Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebekah Graham, Lecturer – Community Psychology, University of Waikato

The way we perceive poverty, hunger and household food insecurity is shaped by media, government policy, public relations, advertising and personal experience. But one persistent strand is the notion that poverty and food insecurity are the result of poor personal choices and priorities.

Over time, this view can come to be seen as “common sense”, influencing our understanding of how and why people go hungry. But is it accurate? Does a focus on individual failings – and individual solutions – mean New Zealanders are missing the bigger picture?

Our three research projects (recently published together) looked at the experiences of families who don’t have enough to eat. We spoke with people struggling with food poverty and asked why this might be tolerated in a country that produces so much food.

We found that, contrary to popular belief, parents went without food in order to feed their children, that many had good nutritional knowledge, and that mothers in particular worked very hard to protect their children from knowing the extent of the poverty and hunger within the home.

Focus on the individual

Food insecurity refers to the inability to access nutritionally adequate and safe foods. In Aotearoa New Zealand, one in five children aged two to 14 live in households that are food insecure with poor access to nutritionally-rich foods.

When there are insufficient resources to feed everyone well, families ration food, opt for cheaper items that “pad out” a meal, and purchase items which last longer in the cupboards.

Despite these rates of food insecurity in families, there is still a tendency by those who haven’t experienced food insecurity to attribute hunger to individual decision making. Families involved in our research felt shame and stigma at being unable to afford enough food, in large part due to the way in which hunger and poverty are framed in public discussions.

Read more:
Hunger is increasing worldwide but women bear the brunt of food insecurity

Stories that blame individuals for not trying harder rarely look at the known drivers of poverty and hunger such as inadequate incomes, insecure work, high rents or lack of access to suitable land for growing food.

Favouring individual self-reliance and self-help as solutions to address food insecurity erases the wider social context within which food insecurity and hunger occur.

External issues

In reality, the challenges regarding food “choice” faced by families such as those in our research stem from insufficient access to resources, and resources that are unfairly shared. Food inflation rose 8.3% in August, while wages rose just 3.4% over the past year.

The families we spoke with spent considerable time and energy to creatively source food and stretch available foods so that all family members had enough to eat.

Households found creative ways to make do, such as pooling resources, calling on wider family networks, and seeking charitable and state support. When faced with ongoing hardship, people used less socially acceptable measures, like shoplifting, dumpster diving and cooking in public spaces to manage the lack of food.

Easier to give to charity than challenge status quo

When presented with examples of food insecurity and hunger, sympathetic people typically offer charitable support in the form of donations or volunteer work. However, this does not address the core drivers of unequal access to resources.

As others have argued, acts of individual and corporate charity maintain the status quo rather than highlighting and addressing the underlying causes of poverty and food insecurity.

Read more:
We asked children how they experienced poverty. Here are 6 changes needed now

People who have resources to share are viewed as altruistic, compassionate and empathetic when they give to charity. In comparison, people in need of charity feel a sense of shame and stigma at having their lack and inadequacy exposed to strangers. In a society that values independence, people who need help to meet a basic need, such as food, feel humiliated.

Hunger is political

Historical and political contributors to food insecurity remain firmly in place, due in part to firmly-held beliefs around “poor choices” and a desire for charity to be employed as a solution instead of more equal access to resources.

Across Aotearoa New Zealand, farms produce enough high-quality food to feed over 30 million people a year. Yet New Zealanders – and disproportionately disabled and Māori, and Pacifica families – do not have sufficient nutritionally-rich foods for their health and well-being.

Structural changes are crucial to properly addressing food insecurity. This includes addressing past and current injustices, ensuring liveable incomes for all, building affordable housing, and taking action on wealth inequality.

Our research found people living under-resourced lives were doing the best they could. What is needed is political action to address the root causes of hunger and food insecurity, not simplistic narratives about personal responsibility and choice.

Rebekah Graham 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. ‘If only they made better life choices’ – how simplistic explanations of poverty and food insecurity miss the mark – https://theconversation.com/if-only-they-made-better-life-choices-how-simplistic-explanations-of-poverty-and-food-insecurity-miss-the-mark-190430

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

The Albanese government will set up an inquiry into the increasing cost of child care, which will start in January and run for a year.

Childcare costs have risen by 41% over the last eight years.

The inquiry will be done by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Next month’s budget will include $10.8 million to fund it. Government sources emphasised the probe would be very rigorous and operators would be put on the spot to explain high fees.

Meanwhile treasurer Jim Chalmers on Tuesday announced the budget outcome for the financial year just ended will be nearly $50 billion better than anticipated at the time former treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s delivered his budget in March. But Chalmers insisted this was largely due to temporary factors and next month’s budget would be difficult.

Figures (to be finalised and released in detail next week) would show a deficit for 2021-22 of “a little bit north of $30 billion” – compared with the earlier projected deficit for 2021-22 approaching $80 billion.

Chalmers said the deficit in the October budget for the current financial year was expected to be higher than last financial year’s outcome.

Labor’s more generous child care scheme starts mid-next year, and is being promoted by the government as both easing cost-of-living pressures and encouraging workforce participation. The government resisted pressure from some participants at the jobs summit to bring the start forward to January. It said that would be both expensive and present operational difficulties.

Next week Education Minister Jason Clare will introduce the legislation for the scheme, which Labor promises will make childcare more affordable for 96% of families with children in the system.

Chalmers said Labor’s plan would cheapen childcare for more than a million families. This meant “parents will be able to work more hours if they want to”.

“It shouldn’t cost parents more than they earn to put their kids through childcare. But for many families, that’s the challenge they face – when it’s sometimes cheaper to stay at home and take care of the kids than it is to go to work.”

Chalmers said for many families, childcare costs were “an incredible burden” and it was “important that we deliver responsible cost-of-living relief that delivers a long-term benefit to our economy”.

Clare said the cost of childcare was ‘a massive disincentive to work more hours or more days.

“At the moment about 60% of mothers of children under six who work, do part-time hours. A lot of Australians would want to work more, but if they did all of that pay would be gobbled up by the childcare bill. It means it’s not worth it.”

Giving an outline of the budget outcome and prospects at a news conference with Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, Chalmers said the almost $50 billion improvement in the deficit “is welcome, but the bulk of it is driven by temporary factors”.

In 2021-22 there had been an improvement in revenue of about $28 billion, while on the outlays side, the improvement was about $20 billion from lower than budgeted payments.

There had been a “substantial but temporary lift in taxes”, and commodity prices remained higher for longer than expected. And “billions of dollars that were promised weren’t delivered”.

There had been “a one-off boost in revenues from lower take-up of COVID business support measures – which has the effect of boosting revenues last year, but lowering them in the out-years compared to what was expected because of the accumulation of the deductions that businesses accumulate.”

“The large payment underspends are all about delays in COVID-related spending including the procurement of vaccines and PPE, also delays in infrastructure spending arising from supply chain disruptions and industry constraints, as well as lower payments across health and social security.”

Chalmers said commodity prices had already begun to drop, while much of the undelivered spending would spill over into this financial year and into subsequent years.

The government is set to ditch some of the former government’s undelivered commitments where it can but some will flow through to the coming budget.

Chalmers reaffirmed the petrol excise cut will end next week, but said prices should not immediately reflect the full amount of the restoration because a lot of petrol was in storage.

“There are hundreds of millions of litres of fuel underground in tanks that was purchased at the lower price,” he said. “And so the ACCC and the government expect that the price of petrol shouldn’t shoot up at the bowser on Wednesday night by the full 23 cents if the normal market pressures are in operation.”

Chalmers said the October budget would be “pretty standard”.

But, agreeing with sentiments expressed by Reserve Bank Governor Phil Lowe last week, Chalmers also said “we need to have a national discussion about the structural position of the budget, and how we fund the expectations that Australians legitimately have”.

He pointed to “the five big growing areas of spending in the budget, which are creating pretty substantial structural concerns – health, NDIS, aged care, defence, and the cost of servicing a trillion dollars in debt – all of those costs are growing fast.

“And that’s a combination of the unavoidable and the desirable, and so we do need to have a conversation about that.

“The first budget in October will be pretty standard, pretty solid, a bread-and-butter budget. But there are multiple opportunities in multiple budgets over the course of the next three years or so, for us to properly engage the people in a proper national conversation about the services that we provide, and how we fund them.”

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

– ref. Government announces inquiry into childcare costs, while Chalmers promises ‘conversation’ about budget challenges – https://theconversation.com/government-announces-inquiry-into-childcare-costs-while-chalmers-promises-conversation-about-budget-challenges-190990

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

As well as her interviews with politicians and experts, Politics with Michelle Grattan includes “Word from The Hill”, where she discusses the news with members of The Conversation politics team.

In this podcast Michelle and Amanda Dunn, the Conversation’s politics editor, canvass Jim Chalmers’ announcement of a windfall improvement of almost $50 billion in the budget outcome for the financial year just ended – which the treasurer is talking down as the result of temporary factors. He insists his October “bread and butter” budget is full of challenges, as the government trawls through Coalition programs looking for cuts.

Michelle and Amanda also discuss the latest polling on a republic, as well as the introduction next week of legislation for a national integrity commission.

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. Word from The Hill: Treasurer Chalmers warns against getting too excited by $50 billion improvement in budget bottom line – https://theconversation.com/word-from-the-hill-treasurer-chalmers-warns-against-getting-too-excited-by-50-billion-improvement-in-budget-bottom-line-190989

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist), The Conversation

A Resolve poll for Nine newspapers, conducted September 14-18 from a sample of 1,607, gave federal Labor 39% of the primary vote (down three since August), the Coalition 32% (up four), the Greens 10% (down two), One Nation 6% (up one), UAP 2% (steady), independents 8% (steady) and others 3% (steady).

Apart from near elections, Resolve does not give a two party estimate. My calculations from 2022 election preference flows say Labor would lead by 57-43 on this poll, a four-point gain for the Coalition since August.

60% thought Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was doing a good job, and 24% a poor job for a net approval of +35, down four points. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s net approval dropped four points to -12. Albanese led Dutton as preferred PM by 53-19 (55-17 in August).

Labor’s lead over the Liberals on economic management was reduced to 33-30 from 39-30 in August, and their lead on keeping the cost of living low fell to 31-23 from 39-21.

I believe the August Resolve poll that gave Labor an estimated 61-39 lead was an outlier. The two Newspolls we have had so far, in early August and early September, have had Labor ahead by 56-44 and 57-43. Labor is still in “honeymoon” polling territory, but no other poll has given them the massive lead the last Resolve poll did.

Morgan and Essential on the republic

A Morgan SMS poll, conducted September 12 from a sample of 1,012, had 60% who thought Australia should remain a monarchy (up five since November 2012), while 40% wanted Australia to become a republic with an elected president (down five).

An Essential poll, conducted in the days before September 20 from a sample of 1,075, had 43% supporting Australia becoming a republic (down one since June) and 37% opposed (up three). This did not mention the monarchy as the alternative.

Four weeks ago, Essential asked voters to give a rating from 0 to 10 on various leaders. Ratings of 0-3 were classed as negative, 4-6 as neutral and 7-10 as positive. Albanese had a 46% positive, 17% negative rating (43-23 previously), while Dutton was at 33% negative, 23% positive (34-26 previously).

US President Joe Biden was at 30% positive, 28% negative, while Russian President Vladimir Putin was at 77% negative, 9% positive.

Members of the royal family were assessed, with Queen Elizabeth II at 71% positive, 8% negative, Prince William at 64% positive, 10% negative, King Charles III at 44% positive, 21% negative and Prince Harry at 42% postive, 22% negative. The country was split 50-50 on whether Charles should be our head of state.

23% said they were very interested in the queen’s passing and the king’s accession, 35% fairly interested, 25% not that interested and 17% not interested at all. 48% thought the media coverage had given them more information than they needed, 42% about the right amount and 10% less information than needed.

61% supported declaring a public holiday to honour the queen, 60% Albanese attending the funeral and 38% suspending federal parliament.

Morgan poll and climate change bill passes parliament

In last week’s Morgan weekly update video, federal Labor led by 53.5-46.5 from polling conducted September 5-11. This lead was unchanged from the previous week, but a 1.5-point gain for Labor since late August.

Labor’s bill to set a 43% emissions reduction target by 2030 passed federal parliament on September 8. It was passed by the Senate with minor amendments by 37 votes to 30, with support from the Greens, the Jacqui Lambie Network and David Pocock. The amendments were then approved by the House of Representatives.

Victorian Essential and Morgan polls: Labor would easily win

The Victorian election will be held on November 26. An Essential poll for The Guardian, conducted August 31 to September 7 from a sample of 536, gave Labor 35.3% of the primary vote, the Coalition 32.2%, the Greens 10.2%, independents 8% and undecided 11.9%.

If undecided are excluded, the primary votes become 40.1% Labor, 36.5% Coalition, 11.6% Greens and 9.1% independents. With Labor ahead of the Coalition on primary votes and a solid Greens vote, Labor would win easily after preferences.

The linked article says Opposition Leader Matthew Guy’s pledge to shelve the Suburban Rail Link appears to be resonating with voters. But by 44-25, voters supported construction beginning on stage one of the proposed 90 kilometre underground railway line.

A Victorian Morgan poll, conducted in August from a sample of 1,407, gave Labor a 58-42 lead, from primary votes of 36.5% Labor, 29% Coalition, 14% Greens and 20.5% for all Others. Unlike the SMS Victorian Morgan polls that have previously been released, this poll was conducted using telephone and online methods.

Many other parties were listed, but none got more than 2%. The highest polling Others were other parties (7.5%) and non-teal independents (5.5%).

NSW Essential poll: it’s close

The New South Wales election is in March 2023. An Essential poll for The Guardian, conducted August 31 to September 7 from a sample of 661, gave the Coalition 36.4% of the primary vote, Labor 32%, the Greens 8.5%, independents 6.8% and 12.8% undecided.

If undecided are excluded, primary votes become 41.7% Coalition, 36.7% Labor, 9.7% Greens and 7.8% independents. Analyst Kevin Bonham estimated a 50-50 tie from these primary votes.

Tasmanian and WA byelection results

A byelection occurred September 10 in the Tasmanian Labor-held upper house seat of Pembroke. Labor defeated the Liberals by 63.3-36.7 after preferences, a 4.6% swing to Labor since the 2019 Pembroke contest.

Labor won 39.5% of the primary vote, the Liberals 28.8%, the Greens 19.3%, an independent 9.3% and the Shooters 3.2%. The result means Labor and four left-aligned independents retain an 8-7 majority in the Tasmanian upper house.

At last Saturday’s byelection for the Western Australian Nationals-held seat of North West Central, the Nationals defeated the Liberals by a 59.7-40.3 margin, after holding by 51.7-48.3 against Labor at the 2021 election. Primary votes were 40.2% Nationals (up 0.5%), 26.7% Liberals (up 18.8%), 12.6% Greens (up 8.5%) and 5.4% Legalise Cannabis.

Labor did not contest despite coming close at the massive March 2021 Labor landslide. Labor holds 53 of the 59 WA lower house seats, with the Nationals retaining four and the Liberals two.

Italian and Brazilian elections

I wrote for The Poll Bludger on Sunday that the far-right is likely to win this Sunday’s Italian election. The first round of the Brazilian presidential election is October 2, with a runoff October 30 if nobody wins a majority. Far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro is likely to lose to the former leftist president.

Adrian Beaumont 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. Federal Labor’s lead in Resolve poll drops from ‘honeymoon’ heights; Labor winning easily in Victoria – https://theconversation.com/federal-labors-lead-in-resolve-poll-drops-from-honeymoon-heights-labor-winning-easily-in-victoria-190415

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lily O’Neill, Senior Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

What a difference six months makes. Before the federal election, the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory was to have spearheaded Australia’s “gas-led recovery”. But Origin Energy this week announced it would sell its share of the basin project ahead of a wider exit from new gas ventures.

The Beetaloo Basin holds a truly enormous amount of fossil carbon – prompting Greens leader Adam Bandt to describe it as a “climate bomb”.

Origin’s exit is not a killing blow to the controversial project. But it shows increasing corporate jitters about investing in gas. And the announcement came as major iron miner Fortescue announced plans to eliminate fossil fuel use within eight years.

Origin’s exit is a major win for the region’s Traditional Owners, many of whom feared the fracking would cause large-scale environmental damage, as well as harming the climate. But Origin has sold its rights to frack Beetaloo – so the fight is far from over.

What is this basin and why does it matter?

Oil and gas are usually found in geological basins – large, low-lying areas filled with rocks and sediment. The Beetaloo Basin covers 28,000 square kilometres and lies around 500 kilometres south-east of Darwin. Origin’s former exploration area lies near the town of Daly Waters.

Fracking the basin has been planned since 2004. The former Morrison Coalition government planned a so-called “gas led recovery” to accelerate its development, fuelled by large amounts of taxpayer money to encourage the fossil fuel industry to frack the remote area.

The move was unpopular with the region’s Traditional Owners, with fracking described by Traditional Owner Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves as “digging up my body, breaking my Tjukurpa (Dreaming)” in a government inquiry.

Local Traditional Owners formed the Nurrdalinji Native Title Aboriginal Corporation to fight fracking, in partnership with local pastoralists.

Origin’s statement makes no mention of these tensions in its decision. Indeed, it talks of “strong support” from the local community, including native title holders.

Despite this rhetoric, the work by Traditional Owners and pastoralists created enormous pressure for Origin to back out of the project.

This win demonstrates yet again how Indigenous people around the world are playing a key role in warding off the worst of the climate crisis.

This occurs not only when Indigenous people oppose fossil fuel projects on their land, but through their management of 38 million square kilometres of land across 87 countries.

This is an enormous estate – one quarter of the Earth’s land surface – and often covers land rich in biodiversity.

Australia’s First Nations peoples hold rights and interests in land covering about 40% of the continent, again land that has been sustainably managed by First Nations peoples for thousands of years and is therefore highly environmentally valuable.

Land management is central to combating climate change, through nature-based solutions such as storing carbon in trees, soils and mangroves and seagrass meadows. First Nations communities have at least 60,000 years of knowledge of how to care for Country in ways which can aid climate adaptation, mitigation and repair.

What next?

Origin has sold its rights to a company half-owned by Tamboran Resources Limited.

Under the previous Coalition government, Tamboran subsidiary Sweetpea Petroleum received A$7.5 million of public money to drill exploration wells in the Beetaloo. Tamboran and Sweetpea refused to appear at a 2021 Senate inquiry into oil and gas activities in the Beetaloo Basin – a move the Senate committee declared was “unacceptable”.

Tamboran is now trying to raise $133 million to pay Origin for the rights and invest the rest in developing the project.

As the International Energy Agency has warned, we cannot open new fossil fuel projects if we hope to limit global temperature rise to the crucial 1.5℃ threshold.

For more than a decade, climate activists have called on institutions to divest themselves of their fossil fuel holdings. Origin has divested itself of Beetaloo and BHP is divesting its oil and gas portfolio.

But these are not true victories for the climate if the fossil fuel assets are sold to be extracted and burned by another company.

Keeping it in the ground

If we are serious about saving our planet we need to legislate to close down fossil fuel assets and force shareholders and investors to cop the losses.

In selling its share, Origin has taken an estimated loss of up to $90 million. But the fight against fracking in the Beetaloo is not over.

Still, it’s important to recognise what’s been achieved. As Johnny Wilson, Chair of Nurrdalinji Corporation said:

We hope this is the start of more companies turning their back on gas production where we live. Fracking is not what we want … The government should give up backing the industry with taxpayers’ money and invest in health, education and clean energy from the sun because that’s what will keep our future strong.

Lily O’Neill has previously done consulting work in relation to fracking in the Beetaloo Basin for the Commonwealth Government. She was previously a PhD candidate on an ARC linkage project that received money from Santos, one of the companies still involved in the Beetaloo Basin. She has collaborated with Original Power, an organisation involved in supporting Traditional Owners in the Beetaloo who wish to protect Country.

Ben Neville owns shares in Australian Ethical Investments. He receives funding from the ARC.

– ref. In a win for Traditional Owners, Origin is walking away from the Beetaloo Basin. But the fight against fracking is not over – https://theconversation.com/in-a-win-for-traditional-owners-origin-is-walking-away-from-the-beetaloo-basin-but-the-fight-against-fracking-is-not-over-190906

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lily O’Neill, Senior Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

What a difference six months makes. Before the federal election, the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory was to have spearheaded Australia’s “gas-led recovery”. But Origin Energy this week announced it would sell its share of the basin project ahead of a wider exit from new gas ventures.

The Beetaloo Basin holds a truly enormous amount of fossil carbon – prompting Greens leader Adam Bandt to describe it as a “climate bomb”.

Origin’s exit is not a killing blow to the controversial project. But it shows increasing corporate jitters about investing in gas. And the announcement came as major iron miner Fortescue announced plans to eliminate fossil fuel use within eight years.

Origin’s exit is a major win for the region’s Traditional Owners, many of whom feared the fracking would cause large-scale environmental damage, as well as harming the climate. But Origin has sold its rights to frack Beetaloo – so the fight is far from over.

What is this basin and why does it matter?

Oil and gas are usually found in geological basins – large, low-lying areas filled with rocks and sediment. The Beetaloo Basin covers 28,000 square kilometres and lies around 500 kilometres south-east of Darwin. Origin’s former exploration area lies near the town of Daly Waters.

Fracking the basin has been planned since 2004. The former Morrison Coalition government planned a so-called “gas led recovery” to accelerate its development, fuelled by large amounts of taxpayer money to encourage the fossil fuel industry to frack the remote area.

The move was unpopular with the region’s Traditional Owners, with fracking described by Traditional Owner Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves as “digging up my body, breaking my Tjukurpa (Dreaming)” in a government inquiry.

Local Traditional Owners formed the Nurrdalinji Native Title Aboriginal Corporation to fight fracking, in partnership with local pastoralists.

Origin’s statement makes no mention of these tensions in its decision. Indeed, it talks of “strong support” from the local community, including native title holders.

Despite this rhetoric, the work by Traditional Owners and pastoralists created enormous pressure for Origin to back out of the project.

This win demonstrates yet again how Indigenous people around the world are playing a key role in warding off the worst of the climate crisis.

This occurs not only when Indigenous people oppose fossil fuel projects on their land, but through their management of 38 million square kilometres of land across 87 countries.

This is an enormous estate – one quarter of the Earth’s land surface – and often covers land rich in biodiversity.

Australia’s First Nations peoples hold rights and interests in land covering about 40% of the continent, again land that has been sustainably managed by First Nations peoples for thousands of years and is therefore highly environmentally valuable.

Land management is central to combating climate change, through nature-based solutions such as storing carbon in trees, soils and mangroves and seagrass meadows. First Nations communities have at least 60,000 years of knowledge of how to care for Country in ways which can aid climate adaptation, mitigation and repair.

What next?

Origin has sold its rights to a company half-owned by Tamboran Resources Limited.

Under the previous Coalition government, Tamboran subsidiary Sweetpea Petroleum received A$7.5 million of public money to drill exploration wells in the Beetaloo. Tamboran and Sweetpea refused to appear at a 2021 Senate inquiry into oil and gas activities in the Beetaloo Basin – a move the Senate committee declared was “unacceptable”.

Tamboran is now trying to raise $133 million to pay Origin for the rights and invest the rest in developing the project.

As the International Energy Agency has warned, we cannot open new fossil fuel projects if we hope to limit global temperature rise to the crucial 1.5℃ threshold.

For more than a decade, climate activists have called on institutions to divest themselves of their fossil fuel holdings. Origin has divested itself of Beetaloo and BHP is divesting its oil and gas portfolio.

But these are not true victories for the climate if the fossil fuel assets are sold to be extracted and burned by another company.

Keeping it in the ground

If we are serious about saving our planet we need to legislate to close down fossil fuel assets and force shareholders and investors to cop the losses.

In selling its share, Origin has taken an estimated loss of up to $90 million. But the fight against fracking in the Beetaloo is not over.

Still, it’s important to recognise what’s been achieved. As Johnny Wilson, Chair of Nurrdalinji Corporation said:

We hope this is the start of more companies turning their back on gas production where we live. Fracking is not what we want … The government should give up backing the industry with taxpayers’ money and invest in health, education and clean energy from the sun because that’s what will keep our future strong.

Lily O’Neill has previously done consulting work in relation to fracking in the Beetaloo Basin for the Commonwealth Government. She was previously a PhD candidate on an ARC linkage project that received money from Santos, one of the companies still involved in the Beetaloo Basin. She has collaborated with Original Power, an organisation involved in supporting Traditional Owners in the Beetaloo who wish to protect Country.

Ben Neville owns shares in Australian Ethical Investments. He receives funding from the ARC.

– ref. In a win for Traditional Owners, Origin is quitting the controversial Beetaloo Basin. But the fight against fracking is nowhere near over – https://theconversation.com/in-a-win-for-traditional-owners-origin-is-quitting-the-controversial-beetaloo-basin-but-the-fight-against-fracking-is-nowhere-near-over-190906

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Doug Drury, Professor/Head of Aviation, CQUniversity Australia

We all know the routine by heart: “Please ensure your seats are in the upright position, tray tables stowed, window shades are up, laptops are stored in the overhead bins and electronic devices are set to flight mode”.

Now, the first four are reasonable, right? Window shades need to be up so we can see if there’s an emergency, such as fire. Tray tables need to be stowed and seats upright so we can get out of the row quickly. Laptops can become projectiles in an emergency, as the seat back pockets are not strong enough to contain them.

And mobile phones need to be set to flight mode so they can’t cause an emergency for the aeroplane, right? Well, it depends whom you ask.

Technology has advanced a great deal

Aviation navigation and communication relies on radio services, which have been coordinated to minimise interference since the 1920s.

The digital technology currently in use is much more advanced than some of the older analogue technologies we used even 60 years ago. Research has shown personal electronic devices can emit a signal within the same frequency band as the aircraft’s communications and navigation systems, creating what is known as electromagnetic interference.

But in 1992, the US Federal Aviation Authority and Boeing, in an independent study, investigated the use of electronic devices on aircraft interference and found no issues with computers or other personal electronic devices during non-critical phases of flight. (Take-offs and landings are considered the critical phases.)

The US Federal Communications Commission also began to create reserved frequency bandwidths for different uses – such as mobile phones and aircraft navigation and communications – so they do not interfere with one another. Governments around the globe developed the same strategies and policies to prevent interference problems with aviation. In the EU, electronic devices have been allowed to stay on since 2014.

Read more:
Using your phone on a plane is safe – but for now you still can’t make calls

2.2 billion passengers

Why then, with these global standards in place, has the aviation industry continued to ban the use of mobile phones? One of the problems lies with something you may not expect – ground interference.

Wireless networks are connected by a series of towers; the networks could become overloaded if passengers flying over these ground networks are all using their phones. The number of passengers that flew in 2021 was over 2.2 billion, and that’s half of what the 2019 passenger numbers were. The wireless companies might have a point here.

Of course, when it comes to mobile networks, the biggest change in recent years is the move to a new standard. Current 5G wireless networks – desirable for their higher speed data transfer – have caused concern for many within the aviation industry.

Radio frequency bandwidth is limited, yet we are still trying to add more new devices to it. The aviation industry points out that the 5G wireless network bandwidth spectrum is remarkably close to the reserved aviation bandwidth spectrum, which may cause interference with navigation systems near airports that assist with landing the aircraft.

Airport operators in Australia and the US have voiced aviation safety concerns linked to 5G rollout, however it appears to have rolled out without such problems in the European Union. Either way, it is prudent to limit mobile phone use on planes while issues around 5G are sorted out.

Read more:
Could 5G really ground planes? Why the US has delayed rolling out the mobile internet technology around airports

Ultimately, we can’t forget air rage

Most airlines now provide customers with Wi-Fi services that are either pay-as-you-go or free. With new Wi-Fi technologies, passengers could theoretically use their mobile phones to make video calls with friends or clients in-flight.

On a recent flight, I spoke with a cabin attendant and asked her opinion on phone use during flights. It would be an inconvenience for cabin crew to wait for passengers to finish their call to ask them if they would like any drinks or something to eat, she stated. On an airliner with 200+ passengers, in-flight service would take longer to complete if everyone was making phone calls.

For me, the problem with in-flight use of phones is more about the social experience of having 200+ people on a plane, and all potentially talking at once. In a time when disruptive passenger behaviour, including “air rage”, is increasingly frequent, phone use in flight might be another trigger that changes the whole flight experience.

Disruptive behaviours take on various forms, from noncompliance to safety requirements such as not wearing seat belts, verbal altercations with fellow passengers and cabin crew, to physical altercations with passengers and cabin crews – typically identified as air rage.

In conclusion – in-flight use of phones does not currently impair the aircraft’s ability to operate. But cabin crews may prefer not to be delayed in providing in-flight service to all of the passengers – it’s a lot of people to serve.

However, 5G technology is encroaching on the radio bandwidth of aircraft navigation systems; we’ll need more research to answer the 5G question regarding interference with aircraft navigation during landings. Remember that when we are discussing the two most critical phases of flight, take-offs are optional – but landings are mandatory.

Read more:
Reducing air travel by small amounts each year could level off the climate impact

Doug Drury 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. Here’s the real reason to turn on aeroplane mode when you fly – https://theconversation.com/heres-the-real-reason-to-turn-on-aeroplane-mode-when-you-fly-188585

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

Briefly, in the days after the death of the queen, we were afforded a glimpse into the machine that makes Australia’s money.

Assistant Treasury Minister Andrew Leigh turned up at the Royal Australian Mint to explain the process by which a portrait of the King Charles will replace the portrait of the queen on the heads-side of coins minted from 2023.

(And yes, he noted “for the avoidance of doubt, for any conspiracy theorists out there, all coins bearing the face of Queen Elizabeth II will remain legal tender”.)

The Mint makes a remarkable 120 million to 140 million coins per year (even more, as much as 175 million when Australians stocked up on cash during the first year of COVID), and it’s a money-making operation in more ways than one.

20 cents to make a $2 coin

Usually it costs the Mint far less to make each coin than each one becomes worth the moment it is sold to a bank (before metal prices climbed, it cost the mint about 20 cents to make a $2 coin, and about 15 cents to make a 50 cent coin).

The profit – the huge markup – goes straight to the Commonwealth budget as non-taxation revenue, tens of millions per year. It’s called “seigniorage” an ancient French word that refers to the profit only a seignior (feudal lord) can make from the exclusive right to mint coins.

Read more:
The paradox of going contactless is we’re more in love with cash than ever

This financial year the government expects A$59 million, next year $67 million.

That the government can keep making money from seigniorage appears to defy common sense. Surely we’ve got just about all the coins we need. Merely replacing coins as they get worn out doesn’t earn seigniorage.

But a previous head of the Mint, Ross MacDiarmid, let the cat out of the bag in 2014 when he told a Senate committee

most of the coins that we provide are against coins that disappear down the back of chairs, down the back of car seats, into rubbish dumps and, in some cases, are taken overseas.

Asked whether he was seriously suggesting a hundred million or so coins per year disappear, Mr MacDiarmid replied he was.

This means the government makes tens of millions per year replacing – at a huge markup – things we have lost.

And it’s just the beginning. The $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 notes made by Note Printing Australia for the Reserve Bank have an astronomical markup.

32 cents to make a $100 note

In 2020-21 Note Printing Australia delivered 234 million notes to the bank for a fee of $74 million, suggesting they cost about 32 cents each to make. Most were $50 and $100 notes, sold to private banks for $50 and $100 each.

That profit is accounted for differently to the profit for coins, and is hard to find.

One estimate, in an international study of 90 countries at the end of the 1990s, found Australia’s income from seigniorage of notes and coins to be low compared to other countries at 2.6% of government spending.

2.6% is an enormous amount. These days that’d be $16.3 billion, which is about what we spend on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

$6-10 billion per year

The Reserve Bank measures seigniorage differently, using a formula that can produce odd results because it depends on the rate of interest. Before COVID, its view was that it only made about $1 billion per year from seigniorage, a figure it doesn’t usually calculate and doesn’t report to the government.

A simpler calculation would take the $6.8 billion of extra notes the bank supplied in 2020-21, deduct the $74 million it cost to print the notes and about as much again for the payments it makes to commercial banks to encourage them to hold sufficient stocks and return worn notes and come up with $6.6 billion.

A year earlier, as we stocked up on cash as COVID took hold, the bank would have made $10 billion.

An end to easy money?

The profits from printing notes don’t flow directly to the budget, except in part via Reserve Bank dividends, but they help by keeping the bank self-funding.

Both profits are under threat. For the Reserve Bank it’s the threat of us one day wanting less cash – although for the moment, while we are using less cash in transactions, we are holding on to more of it for safekeeping than ever.

For the Mint, it’s the reality that we are using less cash. In 2020-21 it produced $82.2 billion worth of new coins, down from $114 billion a decade earlier.

And it’s the skyrocketing price of metal. Mint chief executive Leigh Clifford revealed last week it was costing north of 12 cents to make each five-cent piece.

Earlier this year, after nickel prices soared in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he said even 20 cent coins were about to lose money.

Cheaper coins to the rescue?

Nickel prices have since come down, and one of the oddities of pricing is that it costs far less to make the largely copper and aluminium $1 and $2 coins (about eight cents each) than it does the nickel-heavy 10 and 20 cent coins (14-28 cents), but the Mint is preparing.

In 2016 the Mint developed a proposal to cheapen the metal content of its five, ten and 20 cent coins and shrink the size of its 50 cent coins, which it says was favourably received by retailers and banks who wanted coins that weighed less. The idea was submitted to the Treasury, but “not progressed”.

Read more:
Australia is investigating a digital currency, or e-dollar, but its benefits seem slight and the risks to privacy large

In the meantime it has partnered with Woolworths to produce limited edition “Olympic” and “Wiggles” coins that are delivered as change through cash registers rather than through banks, for which it charges a touch over $2.

There’s a lot that can be done, and every time there’s a crisis, we seem to re-discover cash. But eventually the money making machine will stop.

Peter Martin 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 Mint and Note Printing Australia make billions for Australia – but it could be at risk – https://theconversation.com/the-mint-and-note-printing-australia-make-billions-for-australia-but-it-could-be-at-risk-190901

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jennifer King, Senior Clinical Lecturer, University of Sydney

Last week, Johnson & Johnson reached a A$300 million settlement for two class actions brought by Australian women affected by complications from vaginal mesh products.

The products are surgically implanted to correct urinary incontinence or prolapse, where the vaginal tissues weaken and sag outside the vagina.

However, women involved in the class action experienced a range of issues with vaginal mesh implants, including chronic pain, painful intercourse and incontinence.

The first of the Australian class actions against Johnson & Johnson was filed in 2012. Justice Katzmann ruled the company hadn’t fully researched these products (which carried significant risks), was motivated by commercial factors, and failed to give doctors or patients adequate safety information.

The following ten years have seen a radical overhaul in the use of vaginal mesh implants in Australia and throughout the world. But we’ve also seen unintended consequences, with some women not accessing care.

What has changed?

We now have strict training and credentialing guidelines for surgeons using vaginal mesh, plus detailed management protocols for pelvic floor disorders. Only surgeons with advanced training in pelvic floor surgery following their specialty training are able to perform vaginal mesh surgery.

All patients are first referred for extensive pelvic floor muscle training. Only those who don’t respond to conservative treatment and whose incontinence has a major impact on their quality of life are referred for a surgical review.

Mesh repair for prolapse is considered only in patients with severe or recurrent prolapse in whom basic surgery using the patient’s own tissues has failed. This tends to be patients with multiple health problems who are not fit enough for major abdominal surgery.

Read more:
Vaginal mesh controversy shows collective failure of the TGA and Australia’s specialists

Registration for mesh products has been rigorously upgraded and requires extensive pre- and post-marketing audit. This means implants are tested in lengthy clinicial trials before and after they’re implanted in patients. Trials also compare the outcomes and complications to women having surgery without mesh.

Formal audit systems monitor women’s long-term outcomes. And next year, all implants will have a unique device identifier. Similar systems are used for joint replacements and breast implants, allowing prompt review if there are concerns over a device.

All of these changes should have been standard practice a long time ago and will hopefully prevent similar mistakes in future.

Some women not seeking treatment

Through media coverage of the vaginal mesh issue, most of the population learned “mesh was bad”. They may not have known anything about prolapse or incontinence but they clearly got the message mesh was something to avoid.

Following the 2011 United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety update citing possible complications associated with vaginal mesh, there was a marked reduction in the use of vaginal mesh implants for prolapse surgery.

Over the past ten years, fewer women have had surgery for pelvic floor weakness.

This is most noticeable for a type of surgery for urinary incontinence, mid-urethral sling, which has dropped 64% from its peak usage in 2010–2011. A mid-urethral sling uses a thin band of mesh under the urethra to manage incontinence.

Prolapse repair requires a larger patch of mesh to support the weakened vaginal walls.

Both these products are made from the same polypropylene mesh. This is the same material used in sutures (stitches) for many decades.

However, prolapse repair is more complex and has a higher risk of complications than mesh continence surgery, where short- and long term outcomes are very good.

Yet we have not seen any significant increase in other non-mesh continence surgery to compensate for this.

Read more:
Urinary incontinence can be a problem for women of all ages, but there is a cure

It’s possible more women are turning to physiotherapy treatment which can improve incontinence symptoms and is recommended as first-line treatment. Physiotherapy can also benefit women with mild to moderate vaginal prolapse.

However private physiotherapy care can be costly and difficult to access. There has also been an ongoing decline in physiotherapy and nurse continence services in public hospitals and community centres.

It is likely many women are not seeking help at all.

Mesh still has a place

The problem is, mesh is not inherently bad. Mesh has enabled surgeons to treat many women, including older or more frail patients, who aren’t suited to more major surgery.

Vaginal mesh surgery for prolapse is well tolerated in elderly and frail patients. Since its introduction, the greatest relative uptake in continence procedures has been in women 75 years and older.

For incontinence, a mid-urethral sling is more effective with fewer complications than other procedures for incontinence.
The most effective surgical repair for severe and recurrent prolapse, particularly in younger women, is a sacrocolpopexy. Generally performed via keyhole surgery, this technique uses a mesh strip anchored to the triangular bone at the base of the spine to support weakened vaginal tissues.

Sacrocolpopexy has a good safety profile, is effective and durable – and wasn’t part of the recent class actions.

But this is no longer available, as the manufacturers of mesh for sacrocolpopexy in Australia recently removed their products from the market. This was likely a commercial decision: the long-term studies required for registration of mesh products used in pelvic floor surgery are expensive and time consuming, and Australia is a relatively small market.

Mesh for vaginal prolapse had already been removed from the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods in 2018, meaning it can’t be supplied in Australia, after Australia’s regulator classified it as high risk.

Progress has been made to protect patients from the harms of faulty mesh implants but we need to ensure women have access to safe, effective surgical procedures to treat incontinence and prolapse – and for some women, this will include mesh.

Read more:
Not all vaginal implants are a problem and treating them the same puts many women at risk

Jennifer King is affiliated with International Urogynaecological Association, Continence Foundation of Australia NSW Branch

– ref. Action on faulty vaginal mesh took too long, now women struggle to access mesh surgery that works – https://theconversation.com/action-on-faulty-vaginal-mesh-took-too-long-now-women-struggle-to-access-mesh-surgery-that-works-190532

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrice Pottier, PhD Candidate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UNSW Sydney

Climate change is making heatwaves worse. Many people have already noticed the difference – and so too have other animals.

Sadly, research by myself and colleagues has found young animals, in particular, are struggling to keep up with rising temperatures, likely making them more vulnerable to climate change than adults of their species.

The study focused on “ectotherms”, or cold-blooded animals, which comprise more than 99% of animals on Earth. They include fish, reptiles, amphibians and insects. The body temperature of these animals reflects outside temperatures – so they can get dangerously hot during heat waves.

In a warming world, a species’ ability to adapt or acclimatise to temperatures is crucial. Our study found that young ectotherms, in particular, can struggle to handle more heat as their habitat warms up. That may have dramatic consequences for biodiversity as climate change worsens.

Our findings are yet more evidence of the need to urgently reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent catastrophic global heating. Humans must also provide and retain cool spaces to help animals navigate a warmer future.

Tolerating heat in a changing climate

The body temperature of ectotherms is extremely variable. As they move through their habitat, their body temperature varies according to the outside conditions.

However, there’s only so much heat these animals can tolerate. Heat tolerance is defined as the maximum body temperature ectotherms can handle before they lose functions such as the ability to walk or swim. During heat waves, their body temperature gets so high they can die.

Species, including ectotherms, can adapt to challenges in their environment over time by evolving across generations. But the rate at which global temperatures are rising means in many cases, this adaptation is not happening fast enough. That’s why we need to understand how animals acclimatise to rising temperatures within a single lifetime.

Unfortunately, some young animals have little to no ability to move and seek cooler temperatures. For example, baby lizards inside eggs cannot move elsewhere. And owing to their small size, juvenile ectotherms cannot move great distances.

This suggests young animals may be particularly vulnerable during intense heat waves. But we know very little about how young animals acclimatise to high temperatures. Our research sought to find out more.

Young animals at risk

Our study drew on 60 years of research into 138 ectotherm species from around the world.

Overall, we found the heat tolerance of embryos and juvenile ectotherms increased very little in response to rising temperatures. For each degree of warming, the heat tolerance of young ectotherms only increased by an average 0.13℃.

The physiology of heat acclimatisation in animals is very complex and poorly understood. It appears linked to a number of factors such as metabolic activity and proteins produced by cells in response to stress.

Our research showed young land-based animals were worse at acclimatising to heat than aquatic animals. This may be because moving to a cooler temperature on land is easier than in an aquatic environment, so land-based animals may not have developed the same ability to acclimatise to heat.

Read more:
Thousands of photos captured by everyday Australians reveal the secrets of our marine life as oceans warm

Heat tolerance can vary within a species. It can depend on what temperatures an animal has experienced during its lifetime and, as such, the extent to which it has acclimatised. But surprisingly, our research found past exposure to high temperatures does not necessarily help a young animal withstand future high temperatures.

Take, for example, Lesueur’s velvet gecko which is found mostly along Australia’s east coast. Research shows juveniles from eggs incubated in cooler nests (23.2℃) tolerated temperatures up to 40.2℃. In contrast, juveniles from warmer nests (27℃) only tolerated temperatures up to 38.7℃.

Those patterns can persist through adulthood. For example, adult male mosquito fish from eggs incubated to 32℃ were less tolerant to heat than adult males that experienced 26℃ during incubation.

These results show embryos are especially vulnerable to extreme heat. Instead of getting better at handling heat, warmer eggs tend to produce juveniles and adults less capable of withstanding a warmer future.

Overall, our findings suggest young cold-blooded animals are already struggling to cope with rising temperatures – and conditions during early life can have lifelong consequences.

Read more:
We know heatwaves kill animals. But new research shows the survivors don’t get off scot-free

What’s next?

To date, most studies on the impacts of climate change have focused on adults. Our research suggests animals may be harmed by heatwaves long before they reach adulthood – perhaps even before they’re born.

Alarmingly, this means we may have underestimated the damage climate change will cause to biodiversity.

Clearly, it’s vitally important to limit global greenhouse gas emissions to the extent required by the Paris Agreement.

But we can also act to protect species at a finer scale – by conserving habitats that allow animals to find shade and shelter during heatwaves. Such habitats include trees, shrubs, burrows, ponds, caves, logs and rocks. These places must be created, restored and preserved to help animals prosper in a warming world.

Read more:
Beyond net-zero: we should, if we can, cool the planet back to pre-industrial levels

Patrice Pottier works for The University of New South Wales. He is supported by a UNSW Scientia Doctoral scholarship.

– ref. Young cold-blooded animals are suffering the most as Earth heats up, research finds – https://theconversation.com/young-cold-blooded-animals-are-suffering-the-most-as-earth-heats-up-research-finds-190606

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn Newitt, Lecturer, Criminology, Western Sydney University

This article contains information on deaths in custody, racist language and violence experienced by First Nations people in encounters with the Australian justice system. It also contains references to and the names of people who have passed away.

The three-month coronial inquest into Kumanjayi Walker’s death in police custody began on September 5 at the Alice Springs Local Court.

During an attempted arrest, 19-year-old Warlpiri teenager Kumanjayi Walker was fatally shot on November 9 2019 by Northern Territory police constable Zachary Rolfe. In March 2022, Rolfe was acquitted of murder, manslaughter and engaging in a violent act causing death.

Last week, the inquest heard details of several text messages between Rolfe and other members of the NT police, including officers in more senior positions than Rolfe.

The texts contain derogatory and racist comments about Aboriginal people.

Racism among police will come as little surprise to many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Indeed, systemic racism is entrenched in Australia’s legal system.

Racist texts are relevant for this inquest

Rolfe’s lawyers had objected to the inclusion of text messages between police officers downloaded from his phone after his arrest. But this was rejected by Coroner Elisabeth Armitage, who ruled the text messages should be examined by the inquest as potential evidence of racism playing a “conscious or unconscious” role in Walker’s death.

Read more:
Despite 432 Indigenous deaths in custody since 1991, no one has ever been convicted. Racist silence and complicity are to blame

That ruling was in contrast to Rolfe’s March 2022 trial, at which Supreme Court Justice John Burns ruled the text messages to be inadmissable.

In the opening week of the inquest, Peggy Dwyer, counsel assisting the coroner, said: “some of those text messages do suggest negative attitudes towards Aboriginal people that should and will cause great concern”.

Dwyer also stated the importance of understanding where these racist attitudes were coming from, and if there was a way to prevent them, asking: “Is there a risk that if we don’t, those attitudes may lead again to deadly confrontation?”

Racist attitudes from police are nothing new

Despite the media attention these racist text exchanges are now receiving, such racism is far from an isolated incident.

More than 30 years after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, systemic racism remains entrenched in the Australian legal system. Systemic racism refers to colonial structures that perpetuate white racial superiority across institutions, laws, police and practices which continue to disadvantage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

More than 500 Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people have died in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. No one has been held criminally responsible for any of these deaths.

Read more:
Explainer: what is systemic racism and institutional racism?

Police racially targeting Aboriginal people does not just happen in the NT. In Melbourne in 2020, Korey Penny said he was violently thrown from his bicycle by police who subjected him to foulmouthed racist abuse. Although it was reported Penny is pursuing court action, it’s unknown whether he has reached an outcome.

In the same year, three South Australian police officers were filmed violently arresting a 28-year-old Aboriginal man. And just last week, a 14-year-old Aboriginal boy was taken to hospital in New South Wales with lacerations to his head. The boy’s family allege the head injuries were caused by the violent arrest and excessive use of force by police.

Holding police accountable for violence, excessive use of force and systemic racism must involve an active approach to addressing police culture and dehumanising behaviours. The current investigative process, in which police conduct internal investigations of wrongdoing, is simply not working. The oversight of an external global body into systemic racism and police would be best placed, rather than police investigating police.

However, this coronial inquest is at least an improvement on internal police investigations, as the investigative process involves Walker’s family members’ questions being answered, and keeps them informed as far as practicable.

Read more:
The Kumanjayi Walker murder case echoes a long history of police violence against First Nations people

The acceptance and dismissal of racist language makes it easier for discriminatory behaviour to continue. Addressing systemic racism must go beyond further training and education for police.

Until colonial governments acknowledge the existence of systemic racism and are held accountable for it, Aboriginal people will never see just outcomes.

Robyn Newitt 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. Police texts in Kumanjayi Walker case another sordid example of systemic racism in Australia’s legal system – https://theconversation.com/police-texts-in-kumanjayi-walker-case-another-sordid-example-of-systemic-racism-in-australias-legal-system-190833

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katarina Miljkovic, ARC Future Fellow, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University

Since 2018, NASA’s InSight mission to Mars has recorded seismic waves from more than 1,300 marsquakes in its quest to probe the internal structure of the red planet. The solar panels of the car-sized robotic lander have become caked with Martian dust, and NASA scientists expect it will completely power down by the end of 2022.

Read more:
First recorded ‘marsquakes’ reveal the red planet’s rumbling guts

But the internal rumblings of our planetary neighbour aren’t the only things that InSight’s seismometers detect: they also pick up the thuds of space rocks crashing into the Martian soil.

In new research published in Nature Geoscience, we used data from InSight to detect and locate four high-speed meteoroid collisions, and then tracked down the resulting craters in satellite images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Rocks from space

The Solar System is full of relatively small rocks called meteoroids, and it’s common for them to collide with planets. When a meteoroid encounters a planet with an atmosphere, it heats up due to friction – and may burn up entirely before reaching the ground.

On Earth, we know these incoming meteoroids as shooting stars, or meteors: beautiful events to observe in the night sky. Sometimes a meteoroid explodes when it reaches the thicker atmosphere closer to the ground, creating a spectacular airburst.

Read more:
Where do meteorites come from? We tracked hundreds of fireballs streaking through the sky to find out

Occasionally, a space rock survives its fiery path through the air and drops to the ground, where it is known as a meteorite.

A few of these meteorites hit the surface at such speed they blast a hole in the ground called an impact crater. Compared to a human lifetime, these events are very rare on Earth.

Recording space rock impacts

Scientists have detected the vibrations from meteoroid airbursts using seismic detectors numerous times, including a recent survey of bright meteors above Australia.

However, only once has a high-speed space rock crashing into the ground been observed both visually and with modern seismic equipment. This was an impact crater that formed in 2007 near the village of Carancas in Peru.

Numerous impacts were detected on the Moon by the network of seismic sensors set up during the US Apollo missions of the 1960s and ’70s. However, there was no recording of a natural impact associated with visual detection of a new crater.

Read more:
The moon is still geologically active, study suggests

The closest things to such an observation were artificial impacts: the crash-landings of the booster rockets of the ascent modules that lifted Apollo astronauts off the Moon.

These human-made impacts on the Moon were recorded both in seismic data and visual imagery from orbit. These data were recently used to test simulations of how impacts produce seismic waves.

Martian meteorites

Incoming meteoroids make waves in the atmosphere and also the ground. The atmosphere of Mars is equivalent to 1% of the Earth’s, and has a different chemical composition. This means meteor events on Mars take a different form.

For meteor events large enough to drop a meteorite, the fate of the meteorite and any resulting crater is different from what we have come to expect on our home planet.

Here on Earth, or on the Moon, single craters are the norm. On Mars, however, about half the time a high-speed space rock will burst in the atmosphere shortly before impact, resulting in a tightly grouped cluster of craters.

The separation of these individual fragments remains close at ground level, forming a cluster of small impacts.

From vibrations to craters

Recently, the InSight mission has observed acoustic and seismic waves from four meteoroid impact events. These waves travel at different speeds, and comparing their different arrival times and other properties allowed us to estimate the location of the impacts.

These impact locations were then confirmed with satellite imaging from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Knowing the size and exact location of these impact craters helps us calculate the size and speed of the incoming space rock and how much energy the impact released.

Once we are confident we know something about the impact that created the seismic waves we detected, we can use the waves to learn about the interior of Mars. What’s more, when we compare seismic observations on Mars with observations from Earth and the Moon, we can learn more about how the planets formed and how the Solar System evolved.

Dr Katarina Miljkovic works for Curtin University and is fully funded by the Australian Research Council. She is a science collaborator for the NASA InSight mission.

– ref. For the first time, robots on Mars found meteorite impact craters by sensing seismic shock waves – https://theconversation.com/for-the-first-time-robots-on-mars-found-meteorite-impact-craters-by-sensing-seismic-shock-waves-190755

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Michaelsen, Associate Professor, UNSW Sydney

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24 2022, the United States, the European Union and other countries swiftly imposed a mix of wide-ranging diplomatic and economic sanctions.

Russia was excluded from the Council of Europe and voted off the United Nations Human Rights Council. Russian diplomats were expelled by various Western countries.

Travel bans were introduced to prevent Russian politicians and oligarchs from entering or transiting through US and EU territory.

Economically, the sanction measures included asset freezes. Several Russian banks were removed from the SWIFT banking system, the financial messaging infrastructure that links the world’s banks.

Western countries also sanctioned about half of Russia’s foreign reserves – roughly US$315 billion. And they introduced strong export controls.

For example, the US and Europe have widely prohibited exporting dual-use and advanced technology items. This covers a range of commodities and industrial parts and materials, including timber products, iron and steel products, metalworking, glass and woodworking tools as well as industrial and electrical equipment.

Six months after the Russian invasion, however, the war in Ukraine is raging on. While Ukraine has recently managed to reclaim territory in some of its eastern regions, a speedy end to the military conflict is unlikely.

So, does that mean the sanctions have failed?

Read more:
Kharkiv offensive has shown the west that Ukraine can win

Effectiveness of sanctions is difficult to assess

Speaking at an economic forum in Vladivostok earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed his country was coping with the West’s economic “aggression”. He warned that instead of having the effect the West desired, the sanctions were eroding the quality of life for Europeans and poorer countries were losing access to food.

The EU’s viewpoint is different, of course. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the Russia sanctions the “toughest the world has ever seen”. Delivering the State of the Union Address in Strasbourg last week, she claimed the sanctions had been effective and Russia’s financial sector was on life support.

Some truth can be found in both narratives. But at this stage, an accurate empirical assessment of the effectiveness of the sanctions is difficult for two reasons: time-frame and access to data.

When it comes to assessing the impact of economic sanctions, six months is normally not enough time. Indeed, economists believe the real debate on the Russia sanctions goes beyond 2022.

The second challenge is selection of and access to reliable data.

A commonly used figure to measure the impact of sanctions is Gross Domestic Project (GDP) in a targeted country. In April, the International Monetary Fund forecasted the Russian GDP to drop 8.5% in 2022. It has now improved its outlook for the dynamics of Russia’s economy to a fall of 6%.

A similarly indicative figure is inflation rate. But as with GDP, a clear and singular causality between sanctions and inflation is impossible to establish.

According to First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov, inflation in Russia in 2022 will come in at 12-13%. The actual figure is likely to be higher.

A look at car sales in Russia offers another illustrative example, especially since households tend to try to buy durable goods during periods of high inflation.

Car sales in March 2022 were three times lower than in March 2021. By September 2022, the production of cars in Russia has fallen by three-quarters compared to last year.

A similar dynamic can be observed in the aviation industry. The Russian airline Aeroflot, for instance, has grounded planes because there are no more spare parts.

Equally, the Russian military is reportedly taking chips from dishwashers and refrigerators to fix their military hardware, because they ran out of semiconductors.

This suggests that the system of Western export controls is working. Indeed, according to some estimates, imports in April 2022 collapsed as much as 70-80% year-on-year.

But sanctions are always a double-edged sword.

Ripple effects

As Russia is taking counter-measures, some policymakers in the West may have underestimated the consequences. A key example in this regard is exponentially rising energy costs.

With 40% of gas in Europe originating from Russia, the import and price of gas have become defining issues in daily politics as the continent is heading for winter.

Unsurprisingly, the prospect of freezing households features prominently in tabloids in Germany, France, and Italy. Yet, the economic consequences for these major European economies are potentially worse. In Germany, there are calculations that an import stop of Russian gas would lead up to a 3% decline in GDP.

Nonetheless, at the moment, 78% of Europeans are still supporting the sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia. But many are also recognising that they come at a cost. In Germany, 51% believe that the sanctions are actually hurting Germany more than Russia.

Read more:
Russia is fighting three undeclared wars. Its fourth – an internal struggle for Russia itself – might be looming

So, where does that leave us?

The sanctions have not stopped Russia from waging war in Ukraine. And, at least for the time being, Putin’s grip on power in Russia itself remains strong.

This means the short-term disruptions from the Russia sanctions may be less than originally hoped for. But there are early signs of significant stress for the Russian economy. Indeed, it is likely this stress will intensify in 2023 and beyond.

More generally, it is important to recognise that limiting an assessment of sanctions to measuring impact and causality is missing the bigger picture.

Short of direct military confrontation, the US, the EU and their allies had few alternatives at their disposal to respond to the Russian aggression. More importantly, perhaps, it is clear that eventually the Ukraine crisis can only be solved diplomatically.

And it is at this point that the sanctions – or the lifting of them – will come in handy as a major political and economic bargaining chip.

Christopher Michaelsen receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Are the West’s sanctions against Russia actually working? – https://theconversation.com/are-the-wests-sanctions-against-russia-actually-working-190424

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Wong, Forrest Fellow, The University of Western Australia

Have you ever wondered exactly how many ants live on Earth? Possibly not, but it’s certainly a question we’ve asked ourselves.

Our research published today provides an approximate answer. We conservatively estimate our planet harbours about 20 quadrillion ants. That’s 20 thousand million millions, or in numerical form, 20,000,000,000,000,000 (20 with 15 zeroes).

We further estimate the world’s ants collectively constitute about 12 million tonnes of dry carbon. This exceeds the mass of all the world’s wild birds and wild mammals combined. It’s also equal to about one-fifth of the total weight of humans.

Eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson once said insects and other invertebrates are “the little things that run the world” – and he was right. Ants, in particular, are a crucial part of nature. Among other roles, ants aerate the soil, disperse seeds, break down organic material, create habitat for other animals and form an important part of the food chain.

Estimating ant numbers and mass provides an important baseline from which to monitor ant populations amid worrying environmental changes.

Counting the world’s ants

There are more than 15,700 named species and subspecies of ants, and many others not yet named by science. Ants’ high degree of social organisation has enabled them to colonise nearly all ecosystems and regions around the globe.

The astounding ubiquity of ants has prompted many naturalists to contemplate their exact number on Earth. But these were basically educated guesses. Systematic, evidence-based estimates have been lacking.

Our research involved an analysis of 489 studies of ant populations conducted by fellow ant scientists from around the world. This included non-English literature, in languages such as Spanish, French, German, Russian, Mandarin and Portuguese.

The research spanned all continents and major habitats including forests, deserts, grasslands and cities. They used standardised methods for collecting and counting ants such as pitfall traps and leaf litter samples. As you can imagine, this is often tedious work.

Read more:
In defence of ants

From all this, we estimate there are approximately 20 quadrillion ants on Earth. This figure, though conservative, is between two and 20 times higher than previous estimates.

Th previous figures employed a “top-down” approach by assuming ants comprise about 1% of the world’s estimated insect population. In contrast, our “bottom-up” estimate is more reliable because it uses data on ants observed directly in the field and makes fewer assumptions.

Our next step was to work out how much all these ants weigh. The mass of organisms is typically measured in terms of their carbon makeup. We estimated that 20 quadrillion average-sized ants corresponds to a dry weight or “biomass” of approximately 12 million tonnes of carbon.

This is more than the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals – and about 20% of total human biomass.

Carbon makes up about half the dry weight of an ant. If the weight of other bodily elements was included, the total mass of the world’s ants would be higher still.

We also found ants are distributed unevenly on Earth’s surface. They vary sixfold between habitats and generally peak in the tropics. This underscores the importance of tropical regions in maintaining healthy ant populations.

Ants were also particularly abundant in forests, and surprisingly, in arid regions. But they become less common in human-made habitats.

Our findings come with a few caveats. For example, the sampling locations in our dataset are unevenly distributed across geographic regions. And the vast majority of samples were collected from the ground layer, meaning we have very little information about ant numbers in trees or underground. This means our findings are somewhat incomplete.

Read more:
Where are all the ants? World-first ‘treasure map’ reveals hotspots for rare species

We all need ants

Ants also provide vital “ecosystem services” for humans. For instance, a recent study found ants can be more effective than pesticides at helping farmers produce food.

Ants have also developed tight interactions with other organisms – and some species cannot survive without them.

For example, some birds rely on ants to flush out their prey. And thousands of plant species either feed or house ants in exchange for protection, or dispersal of their seeds. And many ants are predators, helping to keep populations of other insects in check.

Alarmingly, global insect numbers are declining due to threats such as habitat destruction and fragmentation, chemical use, invasive species and climate change.

But data on insect biodiversity is alarmingly scarce. We hope our study provides a baseline for further research to help fill this gap.

It’s in humanity’s interest to monitor ant populations. Counting ants is not difficult, and citizen scientists from all over the world could help investigate how these important animals are faring at a time of great environmental change.

Read more:
Why tiny ants have invaded your house, and what to do about it

Mark Wong receives funding from the Forrest Research Foundation.

Benoit Guénard is an Associate Professor at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). This study was supported thanks to funding from HKU, an Early Career Scheme of the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong (# ECS-27106417), and by National Geographic.

Patrick Schultheiss is a Temporary Principal Investigator at the University of Würzburg in Germany. He currently receives funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project no. 499479766. This study was further supported by a Division of Ecology and Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellow Research Award from the University of Hong Kong.

Sabine Nooten receives funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) — project No. 445715161

François Brassard and Runxi Wang 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. Earth harbours 20,000,000,000,000,000 ants – and they weigh more than wild birds and mammals combined – https://theconversation.com/earth-harbours-20-000-000-000-000-000-ants-and-they-weigh-more-than-wild-birds-and-mammals-combined-190831

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, Lecturer and Research Fellow, Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University

To anyone who has stepped off a hot pavement into a shady park, it will come as little surprise that trees (and shrubs) have a big cooling effect on cities.

Our study published today in Nature Climate Change found climate change will put 90-100% of the trees and shrubs planted in Australian capital cities at risk by 2050. Without action, two-thirds of trees and shrubs in cities worldwide will be at potential risk from climate change.

Increasing city temperatures mean their trees are becoming more important than ever. More than just shade umbrellas, the natural air-conditioning magic of trees happens as water moves up from the soil through their roots and evaporates out of their leaves into the air.

But how will the trees themselves cope with climate change as conditions shift beyond their natural tolerance limits for high temperatures or lack of water? Our team of scientists from Australia and France examined the impacts of temperature and rainfall changes projected for coming decades on 3,129 tree and shrub species planted in 164 cities across 78 countries.

About half of these urban tree and shrub species are already experiencing climate conditions beyond their natural tolerance limits.

These findings sound bleak – but read on. We have also identified steps people can take to help their local trees survive, thrive and keep on cooling.

Read more:
A solution to cut extreme heat by up to 6 degrees is in our own backyards

Risks in Australia are higher

In Australia, reduced rainfall will be the most common stress on urban trees, but increasing temperatures will also be a major factor, especially in Darwin.

By 2050, the proportion of urban tree species that might be at risk of projected temperature increases in Australian cities is very high. Among the major cities with inventories of urban plantings, those with high percentages at risk include: Cairns 82%, Melbourne 93%, Perth 95%, Hobart 95%, Sydney 96%, Canberra 98% and Darwin 100%.

Common native species, including manna gum, swamp gum, yellow box, narrow-leaved peppermint, blackwood and brush box, and well-loved introduced species, such as jacaranda, oaks, elms, poplars and silver birch, are among the trees that could be at risk in Australia.

By at risk, we mean these species might be experiencing stressful climatic conditions that could affect their health and performance. However, we could buffer the risk for these species by providing water or creating other microclimate conditions. Also, urban trees may exhibit plasticity in traits that govern survival, growth and environmental tolerance, which can help them to adapt to local environmental conditions.

Read more:
Our cities need more trees, but some commonly planted ones won’t survive climate change

More than 1,000 tree species at risk globally

Worldwide, we found common species of cherry plums, oaks, maples, poplars, elms, pines, lindens, wattles, eucalypts and chestnuts are among more than 1,000 species that have been flagged at risk due to climate change in most cities where they occur.

Even more worryingly, the number of species affected, and the scale of the impacts, will increase markedly by 2050 as temperatures increase. These trends jeopardise the health and longevity of urban forests and the benefits they provide to society.

The United Nations predicts the world’s population will grow to around 8.5 billion by 2030, with more than half of those people living in cities. Climate change will further heat up the urban heat islands created by millions of people, vehicles and industries generating heat that’s retained among buildings and other infrastructure.

Urban trees have a vital role to play in keeping cities liveable. As they cool their surroundings, they reduce our electricity use for air conditioning, while also absorbing carbon dioxide, purifying the air, reducing city noise and providing wildlife habitat. They are also inherently beautiful, living things that underpin much of the biodiversity on Earth.

Being around their natural greenness also improves our mental health and well-being. Trees have helped us through stressful times such as pandemics.

However, when climatic conditions exceed the natural tolerance of trees, not only can this lead to poor tree health and limited growth, but it can also reduce their cooling effect and eventually lead to tree dieback. During drought or heat stress, trees can stop releasing water vapour from their leaves or shed leaves to reduce tissue damage. This means that at a time when we most need their natural air conditioning, they are more likely to be switching off.

Read more:
Cities could get more than 4°C hotter by 2100. To keep cool in Australia, we urgently need a national planning policy

What can we do to protect our trees?

Increasing the number of trees and shrubs in our cities, collectively called urban forests, is a key climate change adaptation and liveability strategy being used around the world. Until now, though, little information was available on whether or not current climatic conditions exceed what urban forests can stand, or how these conditions compare with projected changes in temperature and precipitation (drought, rain and snow) around the world.

Our study provides guidance to urban forest managers in 164 cities about which species might be at risk and should be monitored. It also identifies which species are likely to be resilient to climate change and so suitable for future plantings.

People can help urban forests to survive and keep providing their many benefits in a few simple ways:

1) reduced rainfall and soil moisture are a big threat to many species, so you can help rain soak into the ground to ensure precious water is not wasted down the drain – consider diverting water from your downpipe to a raingarden or a rainwater tank that trickle-feeds the garden (this also helps your local creek).

2) plant even more trees and shrubs, which helps to keep city temperatures comfortable for them and us – get advice from your local council or horticulturalists about suitable climate-resilient species for your area.

3) leave trees and shrubs in place – think twice before cutting down trees and shrubs, as they are providing you with more benefits than you realise.

Read more:
Residential green spaces protect growing cities against climate change

Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez is employed by Western Sydney University and received funding from the Which Plant Where project via the Hort Frontiers Green Cities Fund developed by Hort Innovation with co-investment from Macquarie University, Western Sydney University, the New South Wales Department of Planning and Environment, and the Australian Government.

Mark G Tjoelker received funding from the Which Plant Where project via the Hort Frontiers Green Cities Fund developed by Hort Innovation with co-investment from Macquarie University, Western Sydney University, the New South Wales Department of Planning and Environment, and the Australian Government.

Rachael Gallagher receives funding from Hort Innovation Australia.

Jaana Dielenberg and Jonathan Lenoir 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. Climate change threatens up to 100% of trees in Australian cities, and most urban species worldwide – https://theconversation.com/climate-change-threatens-up-to-100-of-trees-in-australian-cities-and-most-urban-species-worldwide-188807

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kelly Dombroski, Associate Professor in Geography, Massey University

In the aftermath of a series of earthquakes that devastated Ōtautahi Christchurch 12 years ago, impromptu and transitional organisations kickstarted the city’s recovery.

On the many vacant sites in the demolished city, they supported pop-up shops, installations and events to keep city life and urban wellbeing going during the slow post-quake rebuild.

Such transitional urban wellbeing efforts are just as relevant elsewhere as cities experience the impacts of climate chaos and wider ecological decline, and are subject to shocks, both acute and chronic.

Our research gathered key learnings on urban transition led by grassroots organisations.

Cities are under increasing pressure to shift to circular, zero-carbon and ecological living systems to support social, cultural and ecological wellbeing.

Researchers studying urban system change have identified key areas of action for holistic wellbeing. They emphasise the need for swift transitions in urban energy, economic and ecological infrastructures and transport and building systems to foster community and ecological wellbeing – all of which require people to collaborate, experiment and learn.

Read more:
Wellbeing: how living well together works for the common good

In partnership with Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS), a behind-the-scenes organisation that negotiates with landowners to match projects with empty sites, we interviewed some of the people who were involved with the more than 700 transitional projects in Christchurch during the past decade.

Our team visited sites, interviewed project leaders and did archival research – and we co-curated an exhibition and put together a collaborative book.

We found all projects, in some way, led to more socially and ecologically connected communities, a key aspect of urban wellbeing. But we also found a range of other social, cultural and ecological wellbeing outcomes, as well as knowledge about how broader transitions occur. Here are three useful findings.

Real action starts before government policy

After the earthquakes, many people identified the need for community connection and spaces for business, art and education. They did not wait to be told what to do but started projects and organisations to address these needs.

Photographer and co-working space operator Hannah Watkinson told us that because she and her friends were young at the time of the earthquakes, they could not help with more mundane recovery operations such as water and sewerage. They jumped in and did what they could to build the kind of city they wanted to live in.

This included co-working spaces, outdoor community spaces, transitional art exhibitions and more.

In the shift from acute earthquake recovery to broader urban wellbeing, Christchurch’s transitional organisations have supported collaborative learning and recovery. The city’s rebuild is not simply a return to business as usual, partly because of these organisations and other important transitional partners such as Ngāi Tahu.

Recent government policy encourages urban density to reduce transport emissions and control urban sprawl. The Christchurch experience now provides a model for living well in more dense urban environments.

Community-led action can be holistic and transformative

While many of the organisations and projects began as earthquake recovery, they were motivated by a vision to transform Christchurch. They were piloting and implementing key urban changes, with many founded on a redistributive circular economy.

A circular economy is one where resources are kept in use for as long as possible, then recovered, reinvested and recycled back into production. Transitioning to these forms of economy requires larger systemic change as well as adjustments in many people’s actions.

In Christchurch, that’s what many projects have been working towards.

RAD bikes helps people to “recycle a dunger” bike. Rekindle teaches people how to turn common natural and waste materials into usable goods. Pop-up op shops helped redistribute unused clothing and 20:20 Compost turned city organic waste into an important food-growing resource, all on red-zoned land.

Circular and bioeconomy ideas have become increasingly topical as cities begin to calculate the carbon emitted from their landfills, transport, industry and built infrastructures but also encounter wider costs associated with pollution and over-extraction of resources. These LiVS-enabled projects are not just about one thing – they operate with holistic values that include circularity. They model the kind of changes other organisations can make to reduce carbon emissions.

Read more:
Report from the future: Aotearoa New Zealand is looking good in 2040 – here’s how we did it

People need space and time to experiment

Temporary projects are important for system change because they provide a testing ground for ideas. Social entrepreneurs, artists and visionaries can give something a go to see if it works. Other residents can get used to new ideas in the city.

Bailey Peryman experimented with urban agriculture in a number of projects. The urban farming and composting projects Agropolis, Cultivate and 20:20 Compost each scaled up decentralised community composting another notch, from a single garden bed, to a small urban garden, to a major composting initiative processing significant amounts of organic waste.

Alex Davies’ local food project in a public pizza oven was the basis for his low-carbon Gatherings restaurant.

Kilmore street was the site of many experimental projects in local food, challenging performance art, social networking and more. Some of these temporary projects helped local artists and entrepreneurs go on to do larger-scale transitional projects.

Transitioning cities from extractive to more resilient, circular and ecological systems is a complex, ongoing process. There is no single model emerging from Christchurch that can be exported to other places. However it is clear that collaborating horizontally across communities and governance organisations is necessary for just and effective change.

Examples of this kind of collaborative process include charitable trust Matapopore working with city council and Ngāi Tahu to put mana whenua voices in urban recovery and design, and Burwood residents contributing to new uses for red-zoned land.

As The Green Lab director Khye Hitchcock put it, change requires “a deeper connection with local communities rather than exporting a model […] which may or may not work”.

Genuine community leadership and co-creation is fundamental for transitioning to the more equitable and resilient urban systems needed at this time of change. As we enter into a period of increasing ecological disruption we can take some inspiration from the communities that are already enacting important transitions in holistic urban wellbeing.

Kelly Dombroski receives funding the Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities National Science Challenge. She is an outgoing board member of Life in Vacant Spaces.

Amanda Yates receives funding from the Ngā Kāinga Ora Urban Wellbeing programme part of the Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities National Science Challenge.

– ref. The city as laboratory: what post-quake Christchurch is teaching us about urban recovery and transformation – https://theconversation.com/the-city-as-laboratory-what-post-quake-christchurch-is-teaching-us-about-urban-recovery-and-transformation-190738

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Michael McCarthy, Emeritus Professor, School of Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia

Education Minister Jason Clare has just announced an independent review of the Australian Research Council (ARC).

This is the body that oversees funding for non-medical research in Australian universities and plays a critical role in the careers of academics.

After years of concerns about the ARC – about political interference and low success rates – the review is a welcome step. But will it tackle the big issues?

ARC review

The review has been set up to look at the “role and purpose” of the ARC, its governance model and whether the ARC’s legislation creates an “effective and efficient university research system”.

However, this focus on operational issues is narrow and risks overlooking some of the most serious issues facing research in Australia. These include three ongoing challenges, as outlined in our recent paper.

Read more:
Jason Clare has just put the Australian Research Council on notice. This brings (some) good news for academics

1. Adequate funding

In Australia, the ARC does not usually fund the full cost of research. This is a mismatch identified as far back as the Bradley review of higher education in 2008.

This mismatch means government push funding back to universities, partly to save money and partly to encourage universities to be competitive to gain national and global ranking success.

Read more:
Why big university surpluses underscore the need to reform how they are funded and governed

As of 2018, universities spent about A$12 billion a year on research. About $6 billion came from the government while $6 billion came from universities’ own funds, of which $3 billion was from overseas student fees.

So universities must transfer funds from teaching overseas students to fund research grants. They then seek to attract overseas students based on research rankings. The risk here is that a decline in international student enrolments means a decline in research revenue – if one side fails so does the other.

For researchers, the task of funding projects is more complex and onerous than it should be. To even apply to the ARC, they have to be able to show the rest of the costs can be met by the university.

2. Political interference

All ARC research proposals need to include a “national interest test”. This is a 150-word statement that explains the benefit of the research to the Australian community.

Clare has recently said he will keep the national interest test, but make it “clearer”. This is a significant missed opportunity to abolish this problematic test.

The test was introduced in 2018 by then education minister Dan Tehan, who said it would “improve the public’s confidence” in why grants are awarded.

It followed a public outcry after his predecessor, Simon Birmingham blocked about $4 million-worth of grants in humanities subjects.

The national interest test has not stopped the vetoing of research (as this is allowed in the ARC’s legislation). But it has increased the justification for it. Former acting education minister Stuart Robert vetoed six grants in late 2021, including one on student climate protests. His spokesperson argued, the proposals did not “demonstrate value for taxpayers’ money nor contribute to the national interest.

This has only increased academics’ concerns about political interference in their research.

The role of security agencies in the ARC process is also a deeply concerning development, thanks to the secretive nature of vetting. In late 2020, Tehan blocked five grants on national security grounds.

On top of all this, the national interest test is a highly time-consuming and frustrating process, as there is often a cumbersome back and forth between the ARC, university and researcher to clarify the statement.

3. What is university research for?

There is a misguided view in Australian politics that university research is flexible and easily adaptable to whatever industry needs.

For example, in late 2021, the Morrison government announced $240 million in grants for universities who could commercialise research. The new Labor government wants to see research conforming to the national reconstruction fund priorities, which is geared at projects that expand Australian industry. Its focus is on areas including mining, transport, medical science, renewable energy, defence technology and robotics.

Read more:
7 things the Australian Research Council review should tackle, from a researcher’s point of view

Clare has specifically told the ARC he wants to see “impact with industry”.

This emphasis is concerning because it sees research as a commercial, economic or “value-added” property, rather than something centred on discovering things in an independent, scientific way.

Governments also of course choose which industries they want to support based on their political priorities, which tend toward short-term objectives, based on the electoral cycle.

What next?

The new review began work in early September and will provide an interim report in December. A final report will be handed down in March 2023.

This review is important but it cannot obscure a much-needed debate about the purpose and value of research in Australia.

Australian researchers want to be able to do their work with secure, adequate funding. And they want to be able to do it independently of government. Meanwhile, governments want to be able to “use” the research to suit their own priorities. It is easy to see how the two don’t easily align.

Gregory Michael McCarthy has received in the past funding from the ARC. He was the BHP Chair of Australian Studies at Peking University from 2016-2019.

Kanishka Jayasuriya receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. A review into how university research works in Australia has just begun – it must confront these 3 issues – https://theconversation.com/a-review-into-how-university-research-works-in-australia-has-just-begun-it-must-confront-these-3-issues-190551

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dale Tweedie, Senior lecturer, Macquarie University

If you’re reading this during work hours, there’s a chance your boss knows about it. The market for “bossware” – digital tools that enable managers to keep tabs on what workers are up to – is reportedly booming.

News reports recount tales of health-care workers being ranked “idle” for not typing while counselling drug patients, and hospice chaplains losing “productivity points” for spending too long with the bereaved or dying.

In the United States 60% of employers with more than 200 workers now use “employee productivity monitoring technologies”, according to market research firm Gartner.

Once loaded on your computer, these tools (with names such as Clever Control, Time Doctor, Staffcop and Work Examiner) can track a dizzying array of data – key strokes, how often you move your mouse, if you are using messaging apps, your search queries and the websites you visit.

They can view your screen and record video from your webcam. Work Examiner boasts it can “record every second of an employee’s screen activity”.

They then turn this into easily digestable data on a dashboard (for your manager), highlighting your active hours and “idle time”, awarding you a productivity score, and ranking you against your colleagues.

This may be happening without you even realising. Even if you are informed, it’s done without your input. Too few mouse clicks? There may be a very good reason, but the software doesn’t care.

These technologies are relatively new but the thinking behind them – that productivity can be reduced to simple measurements, and that workers must be constantly surveilled and managed for maximum efficiency – is relatively old.

Read more:
‘They track our every move’: why the cards were stacked against a union at Amazon

More than a century ago techniques to observe and control workers movements intensively were developed into a theory of “scientific management” by US engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor. Tracking mouse clicks remotely is a high-tech version of the same game.

The promises of bossware – of better performance and more control – are tempting to management. But they are also profoundly wrong.

Inventing ‘scientific management’

Taylor, who was born in 1856, developed his management ideas while working at the Midvale Steel Works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he rose through the ranks to become chief engineer.

His book Principles of Scientific Management was published in 1911. The fundamental “science” of management involved intensive surveillance of workers’ activities, breaking them down into constituent parts, and determining the most efficient way everything should be done.

If workers went about drilling holes in different ways, for example, the scientific manager should time each method and then require everyone do it the fastest way. Even if the manager had never handled a drill, the stopwatch enabled them to judge what was most efficient.

Taylor’s book went on to become one of the most influential management books of the 20th century. But it has also been blamed for a “ghastly sublimation of the human spirit”.

Three problems with surveillance

So what’s wrong with excessive managerial surveillance?

First, it can be harmful to health – both mental and physical. This has been well-documented by research on call centres, which pioneered many of the white-collar surveillance techniques now spreading to other workplaces.

Read more:
3 ways ‘algorithmic management’ makes work more stressful and less satisfying

Second, measurement techniques create misleading accounts of what workers do. We have reviewed 100 years of performance management research and found that performance management systems are far from “scientific”.

Measurement is not just observation. It requires reducing work to elements that can be categorised and compared.

A “productivity score” based on measuring keystrokes and mouse clicks illustrates this starkly. It involves a misleading simplification. A stopwatch cannot tell whether a hole was drilled with precision or not. Neither can a mouse tracker capture a worker’s thoughtfulness and experience.

Third, intensive surveillance can actually decrease outcomes. This has been shown in multiple studies. For example, a 2016 study found intensive surveillance of cleaners prevented them cleaning rooms well. With just three minutes allowed per room, some resorted to scrubbing school floors and bleaching toilets for free on their weekends.

A 2107 study of electronic monitoring of nurses providing home care to the elderly and disabled found a similar loss of work quality.

If they want to improve productivity, managers need to talk with workers. E-surveillance and performance dashboards that allow judgement from a distance, without context, undermine this relationship.

Measuring less, understanding more

The resurgence of management surveillance is a worrying trend.
But the fundamental problem is not the technology. It is managers’ desire – which technology enables – to know more than they can, and to trust workers less than they should. Bossware promises managers that illusion.

A different path would be to accept that most people want to work well, and generally know best how to do so. Managers might then measure less, but understand more.

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. 3 ways ‘bossware’ surveillance technology is turning back the management clock – https://theconversation.com/3-ways-bossware-surveillance-technology-is-turning-back-the-management-clock-189070

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Madeline Sprajcer, Lecturer in Psychology, CQUniversity Australia

As a new mum to a “bonny” 6-month-old boy (as several doctors have described him), being frazzled sometimes feels like just part of the job.

For the first three months of my baby’s life, my wife and I rarely got more than two or three hours of sleep at a time and felt like we were on a treadmill of feeding, changing, soothing and, let’s be honest, panicking.

Glow, a new online art project, invites mums like me and other carers of new babies to slow down, connect and breathe.

This project, created by a group of Australian artists, includes a series of audio and video “Moments”.

There are “We Moments” designed for carers to listen to with their baby, and “Me Moments” designed for solo listening or watching.

The Moments include a combination of soothing music, meditative poems or affirmations, or guidance on activities you can do with your baby to connect and relax together.

A deep lack of sleep

As a sleep researcher, I was all too aware of the potential effects of the broken and disturbed sleep I could expect after our son arrived.

I knew to expect things like fatigue, changes in mood, poor cognitive performance and maybe even times when I would be so tired I shouldn’t get behind the wheel of a car.

For many new parents, the effects of poor sleep are compounded by feelings akin to burnout, with many parents experiencing depression, anxiety or high levels of stress after having a baby.

Nearly 60% of new mums have poor sleep, with one in five mothers and one in ten fathers or partners reporting depression or anxiety during pregnancy or after the baby arrives.

Being woken up every few hours for months on end is something people are not expected to do even when employed under the most extreme work schedules.

For shift workers or on-call workers – whose sleep is often broken, shortened or poor quality – these negative effects are typically managed head-on, with regulated management strategies, employee assistance programs and calls for mental health support.

New parents, on the other hand, are generally limited to the (online and rare) support available from local family and health services and/or our local GP – in my case, at least.

Read more:
What is ‘normal’ baby sleep? How evolutionary clues, not cultural expectations, can help new parents

Mindful moments

Glow’s online Moments present the idea that perhaps the best strategy for relieving these feelings of exhaustion and burnout is to give space for new parents to practice a little mindfulness as part of their day.

The term “mindfulness” generally refers to being present and aware of what is going on around us in the moment.

Practising mindfulness typically involves a meditative component, where you can focus on your breathing or the sensations and sounds you are experiencing – to avoid your mind wandering to whether you left the oven on, or if the washing is ready to be hung out.

In recent decades, mindfulness has taken on a life of its own, with mindfulness retreats, smartphone apps and clinicians all espousing the potential benefits.

For new parents, there is a wealth of evidence suggesting mindfulness can be effective in reducing depression, anxiety and stress.

Practising mindfulness can improve parent/infant bonding and increase feelings of self-efficacy (belief in your own abilities) and self-compassion (feelings of kindness towards yourself).

When I listened to the Moments presented on the Glow platform, I found myself breathing more slowly and deliberately.

These recordings and their lovely, calming artwork are soothing to an almost unexpected degree.

The first Me Moment I listened to – comfortingly titled “Put the Kettle On” – brought a sense of calm to an otherwise hurried task (“the kettle is taking too long! Why are we always out of pre-ground coffee?”).

As well as mindfulness for parents to do alone, Glow offers soothing background audio for shared activities with your baby, such as having a bath or playing with a fabric wrap. To me, this is the brilliance of the Glow platform.

Telling new parents to do mindfulness tasks with their five minutes of free time during the crazy first days of parenthood might not be realistic – but adding mindfulness to tasks you’re already doing? That’s just a good use of time.

Glow, by Threshold, is available online now.

Read more:
How effective is mindfulness for treating mental ill-health? And what about the apps?

Madeline Sprajcer 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. ‘Soothing to an almost unexpected degree’: new online art project Glow is rethinking mindfulness for new parents – https://theconversation.com/soothing-to-an-almost-unexpected-degree-new-online-art-project-glow-is-rethinking-mindfulness-for-new-parents-189884

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eric Morand, Head, School of Clincial Sciences at Monash Health, Monash University

When real patients have unprecedented positive outcomes to a new treatment, it’s tempting to talk about it as “breakthrough” for medical science. This describes the excitement around a new report from researchers in Germany of a radical new treatment for lupus.

The patients in the study – five people with severe lupus – went into remission following pioneering CAR T-cell treatment, which uses genetically altered cells.

So what is lupus, why is this such big news, and what could it mean for other patients and diseases?

Lupus and the immune system

Around 5 million people are affected by some form of lupus worldwide. The most common form of lupus is technically known as systemic lupus erythematosus. Though not widespread, it is more common than multiple sclerosis (MS). Both are “autoimmune” diseases where the immune system attacks its owner instead of the germs it is supposed to fight.

MS is an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks nerve tissue. In contrast, lupus can affect any organ in the body. Treatments for lupus have been so poor for so long that even wealthy and famous people with the disease – like pop star and actor Selena Gomez – have had organ failure resulting in the need for a kidney transplant. A lot of complicating factors have made it hard to improve outcomes for people with the disease.

Read more:
Explainer: what is lupus and how is stress implicated?

Firstly, the variety of tissues lupus can affect means no two patients are exactly alike. Diagnosis is hard and often delayed. This also means we researchers have to deal with a lot of complexity as we try to work out what is causing the disease.

This clinical variability makes measuring improvement in response to treatment difficult, and many clinical trials have likely failed due to measurement issues.

Second, there is variation between patients in which part of the immune system goes wrong. This means different patients will need different treatments – and we still do not know with certainty how to get this right.

But progress is happening fast.

Innate and adaptive immunity

The immune system is in two parts.

The “innate” immune system responds fast but non-specifically to viruses and other germs that hit the body with a slug of germ-killing inflammatory proteins. The “adaptive” immune system is slower but more precise. It swings into action after the innate immune system and provides long lasting defense against the invading germ.

When you are vaccinated against a disease (such as COVID), the fever and aches you might get in the first day or two is your innate immune system at work. But the long-lasting protection from antibodies is provided by a part of your adaptive immune system, a key part of which is delivered by cells called “B cells”.

In lupus, both parts of the immune system are involved, and both have been successfully used to develop medicines. Earlier this year, the Therapeutic Goods Administration approved anifrolumab, a drug which blocks “interferon”, a crucial protein made by the innate immune system.

Another drug which works on B cells of the adaptive immune system, called belimumab, was approved a few years ago. Unfortunately, neither drug is on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme yet so access is extremely limited.

However, we now know that interferon and B cells are both important, and so very strong treatments that almost completely eradicate either could be useful. That is where this potential new treatment comes in.

Read more:
How mRNA and DNA vaccines could soon treat cancers, HIV, autoimmune disorders and genetic diseases

Already used to treat cancer

Treatments to destroy B cells are used in cancers like lymphoma. The most powerful of these uses CAR-T cells, which train a type of natural cell to be an assassin of the B cell.

CAR-T medicines are highly complex to make, and extremely expensive – but they work.

Now, this new report shows targeting B cells using this approach could be effective in lupus too. Building on a first-ever patient treated in this way by the same group a year ago, doctors in Germany created a “homemade” CAR-T treatment and used it in five patients with severe lupus.

Remarkably, all five patients had near complete eradication of disease, allowing them to stop conventional medicines, like steroids, with potentially harmful side effects.

Read more:
Long COVID: How researchers are zeroing in on the self-targeted immune attacks that may lurk behind it

What this means for other patients

So what does it mean for patients in Australia? Well, most centres aren’t able to make their own CAR-T treatments, so delivering this potential treatment will require a commercial approach.

However, it might be quicker to market than other treatments in development as it takes a proven approach into a new disease, rather than being new from the ground up.

One day we might even be able to extend such treatments to other autoimmune diseases, like MS, where B cell-directed treatments have been helpful, as well as in lupus.

This would need to be balanced against risk. Importantly, short term side effects of CAR-T treatment (which include brain and bone marrow problems) can be severe. For this reason, such a treatment would only be used for the most severe cases in which standard treatments have failed, like the patients in the German trial.

Long-term side effects are also unknown at this time, and of course suppressing the immune system so profoundly in the setting of a pandemic is not without major risks.

Formal trials of a commercial CAR-T medicine for lupus are in the advanced planning stages already, and Australia is likely to be front and centre of these due to our lupus expertise and trial-friendly regulatory environment. With all these advances, we can at last tell our patients, and our friends and family with lupus, that there is light at the end of what has been a very long tunnel.

Eric Morand consults to companies involved in lupus drug development including Novartis and AstraZeneca. He receives funding from the NH&MRC, Lupus Research Alliance US, and multiple companies. He is affiliated with Monash University and Monash Health, and is a Director of Rare Voices Australia.

– ref. Treatment offers new hope for lupus – and maybe for other autoimmune diseases too – https://theconversation.com/treatment-offers-new-hope-for-lupus-and-maybe-for-other-autoimmune-diseases-too-190835

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Arnott, Co-Director of Global Chronic and Complex Diseases, George Institute for Global Health

A concerning report recently published in Nature Medicine suggests even a mild case of COVID can increase the long-term risks of serious cardiovascular diseases such as stroke, heart attack and heart failure. The study highlights our limited understanding of the full consequences of COVID infection and the long-term impact of the COVID pandemic.

Australia has now reported more than 10 million cases of acute COVID infection and more than 14,000 deaths, with at least 600 million more people infected worldwide.

The immediate effects of COVID infection on the heart have been well documented, with myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) an infrequent but potentially lethal complication. But myocarditis only occurs in about 40 people per million infected.

The big concern raised by this fresh study is that medium- to long-term harms on the body’s blood vessel network (the vascular system) may be much more common than that. And it could drive a new pandemic of cardiovascular disease over the coming years.

Read more:
Imagining COVID is ‘like the flu’ is cutting thousands of lives short. It’s time to wake up

What they found

The study, led by researchers at Washington University, showed a heightened risk of future cardiovascular events among people who have recovered from COVID.

The authors analysed the health records of around 150,000 US veterans, who are often studied because they are a well-documented group within a discrete health-care system. They compared the rates of cardiovascular disease in veterans who’d experienced a COVID infection against uninfected control groups that included some 10 million people.

Between 30 days and a year after recovery from COVID, survivors were 52% more likely to have a stroke, 63% more likely to have a heart attack, and 72% more likely to develop heart failure. This means that over one year, for every 1,000 people who had COVID, there would be five extra strokes, three extra heart attacks and 12 extra cases of heart failure. There was also evidence of an increased risk of serious blood clots on the lungs.

While these numbers might sound small to some, when scaled to 600 million COVID infections worldwide, the implications are enormous.

One particularly concerning finding was that while those with more severe acute COVID infections had the highest risk of a cardiovascular events over the following year, even those with a mild infection were at increased risk. And that risk was not restricted to those who’d had heart health problems before – it could affect anyone.

Read more:
Cutting COVID isolation and mask mandates will mean more damage to business and health in the long run

Necessary cautions

The study was large and had many strengths. But the findings must be reviewed with a degree of caution. It was an observational study (in which researchers draw inferences from what they see in a population, rather than control variables for an experimental study). So, we can’t be certain the increased risk of heart disease or stroke was definitely caused by the COVID infection. The people infected with COVID were not identical to the people who were uninfected.

That said, the researchers made statistical adjustments and could not identify another explanation for the large increases in risks seen.

It is also likely some people with asymptomatic COVID infection were accidentally included in the control groups. However, the effect of this would have been to underestimate the risks of COVID infection on cardiovascular risk.

And of course, US veterans are a very particular set of individuals (mostly older, male and white). Even if the effects of COVID on cardiovascular risk are real for them, there must be some uncertainty about whether the same effects would be seen in other populations.

COVID and hearts

The clear, but low, risk of heart disease at the time of COVID infection also provides support for a connection between COVID infection and medium- to long-term heart disease.

Even before the COVID pandemic there was a well-established link between the inflammation caused by infection and the risk of heart attack.

A heart attack occurs when an artery supplying blood to the heart is blocked and the heart muscle is starved of oxygen. This usually happens when rupture of a fatty plaque in the artery causes a blood clot to form. This process is driven by inflammation in the tissues and thickening of the blood, both of which can occur with COVID, and both of which can persist long after the initial infection has resolved.

These data remind us once again of the importance of limiting the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The best way to reduce COVID-related risks is to prevent COVID infection and reduce the severity of infection. We must maintain high vaccination rates and support infection control measures such as mask wearing in high-risk situations. Ever stronger evidence of the long-term effects of COVID redoubles the importance of these efforts.

Future problems

We rightly feared the respiratory complications of COVID throughout 2020 and 2021 but only now are we appreciating the full impact of the pandemic across other body systems.

Doctors will need to view COVID infection as a new long-term risk factor for cardiovascular disease in much the same way that many other chronic inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis are viewed now. We should advocate for fair access to heart disease prevention and treatment in all Australians, particularly those at highest risk such as First Nations people. And most importantly, as patients, we must prioritise our own heart health.

And we’ll need to remain vigilant for the effects of new strains. Over the decades to come we’ll need to plan for the enduring effects of COVID.

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. Even mild COVID raises the chance of heart attack and stroke. What to know about the risks ahead – https://theconversation.com/even-mild-covid-raises-the-chance-of-heart-attack-and-stroke-what-to-know-about-the-risks-ahead-190552

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathy Ann Townsend, Senior Lecturer in Animal Ecology, University of the Sunshine Coast

To rescue a turtle, University of the Sunshine Coast PhD candidate Caitlin Smith half-swam, half-crawled across mud on an inner tube. She tied a harness around its chest and front flippers, so the rest of the team could carefully pull it to safety. It was just one of 15 sick green turtles our team discovered in recent weeks in the Great Sandy Strait near Queensland’s Hervey Bay.

It’s not just turtles struggling at the moment. A dead dugong was found nearby, while another emaciated dugong was found still alive up the Noosa River.

They’re starving. Huge rains and floods have washed large quantities of sediment out to sea, where it smothers the seagrass these marine creatures rely on. There’s no relief in sight, as we enter our third wet year of La Niña.

Why is this happening?

Most of the sick sea turtles we found – as well as those found by Queensland’s Department of Environment and Science team – showed signs of starvation and illness, including the newly identified soft shell disease.

What lies behind these deaths are the rains and floods brought by La Nina.

Like much of New South Wales and Queensland, the Great Sandy Strait has been heavily hit by flooding this year, with three major floods engorging the Mary River. Floodwaters have carried huge amounts of sediment into Hervey Bay, reducing the water quality and flushing pollutants into sea turtle and dugong habitat.

In normal years, sediment from rivers brings a flush of nutrients, which can actually cause a seagrass boom once the water quality improves. The problem is, there’s been just too much sediment. With one La Niña after another, it’s been harder for seagrass to recover or regrow.

Read more:
Restoring seagrasses can bring coastal bays back to life

As sediment from the floods spread out over the shallow seas, it made the water murkier. Soon, sunlight couldn’t penetrate the gloom to reach the seagrass meadows. Worse, floods release a cocktail of chemicals, including pesticides and herbicides, unintentionally washed down from farms and inundated townships.

The result has been widespread devastation in the Great Sandy Straits region. In May this year, a James Cook University team surveyed 2,300 square kilometres across the region and found almost no seagrass left in waters ranging from 1 metre to 17 metres.

Green sea turtles and dugongs are the grazers of the Australian seas and rely heavily on seagrass. In good years, they drift over these lush meadows of seagrass – which resemble grassy fields on land – eating as they go.

Summers are when our seagrass meadows usually flourish, letting turtles and dugong fatten up for the winter. During winter, seagrass naturally dies back. This year, local sea turtles and dugongs went into winter in poor condition, having missed out on fattening up during the summer season.

That’s why we’re seeing so many sick or dying animals. From January 1 to August 31 this year, volunteers from Turtles in Trouble Rescue have taken 91 sea turtles from the region to the nearest wildlife hospital, 300 kilometres away. By contrast, in 2019, before the La Niña cycle began, the group had only 12 transports.

Is there nowhere else they can get food from?

In flood-affected areas, turtles and dugongs have only two choices: move away, or try eating something else.

During the large 2010 floods, dugongs from Hervey Bay were found more than 200 kilometres south in Moreton Bay, offshore from Brisbane. Unfortunately, their migration didn’t leave them much better off – the seagrass in Moreton Bay had been hit by Brisbane River sediment. But we do know some survived.

Others were found dead, washed up 900 kilometres south after trying to find food and failing. Turtles can migrate too, but they’re often so weak from starvation that disease and parasites that they die before finding an alternative food source.

What about finding something else to eat? When our team analysed the stomachs of dead sea turtles from the Hervey Bay region, we found many were full of mangrove leaves.

Unfortunately, these trees have a range of natural toxins designed to stop animals eating them, such as the toxic sap of the milky mangrove. Worse, as the “kidneys of the coast”, mangroves use their leaves to store concentrated salt and toxins such as heavy metals. In short, this diet is no substitute.

Is this part of a natural cycle of boom and bust?

While turtles and dugongs do have natural variation in their populations over time – and often due to food availability – there are limits. Turtles and dugongs cannot respond to climate-induced pressures the same way fast-breeding mice can.

Female green sea turtles have to be 30 to 40 years old before they can begin to reproduce. They only undertake their long migrations to breed every three to eight years. They lay over 1,000 eggs in the hope just one hatchling will survive the perilous seas long enough to hit reproductive age.

Dugongs, meanwhile, only raise a single calf every three to seven years. These reproductive strategies make it very difficult to respond to fast changes to their environments.

Successive lean years caused by back-to-back La Niña events will hit both the survival rate and reproductive ability of these animals.

Sea turtles in poor condition will not be able to migrate successfully, which means they’re heading for a poor nesting season. Dugongs, too, will struggle. Without stores of fat, the females won’t be able to support their calves through to weaning stage. That will make it harder to replenish the population and recover from losses from starvation or relocation. We won’t know the full impact of this event until years from now.

In response to the crisis, local volunteers have stepped up. The Turtles in Trouble Rescue group has gone from five to 50 trained members, and are working with the University of the Sunshine Coast to create a sea turtle rehabilitation centre in the area. We’ll be better prepared for the next flooding event.

Read more:
Dugongs: looking to the gentle sea creature’s past may guard its future

Kathy Ann Townsend receives funding from Australian Research Council.

– ref. Dugongs and turtles are starving to death in Queensland seas – and La Niña’s floods are to blame – https://theconversation.com/dugongs-and-turtles-are-starving-to-death-in-queensland-seas-and-la-ninas-floods-are-to-blame-190663

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah C. E. Ross, Associate Professor in English Literatures and Creative Communication, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

Not so long ago, the death of a monarch would have been a cue for outpourings of elegies and poetic commemorations. One might have thought the end of the second Elizabethan era would prompt something similar – but apparently not.

So far, the death of Queen Elizabeth II has had only a muted response from our poets, both in the United Kingdom and here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Does this reflect shifting priorities in the national imagination? Are we witnessing the demise of poetry on public occasions?

We need only look back at the death in 1936 of the queen’s grandfather, George V, for comparison. John Betjeman and John Masefield were among the poets who marked the occasion. Betjeman was England’s poet laureate from 1972 until his death in 1984, and also wrote on the birthday of the queen mother and the marriage of Charles and Diana.

Betjeman stood in a long line of British poet laureates stretching back unbroken to John Dryden in 1668, and to poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer before that. But the culture of poetry responding to monarchs’ deaths has flourished outside the official post, too.

The unexpected death in 1612 of the 18-year-old Prince Henry, son and heir to James VI and I, prompted an outpouring of poetic tears. John Donne wrote an elegy, as did George Herbert, John Webster and Sir Walter Raleigh.

Elegiac energy

Particularly voluminous was the the flood of poetry that met the execution of King Charles I at the height of the English Civil Wars in 1649. His dramatic beheading on a scaffold erected outside Whitehall Palace made him a martyr to his loyal followers.

Literary historian Nigel Smith has described the way elegy became a royalist genre, as the death of the king “sucked all elegiac energy into its own subject”.

And there are close connections nearby to these elegies on King Charles I. Melbourne’s State Library Victoria holds the John Emmerson collection of over 5,000 early modern English books, among which poems, pamphlets and other publications on the death of Charles I feature prominently.

Poetic treasures in the collection include a copy of Monumentum Regale: Or a Tombe, Erected for that Incomparable and Glorious Monarch, Charles the First, a volume of elegies and poetic “sighs” and “groans” published three months after the king’s execution. Royalist poets grapple with how they can possibly commemorate an “incomparable” king. The Earl of Montrose declares he has written his poem with “blood”, “wounds” and the point of his sword.

Read more:
How news of the death of Elizabeth I in the 17th century was communicated in ballads and proclamations

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Alexander Turnbull Library is famous for its collection of works by a poet from the other side of the 17th-century political divide, John Milton. Turnbull (1868–1918) had a personal interest in Milton, an ardent republican. Even Turnbull’s collection, however, contains a notable number of volumes celebrating Charles I, including multiple editions of Eikon Basilike (The King’s Book), which represented Charles I as a Christ-like martyr.

Public poetry isn’t dead

This vast body of public poetry about previous monarchs is in sharp contrast to the response to Queen Elizabeth II’s death. Even in the United Kingdom, the current poet laureate, Simon Armitage, seems to have struggled. The form of his poem “Floral Tribute”, an acrostic on the name “Elizabeth”, seems archaic at best and banal at worst.

New Zealand’s poet laurate, Chris Tse, inaugurated only a few weeks ago, has been notably silent. When I asked him why, he said writing a poem for the queen “would be a backwards step in terms of where I want the role to go”.

Tse’s reticence perhaps echoes the complicated thoughts of Selina Tusitala Marsh, the most recent former laureate, on performing her poem “Unity” for the queen in 2016. For Marsh, the British Crown’s colonial legacy (as she put it, “Her peeps also colonised my peeps”) made writing and performing the poem a complex commission to accept.

Read more:
What do Britain’s tears for Queen Elizabeth mean?

As laureate, Marsh preferred to write poems on occasions such as the birth of a prime ministerial baby. But the fact New Zealand even has a poet laureate in 2022 suggests there is still an appetite for public poetry, even if the days of poems on the death of a queen are numbered.

The modern monarchy itself, of course, provides rich material for poetry of a less commemorative kind. Bill Manhire, New Zealand’s inaugural laureate, speculated on Twitter that we are awaiting an acrostic on “Andrew”. And the most remarkable poem of the morning we awoke to news of the queen’s death was essa may ranapiri’s “The Queen is Dead”.

Immediate and visceral, it’s an unabashed anti-colonialist spit in the face of monarchy. Some will find it shocking, others will gasp with appreciation. But even those taken aback by its frank approach and timing may share the sense of distance it captures, in its formal displacement of the news from afar by scrambled eggs, spring sunlight and the joy of quotidian love as a new day begins.

Public poetry isn’t dead. But our poets’ responses to the death of the queen – the the silent, the awkward, the confrontational – tell us much, as ever, about the societies we live in.

Sarah C. E. Ross receives funding from the Australian Research Council for Transforming the Early Modern Archive: The Emmerson Collection at State Library Victoria.

– ref. Silence of the poets – has an ancient tradition of commemorative verse died with the Queen? – https://theconversation.com/silence-of-the-poets-has-an-ancient-tradition-of-commemorative-verse-died-with-the-queen-190834

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cameron McTernan, Lecturer of Media and Communication, University of South Australia

Why do politicians often post content that seems awkward, outrageous or strange? The answer could be an appeal to authenticity – something that has become a valuable currency in the world of politicians, influencers and social media.

When John Howard debuted his first YouTube video as prime minister in 2007 he famously began by addressing the audience with “Good morning”.

The gaffe – not realising that users might view the content at any time of day – represented the beginning of an era for Australian politicians on social media, and a period coloured by naivety and experimentation.

Yet if we were to examine the then prime minister Scott Morrison’s Facebook page ahead of the 2019 and 2022 elections (not to mention his famous “curry night” posts) you might be forgiven for thinking not much had changed.

Of course, Morrison and other pollies’ pages have plenty of high-production content that reflects their professional personas – but among this are also myriad posts that appear unscripted and unrefined.

It could very well be deliberate, and there is evidence to show it’s working.

Can we fake authenticity?

Media scholar Gunn Enli argues that for personalities in the media their public-facing “authenticity” is a kind of performance. This thinking suggests that in the media, being authentic is something you do as opposed to something you are.

Theories of authenticity have been used to examine influencers, reality television and Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign.

Ambivalence, imperfection and shared “live” experiences are among the range of qualities that Enli suggests constitute an authentic performance.

Strategic engagement with social media platforms has become a major preoccupation for politicians. But why?

Well, research has shown young voters in Australia, the UK and US want to see politicians who are more authentic and accessible online. So it could be politicians are taking the authenticity approach to appeal to young voters.

Another consideration is that social media often force campaigners to reduce the scope of their messaging. It’s hard to articulate the nuance of tax reform in Twitter’s 280 characters, or diplomatic efforts in 15 seconds on TikTok.

Appealing to emotions over logic (what is called “politics of the gut”) could be a strategy for campaigners trying to overcome the constraints of digital platforms.

So does ‘authenticity’ on social media work?

We can measure the success of content characteristics or appeals on social media, such as authenticity, by comparing high-engagement posts against a randomised sample.

If a particular characteristic is over-represented in the high-engagement sample, we can estimate it is contributing to its popularity online.

My analysis of social media posts by Australia’s federal party leaders ahead of the 2019 election indicates these kinds of authenticity appeals do, in fact, give posts an edge.

Using Enli’s analytical theory, the following graph shows six out of seven authenticity traits were over-represented in a sample of high-engagement posts. The data were collected from six party leaders: Bill Shorten, Scott Morrison, Clive Palmer, Pauline Hanson, Richard Di Natale and Michael McCormack.

Of these qualities, “predictability” (which loosely refers to how on-brand they stay) and “immediacy” (use of “live” content) were the most frequently observed.

“Ambivalence” appeared to have the widest margin. Further examination at a page-by-page level revealed the majority of these posts were coming from Palmer’s page, reflective of the abundance of memes among Palmer’s high-engagement posts.

We can understand authenticity alongside a constellation of political communication styles referred to as “politics of the gut”. Other appeals to politics of the gut include “populist” and “nativist” appeals.

Populism promotes the worldview that political elites are depriving the public of their rights. Nativism conveys a worldview that promotes divisions between non-migrants and migrants.

When I compared posts that have been measured for traits of populism and nativism, the inverse was observed. Populist and nativist appeals made by Australian party leaders received less support.

This would suggest that, in the context of Australian politics, there is less of an appetite for these kinds of appeals, compared to authenticity.

But authenticity is a good thing … right?

Politicians have sought to appear more authentic since well before the advent of social media. We can look to former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” as an early example of politicians using the media and performance to appear more down to earth.

But is this a good thing for politics and democracy?

Politics of the gut comes at the cost of hearing politicians discuss matters that genuinely affect the public. If social media continue to be a leading arena for political communication, politicians will continue to engineer content that works best on these platforms. This might mean more political personality, but less political substance.

We saw this play out on TV ahead of the 2022 Australian federal election too, with Anthony Albanese’s authenticity being challenged by Morrison after the former’s “glow-up”.

More recently, Senator Sarah Hanson-Young wore an “end gas and coal” dress at a Press Gallery event – an obvious nod to US politician and social media icon Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whose “tax the rich” Met gala dress made headlines everywhere).

The research suggests people (especially young people) want more “authentic” politicians. But this might actually be a political literacy issue.

Wanting politicians to act more like influencers might only seem natural for a generation raised on internet media. Memes, selfies and curry nights help us relate to our political leaders, but they don’t help solve the issues that matter most.

Cameron McTernan 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. From curry nights to ‘coal kills’ dresses: how social media drives politicians to behave like influencers – https://theconversation.com/from-curry-nights-to-coal-kills-dresses-how-social-media-drives-politicians-to-behave-like-influencers-190246

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Wright, Adjunct Research Fellow in Philosophy, La Trobe University

Many of us accept science is a reliable guide to what we ought to believe – but not all of us do.

Mistrust of science has led to scepticism around several important issues, from climate change denial to vaccine hesitancy during the COVID pandemic. And while most of us may be inclined to dismiss such scepticism as unwarranted, it does raise the question: why ought we to trust science?

As a philosopher with a focus on the philosophy of science, I’m particularly intrigued by this question. As it turns out, diving into the works of great thinkers can help provide an answer.

Common arguments

One thought that might initially spring to mind is we ought to trust scientists because what they say is true.

But there are problems with this. One is the question of whether what a scientist says is, in fact, the truth. Sceptics will point out scientists are just humans and remain prone to making mistakes.

Also, if we look at the history of science, we find that what scientists believed in the past has often later turned out to be false. And this suggests what scientists believe now might one day turn out to be false. After all, there were times in history when people thought mercury could treat syphilis, and that the bumps on a person’s skull could reveal their character traits.

Another tempting suggestion for why we ought to trust science is because it is based on “facts and logic”.

This may be true, but unfortunately it is of limited help in persuading someone who is inclined to reject what scientists say. Both sides in a dispute will claim they have the facts on their side; it is not unknown for climate change deniers to say global warming is just a “theory”.

Read more:
Vaccine hesitancy: Why ‘doing your own research’ doesn’t work, but reason alone won’t change minds

Popper and the scientific method

One influential answer to the question of why we should trust scientists is because they use the scientific method. This, of course, raises the question: what is the scientific method?

Possibly the best-known account is offered by science philosopher Karl Popper, who has influenced an Einstein Medal-winning mathematical physicist and Nobel Prize winners in biology and physiology and medicine.

For Popper, science proceeds by means of what he calls “conjectures and refutations”. Scientists are confronted with some question, and offer a possible answer. This answer is a conjecture in the sense that, at least initially, it is not known if it is right or wrong.

Popper says scientists then do their best to refute this conjecture, or prove it wrong. Typically it is refuted, rejected, and replaced by a better one. This too will then be tested, and eventually replaced by an even better one. In this way science progresses.

Sometimes this process can be incredibly slow. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves more than 100 years ago, as part of his general theory of relativity. But it was only in 2015 that scientists managed to observe them.

For Popper, at the core of the scientific method is the attempt to refute or disprove theories, which is called the “falsification principle”. If scientists have not been able to refute a theory over a long period of time, despite their best efforts, then in Popper’s terminology the theory has been “corroborated”.

This suggests a possible answer to the question of why we ought to trust what scientists tell us. It is because, despite their best efforts, they have not been able to disprove the idea they are telling us is true.

Majority rules

Recently, an answer to the question was further articulated in a book by science historian Naomi Oreskes. Oreskes acknowledges the importance Popper placed on the role of attempting to refute a theory, but also emphasises the social and consensual element of scientific practice.

For Oreskes, we have reason to trust science because, or to the extent that, there is a consensus among the (relevant) scientific community that a particular claim is true – wherein that same scientific community has done their best to disprove it, and failed.

Here is a brief sketch of what a scientific idea typically goes through before a consensus emerges it is correct.

A scientist might give a paper on some idea to colleagues, who then discuss it. One aim of this discussion will be to find something wrong with it. If the paper passes the test, the scientist might write a peer-reviewed paper on the same idea. If the referees think it has sufficient merit, it will be published.

Others may then subject the idea to experimental tests. If it passes a sufficient number of these, a consensus may emerge it is correct.

A good example of a theory undergoing this transition is the theory of global warming and human impact on it. It had been suggested as early as 1896 that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere might lead to global warming.

In the early 20th century, another theory emerged that not only was this happening, but carbon dioxide released from human activities (namely fossil fuel burning) could accelerate global warming. It gained some support at the time, but most scientists remained unconvinced.

However, throughout the second half of the 20th century and what has so far passed of the 21st, the theory of human-caused climate change has so successfully passed ongoing testing that one recent meta-study found more than 99% of the relevant scientific community accept its reality. It started off perhaps as a mere hypothesis, successfully passed testing for more than a hundred years, and has now gained near-universal acceptance.

The bottom line

This does not necessarily mean we ought to uncritically accept everything scientists say. There is of course a difference between a single isolated scientist or small group saying something, and there being a consensus within the scientific community that something is true.

And, of course, for a variety of reasons – some practical, some financial, some otherwise – scientists may not have done their best to refute some idea. And even if scientists have repeatedly tried, but failed, to refute a given theory, the history of science suggests at some point in the future it may still turn out to be false when new evidence comes to light.

So when should we trust science? The view that seems to emerge from Popper, Oreskes and other writers in the field is we have good, but fallible, reason to trust what scientists say when, despite their own best efforts to disprove an idea, there remains a consensus that it is true.

Read more:
Curious Kids: what is the most important thing a scientist needs?

John 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. Why should we trust science? Because it doesn’t trust itself – https://theconversation.com/why-should-we-trust-science-because-it-doesnt-trust-itself-188988

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lara Herrero, Research Leader in Virology and Infectious Disease, Griffith University

So you’ve had COVID and have now recovered. You don’t have ongoing symptoms and luckily, you don’t seem to have developed long COVID.

But what impacts has COVID had on your overall immune system?

It’s early days yet. But growing evidence suggests there are changes to your immune system that may put you at risk of other infectious diseases.

Here’s what we know so far.

A round of viral infections

Over this past winter, many of us have had what seemed like a continual round of viral illness. This may have included COVID, influenza or infection with respiratory syncytial virus. We may have recovered from one infection, only to get another.

Then there is the re-emergence of infectious diseases globally such as monkeypox or polio.

Could these all be connected? Does COVID somehow weaken the immune system to make us more prone to other infectious diseases?

There are many reasons for infectious diseases to emerge in new locations, after many decades, or in new populations. So we cannot jump to the conclusion COVID infections have given rise to these and other viral infections.

But evidence is building of the negative impact of COVID on a healthy individual’s immune system, several weeks after symptoms have subsided.

Read more:
The latest polio cases have put the world on alert. Here’s what this means for Australia and people travelling overseas

What happens when you catch a virus?

There are three possible outcomes after a viral infection:

1) your immune system clears the infection and you recover (for instance, with rhinovirus which causes the common cold)

2) your immune system fights the virus into “latency” and you recover with a virus dormant in our bodies (for instance, varicella zoster virus, which causes chickenpox)

3) your immune system fights, and despite best efforts the virus remains “chronic”, replicating at very low levels (this can occur for hepatitis C virus).

Ideally we all want option 1, to clear the virus. In fact, most of us clear SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. That’s through a complex process, using many different parts of our immune system.

But international evidence suggests changes to our immune cells after SARS-CoV-2 infection may have other impacts. It may affect our ability to fight other viruses, as well as other pathogens, such as bacteria or fungi.

Read more:
No, the extra hygiene precautions we’re taking for COVID-19 won’t weaken our immune systems

How much do we know?

An Australian study has found SARS-CoV-2 alters the balance of immune cells up to 24 weeks after clearing the infection.

There were changes to the relative numbers and types of immune cells between people who had recovered from COVID compared with healthy people who had not been infected.

This included changes to cells of the innate immune system (which provides a non-specific immune response) and the adaptive immune system (a specific immune response, targeting a recognised foreign invader).

Another study focused specifically on dendritic cells – the immune cells that are often considered the body’s “first line of defence”.

Researchers found fewer of these cells circulating after people recovered from COVID. The ones that remained were less able to activate white blood cells known as T-cells, a critical step in activating anti-viral immunity.

Other studies have found different impacts on T-cells, and other types of white blood cells known as B-cells (cells involved in producing antibodies).

After SARS-CoV-2 infection, one study found evidence many of these cells had been activated and “exhausted”. This suggests the cells are dysfunctional, and might not be able to adequately fight a subsequent infection. In other words, sustained activation of these immune cells after a SARS-CoV-2 infection may have an impact on other inflammatory diseases.

One study found people who had recovered from COVID have changes in different types of B-cells. This included changes in the cells’ metabolism, which may impact how these cells function. Given B-cells are critical for producing antibodies, we’re not quite sure of the precise implications.

Could this influence how our bodies produce antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 should we encounter it again? Or could this impact our ability to produce antibodies against pathogens more broadly – against other viruses, bacteria or fungi? The study did not say.

Read more:
Explainer: what is the immune system?

What impact will these changes have?

One of the main concerns is whether such changes may impact how the immune system responds to other infections, or whether these changes
might worsen or cause other chronic conditions.

So more work needs to be done to understand the long-term impact of SARS-CoV-2 infection on a person’s immune system.

For instance, we still don’t know how long these changes to the immune system last, and if the immune system recovers. We also don’t know if SARS-CoV-2 triggers other chronic illnesses, such as chronic fatigue syndrome (myalgic encephalomyelitis). Research into this is ongoing.

What we do know is that having a healthy immune system and being vaccinated (when a vaccine has been developed) is critically important to have the best chance of fighting any infection.

Lara Herrero receives funding from NHMRC.

– ref. I’ve had COVID and am constantly getting colds. Did COVID harm my immune system? Am I now at risk of other infectious diseases? – https://theconversation.com/ive-had-covid-and-am-constantly-getting-colds-did-covid-harm-my-immune-system-am-i-now-at-risk-of-other-infectious-diseases-188899

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna M. Kotarba-Morley, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, Flinders University

Climate change is rapidly intensifying. Amid the chaos and damage it wreaks, many precious Indigenous heritage sites in Australia and around the world are being destroyed at an alarming rate.

Sea-level rise, flooding, worsening bushfires and other human-caused climate events put many archaeological and heritage sites at risk. Already, culturally significant Indigenous sites have been lost or are gravely threatened.

For example, in Northern Australia, rock art tens of thousands of years old has been destroyed by cyclones, bushfires and other extreme weather events.

And as we outline below, ancestral remains in the Torres Strait were last year almost washed away by king tides and storm surge.

These examples of loss are just the beginning, unless we act. By combining Indigenous Traditional Knowledge with Western scientific approaches, communities can prioritise what heritage to save.

Indigenous heritage on the brink

Indigenous Australians are one of the longest living cultures on Earth. They have maintained their cultural and sacred sites for millennia.

In July, Traditional Owners from across Australia attended a workshop on disaster risk management at Flinders University. The participants, who work on Country as cultural heritage managers and rangers, hailed from as far afield as the Torres Strait Islands and Tasmania.

Here, three of these Traditional Owners describe cultural heritage losses they’ve witnessed, or fear will occur in the near future.

– Enid Tom, Kaurareg Elder and a director of Kaurareg Native Title Aboriginal Corporation:

Coastal erosion and seawater inundation have long threatened the Torres Strait. But now efforts to deal with the problem have taken on new urgency.

In February last year, king tides and a storm surge eroded parts of a beach on Muralug (or Prince of Wales) Island. Aboriginal custodians and archaeologists rushed to one site where a female ancestor was buried. They excavated the skeletal remains and reburied them at a safe location.

It was the first time such a site had been excavated at the island. Kaurareg Elders now worry coastal erosion will uncover and potentially destroy more burial sites.

Read more:
Sacred Aboriginal sites are yet again at risk in the Pilbara. But tourism can help protect Australia’s rich cultural heritage

– Marcus Lacey, Senior Gumurr Marthakal Indigenous Ranger:

The Marthakal Indigenous Protected Area covers remote islands and coastal mainland areas in the Northern Territory’s North Eastern Arnhem Land. It has an average elevation of just one metre above sea level, and is highly vulnerable to climate change-related hazards such as severe tropical cyclones and sea level rise.

The area is the last remnant of the ancient land bridge joining Australia with Southeast Asia. As such, it can provide valuable information about the first colonisation of Australia by First Nations people.

It is also an important place for understanding contact history between Aboriginal Australians and the Indonesian Maccassans, dating back some 400 years.

What’s more, the area provides insights into Australia’s colonial history, such as Indigenous rock art depicting the ships of British navigator Matthew Flinders. Sea level rise and king tides mean this valuable piece of Australia’s history is now being eroded.

Read more:
Shifting seasons: using Indigenous knowledge and western science to help address climate change impacts

– Shawnee Gorringe, operations administrator at Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation:

On Mithaka land, in remote Queensland, lie important Indigenous heritage sites such as stone circles, fireplaces and examples of traditional First Nations water management infrastructure.

But repeated drought risks destroying these sites – a threat compounded by erosion from over-grazing.

To help solve these issues, we desperately need Indigenous leadership and participation in decision-making at local, state and federal levels. This is the only way to achieve a sustainable future for environmental and heritage protection.

Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation general manager Joshua Gorringe has been invited to the United Nations’ COP27 climate conference in Egypt in November. This is a step in the right direction.

So what now?

The loss of Indigenous heritage to climate change requires immediate action. This should involve rigorous assessment of threatened sites, prioritising those most at risk, and taking steps to mitigate damage.

This work should be undertaken not only by scientists, engineers and heritage workers, but first and foremost by the Indigenous communities themselves, using Traditional Knowledge.

Last year’s COP26 global climate conference included a climate heritage agenda. This allowed global Indigenous voices to be heard. But unfortunately, Indigenous heritage is often excluded from discussions about climate change.

Addressing this requires doing away with the usual “top down” Western, neo-colonial approach which many Indigenous communities see as exclusive and ineffective. Instead, a “bottom up” approach should be adopted through inclusive and long-term initiatives such as Caring for Country.

This approach should draw on Indigenous knowledge – often passed down orally – of how to manage risk. This should be combined with Western climate science, as well as the expertise of governments and other organisations.

Incorporating Indigenous knowledge into cultural heritage policies and procedures will not just improve heritage protection. It would empower Indigenous communities in the face of the growing climate emergency.

Read more:
Caring for Country means tackling the climate crisis with Indigenous leadership: 3 things the new government must do

Anna M. Kotarba-Morley receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Centre of Science (NCN) in Poland.

Enid Tom does not have any thing to disclose.

Shawnee Gorringe has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Marcus Lacey 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. From crumbling rock art to exposed ancestral remains, climate change is ravaging our precious Indigenous heritage – https://theconversation.com/from-crumbling-rock-art-to-exposed-ancestral-remains-climate-change-is-ravaging-our-precious-indigenous-heritage-188454

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Grimmer, Senior Lecturer in Retail Marketing, University of Tasmania

UK supermarkets have removed “best before” dates on thousands of fresh food products in an effort to reduce food waste.

One of the major supermarket chains, Sainsbury’s, is replacing these labels with product messaging that says “no date helps reduce waste”.

Apples, bananas, potatoes, cucumbers and broccoli are among the most wasted foods. Removing “best before” labels from these foods alone will reduce waste by an estimated 50,000 tonnes a year.

In Australia we produce 7.6 million tonnes of food waste every year – about 300kg per person. About 70% of what we throw out is still edible. Why aren’t we following the UK’s example?

Read more:
Scrapping use-by dates could prevent huge amounts of food waste – here’s what else could help

Some might worry about food safety. But two types of date labels – “best before” and “use by” – are used in Australia. “Use by” labels would still alert us to when food can no longer be regarded as safe to eat.

And consumers will still be able to assess the state of fresh produce for themselves.

Food waste has huge impacts

Food waste costs Australia A$36.6 billion a year.

This waste occurs right across the supply chain, including primary production, manufacturing, distribution, retail and hospitality. However, households produce more than half of the waste, at an average cost per household of A$2,000 to $2,500 a year.

In 2017, the Australian government pledged to halve food waste by 2030 when it launched the National Food Waste Strategy.

This is a complex issue, but one simple solution could be to follow the UK and remove “best before” dates.

Read more:
Want to reduce your food waste at home? Here are the 6 best evidence-based ways to do it

How will you know if food is still safe?

Our labelling system is fairly straightforward, but many consumers don’t understand the difference between “best before” and “use by”. This confusion leads them to throw away tonnes of food that’s still suitable for eating.

In Australia, the regulatory authority Food Standards provides guidance for manufacturers, retailers and consumers on using dates on product labels. These dates indicate how long food products can be sold, and kept, before they deteriorate or become unsafe to eat.

Food with a “best before” date can be legally sold and consumed after that date. These products should be safe, but may have lost some of their quality.

Products past their “use by date” are considered not safe.

The food supplier is responsible for placing date labels on the product.

Differences in packaging and date labelling can be subtle. For example, lettuce sold loose or in an open plastic sleeve does not have a “best before” date. The same lettuce packaged in a sealed bag does.

Bread is the only fresh food that uses a different system with “baked on” or “baked for” date labels.

Some foods, such as canned goods and food with a shelf life of two years or more, don’t have to be labelled with “best before” dates because they usually retain their quality for many years. They are typically eaten well before they deteriorate.

Food producers and retailers are keen to keep the labelling status quo, because it makes it easier to manage stock and encourages turnover.

The case for packaging

Some packaging is used to separate branded products such as fruit varieties protected by plant breeders’ rights, organic products and imperfect vegetable ranges. Once packaged, these products require a “best before” date.

Plastic packaging can greatly increase the shelf life of some vegetables. In these cases, it effectively reduces food waste. A striking example is cucumbers. Plastic wrap can extend their shelf life from a few days to two weeks.

Vegetables such as broccoli and cauliflower contain beneficial anti-cancer compounds called glucosinolates. Plastic packaging that seals in specialty gas preserves these longer. However, overcooking quickly erases this packaging benefit.

Read more:
Why some plastic packaging is necessary to prevent food waste and protect the environment

Dead or alive?

The chemistry of a fruit or vegetable starts changing the moment it is picked. Some types of produce, such as bananas and pears, are picked early so they ripen in the shop and at home. Other produce, such as sweet corn and peas, rapidly decline in the quality and quantity of flavours and nutrients once they’re picked. Snap freezing is an excellent way to preserve this produce.

Fresh fruits and vegetables are still alive. Their cells remain full of chemical reactions and enzymatic activity.

This is why a cut apple turns brown. It’s also why ethylene gas released from bananas and other fruits can shorten the life of their neighbours in the fruit bowl.

Potatoes, one of the most wasted products, are sold with “best before” dates when packaged in plastic bags. But if stored correctly in low light and in a “breathable” bag (paper or hessian), potatoes stay “alive” and edible for months. Just make sure you cut away any green parts, which contain toxic solanine.

As well as fresh produce’s own cellular activity, there is microbial activity in the form of bacteria and fungi.

Fortunately, we come equipped with a number of evolved chemical sensors. We can feel, see, sniff and taste the state of fruits, vegetables and other products. Trust (and train) your instincts.

Read more:
Food expiration dates don’t have much science behind them – a food safety researcher explains another way to know what’s too old to eat

Questions to ask yourself

To reduce food waste, we need a combination of approaches, including appropriate packaging, sensible labelling and consumer awareness.

Ideally, the Australian and New Zealand Food Standards Code would be updated to reflect a more nuanced view of packaged fresh foods.

In the short term, consumer awareness and buying power are the best drivers of change. Ask yourself questions like:

• Do I need a packaged product?

• Does the packaging enhance shelf life?

• Would I buy less if it wasn’t packaged?

Thinking about these questions will help us reduce the impacts of food waste.

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. Why ‘best before’ food labelling is not best for the planet or your budget – https://theconversation.com/why-best-before-food-labelling-is-not-best-for-the-planet-or-your-budget-189686

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Fischetti, Professor, Pro Vice-Chancellor of the College of Human and Social Futures, University of Newcastle

Year 12 students around Australia are preparing to sit their final exams.
For many young people this is one of the most stressful parts of school, with their future supposedly coming down to one number.

This is an outdated way of finishing school and working out what students do in the next phase of their lives.

Universities and TAFEs are increasingly using other methods – such as interviews or portfolios – to offer places to school leavers. In 2021, more than 25,000 NSW students applied for an early offer through the “schools recommendation scheme”, to lock in a university place before they sit their exams. This is up from 5,447 in 2014, suggesting year 12 exams may not be as necessary as we once thought.

Our research shows you can reliably predict a student’s year 12 results by year 11. This also suggests we don’t need a battery of stressful exams to work out if a student is suited for tertiary education.

This gives us the opportunity to radically rethink how the final years of school are structured.

Our research

Two years ago, we studied more than 10,000 students in the Catholic Education Diocese of Paramatta, NSW. We have repeated the study and our work now includes 20,000 students across 21 exam areas.

We used predictive analytics which links multiple pieces of information about student progression through school.

We used 17 variables including year 9 NAPLAN scores, Higher School Certificate subject choices and year 11 attendance. We also use demographic information, such as how long a student has lived in Australia and a school’s socioeconomic rating.

Across both our studies, we found we could predict year 12 results in year 11, with a 93% accuracy rate.

Our purpose here is not to label students, but to change the focus of school and the efforts of students and teachers.

What can we do differently in schools?

We are already seeing the beginnings of new ways of “doing school” in Australia. Some schools are changing their focus from year 12 exams to students doing internships, creating portfolios of work, doing TAFE or university certificates, or doing an overseas exchange.

In British Columbia, Canada, final school assessments include a project that connects “real-world” applications of the curriculum for each student.

Read more:
3 things to help improve your exam results (besides studying)

In Estonia, now among the world leaders in education, traditional “knowledge and understanding” approaches have been replaced with a strong emphasis on critical thinking, problem-solving, entrepreneurship, digital skills and citizenship. These are all qualities that fit with both employers’ needs and measures of success in the adult world.

Students undertake a cross-disciplinary creative project to graduate from the equivalent of year 10 – an example might be studying the impact of music on managing the onset of dementia in older people. They then do a research project before finishing high school.

Year 12 exams are outdated

High school as we’ve known it has been dominated by high stakes, high-pressure exams that have outlived their usefulness. If we can reliably predict the results, we don’t need the tests.

We know young people’s mental health is already poor, and has suffered further during COVID.

Read more:
40% of year 12s suffer high anxiety. At exam time, here’s what parents can do to help

We should be looking for ways to improve, rather than exacerbate this. We also know universities are increasingly open to other ways of admitting students.

There is an enormous opportunity here to reallocate resources and create a modern, meaningful school experience that excites young people. It can encourage them to seek career-building activities, study overseas, learn languages or follow passion projects – not just study for stressful exams that tell us what we already know.

The research for this piece is a continuation of the work initiated by Dr Raju Veranasi for his 2021 Phd at the University of Newcastle.

John Fischetti is an unpaid, volunteer member of the Board of Directors of Big Picture Australia.

– ref. We can predict final school marks in year 11 – it’s time to replace stressful exams with more meaningful education – https://theconversation.com/we-can-predict-final-school-marks-in-year-11-its-time-to-replace-stressful-exams-with-more-meaningful-education-190071

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Wooden, Professorial Fellow, The University of Melbourne

One of the key measures announced to “get wages moving” in the wake of the federal government’s jobs summit was greater access to multi-employer agreements.

At the moment, most workers get their wages adjusted by bargaining with individual employers, so-called “enterprise bargaining”.

Others rely on awards and the minimum wage, set by the Fair Work Commission.

Multi-employer agreements would allow workers in particular occupations to bargain with their employers as a group, rather than employer by employer.

If multi-employer agreements were clearly a good way to get real wages moving, we would expect to see real wages growing more strongly in countries that allow multi-employer bargaining than in those that don’t.

What system lifts wages more?

To find out, I examined the measure of average annual wages per full-time and full-year-equivalent employee assembled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, available at OECD.stat.

The OECD measure is derived from national accounts data, making it different to the wage price index commonly quoted in Australia, which comes from a survey of employers and at the moment shows real wage growth negative.

The measure I used has the advantage of including the effect of wage increases from promotions, annual increments and job changes, making it a better guide to the experience of workers than the wage price index, which merely records the rate at which the wages attached to particular positions grows.

17 countries compared

Less helpfully, because the OECD data is an average of all wages paid it can be affected by changes in the composition of the workforce. As an example, a rapid growth in employment concentrated in low-income jobs can make it look as if wage growth is slowing when it isn’t.

The OECD assigns countries to one of two groups:

• those in which bargaining occurs mainly at the company level

• those in which collective bargaining takes place with multiple employers, most often from the same industry, but sometimes from firms in the same region.

Not all countries fit neatly into these categories. Australia is one such exception, relying on centrally-set awards and a minimum wages in addition to employer by employer (and sometimes occupation by occupation) negotiations.

Read more:
Are real wages falling? Here’s the evidence

After omitting countries without comparable wages data, I found 14 countries where multi-employer bargaining dominates, and 12 where company-level bargaining dominates.

Examining the period 2011-21, I found that across the multi-employer bargaining countries, real wages growth averaged only 0.6% per year.

In contrast, among those in the company bargaining group, average real wage growth was about four times a high, at 2.3% per annum.

Read more:
Real wages are shrinking, these figures put it beyond doubt

But the company-bargaining group included many Eastern European countries which have greater room for productivity growth and thus wage increases.

Excluding these from both groups, I found that in the countries where multi-employer bargaining dominated, real wage growth averaged 0.7% per year.

Where company bargaining dominated, real wage growth averaged 1.1%.

Australia, which, along with Luxembourg, fits into neither category, had real wage growth of 0.4%.

These calculations are not consistent with the claim that multi-employer bargaining boosts real wages growth. If anything, they suggests the reverse.

We will need to try other things

But this isn’t to say Australia’s system of enterprise bargaining can’t be improved. The post-summit bipartisan commitment to reform the Better Off Overall Test that is applied to enterprise agreements holds potential.

Researchers at the E61 Institute have identified another problem ripe for attention: an apparent decoupling of wages from firm performance.

Multi-employer bargaining is unlikely to be able to address this; indeed it could make it worse.

Read more:
If the PM wants wage rises, he should start with the 1.6 million people on state payrolls

We also need to recognise that in an economy increasingly dominated by services, getting real wage gains from productivity gains becomes difficult.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the public sector, where teachers and nurses face wages set by government employers and in sectors such as aged care and childcare where governments help pay and effectively set wages.

The main obstacle to higher wage growth in these sectors is not enterprise bargaining, but simply an unwillingness on the part of governments (on behalf of taxpayers) to stump up the cash.

Mark Wooden is also a part-time member of the Fair Work Commission’s Expert Panel responsible for the Annual Wage Review. This piece, however, is written in his capacity as a professor of the University of Melbourne. None of the views expressed here should be attributed to either the Fair Work Commission or the University of Melbourne.

– ref. Despite high hopes, multi-employer bargaining is unlikely to ‘get wages moving’ – https://theconversation.com/despite-high-hopes-multi-employer-bargaining-is-unlikely-to-get-wages-moving-190131

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cherine Fahd, Associate Professor of Visual Communication in the School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

For the past ten months, I have photographed hundreds of people in the Western Sydney suburb of Parramatta for a portrait project called Being Together: Parramatta Yearbook.

The portraits in the yearbook show the people who live, work and play in Parramatta against the backdrop of an ever-changing city.

The way a photographer and subject come together to make a portrait is usually invisible in a portrait.

Here, instead of trying to reveal the elusive individuality of a person, I have been focusing on the social dynamics of portraiture – what happens behind the scenes between me and the people I’m photographing.

As Daniel Palmer notes in his book Photography and Collaboration, portraiture is by definition relational and collaborative. That is, the process of photographic portraiture inherently brings the photographer and subjects together to arrive at an image.

In the context of this project, coming together for a portrait creates playful opportunities for social interactions among strangers.

It is amazing what strangers will share with me in the space of five minutes.

Two men reveal they are brothers and haven’t seen each other for ten years.

One woman tells me she thinks she’s ugly and asks me to make her look beautiful.

Another keenly describes the floral wonders she is holding from her community garden.

One man whispers that he can’t speak English.

Another tells me he’s in a hurry to go to lunch.

We chat about the everyday things, the weather, COVID, shopping and Rugby League.

There are stories of time spent in jail, and lives being turned around.

New arrivals to Australia speak of their family in lands faraway and citizens who have lived all their lives in Parramatta share insights on the city.

These are the stories photography can’t capture in the silent stillness of the image, but that’s no reason not to continue.

Read more:
How the arts can help us come back together again – podcast

Performing photography

Setting up a studio in the street and inviting people to pose together in front of the camera is a thing to see. We always had audiences of passersby watching and it wasn’t long before they were also in front of the camera.

If you look closely at the portraits there are talkative details and warm gestures: micro-movements of the body where people touch each other or hold hands; the spaces between our bodies; instances when we are caught by the camera laughing, chatting and applying lipstick.

I also see myself in action. I am both photographer and subject, a stranger dressed in red, wanting desperately to be with people, to steer them through a photographic moment, to pose and be uncomfortable together.

When people have their portraits made I want to know whether they enjoyed it or found it excruciating and awkward. After the photo is taken, we walk up to the laptop tethered to the camera and look at the photographs. They indicate which portraits they like and hate. I listen and take notes.

Involving people in the selection process creates instant trust.

In bringing people together before a camera, I became acutely aware of photography’s potential to foster social inclusion, social participation, visibility and a sense of belonging and connection to one’s place and people.

Photography is something we all do. It is familiar and familial. Group portraits activate a social encounter and conversation, listening and storytelling.

The social experience of photography is also extended through time. After the photographs have been taken and printed, they are displayed as a collage on a large scale photo wall in the heart of Parramatta in Centenary Square. I love watching people looking for themselves or pointing to familiar faces.

As one passerby declared on seeing the photo wall:

Thanks for treating everyone the same, like we belong and are as deserving of recognition and dignity as others, instead of excluding us from being visible.

This feedback goes to the heart of the project that welcomed people from all walks of life to offer a view of Western Sydney that is far from the media stereotypes.

Fundamentally, the Parramatta Yearbook acts as a model for how cultural institutions and government can work together with artists to record and reflect community, create a sense of belonging and produce narratives about a place in transition that foregrounds the creativity of its citizens ahead of urban development.

Read more:
Drawing data: I make art from the bodily experience of long-distance running

The Parramatta Yearbook portraits are on public display in Parramatta’s Centenary Square until October 3, as well as in a 88-page downloadable yearbook from the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Being Together: Parramatta Yearbook is produced and presented by C3West on behalf of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in partnership with Parramatta Artists’ Studios, an initiative of the City of Parramatta.

– ref. 10 months and hundreds of subjects: how I took portrait photography to the streets of Parramatta – https://theconversation.com/10-months-and-hundreds-of-subjects-how-i-took-portrait-photography-to-the-streets-of-parramatta-189448