t refuge accommodation specifically for older people.

There is a pressing need for a shift in focus to better recognise elder abuse as a significant issue and tailor responses to meet the specific needs of older people. This includes creating safe and accessible refuge options and providing specialised support services to address the multifaceted nature of elder abuse.

4. There’s low public awareness about what elder abuse looks like or how to respond

Awareness of elder abuse remains surprisingly low, hindering effective responses. Changing this requires clear public information campaigns and community-wide conversations about abuse. This includes greater awareness of the challenge for well-meaning adult children who might limit the choices of their older relatives, thinking they know best. This can result in unintended social isolation or even neglect.

A society that speaks openly about elder abuse, without stigma, is better equipped to support victims and intervene. By building public knowledge and promoting a culture where such issues can be freely discussed, we lay the groundwork for reducing its incidence.

We are living longer lives than ever before, meaning we can expect to spend more years in older age than previous generations. This is good news, but also means we need to do more work to support people to age well. Positive steps we can all take include tackling ageism when we see it and normalising conversations about abuse so older people can feel confident to seek help when it’s needed.

Catriona Stevens has received funding as an initiative of the WA Strategy to Respond to the Abuse of Older People (Elder Abuse) 2019-2029.

Professor Loretta Baldassar has received funding as an initiative of the WA Strategy to Respond to the Abuse of Older People (Elder Abuse) 2019-2029.

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

– ref. About 1 in 6 older Australians experiences elder abuse. Here are the reasons they don’t get help – https://theconversation.com/about-1-in-6-older-australians-experiences-elder-abuse-here-are-the-reasons-they-dont-get-help-216827

About one in six older Australians experiences elder abuse. Here are the reasons they don’t get help

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eileen O’Brien, Professor of Law, Discipline of Law, Justice and Society, University of South Australia

Each year, many older Australians experience abuse, neglect or financial exploitation, usually at the hands of their adult children or other close relatives.

Our new research reveals the key reasons older people experiencing harm do not receive the support they so desperately need.

1. Older people are too scared to report abuse.

Older people are often afraid to report abuse because they fear repercussions both for themselves and for the perpetrator, usually an adult child or other close relative.

These concerns can mean an older person endures abuse for a long time. They may only seek help when the situation escalates to an extreme level or when someone else notices the ongoing mistreatment.

All these fears combined create a formidable barrier to older people promptly reporting abuse and getting the help they need.

2. Older people don’t know where to turn for help

Addressing complicated matters may require intensive support and advocacy for an extended time. In the words of one experienced advocate,

People don’t need to know the next ten steps. They need to know one step, maybe two, and then see where they are at.

Helping older people feel empowered to seek help requires simple, accessible channels of assistance, promoted through multiple formats and outreach efforts.

3. Government-funded responses to family violence are more focused on intimate partner violence and child protection, leaving elder abuse out of the picture

A refuge manager explained:

When a bed becomes available we have this awful job of deciding who’s more high-risk and who gets the bed. If an older person needs the bed, as opposed to a single mum with a newborn, unfortunately we would go with the mum. That really presents a barrier where there isn’t refuge accommodation specifically for older people.

4. There’s low public awareness about what elder abuse looks like or how to respond

Catriona Stevens has received funding as an initiative of the WA Strategy to Respond to the Abuse of Older People (Elder Abuse) 2019-2029.

Professor Loretta Baldassar has received funding as an initiative of the WA Strategy to Respond to the Abuse of Older People (Elder Abuse) 2019-2029.

– ref. About one in six older Australians experiences elder abuse. Here are the reasons they don’t get help – https://theconversation.com/about-one-in-six-older-australians-experiences-elder-abuse-here-are-the-reasons-they-dont-get-help-216827

Why are dead and dying seabirds washing up on our beaches in their hundreds?

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Roman, ARC DECRA Fellow, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania

In October and November, horrified beachgoers often find dead and dying muttonbirds washing up in an event called a seabird “wreck”.

Again this year, there are reports of Australia’s beautiful east coast beaches turned grim with hundreds of dying seabirds.

Here’s what we do and don’t know about seabird wrecks, and what you can do if you come across one.

A short-tailed shearwater sits on a beach with two dead ones behind it — Dead and dying shearwaters are a common sight on our beaches in some years.
Heath Robertson/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Wrecks are becoming more common

Millions of short-tailed shearwaters (Ardenna tenuirostis), commonly known as muttonbirds, return to southern Australia from the Arctic each spring – a round trip of up to 35,000km.

Not all birds survive their long migration. The fit and healthy largely return in late September and October. The less fit lag behind. To some extent, deaths are natural.

Muttonbirds keep a strict timetable and, while failed migrants can wash up any time during spring, mass mortalities can occur from mid-October to November. Muttonbird wrecks have happened on rare occasions since time immemorial, but are becoming more common.

The many ideas about what is causing wrecks range from storms and overfishing to plastic, blue-green algae and irradiated water from Fukushima.

University of Tasmania researchers have studied the muttonbirds for decades. While we can’t pinpoint the exact cause for every wreck, we can explain what we know and eliminate the unlikely culprits.

What we know

When muttonbird wrecks occur, the casualties are starving. These birds weigh only half their healthy body weight. The factors leading to this starvation start before they reach Australia.

Muttonbirds chase an eternal summer. After returning to Australia from the North Pacific, they lay eggs in late November on Australia’s southern islands and raise a single chick. When the weather cools in April the adults depart on a great migration north where the sea ice is melting on the Bering Sea ahead of an Arctic summer.

Ecosystem changes in the sub-Arctic, where the birds fatten up over the northern summer, can lead to death on Australian beaches.

Many marine animals share the North Pacific Ocean with muttonbirds. Among them are several salmon species, which compete with muttonbirds and other marine wildlife for the same zooplankton prey – the abundant small animals floating in the surface waters of the ocean.

The pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha), in particular, is central to the muttonbirds story. You may have seen them in documentaries, being eaten by bears on the annual “salmon run”. You may also eat them yourself, as tinned salmon.

Pink salmon live hard and fast. Their life cycle from hatching to spawning lasts two years. However, wild numbers couldn’t satisfy consumer demand and by the mid-20th century the species was in trouble.

To take pressure off wild fish stock and meet soaring demand, salmon hatcheries now release billions of fry, many more than would exist through nature, into the North Pacific Ocean. Pink salmon numbers, both hatchery and wild fish, have more than doubled in recent decades.

Increased salmon numbers have caused crashes in zooplankton in odd-numbered years, when most pink salmon reach spawning size and are 25 times more abundant than in even-numbered years. The effect is so strong that even healthy breeding muttonbirds arriving in Tasmania are lighter most odd-numbered years.

Other factors are also affecting zooplankton. The Arctic seas are among the fastest warming on Earth. Marine heatwaves have been causing shifts in where and when zooplankton occur, and how large they grow.

When seabirds on a strict schedule arrive to feed, they can miss the zooplankton buffet. This has led to devastating wrecks for Arctic and sub-Arctic seabird species, including muttonbirds.

A large flock of short-tailed shearwaters at sea — Muttonbirds often migrate and forage in large flocks, known as ‘rafts’.
Lauren Roman

In 2013, millions of muttonbirds starved along Australia’s coast from K’gari/Fraser Island to Tasmania. Though we don’t know the exact cause, this was likely influenced by a double whammy: competition for food with salmon and a severe marine heatwave called “the blob”.

But what about the other causes? Examination of wrecked birds rules out plastic, blue-green algae and irradiated water from Fukushima as causes of death.

Birds are already in poor condition when they arrive. Storms or strong winds might push an already poorly muttonbird over the edge, but are generally not the cause of its poor condition. People often find muttonbirds after storms because onshore winds blow them from the sea onto beaches.

What should I do if I find a muttonbird?

Only a muttonbird in very poor condition rests on the beach.
Lauren Roman

If a muttonbird is too weak to fly, sadly it’s unlikely to recover.

If you want to give them a chance, though the odds are low, contact a specialist seabird rescue group. Seabirds have very specific care needs. Taking one home or feeding it, while well intended, may cause more harm than good.

If you find more than a few along the beach, you can report the wreck by emailing the author or contacting the University of Tasmania. Note the time, date, location and number of birds per kilometre.

If you find a muttonbird (or any bird) with a metal ring on its leg, please report the number to the Australian Bird and Bat Banding Scheme.

What if I find other dead seabirds or waterbirds?

There’s another reason to watch out for unusual bird deaths this summer.
A deadly bird disease has a high probability of reaching Australia’s shores. High pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI) has killed millions of birds worldwide, including seabirds.

The disease could enter Australia if carried by birds, including muttonbirds, migrating from the Northern Hemisphere (where HPIA is infecting wild bird populations) to Australia.

If you find an unusual number of sick or dying seabirds, shorebirds or waterbirds, report the incident to Wildlife Health Australia.

Lauren Roman receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
She would like to thank Professor Emeritus Alan Springer and Dr Natalie Bool for providing advice on earlier drafts of this article. Alan led the initial discovery and research about the connection between pink salmon and shearwater wrecks. Natalie completed her PhD thesis on the foraging ecology of short-tailed shearwaters. Their contribution and expertise is much appreciated.

– ref. Why are dead and dying seabirds washing up on our beaches in their hundreds? – https://theconversation.com/why-are-dead-and-dying-seabirds-washing-up-on-our-beaches-in-their-hundreds-217349

We’re in a new COVID wave. What can we expect this time?

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Wood, Professor, epidemiological modelling of infectious diseases, UNSW Sydney

Australia is now into its next COVID wave. We’ve seen hints of this for a while. Case numbers and indicators of severe disease began rising in Victoria in August. But it has taken several months for a consistent pattern to emerge across Australia.

Now we see evidence of this new wave via wastewater surveillance for traces of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. We also see rises in COVID-related hospital admissions and antiviral prescriptions. Compared to past waves, this one has built up slowly and over a longer period.

Here’s what we know about this new wave and what to expect over the coming weeks.

How do we know we’re in a new COVID wave?

In earlier waves, when more people were testing for COVID and reporting their results, we were more confident case numbers were a reasonable reflection of how COVID was tracking.

However, now, a more useful indicator for COVID nationally is to look at trends in the number of prescriptions for the antiviral medications ritonavir (Paxlovid) and molnupiravir (Lagevrio) on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).

In the graph below, which is drawn from national prescribing data, you can clearly see script numbers rising.

When will we hit the peak?

It has become more difficult to predict the size and timing of the peak. Reduced access to COVID testing and fewer requirements or opportunities to report test results, combined with the slow growth rate for this wave, give a wider range of possibilities.

The wave is also likely to differ between states and territories, as some got off to a later start.

However, given the wave’s slow growth rate and further increases in hybrid immunity (immunity from both vaccination and infection) over 2023, it’s reasonable to expect this to be the smallest Omicron wave so far.

We also expect it will be over by early in the summer holiday period. That’s when rates of community contact decline significantly, as work and school contacts are much reduced. That means fewer opportunities for the virus to spread between networks of family and friends.

Why now?

It’s unlikely this latest COVID wave stems from changes in behaviour. People are generally out and about, fewer people are wearing masks in public. But we don’t see any dramatic shifts in this type of behaviour in 2023 compared with 2022.

It’s not a seasonal cause, given respiratory viruses tend to spread better in winter, when we’re cooped up indoors with others.

It’s unlikely it’s our waning immunity from infection or vaccination that’s prompting these successive waves.

Instead, we’re seeing the result of a constantly mutating virus. Successful SARS-CoV-2 variants are gradually acquiring mutations. Some of these changes reduce the ability of existing antibodies to bind to and neutralise the virus. So it appears it’s still the “immune escape” variants that are behind these latest waves.

Which variants are to blame?

The primary viral lineage in Australia this year has been XBB. Over the past six months, its two most influential mutations have been:

the F456L mutation that led to the rise of EG.5.1, also known as Eris
more recently, the paired “FLip” mutations F456L+L455F. We see these in offspring of Eris and in much-less closely related lineages. This is a clear sign these mutations help the virus spread better.

Both the single and paired mutations make existing antibodies less effective at blocking SARS-CoV-2 from binding to critical receptors on our cells. This increases our susceptibility to infection.

The novel BA.2.86 lineage – colloquially known as Pirola – was first reported in Denmark in August and has many unique mutations. It has not been influential so far in this wave in Australia. But it has continued to evolve. And we may see it play a much bigger role in Australia in 2024.

Who is most at risk during this COVID wave?

Since the start of the pandemic, rates of COVID-related death and severe disease have greatly declined. That’s due to widespread vaccination and hybrid immunity, and a major change in the Omicron variant that’s made the virus less-likely to infect the lung.

However, provisional statistics show there have been about 3,000 registered COVID deaths in Australia from January to July 2023.

Older people and those with weaker immune systems are expected to remain at greatest risk of developing severe COVID during this current wave.

This is the rationale for the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation’s (ATAGI) September recommendation for people aged 75 or older to get boosted if more than six months had passed since their last vaccine dose.

ATAGI also recommended people aged 65-74, and people 18 years and over with severe immunocompromising conditions, consider having another booster.

But, by the end of October 2023, it was estimated only one-quarter of Australians aged 65-74, one-third of people aged 75 or over and fewer than half (45%) of people in aged care had received a COVID vaccine in the past six months.

Woman receives vaccination — People with immunocompromising conditions should get boosted.
Shutterstock

Which vaccines are available?

Currently available bivalent vaccines protect against the original ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2 (now extinct) plus the newer BA.1 or BA.4/5 variants. These bivalent vaccines also protect us against severe disease from the Omicron variants circulating now, such as XBB.

But we can expect newer monovalent XBB.1.5 vaccines soon, now the Therapeutic Goods Administration has approved them. These are expected to provide better protection against newer Omicron variants than the currently available bivalent vaccines.

In the meantime, boosting with any available COVID vaccine will provide good protection for vulnerable people.

What might we expect from COVID in 2024?

The Northern Hemisphere appears to have settled into an approximate seasonal pattern of COVID infections in 2023 and it’s plausible Australia will follow suit.

If so, we should plan for overlapping seasonal epidemics of our three most important respiratory viruses: SARS-CoV-2, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). So hospitals may need to plan ahead for larger peaks in admissions.

Hopefully, new vaccines for RSV, and more broadly protective flu and COVID vaccines to be developed over the next decade, should help.

James Wood receives funding from NSW Health and the National Health and Medical Research Council for projects on COVID-19. He has previously received funding from the federal government as part of COVID responses in 2020-21 and from WHO Western Pacific Regional Office in 2020. He is a current member of the Australian Technical Advisory Committee on Immunisation.

Bette Liu receives funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council and Australian Government.

Katie Flanagan receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Medical Research Future Fund, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Clifford Craig Foundation. She is involved in research projects studying the impact of COVID-19 vaccine boosters. She is a member of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation and President of the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases.

Stuart Turville receives funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, Medical Research Future Fund and Covid grants (Round 2 Covid grant and VIIM vaccine group) awarded from the NSW state government.

– ref. We’re in a new COVID wave. What can we expect this time? – https://theconversation.com/were-in-a-new-covid-wave-what-can-we-expect-this-time-216820

Will Saturn’s rings really ‘disappear’ by 2025? An astronomer explains

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

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

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

If you can get your hands on a telescope, there are few sights more spectacular than the magnificent ringed planet – Saturn.

Currently, Saturn is clearly visible in the evening sky, at its highest just after sunset. It’s the ideal time to use a telescope or binoculars to get a good view of the Solar System’s sixth planet and its famous rings.

But in the past few days, a slew of articles have run like wildfire through social media. Saturn’s rings, those articles claim, are rapidly disappearing – and will be gone by 2025!

So what’s the story? Could the next couple of months, before Saturn drops out of view in the evening sky, really be our last chance to see its mighty rings?

The short answer is no. While it’s true the rings will become almost invisible from Earth in 2025, this is neither a surprise nor reason to panic. The rings will “reappear” soon thereafter. Here’s why.

Tipping and tilting Earth

To understand why our view of Saturn changes, let’s begin by considering Earth on its constant journey around the Sun. That journey takes us through the seasons – from winter to spring, summer and autumn, then back again.

What causes the seasons? Put simply, Earth is tilted towards one side, as seen from the Sun. Our equator is tilted by about 23.5 degrees from the plane of our orbit.

A diagram of Earth showing its position during solstices and equinoxes — Earth has seasons because its axis is tilted. The axis always points in the same direction as our planet orbits the Sun.
Bureau of Meteorology

The result? As we move around the Sun, we alternately tip one hemisphere and then the other towards our star. When your home hemisphere is tilted more towards the Sun, you get longer days than nights and experience spring and summer. When you’re tilted away, you get shorter days and longer nights, and experience autumn and winter.

From the Sun’s viewpoint, Earth appears to “nod” up and down, alternately showing off its hemispheres as it moves around our star. Now, let’s move on to Saturn.

Saturn, a giant tilted world

Just like Earth, Saturn experiences seasons, but more than 29 times longer than ours. Where Earth’s equator is tilted by 23.5 degrees, Saturn’s equator has a 26.7 degree tilt. The result? As Saturn moves through its 29.4-year orbit around our star, it also appears to nod up and down as seen from both Earth and the Sun.

What about Saturn’s rings? The planet’s enormous ring system, comprised of bits of ice, dust and rocks, spreads out over a huge distance – just over 280,000km from the planet. But it’s very thin – in most places, just tens of metres thick. The rings orbit directly above Saturn’s equator and so they too are tilted to the plane of Saturn’s orbit.

Saturn and its rings, tilted at Saturnian midsummer — A mosaic of images from NASA’s Cassini mission taken in 2016, highlighting Saturn’s axial tilt during its northern hemisphere summer.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI. Composite by Jason Major via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

So why do Saturn’s rings ‘disappear’?

The rings are so thin that, seen from a distance, they appear to vanish when edge on. You can visualise this easily by grabbing a sheet of paper, and rotating it until it is edge on – the paper almost vanishes from view.

As Saturn moves around the Sun, our viewpoint changes. For half of the orbit, its northern hemisphere is tilted towards us and the northern face of the planet’s rings is tipped our way.

When Saturn is on the other side of the Sun, its southern hemisphere is pointed our way. For the same reason, we see the southern face of the planet’s rings tilted our way.

The best way to illustrate this is to get your sheet of paper, and hold it horizontally – parallel to the ground – at eye level. Now, move the paper down towards the ground a few inches. What do you see? The upper side of the paper comes into view. Move the paper back up, through your eye line, to hold it above you and you can see the underside of the paper. But as it passes through eye level, the paper will all but disappear.

This simulation demonstrates the 29.5-year orbital period of Saturn, as viewed from Earth. The ring system lies directly above Saturn’s equator, so both sides of its disk are visible from Earth during the course of one Saturnian year.
Tdadamemd/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

That’s what we see with Saturn’s rings. As the seasons on Saturn progress, we go from having the southern side of the rings tilted our way to seeing the northern side. Then, the planet tips back, revealing the southern side once more.

Twice per Saturnian year, we see the rings edge on and they all but vanish from view.

That’s what’s happening in 2025 – the reason Saturn’s rings will seemingly “disappear” is because we will be looking at them edge on.

This happens regularly. The last time was in 2009 and the rings gradually became visible again, over the course of a few months. The rings will be edge on once again in March 2025. Then they’ll gradually come back into view as seen through large telescopes, before sliding out of view again in November 2025.

Thereafter, the rings will gradually get more and more obvious, reappearing first to the largest telescopes over the months that follow. Nothing to worry about.

If you want to clearly see Saturn’s rings, now is your best chance, at least until 2027 or 2028!

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

– ref. Will Saturn’s rings really ‘disappear’ by 2025? An astronomer explains – https://theconversation.com/will-saturns-rings-really-disappear-by-2025-an-astronomer-explains-217370

Perimenopause usually begins in your 40s. How do you know if it has started?

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Erin Morton, Associate Professor, Health Data & Clinical Trials, Flinders University

More than half our population (50.7%) are born with ovaries and will experience perimenopause in midlife. This occurs as hormone levels decrease and ovaries slow their release of eggs.

Perimenopause usually begins in the early to mid-40s. Some people even begin perimenopause earlier, due to premature ovarian insufficiency or medical treatments such as chemotherapy or surgical oophorectomy (ovary removal).

Menopause is technically the single day 12 months after your last period. It usually occurs five to ten years after perimenopause begins, between ages 45 and 55.

Up to 80% of people in perimenopause experience symptoms. But it’s not just hot flushes – symptoms can be incredibly varied and range in severity.

What are the symptoms?

Oestrogen affects every system in the body and so too can perimenopause symptoms. These include:

depression and anxiety
body aches
“brain fog” and forgetfulness
irregular periods or periods of unusual heaviness or lightness
insomnia
night sweats
hot flushes
vaginal dryness
no interest in sex
urinary urgency.

It’s impossible to anticipate which, if any, symptoms you’ll experience, or in what order they will begin.

What impact does perimenopause have on work and life?

Around 30% of symptomatic Australians find their perimenopause symptoms significantly interfere with daily activities, including their ability to work.

The Australian Women’s Health Survey reported 46% of participants have taken an extended break from work, study or exercise due to menopause symptoms.

Thanks to the personal nature of many symptoms, and the stigma surrounding them, these statistics may still under-report the impact of perimenopause on both individuals and society.

The Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees estimated the retirement of women due to menopausal symptoms would equate to lost earnings and super of more than A$15.2 billion for every year of early retirement.

Some women experience significant deterioration in their mental health in the lead up to menopause. Perimenopausal depression (PMD) is a serious illness and is categorised as a subset of major depression. It certainly shouldn’t be dismissed as female “hysteria” or a bad mood when someone is seeking care or support. In fact, female suicide rates increase from ages 40–60.

Know when to seek help

Each woman’s experience will be different, and not all symptoms are related to menopause, but with early recognition and seeking help when needed, this life transition can be a smoother journey.

There are various treatment options for perimenopausal symptom relief. The gold standard is menopausal hormone treatment, which used to be called hormone replacement therapy. This works by counterbalancing the hormone losses of perimenopause and comes in a range of doses and formulations, including gels, patches, pessaries, creams and tablets.

Two women laugh in the sun — Symptoms of perimenopause vary greatly between individuals.
Priscilla du Preez/Unsplash

The period after menopause is associated with higher risks for heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and dementia. If menopausal hormone treatment is started within ten years of menopause, it may also reduce these risks.

Some women find it helpful to go through a symptom checklist before seeing their GP (or going through it with their GP) if they want an official diagnosis of perimenopause or treatment for symptoms.

There are also national specialist telehealth menopause services available if you’re not getting the care you need locally (currently A$295 or $165 concession, before the Medicare rebate, for a long appointment with a doctor and a detailed report to send to your GP).

And it’s important to know you can seek a second opinion if you’re not being listened to.

Perimenopause doesn’t just impact those personally going through perimenopause, it also affects their partners, families, businesses, workforce participation and gender equity. We all need to be educated about perimenopause and consider how to increase flexibility and support in our workplaces and other environments.

The federal parliament has just commenced a Senate inquiry into issues related to menopause and perimenopause. This will include the economic cost, physical impacts, government policies and programs, and cultural and societal factors. So we can expect to see more discussion of these issues until the final report is delivered in September 2024.

Erin Morton is a member of the Australasian Menopause Society.

– ref. Perimenopause usually begins in your 40s. How do you know if it has started? – https://theconversation.com/perimenopause-usually-begins-in-your-40s-how-do-you-know-if-it-has-started-215806

‘I have no rights’: what happens to stateless people in Australia after the High Court’s ruling?

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Robertson, Director – Stateless Legal Clinic, The University of Melbourne

The decision by the High Court of Australia this week overturning the legality of indefinite immigration detention marks a watershed moment in Australian legal history.

For almost two decades, stateless people have faced the prospect of spending their lives behind bars.

Now, a stateless Rohingya refugee has been released from detention.

With no “stateless” visa category or pathway to permanency, stateless people will continue to face a life of uncertainty in the Australia community, begging the question; what next?

Overturning decades of precedent

This week the Australian High Court ordered the immediate release of the stateless refugee, known as “NZYQ”, from immigration detention.

He’d been held there for more than five years.

The Court found that because there was no real prospect of his removal from Australia “becoming practicable in the reasonably foreseeable future”, his detention was unlawful.

This decision is highly significant, overturning almost twenty years of legal precedent established in 2004.

In that case, the High Court upheld the ability of the Australian government to detain people for an unlimited period.

That looked to be the fate of the man at the centre of this week’s case.

Having had his visa cancelled due to a criminal conviction and unable to be returned to Myanmar as a stateless refugee, he faced potentially being detained for the rest of his life.

Australia’s system of mandatory indefinite detention, a bipartisan policy introduced in 1992, is unique, even when compared with countries with similar legal traditions, such as the UK.

Available government statistics indicate there are currently over 1,000 people in immigration detention, 31 of whom are stateless.

The average length somebody is detained in Australia is a staggering 708 days.

More than 100 people have been held for more than five years.

What does is mean to be stateless?

There is little understanding of statelessness in Australia, despite the fact it affects millions of people globally.

A stateless person is someone with no nationality. Legally speaking, they are recognised as “belonging” to no country in the world.

While the causes of statelessness vary, the dominant root cause is usually discrimination of one kind or another, including on the grounds of gender, race or religion.

The legal definition of statelessness does not do justice to the lived reality.

Statelessness has the potential to impact almost every aspect of a person’s day-to-day life.

It can inhibit freedom of movement, access to education, housing, employment and medical care.

In Australia, these challenges are compounded by an often overwhelming sense of uncertainty about the future and the ever-present threat of detention.

The lived reality of statelessness is perhaps better understood in the words of Amir, a stateless father living in Australia:

Being stateless has been a huge source of sadness for me in my life. At times it has made me question my very existence and made me wonder why my parents chose to bring me into this world. I’ve never felt like I have a future. Wherever I’ve gone, I have no rights.

We must never forget that behind legal judgements are the lives of real people. Many stateless families we work with in the Stateless Legal Clinic have spent years in immigration detention, including Australian-born children who marked their first birthdays behind the wire.

The ongoing health impacts of detention, especially on children, have been well documented.

A lack of legal protections means an uncertain future

Along with the harmful effects of detention is the gap in legal protections stateless people experience in the Australian community.

Australia doesn’t have a distinct visa category for stateless people or pathway to permanent residency.

Many live with crippling prohibitions on their ability to build a secure life for themselves and their children. Access to some of the basic rights many of us take for granted – such as education – can be challenging. In the words of stateless mother Nur:

Being stateless makes things challenging for us here. My children feel Australian – yet we are often reminded they are not […] our eldest child, Iman started kindergarten this year. It was so difficult trying to enrol him – they asked about his passport, his visa, his status. I felt embarrassed having to explain he has no passport – no identity. No certainty of his future.

Australian law does not adequately protect the rights of stateless people in this country.

This week’s High Court decision is a critical first step in protecting stateless people from being indefinitely deprived of their liberty. What happens next is just as important.

In the absence of being recognised as citizens of any country in the world, Australia can – and must – do more to offer stateless children and adults a life of certainty in this country.

Michelle Foster receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

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

– ref. ‘I have no rights’: what happens to stateless people in Australia after the High Court’s ruling? – https://theconversation.com/i-have-no-rights-what-happens-to-stateless-people-in-australia-after-the-high-courts-ruling-217363

Perth’s Optus Stadium has drawn more consumer anger after the outage. Another case of the ‘stadium curse’?

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Rowe, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

Looming over the Swan River in Perth, a shiny sporting structure boldly declares “OPTUS STADIUM Yes”. After the disastrously prolonged communication outage this week, many will have shouted “No”, or other words requiring asterisks in respectable media.

Sport stadium naming rights are controversial at the best of times – so why do corporates pay so much for them? And what are the risks?

Collateral damage

Optus bought the ten-year rights from the Western Australian government in 2017 for a reported A$50 million.

This week’s public relations disaster stands in stark contrast to the company’s optimistic announcement that year, celebrating “a combination of mobile network expansion, coupled with game-changing entertainment experiences for events at the new Optus Stadium”.

Instead, the arrangement has become a focus of consumer anger towards the company, with the sport site suffering collateral damage.

The game has indeed changed, but not in the desired direction.

Named and shamed

From the outset, Perth Lord Mayor Basil Zempilas objected to the erasure of Perth from the stadium’s title.

Instead of anchoring the stadium to place for global marketing purposes, he argued, it could be anywhere in the world.

Optus’s troubles this week gave him a free kick on X (formerly Twitter), where he said:

The Optus Stadium naming rights arrangement never looks good on days like this. Bad decision any day – terrible look today.

Given the risks of such associations, why are businesses attracted to having their names and logos mounted on sports infrastructure?

Ever since sport and media converged, corporate brands joined the party.

It should be a fairly straightforward exchange – sport receives money and kudos, sponsors get profile and assumed good will. This is why companies advertise on sport clothing and equipment.

Stadium naming rights, though, make brands even more prominent by imprinting themselves on the cathedrals of sport.

But in the middle of a corporate crisis, reputations can be reduced to rubble.

Sydney’s newly rebuilt Commbank Stadium was hardly the best advertisement for rugby league in Parramatta during the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, for example.

Self-inflicted brand casualty Qantas previously had naming rights over the Sydney Entertainment Centre, which was known as the Qantas Credit Union Arena. Once home of the Sydney Kings and Sydney Uni Flames basketball teams, the venue was eventually demolished.

After its recent PR disasters, it seems unlikely Qantas would be rushing to get its name all over big venues again. It could, as in the Optus case, end up serving as a costly, flashing focal point for consumer rage.

The stadium curse?

Some analysts have argued acquiring sport stadium naming rights is a sign of corporate indulgence, frequently indicating a company is in decline.

Others have called it the “stadium curse” or “stadium jinx”, whereby stadium naming rights are mysteriously associated with corporate peril, even collapse.

Yet, despite these anxieties, sport stadia have no lack of big-time suitors in pursuit of prestige signage. Entry to this club takes a lot of capital, which is why banks, insurance companies, car manufacturers, hoteliers, communication conglomerates, entertainment companies and airlines predominate.

The likes of Melbourne’s AAMI Park and Kia Arena, or Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium, are conspicuous examples of the corporate love affair with sporting real estate.

Smaller venues like PointsBet Stadium (Cronulla) and BlueBet Stadium (Penrith) are named after sport gambling companies, especially in association with rugby league. Here, physical spaces are used to attract customers to “punt” online.

This gamblification of sport is unpopular among citizens and politicians who are troubled by the cultivation of children and the malign social impact on vulnerable adults.

Traditionalist fans also resent the names of their hallowed stadium being hawked around the marketplace and switched with the latest contract.

Confusingly, Melbourne’s Disney-themed Marvel Stadium has also been known as Colonial Stadium, Telstra Dome and Etihad Stadium in the last two decades.

For this reason, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Adelaide Oval and the Sydney Cricket Ground have all resisted commercial naming rights.

Accor Stadium in Sydney is still often called Stadium Australia by the historically inclined and ABC broadcasters concerned about their editorial independence and integrity.

Aversion to a rival team’s sponsor

Stadium naming is a conspicuous means of marking sports territory, but fans may even feel an aversion to a rival team’s sponsor in the highly partisan world of sport.

Marketing scholars have developed the concept of oppositional loyalty to capture this antagonism of sport fans to the products and services associated with “the enemy”.

So branding a home stadium might turn both diehard fans and their fiercest opponents off the company paying so much for the naming rights.

Nonetheless, the association of sports, sponsors and grand buildings has enduring appeal.

The Sydney Opera House may not be a sport stadium as such, but it does host sport events.

Its famous sails are coveted by many sports, especially horse racing, to the chagrin of those who protest “our house is not for sale”.

On the other side of the continent, Optus Stadium would likely just settle for a full house with a functioning communications network.

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

– ref. Perth’s Optus Stadium has drawn more consumer anger after the outage. Another case of the ‘stadium curse’? – https://theconversation.com/perths-optus-stadium-has-drawn-more-consumer-anger-after-the-outage-another-case-of-the-stadium-curse-217369

SUV and ute sales slowed due to NZ’s Clean Car Discount – expect that to reverse under a new government

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Welch, Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning, University of Auckland

With National, ACT and NZ First locked in coalition negotiations, various urgent and climate-related transport challenges hang in the balance.

Based on pre-election rhetoric, the Clean Car Discount (CCD) scheme may soon be gone. While popular with the public, National has criticised the electric vehicle rebate portion as a “Tesla subsidy”, and the fees charged for high-emissions vehicles as a “ute tax”.

Transport agency Waka Kotahi has already put funding for cycling, pedestrian and public transport initiatives on hold, pending a “clear direction from the incoming government on its transport investment priorities”.

If the CCD does end, it’s likely the upward trend in SUV and ute purchases, which lost steam with the introduction of the programme, will once again pick up. Combined with any lost momentum on developing other transport modes, the impact on road safety and emissions reduction could be significant.

Utes and SUVs take over

Big vehicles already dominate New Zealand streets.

In 2009, over 75% of annual passenger vehicle registrations were for small cars, sedans and hatchbacks. SUVs and utes made up just 20% of imports.

By 2022, 87,669 (53%) of the 164,813 new vehicles sold in New Zealand were SUVs of some variety, and 35,056 (21%) were utes. All other vehicles, including passenger cars, vans and buses, comprised about 25% of new registrations.

Four of the five top-selling vehicles in the passenger segment in 2022 were utes and SUVs. They included (in order of sales volume) the Ford Ranger, Toyota Hilux, Mitsubishi Outlander and Mitsubishi Triton. Combined, these four big vehicles accounted for 40% of new registrations.

The low fuel economy of these vehicles directly translates to higher carbon emissions. Depending on the model, the Ford Ranger has a fuel economy rating between 7.6 litres per 100 kilometres and 11.5 L/100km; the Toyota Hilux has a range of 7.1 L/100km to 9.7 L/100km.

By comparison, the best-selling conventionally fuelled compact car, the Suzuki Swift, manages a significantly more efficient 4.6 to 6.1 L/100km.

Blind spots and safety

SUVs and utes are also much taller, weigh more, have higher grilles and bonnets, and have more blind spots than more compact vehicles. This makes them more dangerous in urban environments, for pedestrians and cyclists in particular.

In a crash, a vulnerable pedestrian is more likely to suffer a direct strike to the head from a ute or SUV than from a smaller car, where they are more likely to roll onto the bonnet and hit their head with less blunt force.

A recent report from the Vias Institute in Brussels found that if a ute hits a pedestrian or cyclist, “the risk of fatal injuries [increases] by nearly 200%”.

The same report showed ute occupants are 65% less likely than other vehicle type occupants to suffer a serious or fatal injury in a crash. Safety is one of the main reasons SUV and ute owners cite for buying a larger vehicle.

Conversely, the risk of serious or fatal injury for occupants of smaller cars that collide with utes increases by 50%.

Problems with a technological fix

SUV and ute manufacturers have recognised the increased danger blind spots pose to vulnerable road users. New technology has been added to the vehicles, including proximity sensors, 360-degree cameras and automatic emergency braking (AEB).

The technology is geared primarily to avoid collisions with other vehicles and improve safety for vehicle occupants. Studies have shown it can reduce vehicle-to-vehicle collisions by up to 25%.

The record with pedestrians and cyclists is less clear. But one obvious problem is the inability of the technology to function when the vehicle is turning, operating in adverse weather conditions, or at a very slow speed.

A recent study from the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety showed fatal collisions with crossing pedestrians were more likely when a vehicle is turning than when it was not.

The rates were about twice as high for SUVs, nearly three times as high for vans and minivans, and nearly four times as high for pickups as they were for cars.

The Ford Ranger’s AEB system “does not react to pedestrians in turning scenarios”, according a safety testing report from the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP), the independent vehicle-testing organisation used by Australia and New Zealand. The Toyota Hilux and Mitsubishi Triton have no ANCAP data on turning.

Danger and discouragement

Utes and SUVs also tend to have more blind spots than smaller cars when reversing. In New Zealand, five children are killed every year in driveway “backover” incidents.

As far back as 2011, before the big shift to larger vehicles, a Safekids New Zealand report on child driveway injuries found:

Cars run over more children than any other type of vehicle, but light trucks, commercial vans, four-wheeled drive and sport utility vehicles (SUVs) are consistently identified as being over-represented in the numbers of vehicles involved.

According to ANCAP safety tests, none of the four top-selling SUVs and utes in New Zealand have AEB systems tested or operated in backover scenarios.

Pedestrians and cyclists are over-represented in road deaths. Last year was particularly deadly for vulnerable road users, with cyclists making up 5% of all road deaths despite accounting for only about 1% of all trips.

The sad irony is that the dominance of SUVs and utes reduces the ability of communities to create safer streets that would encourage more walking and cycling. If the new government reverses transport policies aimed at encouraging walking and cycling and reducing the prevalence of large vehicles, those efforts will be set back even further.

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

– ref. SUV and ute sales slowed due to NZ’s Clean Car Discount – expect that to reverse under a new government – https://theconversation.com/suv-and-ute-sales-slowed-due-to-nzs-clean-car-discount-expect-that-to-reverse-under-a-new-government-215983

A new theory linking evolution and physics has scientists baffled – but is it solving a problem that doesn’t exist?

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bill Bateman, Associate professor, Curtin University

In October, a paper titled “Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution” appeared in the top science journal Nature. The authors – a team led by Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow and Sara Walker at Arizona State University – claim their theory is an “interface between physics and biology” which explains how complex biological forms can evolve.

The paper provoked strong responses. On the one hand were headlines like “Bold New ‘Theory of Everything’ Could Unite Physics And Evolution”.

On the other were reactions from scientists. One evolutionary biologist tweeted “after multiple reads I still have absolutely no idea what [this paper] is doing”. Another said “I read the paper and I feel more confused […] I think reading that paper has made me forget my own name.”

As a biologist who studies evolution, I felt I had to read the paper myself. Was assembly theory really the radical new paradigm its authors suggested? Or was it the “abject wankwaffle” its critics decried?

Hackle-raising claims

When I sat down to read the paper, the very first sentence of the abstract had my hackles up:

Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution with the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics.

I had no idea we scientists grappled with this. No biologist I know has a problem with the laws of physics or sees any problem with reconciling them with evolution.

The abstract goes on to note that the laws of physics do not predict “life’s origin, evolution and the development of human culture and technology”, and claims we need a “new approach” to understand “how diverse, open-ended forms can emerge from physics without an inherent design blueprint”.

The complaint that biological evolution seems incompatible with the laws of physics, taken with the use of loaded terms like “design blueprint”, is reminiscent of creationist arguments against evolution. No wonder the blood pressure of evolutionary biologists was spiking.

In the words of one Nature commenter: “Why so many creationist tropes in the first few sentences?”

Biology and physics

Before I go further, I should note that I may, along with some of scientists quoted above, not fully understand the aim of the paper. But I have problems with what I do understand of it.

First of all, the claim that evolution is at odds with the immutable laws of physics does not seem to be supported.

The paper says “the open-ended generation of novelty does not fit cleanly in the paradigmatic frameworks of either biology or physics”, which doesn’t seem to make much sense.

A microscope photo of fluorescent cells — Is there a conflict between biology and physics that needs to be explained?
National Cancer Institute / Unsplash

In the paradigm of biology, we understand there is a variation in biological forms through genetic drift, mutation and selection. Does this need to “fit the paradigm of physics”, as long as it doesn’t break any laws of physics?

Another troubling statement: “To comprehend how diverse, open-ended forms can emerge from physics without an inherent design blueprint, a new approach to understanding and quantifying selection is necessary.”

Is it? One of the tenets of evolutionary theory is that there is no “teleology” – no goal or aimed-for endpoint – in the process. So how could there be a “design blueprint”? Why would its absence need to be explained?

Putting numbers on the odds of evolution

So what is assembly theory trying to do? According to Cronin, it “aims to explain selection & evolution before biology”; as such its goal is a theory that unifies inert and living matter and seeks to explain their complexity or otherwise, in the same way.

The paper itself says it is a “framework that does not alter the laws of physics, but redefines the concept of an ‘object’ on which these laws act”.

[Assembly theory] conceptualizes objects not as point particles, but as entities defined by their possible formation histories. This allows objects to show evidence of selection, within well-defined boundaries of individuals or selected units.

The “object” in assembly theory is then what “laws of physics” act on. For any object, we can calculate its “assembly index”, a number that measures how complex the object would be to make.

Any object that is both abundant and has a high assembly index is unlikely to have arisen by chance, so it must be a product of evolution and selection. This, in itself, is neither problematic nor new – apart from this calculated “index”.

How do we figure out that assembly index? We count the number of steps it would take to build a molecule, say, or a bodily organ, or a whole organism. The higher the index, the more likely it is to have evolved.

So assembly theory is an attempt to quantify the complexity of something and the likelihood of it having evolved.

A problem that doesn’t exist?

Is this useful? It’s hard to say.

For one thing, it implies there is only one pathway to produce a complicated (high assembly index) object such as a biochemical molecule, which is simply not the case.

Also, as another scientist pointed out:

it’s obvious that if a molecule is complex and there are lots of copies of it, then it likely emerged from some process of evolution. And most chemists could spot such cases without the need for assembly theory. Although trying to put numbers on it is very neat.

My own feeling is that this is a poorly written paper, as evidenced by the inability of many biologists to understand what it is trying to do, and much of the negative reaction to the work springs from the hard-to-follow framing and use of phrases that echo creationist talking points.

As for assembly theory itself, it seems to have been developed in the course of Cronin and Walker’s efforts to find a general way to recognise signs of life on alien planets, and even create artificial life. And perhaps, in those contexts, it may prove useful.

However, as a sweeping new paradigm aiming to unify evolution and physics, assembly theory appears – to me and many others – to be addressing a problem that does not exist.

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

– ref. A new theory linking evolution and physics has scientists baffled – but is it solving a problem that doesn’t exist? – https://theconversation.com/a-new-theory-linking-evolution-and-physics-has-scientists-baffled-but-is-it-solving-a-problem-that-doesnt-exist-216639

Australia has long viewed the Pacific as a place of threats that must be contained. It’s time for this mindset to change

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Kemish AM, Adjunct Professor, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland

During the 2022 federal election campaign, the Morrison government was all too eager to brandish its national security credentials. Its message to voters was that the Asia Pacific was brimming with threats from aggressive, authoritarian China.

Then, when Solomon Islands signed a secret security deal with China, Australian media attention swung sharply to the Pacific and commentators with little real experience of the region sprang into action.

The debate seemed to treat the Pacific as a vacant expanse where China was locked in a contest with the West, led by Australia as its chief representative. There was little discussion about the people of the Pacific themselves, their concerns about climate change and environmental degradation, or their development aspirations.

Since coming into office, the Albanese government has engaged the region with energy and a more positive tone. But as Australians we still need to do more to elevate the quality of public discussion about the region. Like others whose work focuses on the Pacific, I find it disappointing that media interest evaporates if there is no obvious “China angle”.

As the Pacific Islands Forum is holding its annual summit this week, we’ve asked experts on the Pacific to examine the great power competition in the region. How are countries like the US, Australia, China and others attempting to wield power and influence in the Pacific? And how effective has it been? You can read the rest of the series here and here

To be sure, China’s behaviour in the Pacific is a legitimate matter of concern for both Australia and the region.

Beijing is investing heavily in its defence relations with the Pacific and promoting a different model of governance based on an authoritarian set of values. Many islanders are also concerned about creeping Chinese influence on the governance, media freedom and political independence of their nations.

The trouble is the way Australians talk about the Pacific often conveys the impression that “strategic denial” is the only motivation underpinning the country’s approach to the region – that we are more interested in excluding others than we are in the region itself.

There is nothing new about this. We are simply continuing a pattern that can be traced back to the very beginnings of colonial Australia.

Preventing settlement on the continent

Denying the Pacific to others was among the reasons behind Britain’s decision to establish the New South Wales colony. The planners argued it would provide a base from which to attack Spanish commerce in the ocean. They also saw an opportunity to deny French occupation of the continent.

As British Home Secretary Lord Sydney noted in 1786, a settlement at Botany Bay would

be a means of preventing the emigration of Our European Neighbours to that Quarter.

The appointment of Arthur Philip as the first governor of the colony effectively put him in charge of the entire eastern half of the continent, as well as a vast expanse of ocean radiating out from Cape York in the north to the southern tip of what is now Tasmania.

In the early 1800s, the Australian colonies responded with anxiety to a series of strategic threats – real or perceived – from foreign powers in the Pacific.

For example, just after war broke out between Britain and Napoleon Bonaparte’s France in 1803, Governor Philip King dispatched an expedition to settle Van Diemen’s Land out of concern it might be of strategic use to France.

Two French naval ships, the Naturaliste and Géographe, which explored the continent in 1802.
Wikipedia Commons

Two decades later, rumours of French plans for a colony in Western Australia motivated Britain to establish its own there, too.

Russia followed closely behind France as a perceived threat in the Pacific. This intensified in the 1850s when Britain was part of an alliance that fought Russia in the Crimean War. The movement of a Russian naval squadron near Australian waters in 1854 prompted the reorganisation of imperial forces in the colonies and the construction of defensive batteries around Sydney Harbour.

Then, in the late 19th century, alarm bells rang about the French again. Colonial officials and newspapers strongly opposed the establishment of a French penal colony in New Caledonia and settlement in New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), not far from Australia’s shores.

A new threat emerges

Around the same time, the newly unified Germany came to be regarded in the colonies as the main threat to “natural” British dominance in the Pacific. This concern focused on the island of New Guinea as German missionary and trading activity expanded there from the early 1870s.

The authorities in London thought the Australians’ concerns were overblown and had no wish to provoke either Berlin or Paris at a delicate time in European affairs.

This tension, however, led to one of the more dramatic moments in colonial history. Fearing imminent German annexation of New Guinea, Queensland Premier Thomas McIlwraith sent a police magistrate to Port Moresby in 1883 to claim the island on behalf of the British empire.

British authorities, however, suspected the move was motivated by a desire to source “blackbirding” labour for Queensland’s sugarcane plantations and refused to approve the action, sparking colonial outrage.

Just a year later, the British ended up establishing a protectorate in southeastern New Guinea anyway, after Germany moved into the northeastern corner. But Australian anger about the British “betrayal” did not subside, helping drive the push for an independent policy towards the Pacific and eventually Australian nationhood.

A platoon of German reservists in New Guinea after the outbreak of the first world war in 1914.
Australian War Memorial, CC BY-NC

A national mindset on the Pacific takes hold

In fact, the first major convention of the colonies to discuss federation in 1883 was prompted by an immediate need to oppose French and German colonisation in the Pacific.

Around the same time, renewed tensions between Russia and Britain in the Pacific led to an expansion of the colonies’ military forces and the establishment of an auxiliary Royal Navy squadron in Australian waters.

So, when the Constitution was drafted in 1901, the framers specifically gave the Commonwealth the power to make laws “with the islands of the Pacific”. This reflected the growing sense that British authorities were not taking the colonies’ security concerns about the Pacific seriously enough.

A new national way of thinking of the Pacific was beginning to take hold. Early Australian leaders saw the Pacific similarly to how it was depicted during the 2022 election campaign – a vast, empty region where alien powers threatened Australian security interests.

And just like today, arguments for greater national sovereignty in defence came up against the belief that Australia’s security could best be guaranteed through an alliance with a major power.

For example, the Australian public strongly approved of a visit by the US Navy in 1908, which demonstrated to a rising Japan that Australia had powerful friends. But some voices were also critical of relying too heavily on the United States. The Bulletin magazine opined that if Japan was to attack,

there may be one chance in ten that the United States will be our ally.

Shifting our perspective

Australian solders seize Japanese ammunition after attacking Gona village in New Guinea during the second world war.
Wikimedia Commons

Throughout the 20th century, more conflicts and geopolitical rivalries have only strengthened this mindset that Australia must retain hegemony over the Pacific to keep threats at bay.

The second world war in the Pacific was crucial to shaping Australia’s defence posture and the misgivings it continues to have about potential threats.

In recent years, this concern has shifted from Japan and Germany to China. As it has emerged as a regional power, Beijing has taken an aggressive approach to security issues in the Pacific and attempted to woo Pacific partners with concessional finance arrangements and opaque support for politicians.

On the plus side, Australia’s relations with the region have matured. Canberra respected the post-war drive for independence in the Pacific and has poured billions of dollars in aid money into the region to help the new nations develop.

Australian diplomacy has also become more responsive to the concerns of island nations, and has been in the spotlight again this week during Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visit to Cook Islands for the Pacific Islands Forum.

But our public discussions about the Pacific still contain echoes of the past. This contributes to a narrow, seemingly insecure, viewpoint on the region.

The Morrison government’s mishandling of its communication with Pacific countries about the AUKUS initiative shows how a singular focus on strategic denial can undermine our relations. Pacific nations were shocked by the idea that nuclear-powered submarines would be deployed in their region, particularly those that had experienced nuclear testing in the past.

Some leaders lashed out, like Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama:

If we can spend trillions on missiles drones, and nuclear submarines, we can fund climate action.

Our diplomacy on this issue has improved since.

Successive Australian governments stretching back to the early colonial administrators were not necessarily wrong in pointing to the potential security threats arising from the activities of others in the region.

But the real failing – then and now – has been to project only these concerns in the way we talk to, and about, the Pacific.

Ian Kemish AM is affiliated with the ANU National Security College, Griffith Asia Institute and University of Queensland. His strategic advisory business Forridel assists private and public sector organisations with stakeholder engagement across the Indo-Pacific region. He also chairs KTF, a foundation which partners with the Australian Government, PNG authorities and several private sector entities.

– ref. Australia has long viewed the Pacific as a place of threats that must be contained. It’s time for this mindset to change – https://theconversation.com/australia-has-long-viewed-the-pacific-as-a-place-of-threats-that-must-be-contained-its-time-for-this-mindset-to-change-212772

Overwhelmed by group chat messages? You’re not alone

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Mannell, Research Fellow in Digital Childhoods, Deakin University

For many of us, group chats are part of the texture of our social lives. These groups, formed on apps like Messenger or Whatsapp, can be as large as a hundred people or as small as three.

We use them for organising one-off tasks or events, managing recurring coordination between groups like sports clubs or work teams, and keeping in touch with family and friends.

In the best cases, group chats can provide important spaces for building and maintaining relationships. They can be places of joy, solidarity and refuge.

But they can also be burdensome, and create feelings of anxiety and worry. I researched group chat dynamics and these are the three biggest issues I encountered.

1. You’re overwhelmed by the volume of messages

The volume of messages and notifications group chats generate can be overwhelming.

In my own research, a participant recalled accidentally leaving her phone at home, and returning to find she’d missed 200 messages in a group chat about buying a birthday gift.

Another explained that their most active group chat kicked off at 8am and didn’t quiet down until 1am.

A recent survey of people in the United States and United Kingdom suggests this is a common problem, with 40% of the respondents indicating they were overwhelmed with group chat messages and notifications. And then there’s notifications from email, social media, calendars, news apps, and so on.

People often manage this by muting group chats. But this can mean missing important information or plans to catch up, or having to dip in and out of the group chat to check for relevant conversations.

People can also find the chaos of group chat conversations overwhelming. In large groups, multiple conversations can be running at once, making it hard to keep track of what is being discussed or planned.

These problems can make group chats ineffective for the tasks they were set up to complete. Especially in large groups of acquaintances, planning can devolve into a mess of opinions, alternatives and side conversations.

One participant in my research described a group chat about a birthday gift getting sidetracked by two people having their own catch up.

Another recounted a disastrous group chat involving 20 people trying to organise a potluck dinner. Rather than reaching a consensus about who would bring what, the conversation devolved into a debate about whether potlucks were a bad idea, with one person insisting professional catering would better account for dietary requirements.

2. You don’t want to be there – but can’t leave

Other, possibly more significant, challenges are the difficult or awkward social dynamics that can arise. The ease of creating groups and adding members means people can be included in groups they wouldn’t have chosen to join.

In one instance of this, a woman was added to a group for organising a shared gift for a colleague. She would have preferred not to contribute to the gift but found it too awkward to leave.

Woman looks at phone — Sometimes it can feel like you’re lurking.
Kev Costello/Unsplash

Challenging dynamics can also arise when relationships change after a group chat has been established.

One participant told me about a group chat started by four close friends when they began university. A year later, one person had grown distant and become largely silent in the group chat, although the other three still used it to chat and organise catch ups. My participant found this dynamic incredibly awkward and had become cautious about starting group chats as a result.

Other participants described feeling trapped in group chats they would prefer to leave. The blunt “x has left the group” notification made them reluctant to formally quit but ignoring the group was also uncomfortable.

Many of these challenges stem from the rigid membership of group chats (you’re either in or you’re out) which doesn’t always gel with the complexity of our relationships. These challenges may also be exacerbated by unclear or contested social etiquette around group messaging.

3. You feel excluded

The most difficult issues arise when processes of social exclusion play out in group chats.

Back channel groups can emerge, where some group members create a new group to privately communicate about what’s happening in the main chat.

In the most dramatic cases, participants described people getting kicked out of groups because of disagreements or because someone felt the group chat had become too large.

Research suggests that being removed from a group is rare and mostly occurs when a relationship has ended.

But guessing whether you’ve been excluded from a group chat can be cause for anxiety, especially because you might not just be missing out on gossip and cat videos but also plans to catch up in person.

Person opens Whatsapp on their smartphone — Being removed from a group is rare, but users still worry about being excluded.
Dimitri Karastelev/Unsplash

So what can you do?

Our relationships with each other can be weird, awkward and messy – group chats reflect this social reality but with an added layer of technological complexity thrown in.

Generally, research suggests that the group chats people enjoy most are smaller groups with closer friends.

So, until app design improves and we collectively figure out etiquette for awkward group chat moments, your best bets are to:

use group chats with a handful of people who know each other, or who you’re confident will get along
find another way of organising that potluck. Use other forms of organisation for more complex events or with larger groups (invitations, Facebook events or one-on-one texts)
mute those crazy chats if you’re struggling with distraction or aren’t that interested. Muting is common and increasingly expected. If the chat is often used for organising things you don’t want to miss, let someone in the group know so they can keep you posted or make a routine of checking in
if you’re feeling weird about some group chat social dynamics, raise it with the person in the group you know best. We can make lots of assumptions about what other people’s messaging behaviours mean but the lack of extra social cues mean our assumptions can be off. That person might not be avoiding you – they might just have the chat muted!

The Conversation is commissioning articles by academics across the world who are researching how society is being shaped by our digital interactions with each other. Read more here

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

– ref. Overwhelmed by group chat messages? You’re not alone – https://theconversation.com/overwhelmed-by-group-chat-messages-youre-not-alone-215879

The unsafe Safeguard Mechanism: how carbon credits could blow up Australia’s main climate policy

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Macintosh, Professor and Director of Research, ANU Law School, Australian National University

This article is part of a series by The Conversation, Getting to Zero, examining Australia’s energy transition.

A time bomb is ticking inside the Albanese government’s climate policy. When it explodes, Australia will fall short of its climate targets and leave a gaggle of investors shirtless.

The problem arises from a poorly understood aspect of the net zero transition: carbon credits or offsets.

The centrepiece of Australia’s climate policy is a carbon pricing scheme known as the Safeguard Mechanism. It places caps on the emissions of around 220 of the country’s largest mining, gas and industrial facilities, based on the emissions intensity of their operations. Every year through to 2030 these caps will decline by between 1% and nearly 5%.

The facilities have two ways to keep their emissions within the caps. They can reduce them, or they can buy and surrender one of two forms of credits, the most significant being Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs) issued under Australia’s carbon offset scheme.

How the offset scheme works

Under the scheme, landholders, energy users and other emitters can register projects that avoid emissions or sequester carbon dioxide in trees, soils or geological formations. Those who do so in line with specified rules receive ACCUs, a tradeable financial instrument.

Each carbon credit unit is supposed to represent additional and permanent abatement of greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to one tonne of CO₂.

Reducing the emissions of facilities covered by the Safeguard Mechanism is likely to be difficult and expensive, at least in the short term, as most are in the oil and gas, coal and other mining sectors. For some, the only viable way to significantly reduce emissions is to stop production.

Carbon credits enable these facilities to meet their obligations by effectively paying someone else who can cut emissions more cheaply. In theory, allowing facilities with high abatement costs to use offsets lowers the economy-wide cost of reducing greenhouse gases, without sacrificing climate outcomes.

But for the scheme to work, the ACCUs must have “integrity”: they must represent an actual reduction in emissions that would not have otherwise occurred. And to the extent the reduction involves sequestration of CO₂ in a sink (such as a forest), it must stay in the sink permanently.

Since the offset scheme started in 2011, 137 million ACCUs have been issued. Three-quarters of these have come from three project types: avoided deforestation in western New South Wales, combustion of methane from landfills (largely to create electricity), and human-induced regeneration of native forests in arid areas of inland Australia.

Our research shows that most of these projects have low integrity. People are getting carbon credits for not clearing forests that were never going to be cleared anyway, for growing trees that already exist, for growing forests in places that will never sustain them, and for operating electricity generators at landfills that would have operated anyway.

Putting net zero in peril

These projects do serious damage to Australia’s emissions reduction efforts. They enable Safeguard Mechanism facilities to increase their emissions – and governments to approve new fossil fuel projects – on the grounds that carbon credits will provide offsetting reductions elsewhere. But credits with no integrity produce no offsetting reductions.

The flood of low-integrity credits in the ACCU market also artificially lowers the carbon price faced by the Safeguard Mechanism facilities. The lower price causes the facility operators to rely more heavily on offsets and delay onsite emission reduction efforts. It also warps the offset market by making high-integrity offset projects unviable – a form of Gresham’s Law, where bad projects drive out the good.

The situation with Australia’s offset scheme is not unique. Research on other offset schemes has found similar integrity problems. That’s because generating high-integrity credits is difficult.

Scheme regulators have a challenging job. Along with having to measure emissions and removals from dispersed and often naturally variable sources and carbon sinks, they must try to screen out phoney emissions reductions offered by project proponents.

The latter have both a huge information advantage over regulators and strong incentives to claim credits for doing what they were already doing or planning to do anyway – such as retaining forests they never intended to clear.

But regulators also have an incentive to increase the supply of credits, even if it risks reducing integrity. This is because low credit supply is taken as a sign of scheme failure.

Tight integrity standards reduce credit supply and push up credit prices, which in turn increases compliance costs for polluters and destabilises political support for carbon pricing schemes. Liquid markets built on a healthy supply of credits (regardless of quality) make regulators look good and keep emitters and politicians happy.

The failings of the Chubb Review

In 2022, the Albanese government commissioned former chief scientist Ian Chubb to lead a review of the ACCU scheme. The review’s report was confused and contradictory. It dismissed concerns about the scheme’s integrity, even those expressed by developers of offset projects.

Despite not analysing the performance of a single project, the review confidently concluded that the level of abatement credited under the scheme had not been overstated. Its evidence for this was limited to one sentence: “While the Panel was provided with some evidence supporting that position (that integrity problems existed), it was also provided with evidence to the contrary.” It gave no details of what that contrary evidence was.

The panel then recommended substantial changes, including an end to the untenable situation in which the Clean Energy Regulator, the statutory authority charged with implementing legislation to reduce emissions, was responsible for making and administering the scheme rules and then buying most of the credits. The panel also proposed repeal of the avoided deforestation offset.

These changes, while welcome, were carefully designed to leave existing projects untouched. For example, repeal of the avoided deforestation method will not affect 63 existing projects, which will generate credits for years to come.

Conveniently, this will ensure that the supply of ACCUs and their price remain in a politically acceptable range until at least 2030.

What the government must do

Truly fixing the scheme requires the government to stop crediting low-integrity projects and methods. The credit tap must be turned off for all avoided deforestation projects and most human-induced regeneration projects, and crediting arrangements for landfill projects must be radically improved.

The government’s political problem is that it needs to keep the carbon price within a palatable range for Safeguard Mechanism facilities. If it stopped crediting low-integrity projects, prices would skyrocket and not enough high-integrity credits exist to meet demand.

The government could solve the problem by introducing a standard cap price into the Safeguard Mechanism. Instead of surrendering credits, facilities could pay, for instance, A$50 per tonne on excess emissions. But that would open the government to claims that the scheme is just another carbon tax.

Fixing these flaws is challenging. But by refusing to face the problems head-on, the government has sabotaged its own climate policy. Its failure could also permanently stain the reputation of offsets.

Like Robodebt, the scheme is badly designed, unethical, and destined to fail, albeit for different reasons. We can only hope that when it unravels, it doesn’t do Australia’s decarbonisation efforts permanent harm.

Andrew Macintosh is a director of the Paraway Pastoral Company, which has offset projects registered under the ACCU scheme. He has also received funding for research projects involving analysis of the operation of the ACCU scheme.

Don Butler receives funding from the Australian Government.

– ref. The unsafe Safeguard Mechanism: how carbon credits could blow up Australia’s main climate policy – https://theconversation.com/the-unsafe-safeguard-mechanism-how-carbon-credits-could-blow-up-australias-main-climate-policy-213874

Farmers or foragers? Pre-colonial Aboriginal food production was hardly that simple

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Westaway, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Archaeology, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland

For almost ten years, debate has raged over the book Dark Emu by Aboriginal historian Bruce Pascoe. In it, Pascoe argues many pre-colonial Aboriginal groups were farmers, pointing to examples like eel aquaculture in Victoria, and grain planting and threshing of native millet in the arid centre.

The debate has drawn in everyone from academics to Aboriginal communities invested in food futures to shock jocks claiming it is a warping of history.

For our group of archaeologists and First Nations people, the fact this debate has raged so long suggests there are shortcomings in how we think of food production and how we investigate it in Australian archaeology.

Farmers versus foragers is a huge oversimplification of what was a mosaic of food production. After all, Australian landscapes differ markedly, from tropical rainforest to snowy mountains to arid spinifex country. For many Aboriginal people, the terms “farming” and “hunter-gatherer” do not capture the realities of 60 millennia of food production.

In our new research published in the Archaeology of Food and Foodways, we argue that to better understand millennia-old systems, archaeologists must engage deeply with fields such as plant genetics, ethnobotany, archaeobotany and bioarchaeology as well as listening more carefully to the views of Aboriginal people. Here’s how.

We need to use better methods

For decades, archaeologists have grappled with the task of understanding ancient food production. We are by no means the first to point to the lack of appropriate methods as a reason why this has proved hard.

Archaeobotanists Anna Florin and Xavier Carah have observed that food production systems in northern Australia are very similar to those in Papua New Guinea. While we accept Papuan food gardens, Australian archaeologists have been less eager to embrace this idea for Australia.

In part, this is a failure of terminology. Aboriginal food production was enormously varied.

map of australia showing Aboriginal grainlands in the centre, yam country in the south east and many other food production systems — This map shows the complex and diverse types of food production and settlement systems documented by researchers across Australia, ranging from arid grainlands to rainforest seed processing to yam harvesting.
Author provided, CC BY-ND

The solution lies in better methods. For instance, many Aboriginal groups lived semi-permanently in gunyah (bark hut) villages, as Dark Emu demonstrates by quoting colonial observers.

These settlement sites are vital to gaining a better understanding of how people lived. By excavating gunyah sites and fireplaces where food was prepared, we can recover seeds by sieving dirt and ash to find out which plants people used. The problem? Many of the sieves used were not fine enough to capture the tiny seeds of vital plants such as native millet. Most seeds used by Aboriginal groups were less than 1mm in radius.

This can be fixed. In south-west Asia, archeobotanists have long used fine mesh sieves to recover ancient seeds. You also need reference collections of seeds to be able to identify them from fireplaces.

Genetics – and archaeology?

It might not sound like a natural fit. But around the world, combining plant genetics with archaeology has dramatically changed our understanding of how people used plants, how they moved them about the landscape and how they changed these plants into forms better suiting our use. The wild precursor of corn, for instance, looks almost nothing like what we moulded it into through selection.

Combining these approaches is only in its infancy in Australia. But early applications together with Aboriginal knowledge of plant use has revealed dramatic new insights into how Aboriginal people moved important species such as black bean Castanospermum australe around the landscape and cultivated them.

The legacy of these food production techniques may still be visible today. For instance, when we look at the four species of native rice, we would not expect them to have large seeds. But all four species do. For millennia, Aboriginal groups in Australia’s wet north farmed these floodplain grasses. They may well have provided some selective pressure that resulted in larger grains, as early farmers did elsewhere.

To date, we don’t know this for sure. But we can find out. Careful genetic analysis of remaining wild populations should tell us if these large grains came from human rather than natural selection. We can also analyse genetic diversity between wild rice populations, to see if Aboriginal groups were involved in spreading these useful plants further.

Reading the story of bones

Every bone tells a story. In your bones lie traces of how fast you grew, what you ate and how hard your life was.

Studying ancestral remains is a very sensitive issue due to the colonial practice of collecting Aboriginal remains for research. But when done sensitively and respectfully, it yields fresh insights.

Bones and teeth can tell us many things about life in Aboriginal Australia. Tracking changes in isotope ratios in teeth can tell us if people were shifting to a more sedentary way of living. Stress in bones can tell us about difficult food production techniques such as labour-intensive seed grinding.

The past can shape the future

Aboriginal culture is 60 millennia old, during which time the climate shifted several times. Sea levels rose, flooding the Bass Strait and the coastal plains connecting Cape York to Papua New Guinea.

For a culture to survive that long means it had to rely on sustainable food production. Finding out how exactly this was done could yield lost knowledge and make it possible for current-day Aboriginal groups to recapture these methods and crops.

To date, renewed interest in bushfoods has not spread far beyond boutique food industries such as gourmet breads and specialised plant foods like Kakadu plum and quandongs.

Learning more about drought-resilient crops such as native rice and native millet (Panicum decompositum) could help farmers adapt to climate change and diversify food production. In central Victoria, the Dja Dja Wurung group is exploring the potential for kangaroo grass (Themeda triandra) for use as a food and as drought-resistant cattle fodder.

The better we understand ancient food production, the more likely we are to be able to bring this knowledge to bear on today’s challenges – and give a fuller answer to the questions raised by Dark Emu.

Man holding kangaroo grass — Dja Dja Wurung man Rodney Carter inspects kangaroo grass.
Author provided, CC BY-ND

Michael Westaway receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Alison Crowther receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Robert Henry receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Rodney Carter is the CEO of the Dja Dja Wurrung Corporate Group, the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aborginal Corporation and Dja Dja Wurrung Enterprises.

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

– ref. Farmers or foragers? Pre-colonial Aboriginal food production was hardly that simple – https://theconversation.com/farmers-or-foragers-pre-colonial-aboriginal-food-production-was-hardly-that-simple-216988

‘Thank you for making me feel smart’: will a new campaign to raise the status of teaching work?

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Virginia Beal, Senior Marketing Scientist, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, University of South Australia

Federal and state governments have just launched a A$10 million advertising campaign to “raise the status” of teachers in Australia and encourage people to consider a career in school education.

Called “Be That Teacher”, the campaign features emotive stories from eight real teachers who have positively affected their students’ lives and futures.

For example, Mr Wang, a maths teacher from Victoria talks about how a Year 10 student wrote him a note to say “thank you for making me feel smart for once”. Mrs Kentwell, a primary teacher from Queensland, spoke about holding the hand of a young blind student in a running race, while other students cheered him on.

The rewarding feeling you get from teaching is something I’ve never felt from any other job.

The campaign, by ad agency Clemenger BBDO, is running across social media, television, cinema, billboards and at bus stops and train stations until next April.

Why do we need it?

The campaign comes amid an ongoing teacher shortage crisis in Australia. Federal government modelling has predicted a shortfall of more than 4,000 teachers by 2025. Last month, the New South Wales government revealed a 42% drop in casual teacher numbers meant 10,000 lessons in the state were going without a teacher each day.

We also know the number of students enrolling in teaching degrees has dropped 12% in the past ten years. Of those who do enrol, only 50% finish the degree and 20% of those who graduate leave the profession within three years.

Australian studies have also told us teachers do not feel valued by the community, are abused and disrespected by parents, and receive poor media coverage.

Is this campaign the answer? Can advertising help solve Australia’s teacher shortage?

Advertising can work

There is evidence to show advertising can work. A clever way to demonstrate advertising’s value is to examine what happens in its absence. Our 2023 study showed, on average, brands experience a decline in sales when they stop advertising for more than one year.

But there are no certainties with advertising. So what increases the chance of a successful campaign?

Advertising works primarily by creating and refreshing memories – in this case by establishing a link between “teaching” and “positive career option”. This heightens the chance teaching will come to someone’s mind when considering careers. The freshness of a memory (how recently they saw the ad) increases the chances they will think of teaching.

This means the campaign should run while the shortage persists, to increase the chance it will be in potential students’ minds and particularly during the lead-up to university preference cut-off dates over the summer.

Do the ads themselves work?

The campaign gets an A on several factors.

The videos are beautifully crafted, capturing attention by using human faces, voices and authentic storytelling. All these elements improve the chances of campaign success by evoking an emotional response, which heightens memory retention.

The “Who will you inspire?” tagline used in the campaign is also both emotive and memorable.

The branding needs more work

Beyond the ads, the Be That Teacher website contains information about pursuing a teaching career (how to do it, available scholarships and support). While the campaign can create a memory or pique someone’s interest, this information will help people decide if teaching is the career for them.

Here, the branding aspect (or identity) of the campaign needs more work. Be That Teacher is new to Australians and it needs to be more prominent in the videos and still images to stand out and capture attention.

Introducing the line “Be That Teacher” visually at the beginning of the ads and adding a verbal mention, rather than just at the end, heightens the chance it will be processed and remembered. This is crucial if the campaign is going to push people to the website.

Of course we also need more than ads

Recruitment and retention issues in education are not new. Teachers report feeling overworked, underpaid and overly burdened by administrative tasks.

These are all complex issues and clearly, advertising will not be the sole fix to the teacher shortage (nor are governments suggesting it will be).

But with teachers so essential to Australia’s future, every effort should be made to build and retain our teaching workforce. Good advertising like this campaign can help generate more interest in the profession and provide a gentle nudge towards improving the status of this vital career.

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

– ref. ‘Thank you for making me feel smart’: will a new campaign to raise the status of teaching work? – https://theconversation.com/thank-you-for-making-me-feel-smart-will-a-new-campaign-to-raise-the-status-of-teaching-work-217362

5 Aussie musicals you might not have heard of – but really should see

By The Conversation -

November 10, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phoebe Macrossan, Lecturer in Screen Media, University of the Sunshine Coast

Gillian Armstrong’s Starstruck (1982) IMDB

When you think of great Aussie musicals, some key films from the 1990s and 2000s come to mind: Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding, Moulin Rouge!, Bran Nue Dae and The Sapphires. These films are often framed as “reviving” the musical genre for Australian audiences, due in large part to their box-office success.

While certainly fantastic films, there is actually a long history of Aussie musicals that have been popular with cinema audiences since the 1930s.

There are 73 films that have been classified as a “musical” or containing musical elements by the National Film and Sound Archive. They include comedies, children’s and animated films, dramas, revues, backstage musicals, biopics, dance films, rock musicals, soundtrack films, television musicals and live concert films.

So where to begin? These are my top five Aussie musicals you may not have heard of but should definitely try to see.

These films represent just a snapshot of the rich history of musical cinema in Australia. They demonstrate how Australian cinema responds to international trends in musical cinema production, but also how it influences and innovates in the global musical genre.

These films are hard to get a hold of and only occasionally pop up on streaming services – if at all. However, you might catch them on DVD or at your local indie film festival or retrospective (there were several screenings of Starstruck when the NFSA released a digitally restored version in 2015).

1. Funny Things Happen Down Under

Olivia Newton-John’s 1965 debut feature, Funny Things Happen Down Under, directed by Joe McCormick, was an adaptation of the Terrible Ten children’s television show from 1959–60.

It’s Christmas time in the bush and a group of country children make a plan to save their woolshed, under threat because the sheep station has to be sold.

After they accidentally turn a goat’s wool multi-coloured because it drinks a strange concoction of Christmas pudding, flowers and fizzy water, they decide to feed it to the sheep to sell rainbow-coloured wool.

While certainly of its time (there is a scene that involves yellow face), the film has some great songs by Newton-John and New Zealand singer Howard Morrison, as well as an athletic final dance number around the shed called Click Go the Shears.

2. Oz

Directed by Chris Lofven, the 1976 film Oz (also known as Oz: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Road Movie, or 20th Century Oz on its release in the United States) is a version of The Wizard of Oz as a rock ‘n’ roll road movie set in the Australian outback.

Dorothy (Joy Dunstan) is hitchhiking to the city to see glam rocker The Wizard. Along the way she meets brainless surfie (Bruce “Stork” Spence) – the scarecrow – a mean mechanic (Michael Carman) – the tin man – and an overly confident bikie (Gary Waddell) – the lion.

Ross Wilson, the frontman of Daddy Cool and Mondo Rock, wrote and produced Oz’s musical score. The singles Livin’ in the Land of Oz by Wilson and Beating Around the Bush by Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons were both released in 1976 from the soundtrack.

Much like motorcycle road movie Easy Rider (1970), which had become a symbol of New Hollywood, Oz made a direct appeal to young audiences and the counterculture via a compilation soundtrack of contemporary popular music.

3. Starstruck

Gillian Armstrong’s Starstruck (1982) is a backstage musical set in 1980s Sydney. Barmaid Jackie (Jo Kennedy) lives above her family pub The Harbour View Hotel in The Rocks in Sydney with her mum, Nanna, cousin Angus and their pet cockatoo.

Jackie dreams of being a star, falls for a guitarist and joins a band called The Wombats so they can enter a TV talent competition.

Cue numerous musical numbers including Body and Soul, where Jackie dances on the bar, and an eventual performance at the Opera House after the band sneak on stage.

There’s also a fabulously camp Busby Berkeley-eque rooftop swimming pool number complete with co-ordinated lifeguards in speedos.

4. Dogs in Space

Rather than a traditional musical, Richard Lowenstein’s Dogs in Space (1986) is set in the underground punk scene in late 1970s Melbourne. It follows rocker Sammy (played by Aussie icon Michael Hutchence) through performing, partying, falling in love – and taking lots and lots of drugs.

The film has some amazing cinematography with winding long takes of the cast at their crammed inner-city terrace house as it gets progressively trashed by party after party.

Sammy’s love story with girlfriend Anna (Saskia Post) ends in tragedy and the final song, Rooms for the Memory, effectively uses Hutchence’s brooding star presence and vocals to great effect.

5. One Night the Moon

Based on true events from 1932, One Night the Moon (2001), written by First Nations director Rachel Perkins, features Aussie singer-songwriter Paul Kelly as the father of a girl (played by Memphis Kelly, his real daughter) who goes missing in the outback.

The girl’s mother (played by Kelly’s then wife and Memphis’ mother, Kaarin Fairfax) wants to employ an Aboriginal tracker (Kelton Pell) to help find the girl. Her father refuses, thus sealing the fate of his daughter through his prejudice.

With haunting songwriting and sweeping shots of the unforgiving landscape, this is a beautiful and moving story.

Phoebe Macrossan received funding from the University of the Sunshine Coast and assistance from the National Film and Sound Archive and the Australian Film Institute Research Collection for this research.

– ref. 5 Aussie musicals you might not have heard of – but really should see – https://theconversation.com/5-aussie-musicals-you-might-not-have-heard-of-but-really-should-see-213646

Grattan on Friday: When Labor states don’t dance to the Albanese government’s tune

By The Conversation -

November 9, 2023

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

It’s helpful for the Albanese government to have all mainland states in Labor hands – but only up to a point.

This week we’ve seen the Queensland government bite back at federal plans to curb the national infrastructure program, while Victorian resistance to changes to the Murray-Darling water plan prompted Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to lash out.

Infrastructure is always a vexed issue. The program is full of pork barrelling, whoever is in power. Even when that’s not involved, what to build and when it should be built is often contested.

In May, the government announced a 90-day review of the $120 billion infrastructure pipeline it inherited from the Coalition.

Infrastructure Minister Catherine King said projects had increased from about 150 to 800. The government’s aim was to reduce the number of projects (many of them small) and rearrange priorities.

High inflation, cost overruns and shortages of labour and materials are plaguing the program.

The political difficulties of abolishing or changing projects, often involving negotiation with states and territories, are obvious enough. Now they have become significantly worse.

The government has received its stocktake, and Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the overall cost of the program has blown out by some $33 billion.

Also, an International Monetary Fund report last week said infrastructure projects should be rolled out at a “more measured and co-ordinated pace, given supply constraints, to alleviate inflationary pressures”.

Chalmers is pushing this message, but it’s not being received well in Queensland.

State Treasurer Cameron Dick was blunt. “Queensland is Australia’s growth state and we need more infrastructure, not less,” he said in a tweet. “If infrastructure cuts are needed, they should be made to southern states with low growth and high debt.” (Fun fact: the electorate offices of Queenslanders Chalmers and Dick share a common wall.)

Queensland Police Minister Mark Ryan said:

I’ve got a clear message for Jim. Jim’s a mate of mine. Jim, those projects better not be in Queensland.

The last thing the Palaszczuk government wants is for projects to be cancelled, slashed or delayed. It is in a particularly precarious position – it faces an election in a year’s time and will be fighting for survival.

Queensland has an obvious political self-interest in resisting infrastructure cuts, but there’s a national point too. With large numbers of migrants coming into Australia, the demand for transport and other infrastructure will be increasing, rather than decreasing. Whatever cuts and slowdowns are made will need to be well judged.

The federal government argues the existing pipeline is unrealistic and without change could not be delivered anyway. But even if the decisions about what to cut, scale back or defer are economically sound, in political terms they could store up electoral time bombs for the government.

Even minor and unworthy projects can be sensitive in marginal seats. Scrapping them could open opportunities for the opposition. Also, available funds for new projects presumably will be limited.

When the government finishes its negotiations with the states and the outcomes are announced, King will be the main minister defending the decisions.

As we saw in the row over the rejection of Qatar Airways’ bid for extra flights, she struggles when under pressure. She could find the task challenging.

The fight over the government’s water changes centre on its planned amendments to the Murray-Darling Basin plan.

The legislation, soon to be considered by the Senate, broadens the activities that can be funded and extends the times for delivery of water-recovery projects. Most importantly, it removes the cap on the federal government’s “buybacks” of extra water for the environment.

The Murray-Darling plan is always fraught, because the interests of upstream and downstream users and their governments differ. Nevertheless, Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales have signed on – although NSW has done so reluctantly.

But Victoria, where the Andrews government has built a close relationship with irrigators, has held out, defending its position on the basis of work done by Frontier Economics](https://www.water.vic.gov.au/our-programs/murray-darling-basin/social-and-economic-impacts-of-the-basin-plan-in-victoria).

Its report argues that “previous water recovery has resulted in less irrigation […] putting the viability of major irrigation districts and the industries and communities they support under pressure”.

“Further water recovery from irrigators (buybacks and on-farm projects) will add to the impacts already being felt and undermine the ability of irrigation communities to plan for the future.”

Plibersek declared, in an interview with the ABC, that it was “extraordinary that we’ve got a Labor government using dodgy modelling to join up with Barnaby Joyce and David Littleproud”.

Victoria’s Water Minister Harriet Shing retorts: “This isn’t about party politics, and it’s disappointing to see it framed that way. We don’t apologise for standing up for Victorian communities and environments.”

But Plibersek has backing from Jamie Pittock, from the Australian National University’s Fenner School of Environment and Society. He says:

The Victorian government can usually be relied on to make decisions based on solid data. In the case of the Murray-Darling Basin, bizarrely, it has relied on low-quality consultants’ reports that exaggerate the socio-economic costs and ignore the benefits from water buybacks.

The legislation will come to a vote in the Senate this year, and there will be wrangling with the crossbench.

Assuming the legislation passes, the federal government can override Victoria and proceed with the buybacks of water for the environment. But it will still face the opposition of farming and irrigator groups, and some local communities.

It would be hard to find political observers who believe Peter Dutton can win the next election, due by May 2025. But there is increasing talk about the possibility that Labor, given it has a very narrow majority, could find itself in minority government. (Contrast a year ago, when all the talk was about Labor’s prospects for increasing its majority.)

Being pushed into minority is something Albanese – a senior figure in the minority Gillard government – would want to avoid at all costs. It would hamper the government’s flexibility to pursue its program, mean constant negotiation with crossbenchers including bolshie Greens, and encourage the Coalition to run maximum disruption.

The challenge of keeping out of minority increases the importance of the “ground game” in Labor’s marginal electorates. And it could make controversies over local issues – scrapped infrastructure projects, or unpopular new ventures including ugly transmission lines for renewable energy – potentially dangerous for the incumbents in those seats.

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

– ref. Grattan on Friday: When Labor states don’t dance to the Albanese government’s tune – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-when-labor-states-dont-dance-to-the-albanese-governments-tune-217280

Explainer: what is the ‘core network’ that was crucial to the Optus outage?

By The Conversation -

November 9, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark A Gregory, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, RMIT University

This week’s Optus outage affected 10 million people and hundreds of businesses. One of the early reasons given for the failure was a fault in the “core network”. The latest statement from the company points to “a network event” that caused the “cascading failure”.

The internet is complex, so most carriers, including Optus, use the concept of the “three layer network architecture” to explain it. This abstraction splits the entire network into layers.

This architecture is just one of many different ways of modeling complex networks.
CC BY-SA

The access layer

This layer consists of the devices you use to connect to the internet. They include the customer equipment, National Broadband Network firewalls, routers, mobile towers, and the wall sockets you plug into.

This layer generally isn’t interconnected, meaning each device sits at the end of the network. If you want to call a friend, for example, the signal would have to travel deeper into the network before coming back out to your friend’s phone.

An outage in the access layer might only affect you and your local neighbourhood.

The distribution layer

This layer interconnects the access layer with the core network (more on that later). Remember that the access layer regions aren’t connected to each other directly, so the distribution layer is the interconnecting layer.

Another term for the interconnection cables is “backhaul.”

It is a bit more abstract but generally includes large switches in local exchange buildings, and the cabling that joins them together and to the core network.

An exchange building in Bendigo, Victoria.
Google maps, CC BY-SA

The main purpose of the distribution layer is to route data efficiently between access points. An outage in this layer could affect whole suburbs or geographic regions.

The core layer

The core layer is the most abstract. It is the central backbone of the entire network and connects the distribution layers together and connects telecommunication carrier networks with the global network.

While physically similar to the distribution layer, with switches and cables, it is much faster, contains more redundancy and is the location on the carrier’s network where device and customer management systems reside. The carrier’s operational and business systems are responsible for access, authentication, traffic management, service provision and billing.

The core layer is abstract but includes fibre optic cables and datacentres.
Pexels, Lukas Coch/AAP, CC BY-SA

The core layer’s primary function is volume and speed. It connects data-centres, servers and the world wide web into the network using large fibre optic cables.

An outage in the core layer affects the entire country, as occurred with the Optus outage.

Why three layers?

A big problem with networking is how to keep everyone connected as the network expands.

In a small network it may be possible to link everyone together but as a network grows this would be unwieldy, so the network is divided into layers based on function.

The three layer model provides a functional description of a typical carrier network. In practice, networks are more complex, but we use the three layer model to assist with the understanding of where equipment and systems are found in the network, e.g., mobile towers are in the access layer.

A network of nine people would have 36 connections to link them to each other.
The Conversation/Pexels, CC BY-SA

The core layer is designed to ensure that access layer traffic coming from and going to the Internet or data-centres is processed and distributed quickly and efficiently. Today many terabytes of data moves through a typical carrier core network daily.

Now a network of 20 people only needs 20 connections to a deeper layer.
The Conversation/Pexels, CC BY-SA

Now you can see why a core layer failure could affect so many people.

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

– ref. Explainer: what is the ‘core network’ that was crucial to the Optus outage? – https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-the-core-network-that-was-crucial-to-the-optus-outage-217375

Optus said it didn’t have the ‘soundbite’ to explain the crisis. We should expect better

By The Conversation -

November 9, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Roberts, Lecturer, School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Sydney

Asked on Wednesday to explain why Optus broadband and mobile services had been simultaneously knocked out for five hours, its chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarino blamed a “technical network fault”, and then added:

There is no soundbite that is going to do it justice, so we want to really bottom-out the root cause, and when we have that very clear and in a digestible form, we will be forthcoming.

There are a couple of ways to interpret this statement. Either she didn’t want to indicate what her engineers really thought had happened, or she believed Optus users wouldn’t be able to understand the truth.

Or she might not have been thinking about Optus users.

Her reference to a “soundbite” seems to suggest Optus regards its key audience as the media rather than its customers.

Optus is baked into too much of what we do

With more than 10 million mobile customers alone, accounting for more than one-third of Australia’s population, the Singapore-owned Optus has become integrated into almost everything Australia does, from the operation of railways to automatic teller machines, to hospitals to emergency services.

Its customers, both corporate and personal, have become increasingly familiar with technical terms and technical explanations.

Those customers not only know more than they did – understanding many of the terms that apply to both software and hardware – but they expect more from technology, knowing that even some of their own jobs can potentially be replaced by artificially intelligent algorithms.

Many of those customers would be not only be asking “how did this happen”, but also “how could this be allowed to happen, given what technology is capable of”.

The golden hour

Crisis communicators have long spoken of the need to respond within the so-called “golden hour”, a concept taken from the emergency services where it is important to get to the injured party promptly.

In an increasingly automated world, that’s what Optus ought to have been able to do. Its core business is using technology for communications.

If it couldn’t use its mobile network, it ought to have been ready to use something else, even email.

Technology firms have built-in intensifiers

Crisis communications expert Timothy Coombs argues that the damage done to reputations during a crisis can be worsened by “intensifiers”, such as the organisation’s past history of crises, its track record, and sometimes the severity of damage caused.

Significantly, he finds no “halo effect” from having handled things well in the past, only a “Velcro effect” from having handled things badly.

To that I would add that a further intensifier is the extent to which an organisation suffering from a technology failure is itself a technology organisation.

It’s hard to argue you are a victim of something you have put yourself forward as a master of.

Sharing what it knows, on the assumption that at least some of its users will understand it, would be one way of indicating that Optus trusts its customers and is worthy of their trust.

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

– ref. Optus said it didn’t have the ‘soundbite’ to explain the crisis. We should expect better – https://theconversation.com/optus-said-it-didnt-have-the-soundbite-to-explain-the-crisis-we-should-expect-better-217302

41 US states are suing Meta for getting teens hooked on social media. Here’s what to expect next

By The Conversation -

November 9, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kayleen Manwaring, Senior Research Fellow, Allens Hub for Technology, Law & Innovation, and Senior Lecturer, School of Private & Commercial Law, UNSW Sydney

In the United States, 41 states have filed lawsuits against Meta for allegedly driving social media addiction in its young users (under the age of 18), amid growing concerns about the negative effects of platforms.

The lawsuits allege Meta has been harvesting young users’ data, deploying features to promote compulsive use of both Facebook and Instagram, and misleading the public about the negative effects of these features.

What might we expect to happen next? And are there potential consequences for Australia?

Leveraging whistleblower revelations

The most significant suit, filed in a federal court in California, involves 33 states. The claim is based on breaches of state consumer protection statutes and common law principles regarding deceptive, unfair or unconscionable conduct, and federal privacy statutory provisions and regulations (collectively “COPPA”) which specifically protect children.

This co-ordinated action is reminiscent of other class actions in the US and United Kingdom by Rohingya refugees against Facebook for its role in enabling hate speech against their community in Myanmar.

These cases rely in part on revelations made by former Meta employee Frances Haugen in 2021 about the role Facebook’s algorithms play in facilitating harms on the platform. Haugen’s testimony suggests algorithms deployed across Facebook and Instagram were designed to increase content sharing, and therefore profits, using data harvested from users over many years.

These algorithms play a crucial role in determining what kind of content viewers are exposed to, how long they engage with it, and the likelihood of them sharing it.

According to Haugen, Meta made changes to its algorithms in 2018 to prioritise meaningful social interactions. These changes, she said, impacted how content was viewed on the news feed, leading to increased sharing of negative content such as hate speech.

Concerns over algorithms and content

The California case is notable for the specific allegations around strategies used to keep young people interacting with Facebook and Instagram. For instance, the plaintiffs have elaborated on the impact of the “infinite scroll” feature introduced in 2016.

This feature prevents users from viewing a single post in isolation. Instead it provides a continuous stream of content without a natural endpoint. Haugen described this as being similar to giving users small dopamine hits. It leaves them wanting more and less likely to exercise self-control.

The plaintiffs in the California case claim this feature encourages users, and especially young users, to compulsively use the platforms – negatively affecting their wellbeing and mental health.

They say the recommendation algorithms used by Meta periodically present users with harmful materials. These include “content related to eating disorders, violent content, content encouraging negative self-perception and body image issues, [and] bullying content”.

They also allege features such as “variable reward schedules” are implemented to encourage compulsive use by young people. This causes further physical and mental harm (such as from a lack of sleep).

Consequences for Australia

In the US, federal laws substantially restrict liability of online intermediaries such as Meta for content shared by users.

In contrast, Australia’s Online Safety Act empowers the eSafety Commissioner to compel social media platforms and other online intermediaries to remove problematic material from circulation. This includes material relating to cyberbullying of children, cyberabuse of adults, image-based abuse and abhorrent violent material.

The Federal Court can impose significant penalties for violations of the Online Safety Act. But this doesn’t cover all the harmful content on social media, such as some linked to eating disorders and negative self-image.

Addressing young users’ compulsive social media use is a different challenge altogether. Some measures against this are possible. For example, if the US deception allegations are proven, any evidence that this extends to Australian users may ground an action against Meta for misleading or deceptive conduct (or false or misleading representations) under the Australian Consumer Law.

Last year, A$60 million in civil penalties was awarded against Google LLC for false or misleading representations in 2017-2018. A smaller A$20 million penalty was awarded against two of Meta’s subsidiaries in 2023.

Penalties under the Australian Consumer Law have increased since the Google case, likely due to the deep pockets of platforms. Options for courts awarding penalties include 30% of a platform’s turnover, or three times the value of the benefit to the offending entity.

However, platforms are in a stronger position where conduct isn’t misleading, false or deceptive, but is merely “manipulative” or “unfair”. For instance, the infinite scroll feature is unlikely to be considered misleading or deceptive under Australian law.

Australia also has no legislative equivalent to COPPA. Australia’s law of unconscionable conduct requires such a high level of harsh or oppressive conduct that it’s extremely difficult to prove.

One recent unconscionable conduct case brought by a problem gambler based on the addictive design of electronic poker machines failed in the Federal Court.

Shortcomings in the current law have, in part, led to calls for a new prohibition on unfair trading practices. Pressure is also mounting to reform the ineffective and under-enforced Privacy Act.

We need collaboration and innovation

There are still many gaps in Australian law required to protect consumers, especially children, against harms posed by social media platforms. But domestic law can only go so far in protecting people using a medium that operates (mostly) seamlessly across borders.

As such, international law scholars have suggested more creative approaches in the context of online hate speech. One suggestion has been to make platforms accountable for their actions under the laws of the country where they are headquartered, for enabling crimes that have taken place in other jurisdictions.

In 2021, the world welcomed a US district court’s order for Facebook to disclose various materials to The Gambia relating to hate speech against the Rohingya community in Myanmar.

In doing so, the court strengthened The Gambia’s claims in a pending action before the International Court of Justice. This action claims the Myanmar government had, through its genocidal actions against the Rohingya people, breached its obligations under the Genocide Convention – and that hate speech amplified on Facebook enabled the violence.

As society grapples with the implications of mass data collection and profit-maximising algorithms, protecting individuals will require international co-operation and a re-evaluation of legal frameworks.

Kayleen Manwaring receives funding from the UNSW Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation and the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre. She is a member of the Advisory Board for the Consumer Policy Research Centre (Vic) and is Deputy Chair and NSW Coordinator for an Australian chapter of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology.

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

– ref. 41 US states are suing Meta for getting teens hooked on social media. Here’s what to expect next – https://theconversation.com/41-us-states-are-suing-meta-for-getting-teens-hooked-on-social-media-heres-what-to-expect-next-216914

PODCAST: How the Hamas-Israel War is a Catalyst of Global Order Change – Buchanan and Manning

By Selwyn Manning -

November 9, 2023

Screenshot 2023-11-08 at 9.24.56 PM — AVFA S04 E11

A View from Afar

PODCAST: How the Hamas-Israel War is a Catalyst of Global Order Change - Buchanan and Manning

00:00 / 1:13:23

A View from Afar, by Dr Paul G. Buchanan and Selwyn Manning.

In this the eleventh episode of A View from Afar for 2023, political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and journalist Selwyn Manning examine how the post-World War II liberal internationalist system is being challenged by a fluid constellation of global and regional powers to influence the shape of an emerging new world order.

And Paul and Selwyn also assess how this massive shift in geopolitic demarcations is forming, relatively quickly, into a world of bipolarity where on one side we have a multipolar constellation of states, and on the other the traditional western liberal democracies.

The catalyst behind this rapidly forming bipolarity is conflict.

And, most recently, it is clear, that the Israel-Hamas war – and the atrocities committed initially by Hamas and more lately by Israel forces – is driving the world toward a transitional moment.

It appears, that what is emerging from the current multipolar system – and think here the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court among many other global bodies – is a situation that is not merely new-and-old Great Powers competing as nation-states.

But rather, what we see are groupings of fluid constellations of powers competing as blocs to influence the shape of what is to come.

In this episode Paul and Selwyn discuss and describe what is now evident, and sketch out what will likely emerge.

Of course, as mentioned, the Israel-Hamas war lays bare any claims of morality and exposes the hypocrisies of all sides in conflicts.

In particular the Hamas-Israel war exposes the west – led by the United States of America, the United Kingdom and various European states – to an argument that the west is morally moribund as it continues its colonial/post colonial attitudes of support of Israel as the latter commits an apparent disproportionate-defence offensive against Palestine’s peoples.

The argument appears to carry weight, especially as this western axis sustains its support for Israel’s war machine even while, on international humanitarian law grounds, the atrocities being committed against Palestine’s civilian population are morally indefensible and potentially legally enforceable as war crimes.

For example; retribution for the atrocities and despicable crimes committed by Hamas against defenceless Israeli citizens does not remove culpability for the State of Israel as it delivers on an apparent intention to annihilate Hamas and all people – children, the elderly, all innocents – who may surround Israel’s targets.

IHL shows how duty of care is not excused even if civilians are used as “human shields”, and at this juncture, it is not clear, whether that cited flawed-justification is founded on truth.

This is the position of what was once an authoritarian axis.

But what has formed is a multipolar-constellation that supports the Palestinian cause on postcolonial, Global South, and solidarity grounds.

The Questions:

So if all of this carnage is the catalyst for a new world order, what comes next?

Will we see the emergence of a parallel global institutional structure that develops as a counter-balance to the west’s post-WWII world order?

Has the west’s leading power lost its moral authority through its support for a war machine that has caused the deaths of over 10,000 people of innocent disposition, while itself refuses to be a signatory member state to the International Criminal Court and its principles of global justice?

And as such, has the west ceded persuasive moral authority to the rising constellation of once authoritarian-states that dominate the opposing bloc?

And does the west, as a consequence, find itself powerless to counter the migration of moderate independent states that are repelled by the immorality of the west’s arguments, laid bare by the Hamas-Israel war?

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

How to never get a speeding fine again — and maybe save a child’s life

By The Conversation -

November 9, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Mclaughlin, Adjunct Research Fellow, The University of Western Australia

What if our cars didn’t allow us to speed? Or, at least, strongly encouraged us not to speed?

We could help motorists avoid speeding — and therefore reduce emissions and fuel use, improve traffic flow, reduce crashes, lower insurance costs, make streets feel safer to walk and cycle – and totally avoid speeding fines.

Reducing speeding is crucial if we are to reduce the rising road toll. More than 1,200 people were killed on Australian roads in the past year.

It’s no wonder Australians want this technology – 81% believe “intelligent speed assist” technology is important for making roads safer.

Technology to stop speeding

“Intelligent speed assist” is the name of the low-cost technology that could save lives every year by reducing speeding.

Graphic explaining what intelligent speed assist does, how it works and the benefits — CC BY

The idea of helping drivers to avoid speeding is more than 100 years old. But early speed-limiting technologies proposed a top speed limit (similar to the way e-scooters are regulated in Australia), rather than allowing motorists the option to break the speed limit.

If we don’t do intelligent speed assist, what’s the alternative? Currently, we must constantly monitor speed limits and adjust our speed accordingly to avoid speeding. That means looking often at our speedometers.

There is some research to suggest continually taking our eyes off the road to review our speedometer could be dangerous.

Given how often speed limits can change on a route, and that we all make mistakes, it’s no wonder speeding is so common.

Will it work?

Installing intelligent speed assist in all cars could prevent at least 8% and up to 19% of all crashes Australia-wide. This represents up to 200 lives saved per year.

A NSW Centre for Road Safety trial found advisory intelligent speed systems reduced speeding in 89% of vehicles, across more than 1.9 million kilometres of testing.

Intelligent speed assist is not yet a perfect system. Hurdles to overcome include:

different speed sign coverage and designs from state to state
maintaining an accurate map of speed limits across Australia for GPS
potential over-reliance on the feature in varying driving conditions, such as wet weather, corners and so on.

But shouldn’t we be doing everything we can to overcome these hurdles, to make such a life-saving, child-saving technology work as well as it can?

What’s already been done?

Legislation in 2022 has made intelligent speed assist technology mandatory for all new cars sold in the European Union.

In Australia, if you drive a relatively new car, you may already have the option of intelligent speed assist. For example, if you drive a new Ford, you can activate its Intelligent Speed Limiter.

Intelligent speed assist adds to a growing list of in-vehicle safety technologies, such auto emergency braking, lane keep assist and blind spot monitoring. We know older vehicles that lack such technologies are involved in more crashes.

What about older vehicles?

Cars have an average age of 10.4 years. So retrofitting older cars with intelligent speed assist technology has been trialled. Despite the European legislation, there’s no expectation of a wide-scale retro-fitting program.

It is common, though, to retrofit fleet cars such as government and company vehicles with intelligent speed assist. This improves fleet safety and distributes new technologies when these vehicles are sold on the second-hand market.

‘But I only speed a little bit’

Research shows most people think they’re better-than-average drivers. More than one in four Australians think it’s ok to speed if driving “safely”.

But you can’t speed and drive safely. For every 1km/h increase in speed, there is a 4% increase in fatal crashes. If everyone was to increase their speed by just 1km/h, we could expect an extra 48 deaths a year.

Road deaths remain the number one killer of children in Australia and speed is the most common factor in a crash.

Current measures to reduce speeding haven’t gone far enough. Despite two in three Australian drivers admitting to speeding every week, only one in ten got a speeding fine last year.

If you are worried about the government losing out on revenue, don’t. Road traffic crashes cost the Australian economy A$27 billion a year. Speed camera fines generate just $1.5 billion a year.

3 actions to get started

Intelligent speed assist is not a silver bullet. But it is one of five crucial actions that can make zero road deaths possible. More than 200 cities around the world have already achieved this goal at least five times for a calendar year since 2009.

Here are three actions to get started:

install intelligent speed assist in all all public buses and government fleet cars – the NSW government fleet, for example, has 25,000 cars
require intelligent speed assist for a 5-star ANCAP safety rating
adopt the EU legislation in Australia to require intelligent speed assist in all new cars.

We have an urgent problem, we have the technology, we have the evidence it works, so what’s stopping us using it to save lives on our roads?

The authors have provided footage online of intelligent speed assist in action, for free reuse.

Matthew ‘Tepi’ Mclaughlin receives research funding from the Australian government’s Medical Research Future Fund and the government of Western Australia’s Healthway. He also receives salary support through the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course. He is a member of the Asia-Pacific Society for Physical Activity and a member of the Active Transport Advisory Group of Westcycle.

Courtney Babb receives funding from the Government of Western Australia, via the Department of Transport, and the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). He is a member of the WA Greens.

Paul Roberts receives funding from: 1. the government of Western Australia via the Road Safety Commission of Western Australia funding of the Western Australian Centre for Road Safety; 2. the Australian Office of Road Safety.

– ref. How to never get a speeding fine again — and maybe save a child’s life – https://theconversation.com/how-to-never-get-a-speeding-fine-again-and-maybe-save-a-childs-life-216347

It’s hard to find a surrogate in Australia. But heading overseas comes with risks

By The Conversation -

November 9, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ezra Kneebone, PhD Candidate, Monash University

Surrogacy offers the chance of parenthood for those who can’t carry a pregnancy for medical or social reasons.

In a surrogacy arrangement, a surrogate gives birth to a baby for the intended parents to raise. Most intended parents are heterosexual or gay couples, but single people can also use surrogacy to have a child.

In the 2021–2022 financial year, 213 Australian babies were born through international surrogacy – an arrangement between Australian intended parents and a foreign surrogate. Just 100 surrogacy births were reported by Australian and New Zealand fertility clinics in 2021.

Australian surrogacy laws and ethical guidelines aim to protect the interest of everyone involved with surrogacy. They also recognise the most important consideration of all is the welfare of the children born.

However, children born through international surrogacy aren’t protected by Australian laws because they’re born overseas. Our new research shows this can increase the physical and psychological risks to the child.

Making surrogacy easier to access in Australia could protect future children born through surrogacy.

How does international surrogacy impact children?

We surveyed more than 300 Australians who were parents through surrogacy, or were planning on having a child via surrogacy. We asked if they had picked international or domestic surrogacy and why, and we asked about the fertility treatment they and their surrogate received.

Respondents who had a child through international surrogacy commonly reported using two fertility treatments currently banned in Australia: multiple embryo transfer and anonymous egg donation.

Surrogates sometimes supply their own egg, but mostly the egg is supplied from one of the intended parents or a donor. Once the egg has been fertilised, the resulting embryo is then transferred to the surrogate.

In Australia, only one embryo can be transferred to surrogates at a time. This is because multiple embryo transfer increases the risk of twin, or even triplet, pregnancies. These pregnancies are linked to higher rates of complications for the pregnant woman and the baby, including preterm birth. Preterm birth is when a baby is born before 37 weeks of pregnancy and is the main cause of death in children below the age of five.

Dad carries his twins in a field, while an older child runs ahead — Multiple births are more likely with international surrogacy.
Unsplash/Juliane Liebermann

Of the survey respondents who had completed international surrogacy, 37% reported multiple embryos had been transferred to their surrogate. Some 27% of parents through international surrogacy had a preterm baby and 11% had twins or triplets. In contrast, just 11% of parents through surrogacy in Australia had a preterm baby and none had twins or triplets.

If a donor egg is used in Australia, the donor-conceived person can access information about their donor once they turn 18. Anonymous donation is not allowed because research shows many people born through egg or sperm donation want to know the identity of their donor.

Of the respondents who used donor eggs in international surrogacy, 47% said the identity of the donor was anonymous. Australians born through international surrogacy with anonymous egg donors may never know who their genetic mother is.

Why choose international surrogacy?

The most popular reasons for picking international surrogacy were that surrogacy in Australia is long and complicated and it is difficult to find an Australian surrogate.

Most Australian surrogacy arrangements occur between friends and family members. If this is not possible, intended parents can join online communities to meet potential surrogates. However, the number of intended parents in these communities far outweighs the number of surrogates.

For those lucky to find an Australian surrogate, they must complete a series of legal requirements as part of the arrangement. These requirements protect the interests of surrogacy participants and include legal advice, counselling and a court order to transfer parentage from the surrogate to the intended parents.

With international surrogacy, commercial agencies or brokers can match intended parents to a surrogate and the various Australian legal requirements may not be needed.

Pregnant women holds her hands under her belly — In some countries, you don’t have to go to court for legal parentage of babies born via surrogacy.
Unsplash/Omurden Cengiz

How can the risks of international surrogacy be reduced?

Intended parents considering international surrogacy should choose single embryo transfers and, if required, a known donor.

However, intended parents may not always be equipped with the information or resources to make this choice. Known donors may not always be available overseas and some of our respondents said they transferred multiple embryos because they were following the advice of their doctor.

Most respondents said they would prefer to complete surrogacy in Australia if it were possible. This means if surrogacy was more accessible in Australia, fewer people might go overseas and more babies might be born in Australia where regulations protect the child’s physical and psychological health.

To make surrogacy more accessible, surrogacy laws should be reviewed by an inquiry by the Australian Law Reform Commission. The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs recommended such an inquiry in 2016. This was never undertaken, but we don’t know why.

The Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission recently published recommendations for surrogacy law reform in the United Kingdom. One recommendation removes the need for a court to grant intended parents legal recognition. This is a welcome step forward.

However, the recommendations have also been criticised for not allowing surrogate compensation, which could discourage some people from becoming surrogates. Compensation is financial acknowledgement of the time and effort involved with the surrogacy pregnancy and is currently not allowed in Australia.

Law reform in Australia must address all barriers for domestic surrogacy, including the shortage of surrogates, to protect the welfare of children born through surrogacy.

Ezra Kneebone receives funding from the Australian Government Department of Education.

Karin Hammarberg works for the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority.

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

– ref. It’s hard to find a surrogate in Australia. But heading overseas comes with risks – https://theconversation.com/its-hard-to-find-a-surrogate-in-australia-but-heading-overseas-comes-with-risks-206182

Interlinking tunnels, hidden explosives and civilian casualties: the Israel-Hamas war enters a precarious new phase

By The Conversation -

November 9, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charles Knight, Adjunct Lecturer in Terrorism and Assymetric Conflict and Senior Researcher in Urban Warfare (UNSW), Charles Sturt University

With Israeli Defence Forces now reportedly surrounding Gaza City, the most densely packed part of the Gaza Strip, their fight against Hamas has entered a new phase focused primarily on urban warfare – some of it underground.

Sappers are the soldiers who clear paths through obstacles with machines and explosives, enabling other troops to overwhelm the enemy. They also create such obstructions and lay traps and mines when trying to defend a position.

Tunnels are a sapper’s job, too. Indeed, this is where the word comes from: the ancient technique of “sapping” beneath the surface to approach an enemy position protected from their arrows, bullets or shells.

As part of their plan for defence, Hamas sappers have excavated a huge series of tactical tunnels. Some are interlinked, some isolated. Some have been dug far below where bombs can reach, some are near the surface to allow access.

Tunnels and “mouseholes” in walls also allow for undetected movement between buildings. Hamas fighters expect they can emerge from these holes to attack Israeli soldiers before disappearing again.

In addition, Hamas sappers have likely prepared many improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – some hidden in walls to detonate when armoured vehicles pass by and other, larger explosives buried under roads.

Some tunnels may also be set as traps to entice Israeli soldiers to enter as they search for hostages.

Urban warfare is excruciatingly slow

As the war enters a new phase, it is pitting a grimly determined Israeli Defence Force (IDF), with the world’s best capabilities for urban warfare, against a force ready for martyrdom that has prepared for this fight for years. It will also be happening on terrain that analysts argue greatly favours the defender.

Though fighting in Gaza presents its own unique challenges, there are some lessons to be learned from the operations to eliminate Islamist fighters from the Iraqi city of Mosul and the southern Philippines city of Marawi in 2016-17.

In Mosul, a US-supported Iraqi force of about 100,000 took nine months to destroy an ISIS force of thousands in a thoroughly fortified city. The coalition lost 8,000 troops and many tanks and bulldozers to massive IEDs.

Progress was equally slow in Marawi, where it took five months for Filipino forces to defeat ISIS-Maute fighters. Troops could sometimes secure only one building per day because of the constant threat of ambush from tunnels and IEDs hidden in entrances, windows and stairwells.

Three layers of challenges

Urban war presents armies with compounding challenges.

The first layer is perceptual. There is a cognitive dissonance between a liberal society’s beliefs around the need for restraint in conflict and the primordial demands of urban war with its high costs in blood, destruction and legitimacy. Armies are averse to preparing for such horror.

Second, there are tactical challenges with fighting among buildings:

the threat of remote attack by drones or IEDs
the uncertainty created by hidden adversaries
the extreme exposure of forces as they advance
the dilution of combat power as forces are channelled, isolated and dispersed among buildings, with very restricted views
the degrading of sensors and communications systems.

Third, and critically, the presence of civilians in urban war zones imposes moral and ethical challenges. They suffer disproportionately and catastrophically, both as immediate casualties and from displacement and disease following the destruction of cities.

Military commanders also face a proportionality dilemma when it comes to interpreting international humanitarian law. They need to balance the necessity of their actions and the survival of soldiers against causing unintended but foreseeable civilian harm.

Further complexities include:

the obligation of forces to provide security and logistical support to noncombatants
the security threat from phone and social media usage by civilians
civilians who are hostile, obstructive or offer unarmed resistance
the psychological and political burden on commanders that may distort their decision-making.

How Israel has been preparing for this moment

The IDF has previously experienced these challenges in Gaza. After Israeli occupation ended in 2005, militant attacks prompted major incursions by the army in 2008 and 2014. That fighting taught the IDF key lessons.

From a political standpoint, Israel realised the importance of winning the contest of international and domestic public opinion. From a military and operational standpoint, the IDF learned that precision air power alone could not eliminate the threat from Hamas. Well-protected armoured vehicles were essential, and new capabilities were needed to counter the increasing use of tunnels by Hamas.

As a result, the IDF is uniquely well-equipped for urban operations, with the world’s best-protected tanks and armoured personnel carriers.

It also has world-leading armoured engineering vehicles, such as the D9 armoured “Doobi” bulldozer. With the D9, houses can be demolished instead of entered, reducing the risk of ambush and IEDs. However, these bulldozers have been controversially associated with destroying homes as punishment.

The D9 will be used in the war to create safe paths through terrain that may be mined, push alternative routes through buildings and build protective berms around “secured areas” to consolidate the IDF’s progress. Some of these bulldozers can even be operated by remote control.

The IDF’s Caterpillar D9R armoured bulldozer.
Zachi Evenor/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Other armoured engineering vehicles include the Puma minefield breacher, with the Carpet mine and IED clearing system that can detonate or disrupt hidden munitions with blasts from
fuel-air explosive rockets. Engineer vehicles also carry equipment that can jam IED circuits or transmissions. Some may also have the THOR system, which uses lasers to explode IEDs.

Soldiers are also trained to find, operate in and destroy tunnels. They include elements of the Sarayet Yahalom, a special forces unit that uses specialised demolition charges, subterranean drones and robots.

The Israelis lead the world in highly classified subterranean sensing research, including the use of geospatial, acoustic, seismic, electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) and ground-penetrating radar technologies. The IDF’s public statements suggest tunnels within 20 metres of the surface can be mapped.

The IDF tunnel sappers also have niche armoured fighting vehicles. Some are fitted with the technologies mentioned above, others with drilling equipment that can bore down into tunnels to deliver devices, materials or explosives. One, the Nakpilon, uniquely has a door at the front to deploy soldiers straight into tunnel entrances.

The IDF has generally preferred to destroy tunnels from the surface rather than entering, but some Yahalom and other reconnaissance special forces train to fight below ground, alongside the Oketz dog unit, with specialised vision, breathing and communications equipment.

Given the scale of the tunnel network and the task of recovering hostages, some human reconnaissance seems unavoidable. History suggests this will be done by pairs or individuals, perhaps the Mista’arvim elite undercover units, who may operate by disguising themselves as Hamas fighters.

Given the Hamas advantage of home terrain and the advanced technology deployed by Israel, both sides will likely inflict bloody surprises on one another. The IDF has the military capability to prevail, but the human cost of the ground war and the outcome of the crucial geopolitical war of narratives remain unclear.

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

– ref. Interlinking tunnels, hidden explosives and civilian casualties: the Israel-Hamas war enters a precarious new phase – https://theconversation.com/interlinking-tunnels-hidden-explosives-and-civilian-casualties-the-israel-hamas-war-enters-a-precarious-new-phase-216830

If NZ’s new government wants a simple fix to improve child poverty, here’s what it should do

By The Conversation -

November 9, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan St John, Honorary Associate Professor, Economic Policy Centre, Auckland Business School, University of Auckland

With a National-led coalition government taking shape (how long it takes is another matter), the nation’s “squeezed middle” awaits the financial relief promised during the election campaign.

As the lead party, National’s policies should be central to negotiations. For those without children, its proposed payment of the full Independent Earner Tax Credit for incomes between NZ$24,000 and $66,000 would kick in from April 1 next year.

This would help some 380,000 people in low and modestly paid work with an extra $10 a week. It’s not a lot, but better than nothing. For those with children, National has promised an extra $25 a week from the In Work Tax Credit – providing neither parent receives any part of a core welfare benefit.

At an annual cost of about $200 million, around 160,000 low-income “working families” would gain enough each week to buy a large block of cheese.

But for those roughly 180,000 families where parents are without work and who need welfare to survive, National’s election promises will deliver nothing.

This raises real questions about incoming prime minister Christopher Luxon’s promise to stick to the targets outlined in the Child Poverty Reduction Act and halve child poverty by 2028.

With a willingness to re-examine what is on the table, however, New Zealand’s worst-off children can be helped in a meaningful way. At the same time, the work effort of low-income parents can be better rewarded.

How the poverty trap works

The various tax credits available through Working for Families (WFF) are fiendishly complicated but utterly critical for the negotiating coalition parties to understand.

When a family’s joint gross income exceeds the (very low) fixed $42,700 threshold, every extra dollar earned denies them 27 cents of WFF assistance. To help explain this, it’s useful to imagine a typical family in those circumstances.

Let’s say this family has two children at school, with one parent in full-time employment and the other half-time, both on the minimum wage. That gives them a total annual gross income of $70,824, or $63,984 after tax.

WFF currently provides a maximum of $320 per week, made up of $248 from the Family Tax Credit (FTC) and $72 from the In Work Tax Credit (IWTC). But the parents’ joint income is over the fixed threshold, meaning they lose entitlement to $146 of WFF. This leaves just $174 a week for the needs of their children.

With rent or a mortgage taking maybe half of their net income, their budget just doesn’t add up. The weekly deficit must be covered by food parcels from foodbanks, special assistance from Work and Income, defaults on payments, high-interest borrowing or selling assets.

The parents are already stretched, but let’s say the mother decides to go back to full-time paid work. Her additional gross income would see Inland Revenue reduce her WFF entitlement by $116 a week – or demand repayment of any overpaid entitlements.

If she has a student loan, as many do, she could be liable for another repayment of $51 a week. Her extra income of $454 for 20 hours’ work leaves her better off by just $207.

Letting people work and earn more

To alleviate this kind of poverty trap, National proposes to increase the WFF threshold from $42,700 to $50,000. But this does not happen until 2026, just in time for the next election. In the meantime, rising costs will erode the family’s extra weekly $25 from the IWTC.

To increase the threshold to $50,000 immediately would cost about $250 million according to National’s own calculations. Delaying the change only decreases the incentive to work, with flow-on effects for productivity.

Rather than increasing the IWTC by $25, bringing forward the higher income threshold would be a more effective way to help squeezed middle-income “working” families by loosening the vice of that poverty trap.

It would deliver an extra $38 a week of WFF on joint incomes between $50,000 and, $100,000 or more, depending on the number of children. This would also address child poverty, as about half of the country’s poor children are in families in low-paid work.

But what of the other poor children in families that get nothing from National’s election promises? If their parents are so poor they need a benefit, or part of a benefit, they do not receive the IWTC and would gain nothing from the threshold increase.

These families live on budgets that fall far short of a liveable income. Many slip further into debt every week, waste precious time arguing for means-tested top-ups from Work and Income, or need food parcels from stretched and underfunded foodbanks.

A simple solution

For child poverty targets to have even a remote chance of being met, these worst-off children must be helped. This would best be achieved by an immediate increase to the Family Tax Credit, over and above the required inflation adjustment.

Here is a counter-intuitive but serious suggestion: reduce the In Work Tax Credit by $25 a week and increase the Family Tax Credit by the same amount.

This would mean the poorest families are better off. The working poor would see no difference, as their IWTC goes down while their FTC goes up. But they would still be helped greatly by the increase in the income abatement threshold, because any extra earnings would not be quite so badly penalised.

Much more could be done to reduce the poverty trap, including a reduction of the 27% abatement rate, indexation of the threshold for inflation, and a review of the penal student loan arrangements.

But this basic suggestion could still be a win-win for National’s key objectives at roughly the same eventual annual cost. It should be only a beginning, but it would provide a better path for future adjustments.

Susan St John is affiliated with the Child Poverty Action Group.

– ref. If NZ’s new government wants a simple fix to improve child poverty, here’s what it should do – https://theconversation.com/if-nzs-new-government-wants-a-simple-fix-to-improve-child-poverty-heres-what-it-should-do-217260

Do you think you have a penicillin allergy? You might be wrong

By The Conversation -

November 9, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Winnie Tong, Clinical Immunologist & Allergist, Immunopathologist and Senior Lecturer, UNSW Sydney

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest global threats to health, food security and development. This month, The Conversation’s experts explore how we got here and the potential solutions.

Penicillins are the most prescribed class of antibiotics in Australia. Originally derived from a fungus, penicillin antibiotics such as amoxicillin are used to treat common infections, including chest, sinus, ear, urinary tract and skin infections.

Penicillins are effective against a wide range of bacteria that cause common infections. But their activity is not so broad as to impact on good bacteria in our gut like other antibiotic classes do. They’re also cheap and readily accessible.

Up to 20% of Australians admitted in hospital say they have a penicillin allergy.

But not everyone who thinks they’re allergic to penicillin actually is. Research from our team and others suggests that if we assess all these patients, up to 90% are not allergic to it.

Why does it matter?

People who mistakenly think they’re allergic to penicillin may not get the most effective or safest antibiotics to treat their infection.

They are also at greater risk of developing multidrug-resistant infections or “superbugs”. This is because the antibiotic will kill off the bacteria that are susceptible to it, but the resistant bacteria are left behind to proliferate and cause further infection.

People who receive second-line antibiotics are more likely to have complications, such as antibiotic-induced gut infections. Second-line antibiotics tend to have a wider range of activity, killing both the bacteria causing infection, and the good bacteria required to keep our gut in balance. This allows bugs like Clostridium difficile, which normally lives in our gut but is controlled by other bacteria, to overgrow and cause inflammation.

For the health system, using second-line antibiotics means longer, more complicated hospital stays. Hospital stays for patients with penicillin allergies cost up to 63% more more than those without. It also results in greater costs for medications and greater resources required to treat the patient.

Why do people think they’re allergic?

People incorrectly believe they are allergic to penicillin for a number of reasons.

They may have experienced side effects from penicillin, such as nausea or diarrhoea. But though unpleasant, this doesn’t mean an allergy.

Others had a rash as a child, but this could have been due to the illness itself or an interaction between the virus and the antibiotic. An Epstein-Barr viral infection treated with amoxicillin, for example, causes a fine, red rash.

Woman sits it wheelchair in hospital — It’s important to know your true allergy status when you go to hospital.
Shutterstock

Some believe a family history of reactions to penicillin means they cannot take them. But there is no evidence penicillin allergy is inherited.

If some time has passed between exposure, people can lose the allergic response. This is typically seen in adults who had a mild allergy as a child, but lose the response with time, so are said to have “grown out” of their allergy.

Then there are people who have had a genuine and serious reaction to penicillin. This includes anaphylaxis, with profound swelling, breathing difficulties and low blood pressure, and severe life-threatening reactions such as Steven-Johnson’s syndrome, which causes widespread blisters and wounds that resemble burns.

Testing for penicillin

When someone says they have a penicillin allergy, we first get them to explain what happened with the reaction, including to what antibiotic, in what context and how severe it was.

Then we perform skin tests to further assess the person’s risk of reaction. If skin tests are negative, we can then give the patient the penicillin in question under supervision (a “challenge”) to see if they react.

Allergist performs skin test on patient's arm — Skin tests assess a patient’s reaction to the allergen.
Shutterstock

Some people can skip the skin tests altogether and go straight to the challenge if the history tells us they are at low risk of reacting.

Our study followed 195 patients who reported a penicillin allergy across six Sydney hospitals. In the first phase, we assessed 85 people and found 82% weren’t allergic to penicillin.

In the second phase, we assessed 110 people, of whom 69% weren’t allergic.
This is slightly lower than research on the population as a whole, because we only looked at people who were referred for an allergy assessment. Many more patients carry an allergy label than those referred for testing.

In our study, eight weeks after their test, just 54% of participants in phase one correctly knew their penicillin allergy status. Some allergic people believed they were not allergic, and many non-allergic people believed they were allergic.

For phase two, we ensured people received a standardised letter outlining their results in addition to having a doctor or nurse explain them. This time, 92% were correct in their understanding when contacted eight weeks later.

Reducing long waits for allergy tests

Ruling out allergies among people who think they can’t have penicillin is time- and labour-intensive. The wait time from someone first being referred to an allergy clinic to having testing can be up to two years. And it’s usually not available outside major metropolitan hospitals.

We need to improve access to testing and also look at when people can access allergy services. When a person is sick in hospital with a serious infection, it’s not the right time for testing.

We also need to ensure the results of allergy tests translate to the real world so people know their true allergy status. The fragmentation of our medical records are a barrier to clear and effective communication of a patient’s true allergy status, and urgently need to be improved.

Read the other articles in The Conversation’s series on the dangers of antibiotic resistance here.

Winnie Tong has received funding from Maridulu Budyari Gumal, the Sydney Partnership for Health, Education, Research and Enterprise (SPHERE), Triple I Clinical Academic Group seed grant 2017, and the Balnaves Foundation. The authors would like to acknowledge Professor Andrew Carr, their collaborators and participants on this project.

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

– ref. Do you think you have a penicillin allergy? You might be wrong – https://theconversation.com/do-you-think-you-have-a-penicillin-allergy-you-might-be-wrong-212874

Heat, cold, pollution, noise and insects: too many apartment blocks aren’t up to the challenge

By The Conversation -

November 9, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole Cook, Lecturer, School of Geography and Sustainable Communities, University of Wollongong

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the impacts of air quality on high-rise living. However, apartments face a range of atmospheric challenges. These include air and noise pollution, temperature and weather extremes, bushfire smoke and insects.

Our newly published research shows how apartment residents struggle with the impacts of unhealthy homes. It’s a result of decades of urban planning based on fossil fuel use and high-rise building standards poorly adapted to the Australian environment.

Our study involved residents of apartments in Liverpool CBD in New South Wales. They are exposed to particulate pollution from heavy truck movements tied to the Moorebank freight terminal, smoke from increasingly severe bushfires and a rising number of days of extreme heat each year.

Residents in our study preferred centrally located apartments to detached, car-dependent houses. However, our interviews revealed apartments were hot in summer, cold in winter and prone to mould, condensation, noise and air pollution. The lower people’s socioeconomic status, the more likely they are to be exposed to such problems.

At the same time, residents’ experiences pointed to low-cost, low-tech solutions. Sustainable, climate-adapted apartment designs would allow for better natural airflow, shading and screening.

Buildings that are bad for health and sleep

Ayasha’s experience in a two-bedroom apartment, built in 2017, highlighted the health costs of flawed design and a lack of insulation. She told us:

[…] at night-time it gets really cold because of the fog, like the interior glass gets wet and the room is always wet even when the heater is on […] Both of my daughter and me are having this cough thing because of the continuous heater […] For the last three weeks continuously she has this runny nose, like teary eyes and cough. She’s not recovering at all.

For Naomi, dampness in the 2016 two-bedroom apartment she and her husband bought caused concern about mould:

We’re conscious of the mould and we’re trying to keep the house aerated but it is very hard. In the bathroom, there’s a vent but it’s not strong and you don’t really want the window open for too long when it’s cold, so it does get a real build-up of moisture […] You’ll wake up and you can see a layer of wet all up the windows and on the ledge and it’s really hard to dry everything out.

Sarah’s 2018 apartment lacked flyscreens and ceiling fans to allow natural airflow through all the rooms. She said air conditioning became essential for coping with summer heat and avoiding unwanted insects.

We did open the doors a couple of times, the mosquitoes would get in and they would attack the baby. Like one time, she had 20 bites on her head one night […] and that was when we realised, no, we’re just gonna have to put the air con on.

Wanted: better regulations and development models

Residents’ experiences reflect low building standards in Australia.

Recent research on how to deliver sustainable apartment housing underscores the limitations of the National Construction Code, building materials and minimum regulations. This 2023 study called for better regulations targeting project design, compliance with standards, property valuation and transparent information about properties’ sustainability features.

As with all complex reforms, there are concerns the development industry will resist. Thus, some have suggested expanding the build-to-rent sector to achieve more sustainable apartment design.

Typically, diversified construction, finance and superannuation firms support this model of developing housing specifically to be rented. They have deeper pockets and a longer-term interest in the energy performance of buildings.

Yet studies show the build-to-rent sector is concentrated in higher-value locations. Costly subsidies and incentives would be needed to move it to areas where better, affordable housing is most needed.

Low-cost, low-tech solutions

Residents’ experiences reveal a range of low-cost, low-tech solutions that could easily be mandated for all apartment housing. These solutions include flyscreens, ceiling fans, external shading and adequate insulation.

Reminiscent of pre-air-conditioning building design, these solutions allow for flexibility in building facades, enabling both airflow and screening.

The same principles characterised early 20th-century, high-rise architecture. These buildings featured terraces, mesh balustrades, exhaust flues, cross-ventilation, sunrooms, external shading, louvres and screens “as a strategy of climate adaptability”.

The rise of air conditioning in the 20th century cemented apartments as enclosed environments. Models that depend on shutting the doors and windows and turning on the air conditioner are no longer viable in a climate crisis. Increasing living costs also mean many households can’t afford to use air conditioning.

COVID-19, too, has made enhancing natural airflow in buildings more important.

Looking down from the top of a room at a ceiling fan and man sitting at a desk — Ceiling fans, louvres and cross-ventilation are a proven, low-cost way to create comfortable and healthy conditions.
Shutterstock

Time to champion an Australian high-rise architecture

Australian governments, including the NSW government, have committed to delivering more affordable housing. But high-rise developments are often sited in polluted, noisy, freezing and sweltering environments. They get clustered around freeways and other busy roads to avoid political backlash from residents opposed to such developments.

At the same time, housing researchers are increasingly concerned about the energy emissions of high-rise buildings.

Planning that optimises building orientation – to best access sunlight and ventilation – and apartment design standards adapted to the Australian environment are urgently needed. Otherwise households will be locked into unsustainable, single-access apartments devoid of cross-ventilation, screens or shading.

This sort of housing is bad for residents’ health and wellbeing. It will also add to energy poverty for decades to come.

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

– ref. Heat, cold, pollution, noise and insects: too many apartment blocks aren’t up to the challenge – https://theconversation.com/heat-cold-pollution-noise-and-insects-too-many-apartment-blocks-arent-up-to-the-challenge-215990

When do kids learn to read? How do you know if your child is falling behind?

By The Conversation -

November 9, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tina Daniel, Researcher and Lecturer, Australian Centre for the Advancement of Literacy, Australian Catholic University

Learning to read is one of the most important parts of early schooling. But there is ongoing and arguably increasing concern too many Australian children are falling behind in reading.

This year’s NAPLAN results alarmingly show almost one in three Australian children don’t meet the expected standard in Year 3.

What are the expectations around when children learn to read and how should their progress be monitored?

When do children start to learn to read?

In Australia, school is where formal reading instruction begins. So most children start to learn to read at age five or six.

In some countries children won’t begin to learn to read until seven because they start school later, while in other countries they might start at age four.

There is no optimal age to start to learn to read and beginning the process before a child reaches school age does not necessarily give them an advantage.

But once school begins, children should be taught about the sounds that letters typically make (for example, the letter t makes the “t” sound). After a few months of continuous instruction, they should be able to use the letter sounds they’ve been taught to read simple words that use these same letter sounds.

This doesn’t mean your child should be reading fluently by the end of their first year, but they should be able to remember and use what they have practised at school to read some simple words and text.

What should I do before they start school?

Parents can help prepare their child to learn to read before they reach school age.

One of the most reliable predictors of learning to read well is a strong spoken vocabulary, so explaining what words mean and discussing a range of topics with your child is an excellent start.

Reading with your child is another way to boost their vocabulary. Learning to read relies on a foundation of children learning the connections between letters and sounds. So when parents teach children to pay attention to letters and sounds in words, it helps them to learn to break the code.

Having books available to children to explore on their own (and with your help) may also increase their interest in learning to read.

Many kids take time to learn

Even if you have lots of books at home and read together, there is natural variation in how quickly children learn to read. Some children learn the connections between letters and sounds quickly and form memories of written words after only a few attempts at reading them.

But many children take longer to learn and require more practise and support.

The reasons some children don’t learn to read as well as others are often complex.

For example, one child may need more practice making the connections between letters and sounds than others. Another may have limited spoken language skills and need additional support to improve their sensitivity to the sounds of language or develop their understanding of what words mean.

It is important for parents to know that having difficulty with learning to read does not say anything about their child’s intelligence. Reading difficulties can impact children with a wide range of intellectual abilities and intelligence is not a criterion for diagnosing a reading difficulty.

A mother and two young children sit together reading a book. — Reading with your child can help boost their vocabulary.
Kinder Media/Pexels, CC BY-SA

How do I know if my child needs more help?

Schools and teachers should routinely monitor children’s reading progress. This is particularly important during the first three years of school but should continue throughout the primary school years.

There are free and reliable tests to assess reading skills.

If a consistent gap is identified within the first year at school, a child should be offered additional help and opportunities for practise both at school and at home. It’s important to note gaps in reading achievement should be filled when the gap is small, rather than taking a “wait and see” approach that allows the gap to widen and for the child to fall further behind.

If you are concerned your child is finding it difficult to learn to read even after several months of intensive additional support, an expert assessment by a reading clinician is an important step.

Parents can find professional help for learning difficulties in Australia by visiting AUSPELD, which supports children and adults with learning difficulties.

– ref. When do kids learn to read? How do you know if your child is falling behind? – https://theconversation.com/when-do-kids-learn-to-read-how-do-you-know-if-your-child-is-falling-behind-214154

Is drug testing in the workplace effective or necessary?

By The Conversation -

November 9, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jarryd Bartle, Associate Lecturer, RMIT University

Alcohol and other drug use is a major problem in Australian workplaces costing more than A$4 billion a year. Of this, $3.6 billion is due to absenteeism.

While testing is legal to ensure the health and safety of workers, companies must have explicit policies telling employees their objectives and the consequences of being drug affected at work.

Many workplaces, particularly in safety sensitive industries like building and construction, manufacturing, mining, transport and aviation, test regularly for alcohol and other drugs. Workers can be fired for refusing to take part.

Both the Broderick report into bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct at the parliament of NSW in 2022 and the Jenkins report into Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces in 2021 identified alcohol as a significant psychosocial risk in the workplace.

How should testing be conducted?

While workplace health and safety laws are largely uniform across the country, there are no specific provisions regarding how and in what way alcohol and other drug testing should be conducted.

Most workplaces that test do it either at random intervals and with no notice as workers enter high risk worksites if there is a suspicion of use, or if a safety incident occurs.

Testing usually involves breath tests for alcohol, similar to police roadside testing of drivers, or urine or saliva tests for other drugs. Current standards require positive tests to undergo further testing in a laboratory to confirm the result.

Certificate signed by workers to say they agree with their workplace's drug and alcohol free policy — A workplace must inform its employees if has an alcohol and other drugs testing policy.
Shutterstock

Alcohol testing is an effective way to detect someone who is unfit for work because they are intoxicated. The test involves measuring alcohol in the blood stream and correlating this with impairment.

Even workplace testing is not foolproof

The problem with testing for illicit and pharmaceutical drugs is that these tests don’t necessarily indicate intoxication.

Both urine and saliva tests have long detection windows, so drugs can be detected hours, days or even months after the effects have worn off.

THC (Delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol), the psychoactive component of cannabis, can be detected up to 30 hours after consumption in a saliva test and nearly a month after consumption in a urine test.

The Victorian parliament is currently holding an inquiry into the laws governing workplace drug testing, with a particular focus on whether current laws discriminate against medicinal cannabis users.

Under its terms of reference, the inquiry is considering whether testing may be improved to ensure due process and natural justice occurs in workplaces with these users.

Is there evidence to support workplace drug testing?

Drug testing is considered quite invasive so it needs strong evidence to justify its use. But there is very limited research of good quality available.

The evidence we do have is mixed. There is some indication testing can reduce risk of injury but other research has found no impact.

The highest quality evidence shows testing doesn’t reduce overall alcohol or other drug use. One study found of 11 evaluations only two showed tests cut alcohol or other drug use rates.

What makes good alcohol and other drug policy?

So testing may be helpful for workplace safety in industries where there is a high risk of injury, but it’s not enough on its own to improve the health of the majority of the workforce.

For that to occur, testing needs to be part of a comprehensive workplace strategy. Fatigue, stress, and mental health problems can all impact on health and safety in similar ways to alcohol and other drugs.

So there needs to be a broader consideration of “fitness for work” than just alcohol and other drug intoxication.

Also, much of the negative impact of alcohol and other drugs in the workplace is not in safety but in productivity and absenteeism rates.

A good alcohol and other drug policy reduces the damaging effect of usage, fatigue, stress and mental health issues by creating a healthy workplace culture where:

wellbeing is valued and supported
workers receive early education and support
managers and team leaders are trained to identify workers at risk
clear referral options such as an identified employee assistance program (EAP) provider are available
there are return to work options for workers who have been impaired
there are clear expectations about what is and what is not acceptable to ensure fitness for work.

Workplaces with effective drug and alcohol policies have happier, healthier and more productive staff and reduced absenteeism.

If you are worried about your own or someone else’s alcohol or other drug use, contact the National Alcohol and other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015 for free, confidential advice.

Nicole Lee is CEO at Hello Sunday Morning and also works as a consultant in the alcohol and other drug sector and a psychologist in private practice. She has previously been awarded funding by Australian and state governments, NHMRC and other bodies for evaluation and research into alcohol and other drug prevention and treatment.

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

– ref. Is drug testing in the workplace effective or necessary? – https://theconversation.com/is-drug-testing-in-the-workplace-effective-or-necessary-216628

LIVE @MIDDAY THURS: How the Hamas-Israel War is a Catalyst of Global Order Change

By Selwyn Manning -

November 8, 2023

The LIVE Recording of A View from Afar podcast will begin at midday Thurs November 9, 2023 (NZST) and Wednesday November 8, 6pm (USEDST).

Today, In this the eleventh episode of A View from Afar for 2023, political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and journalist Selwyn Manning will examine how the post-World War II liberal internationalist system is being challenged by a fluid constellation of global and regional powers to influence the shape of an emerging new world order.

And Paul and Selwyn will also assess how this massive shift in geopolitic demarcations is forming, relatively quickly, into a world of bipolarity where on one side we have a multipolar constellation of states, and on the other the traditional western liberal democracies.

The catalyst behind this rapidly forming bipolarity is conflict.

And, most recently, it is clear, that the Israel-Hamas war – and the atrocities committed initially by Hamas and more lately by Israel forces – is driving the world toward a transitional moment.

It appears, that what is emerging from the current multipolar system – and think here the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court among many other global bodies – is a situation that is not merely new-and-old Great Powers competing as nation-states.

But rather, what we see are groupings of fluid constellations of powers competing as blocs to influence the shape of what is to come.

In this episode Paul and Selwyn will discuss and describe what is now evident, and sketch out what will likely emerge.

Of course, as mentioned, the Israel-Hamas war lays bare any claims of morality and exposes the hypocrisies of all sides in conflicts.

In particular the Hamas-Israel war exposes the west – led by the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Europe – to an argument that the west is morally moribund as it continues its colonial/post colonial attitudes of support of Israel as the latter commits an apparent disproportionate-defence offensive against Palestine’s peoples.

Duty of care is not excused even if civilians are used as “human shields”, and at this juncture, it is not clear, whether that cited justification is founded on truth.

This is the position of what was once an authoritarian axis.

But what has formed is a multipolar-constellation that supports the Palestinian cause on postcolonial, Global South, and solidarity grounds.

The Questions:

So if all of this carnage is the catalyst for a new world order, what comes next?

Will we see the emergence of a parallel global institutional structure that develops as a counter-balance to the west’s post-WWII world order?

And as such, has the west ceded persuasive moral authority to the rising constellation of once authoritarian-states that dominate the opposing bloc?

*******

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

***

‘Clear change in Australia’s attitude’: what mattered most to China about Anthony Albanese’s visit

By The Conversation -

November 8, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jingdong Yuan, Associate Professor, Asia-Pacific security, University of Sydney

As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese concluded his four-day visit to China, both countries agreed it was important to keep up the momentum in their steadily warming relations, while also expanding their areas of cooperation.

Both sides emphasised the complementary nature of their economic ties and sounded optimistic about exploring new areas of cooperation in climate change, renewable energy and agriculture. They also committed to maintaining their recently resumed high-level dialogues. These include annual prime minister meetings and other diplomatic, strategic and economic talks.

While Australian media coverage focused on the historic nature of the trip, as well as the importance from a trade perspective, what mattered most to China? And how was the visit covered by the media there?

Beijing certainly views the visit as a major milestone in bilateral relations. Official media coverage emphasised that the two countries have no historical issues with one another, and have previously demonstrated how a stable bilateral relationship can be mutually beneficial.

President Xi Jinping praised Albanese’s efforts in getting their relations back to this level, calling the visit “a new starting point”.

The Chinese media and some of China’s Australia watchers also noted Albanese’s attendance at the China International Import Exhibition in Shanghai as symbolising the importance of the Chinese market for Australia. They saw this as an indication Australia “will not comply with US attempts to decouple from China”.

The main takeaways from the Chinese side

There are several important takeaways from Albanese’s trip on the Chinese side.

Overall, China saw the visit as an opportunity to re-engage Australia, a key US ally in the region and an important economic partner.

Recognising its economic coercion against the Morrison government did not achieve its objectives – and facing ongoing US-led efforts to constrain its rise – Beijing has been making foreign policy adjustments.

It has been reaching out to some US allies and partners, including key European Union member states, and inviting them to multi-pronged diplomatic initiatives organised by China. It has also been holding bilateral talks on important economic and political issues with high-ranking officials from these countries.

Chinese leaders recognised the Australian Labor Party’s traditional approach to foreign policy emphasises cooperation with international organisations, such as the United Nations and regional institutions. As such, they focused on the shared interests between China and Australia (commerce, climate change), as well as their shared identities (Asia-Pacific countries).

At the same time, they also subtly (or bluntly, depending which side you look at it) reminded Canberra that its alliance commitments with the US and membership in security arrangements like AUKUS and the Quad should not be at the expense of Australia-China relations – and certainly not Chinese interests.

The Global Times made no secret of the fact Australia can set an example for other US allies in an opinion piece:

Australia is the first US ally to make a clear change in its attitude toward China after a fierce conflict with China since the US defined China as its No. 1 strategic competitor. […] Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and even US allies in Europe will think about themselves given the ups and downs of China-Australia relations.

The economic agenda was equally important to Beijing, given the difficulties China is currently facing.

Given the nature of Australia-China trade, there is a limit to the punitive measures China can impose on Australia. In fact, despite the tensions that existed with Australia under the Morrison government, overall bilateral trade has continued to grow, reaching nearly $300 billion in 2022. This shows how complementary the two economies actually are, as well as the resilience of these economic ties.

This is what Chinese leaders and the media emphasised during Albanese’s visit and why they were highly critical of the idea of “decoupling” or “de-risking” from China’s economy.

They characterised “decoupling” as going against free trade and protectionism, but in reality, Beijing is deeply concerned over any specific measures that restrict trade in the high-tech sector, such as with semiconductors. The US and its allies have been increasingly adopting such restrictions in recent years.

The importance of what wasn’t said

What wasn’t discussed much in the Chinese media was the gap between what Beijing presented as a successful visit and what was actually achieved.

One could argue both sides talked about the obvious – for example, that bilateral relations have more or less stabilised, compared to how they were 18 months ago. As China expert Richard McGregor astutely observed, Albanese was “pushing on an open door”.

This is not to belittle the progress made so far. The intentions of both governments to resume and strengthen the many dialogues between officials from their countries is important – even critical – in “resetting” the relationship. These channels of communication are incredibly important during times of crisis as a way of managing disputes and avoiding conflicts from spiralling out of control.

Though resetting the relationship was a definite aim in the long term, there were also significant takeaways in the short term. This can be seen in how the state media coverage downplayed AUKUS and conflicts in the South Pacific, where China’s influence has raised alarm bells in Canberra and Washington.

China has signalled its displeasure over AUKUS and continues to consider it a major impediment to further improvement of bilateral relations. But Xi told Albanese they could work together on regional security challenges.

Where there are efforts to cause disturbances in the Asia-Pacific region, we must firstly stay vigilant, and secondly oppose them.

And in the Pacific, the Chinese side is seeing an opportunity for the two countries in terms of regional economic development – how Australia and China can both contribute.

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

– ref. ‘Clear change in Australia’s attitude’: what mattered most to China about Anthony Albanese’s visit – https://theconversation.com/clear-change-in-australias-attitude-what-mattered-most-to-china-about-anthony-albaneses-visit-217270

The words that helped wrongly convict Kathleen Folbigg

By The Conversation -

November 8, 2023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics, Monash University

Prosecutor: Are you able to say whether or not Caleb died from a catastrophic asphyxiating event of unknown causes?

Pathologist: I believe that is likely. […]

Prosecutor: In relation to Laura […] her cause of death was consistent with smothering?

Pathologist: Yes.

Prosecutor: Including deliberate smothering?

Pathologist: Yes.

Prosecutor: And that she probably died from an acute catastrophic asphyxiating event of unknown causes?

Pathologist: Yes. – (Transcript pp. 746-48)

The above exchange occurred during the seven-week trial leading to Kathleen Folbigg’s conviction for the deaths of her four infant children (Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura) between 1989 and 1999. During the trial, the word “asphyxia” in its various forms (-ate; -ation; -ating) was used 208 times; “smother” (-ing; -ed) 221 times; and “consistent with” 233 times.

The pathologists and doctors concurred that the absence of external injuries was “consistent with” Caleb dying of a “catastrophic asphyxiating event”. This was repeated for each of the four children by each of the doctors, with strangling or smothering likely to be uppermost in the minds of the jurors.

Of course, Folbigg’s wrongful conviction had numerous factors. We have no way of knowing why the jury decided as it did.

But there are good reasons for forensic medicine practitioners and advocates to rethink their understanding – and use – of these words.

The semantic journey of asphyxia

“Asphyxia” first appeared in print in 1699 defined as “without any Pulse, or sign of Life”. Predictably, this meaning “stoppage of pulse” then sprouted the meaning “stoppage of respiration” – a lack of breath is a salient sign of lifelessness.

Subsequently, the path has been rocky, and it is now understood variously by forensic doctors around the world. What is agreed, however, is that “asphyxia” is not a diagnosis; it is not a condition that can be pointed at or diagnosed.

As far as lay understandings go, things get murkier. Modern dictionaries list many senses but privilege “respiratory failure”, with “suffocation” usually given as a synonym; this in turn is defined as the interruption of breathing, including some means by which it’s brought about (for example, smothering, throttling).

The Urban Dictionary’s definition for “asphyxiation” is “death by strangulation; ergo blockage in air passage”. This dictionary has its problems, but like other collaboratively constructed dictionaries, it is useful for tracking contemporary social meanings of expressions not yet in more mainstream dictionaries.

More murkiness

In the trial, confused senses of “asphyxia” were combined with the misleading phrase “consistent with”. As used by experts, this is synonymous with “may or may not mean”.

Research shows, however, that people without expert knowledge hear the phrase as strong confirmation of the proposed connection.

In the 1998 Canadian inquiry into the (wrongful) conviction of Canadian man Guy Paul Morin, Commissioner Kaufman was scathing in his criticism of the use of “consistent with”. He regarded it as demonstrably misleading language, variably being used to mean:

‘could have come, or cannot be excluded as coming, from the accused’; ‘not inconsistent with’; ‘more than a possibility but less than a probability’; ‘perfect or near identity of two items’.

The historical thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary suggests this last sense “perfect or near identity of two items” has been around since the 1600s. Clearly, we can’t assume people today would automatically understand “consistent with” as simply a way of saying what is proposed is possible.

Bad meanings drive out good

The meanings we carry around in our heads seem so natural we fail to realise other people can have quite different understandings.

As linguist Nick Enfield describes, we hypothesise what others mean by the words they use. And the more unusual a word is, the more its meanings will vary because we aren’t given the same opportunities to refine our hypotheses.

For example, what part of the foot do you understand as the “instep” – the upper surface between toes and ankle, the underneath part, or perhaps both the top and underneath? All three meanings are out there, and different dictionaries favour different ones.

Does this really matter? In a highly circumstantial murder trial, it does.

Words are far more likely to take on negative overtones than favourable ones. The linguistic evidence is compelling – negative senses come to dominate and eventually quash all other senses. This transformation has a name: Gresham’s Law of Semantic Change.

It comes as no surprise that crowdsourced online dictionaries show the homicidal senses of “asphyxia” (and its derived forms) as winning out.

Asphyxia permeated Kathleen Folbigg’s trial

Importantly, it was agreed by all involved none of the babies showed any injuries. (Two pinpoint scratches on Sarah’s lower lip were agreed to be of no significance).
As the prosecutor said:

All they [the doctors] can say is that there was some form of obstruction that caused oxygen not to be able to get into the lungs and that’s what caused these babies to die […] all they can say is that it was induced asphyxiation from an external cause […]“ (Transcript p. 66)_

It was repeatedly asserted the presence of no injuries in any of the Folbigg children “was consistent with the occurrence of an acute catastrophic asphyxiating event” or “smothering”. This was probably heard by the jury as indicating no injuries meant an “asphyxial event” had occurred – in other words, the children had been strangled or smothered.

There was also repeated reference to the absence of natural explanations for four sudden and unexplained deaths in one family – with the unstated inference that the only reasonable explanation was homicide. Known as Meadows Law, this inference stalked Kathleen Folbigg’s trial and her subsequent appeals relentlessly. Meadows Law falls at the first hurdle: how likely is it there would be four murders – where there are no injuries – masquerading as natural deaths?

In his sentencing remarks, the judge stated:

No (expert) witness was prepared to say that the signs pointed only to smothering but the medical evidence generally was that the result of each event was consistent with having been caused by acute asphyxiation. The jury accepted that evidence.

That summary encompasses the following linguistic storm: the doctors might say they thought the prosecutor was talking about asphyxia as meaning hypoxia/anoxia (low oxygen levels) due to any one of a myriad of causes.

The prosecutor believed he was asking whether, and the doctors were telling him that, the babies died from induced airways obstruction from external causes. And the jury thought they were being told the babies were smothered, or even strangled.
All of this is medically incoherent and incapable of establishing anything of significance – but probably had a powerful effect on the jury.

‘The wisdom of the crowd’

Since its first appearance in English in the 1600s, the term “asphyxia” has caused confusion.

In forensic pathology, it encompasses a number of concepts and is used variously by pathologists – and these uses are out of alignment with common lay usage. Combined with different understandings of “consistent with”, this confusion was very much to Folbigg’s disadvantage.

The jury system relies on “the wisdom of the crowd”. Forensic doctors, advocates and judges must recognise that, despite what they think and dictionaries say, the crowd can understand words very differently, and this can have consequences.

Professor Cordner was an expert witness at both Commissions of Inquiry into the convictions of Kathleen Folbigg.

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

– ref. The words that helped wrongly convict Kathleen Folbigg – https://theconversation.com/the-words-that-helped-wrongly-convict-kathleen-folbigg-200635