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

The arrival of a boat on the coast of north-western Australia last week predictably set off an opposition political feeding frenzy. Peter Dutton was quick to claim the Albanese government had “lost control” of the border.

But a boat (or even two – there was another landing late last year) does not an armada make. Australian authorities might need to lift their detection game – no doubt they are getting that message – but so far there is not evidence of a new wave of people smuggling.

Further arrivals would change the dynamics but, in the absence of that, the opposition needs to be careful of overreach, for a couple of reasons.

One is that it’s irresponsible, thinking of Australia’s national interest, to be in effect telling the people smugglers there are fresh opportunities for them. Signals are important: for example, there’s a suggestion last year’s release of the immigration detainees (in the wake of the High Court decision) fed into the people smugglers’ pitch.

Secondly, the border issue is unlikely to play as strongly with voters these days. Kos Samaras of the RedBridge Group, a political consultancy that does regular research, says: “The political heat that was associated with the politics of boat people in the early 2000s is all gone. I think that we’re dealing with a different generation of politics now, and Australians generally just don’t get all that worried or concerned about what sort of people will stumble onto our shores and walk into a town looking for food.”

Read more:
Politics with Michelle Grattan: Antony Green, Kos Samaras and Tim Costello on Dunkley contest

With eyes firmly on their pockets, people are likely to see excessive rhetoric about boats for what it is, a scare tactic.

The issue of boat arrivals should be distinguished from immigration, which is current in many people’s minds and related to debates around housing and cost of living.

Both issues, however, do take us to the question of the Home Affairs Department, a behemoth encompassing the Australia Border Force, immigration, citizenship and multiculturalism, and cyber security. ASIO sits under it too. It is overseen by cabinet minister Clare O’Neil, with a junior minister, Andrew Giles, having responsibility for immigration, citizenship and multicultural affairs.

Put bluntly, the department has been a nest of trouble. There are very strong arguments for breaking it up.

The department has been scandal-ridden. A recent report by Dennis Richardson, former head of Foreign Affairs, Defence and ASIO, documented how it failed to do due diligence on contracts. The revelation of extraordinary emails by its former secretary, Mike Pezzullo, led to his dismissal last year.

This empire was trimmed when Labor took office. The Australian Federal Police and a couple of other crime-fighting agencies were moved to come under the Attorney-General’s Department. ASIO would fit more appropriately there too, but Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus lost that battle.

Pezzullo ran the Home Affairs Department with an iron rod and morale was at rock bottom. There are mixed views about whether his successor, Stephanie Foster, who had been the department’s associate secretary, is a strong enough leader for the demands of this very tough job.

A central problem is that the department’s component parts are a bad fit. There seems an overwhelming case for separating immigration, citizenship and multicultural affairs into their own department with cabinet status.

That way, immigration could be viewed essentially as an economic department and cast in more positive terms, to promote nation building. This was how it was seen in earlier times.

At present, immigration suffers from being in the more negative national security environment that dominates Home Affairs.

Former senior bureaucrat Paddy Gourley, an expert on the public service, has argued that “the grandest failure of Home Affairs and its leaders has been the diminution of immigration as a principal function of the federal government”.

A freestanding department would allow “a clear-eyed, high-priority concentration on immigration policy and service delivery free of the distractions and distortions to which it is vulnerable in Home Affairs”, Gourley wrote on Inside Story in November.

Equally, multiculturalism requires a lot more attention, especially at the moment.

Multiculturalism has been a great success story of Australia’s immigration program, celebrating diversity while also promoting unity and commitment to common Australian values.

But the community frictions prompted by the Israel-Hamas conflict have highlighted that at times the tensions that lurk in a multicultural society can test its cohesion. Crises abroad can cause local divisions to flare dangerously. At present the Albanese government is seriously worried about community harmony.

The level of anti-Semitism we’re currently seeing in this country is deeply disturbing, striking fear into many Jewish Australians. Meanwhile, many in the Islamic community, with family or friends in Gaza, are traumatised, plus there’s been a rise in islamophobia. And the regular pro-Palestinian demonstrations since the start of the current Middle East conflict have, on occasion, tested authorities.

Reacting to these challenges is not likely to get any easier. A separate immigration department could mean more bureaucratic attention and resources for engagement with the various multicultural communities.

On another front, prospective citizens are not receiving the attention they deserve. Peter Hughes, a one-time deputy secretary in immigration, has condemned “the outrageously long time it takes to process applications for Australian citizenship”.

Writing for Pearls and Irritations last month, Hughes said a person who’d met all the requirements, including the four-year residential qualifying period, could expect to wait up to 15 months for a decision and another six months for a conferral ceremony. Imagine the outcry if it took this long to get a passport for an overseas trip, Hughes added.

This week Anthony Albanese hosed down speculation that there could be an election this year. He intends to run full term – the election is due by May next year.

At some point the Prime Minister may consider freshening his team. This is not a prediction, but a reshuffle would provide the ideal opportunity to split the Home Affairs Department and rescue immigration from what often seems its also-ran bureaucratic status.

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

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Unshackle immigration from Home Affairs and give it its own department – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-unshackle-immigration-from-home-affairs-and-give-it-its-own-department-224155

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

The National Anti-Corruption Commission will provide guidance on “corruption vulnerabilities” ahead of next year’s federal election, NACC Commissioner Paul Brereton said on Thursday.

“The commission will produce guidance concerning corruption risks and vulnerabilities associated with issues such as grants, political donations and fundraising, foreign interference, government advertising and appointments,” Brereton said.

He told a a conference in “Rebuilding trust and integrity in the Australian Public Service”, run by The Mandarin, that there was a vast difference in the integrity landscape now compared with when the first anti-corruption commission was set up – the ICAC in New South Wales – 35 years ago.

“Since then, there has been a sea change in the tolerance of the public, the press and the public service for corrupt conduct.”

Brereton said corruption was “about the misuse of public power, position, privilege or property” usually for private purposes. “It results in the diversion of public resources, and the undermining of trust in our public institutions. Although it is not the only form of corrupt conduct within the definition, breach of public trust lies at its core.”

Brereton stressed that “mere mistakes, incorrect decisions, and even negligent maladministration, are not in themselves corrupt conduct”. Generally, there must be an element of dishonesty and/or personal benefit.

Up to February 18 the commission had received 2,534 referrals of suspected corrupt conduct, overwhelmingly voluntary referrals from the public. Nearly 80% were excluded because they didn’t involve a Commonwealth official or didn’t raise a corruption issue.

The commission had opened 18 preliminary investigations, of which five had been finished, in each case with a finding of no corruption.

It had opened 13 corruption investigations, four of them jointly with other agencies, and had referred five corruption issues to other agencies for investigation.

In 220 cases which passed triage, the commission had decided to to take no more action.

“Typically, this is because there are insufficient prospects of finding corrupt conduct, or the matter is already being adequately investigated by another agency, or a corruption investigation would not add value in the public interest.”

The commission also progressed seven investigations that were started by the former Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity.

Brereton said the statistics showed “that the public perception of corruption greatly exceeds the actuality”.

But this wasn’t a reason to be complacent “first, because the perception bespeaks a lack of trust and confidence in our institutions, and secondly, because there is still an actuality that underlies it”.

He said in the public service there were two main areas where there was the perception and actuality of corrupt conduct – procurement, and recruitment and promotion.

“Concerns in both those areas relate to the preferring of family, friends and associates, and misuse of official information to gain an advantage.”

While many complaints about selection and promotion reflected grievances by disappointed applicants, not all could be dismissed on these grounds. In procurement, mere compliance with the rules didn’t mean the conduct was ethical. “In particular, contracts for a value just under the threshold for a limited tender process tend to be a red flag.”

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. National Anti-Corruption Commission to warn of ‘corruption vulnerabilities’ ahead of federal election – https://theconversation.com/national-anti-corruption-commission-to-warn-of-corruption-vulnerabilities-ahead-of-federal-election-224158

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Marie Quigley, DECRA Research Fellow (James Cook University), Principal Research Scientist (Minderoo Foundation), James Cook University

Seas surrounding Australia this month hit an alarming level of warming. It comes on the back of serious marine heatwaves in the Northern Hemisphere summer.

Such warming is highly dangerous for corals. Every half a degree of ocean warming increases their risk of bleaching and potential death.

The best long-term strategy to protecting Earth’s coral reefs is to dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions and so limit global warming. But in the meantime, we must urgently make corals more resilient and protect those that are vulnerable.

That is particularly true for the huge, ancient features of reefs known as boulder corals. Research suggests they will be a vital part of reef survival in a warmer world.

The old-growth trees of the sea

Boulder corals (Porites) can grow to more than 10m high and live for more than 600 years. In Australia they are often referred to as “bommies”. Each bommie can comprise multiple species, but they’re often a single massive individual.

The corals play a crucial role in reefs, including providing habitat for marine life. Importantly, they can maintain these functions even when other coral species are absent.

Some species are thought to be resistant to stress. Old corals have likely experienced
– and survived – past warming episodes, proving their resilience.

For example, a paper in 2021 described a giant boulder coral discovered on the Great Barrier Reef which was thought to be more than 400 years old. It has survived 80 major cyclones, numerous coral bleaching events and centuries of exposure to other threats.

This resilience can benefit the whole reef ecosystem. We can think of boulder corals as akin to old-growth trees in a forest. Just like forests containing big, old trees are more resistent to fire, studies show a mix of different growth forms, including old and large boulder corals, fare better in the long-term under marine warming.

Older and bigger corals may also produce more offspring, so can more rapidly replenish the reef after disturbances.

Clearly, as our oceans face unprecedented pressures under climate change, we must protect – and learn from – these sentinels of the sea.

Read more:
Snorkellers discover rare, giant 400-year-old coral – one of the oldest on the Great Barrier Reef

Preparing for the challenges ahead

Understanding boulder corals is crucial to predicting how they might cope under climate change, and planning for their protection.

But scientists still have much to learn about boulder corals. In particular, we don’t know exactly how many species exist, their life histories and how they evolved.

My colleagues and I are aiming to overcome this knowledge gap. We are studying reefs across Australia, with a particular focus on boulder corals at Ningaloo Reef off Western Australia.

We are creating maps of what species of boulder corals exist and where they are located. And using cutting-edge genomics technology, such as DNA sequencing, we are measuring the tolerance of each species to warming and trying to predict when they will reproduce.

Importantly, we are also examining the mutually beneficial relationship between the corals and algae. This relationship provides algae with shelter, gives corals their colour and provides nutrients to both partners. It may also be a main factor in coral resistance to warmer temperatures.

So far, we have found more diversity than initially expected. This is exciting because it may signal an increased capacity to resist different types of stress. But the work to fully map Ningaloo’s coral diversity has only just begun.

We hope our findings, once finalised, can inform local community management actions such as:

• public education campaigns and signs
• managing visitor numbers to reefs
• installing public moorings to reduce harm from boat anchoring, especially during coral spawning.

The information can also be used in broader management actions such as:

• establishing “baseline” conditions from which to measure change
• zoning decisions, including the establishment or ramping up of of marine park protections, especially for resilient coral species and individuals
• impact assessments following events such as heatwaves
• direct conservation actions for iconic, at-risk bommies, such as providing shade to diminish stress from heat
• the development of national reef management plans.

Read more:
Photos from the field: why losing these tiny, loyal fish to climate change spells disaster for coral

Something worth fighting for

The stress to coral wrought by recent marine heatwaves compounds damage incurred over decades. The Great Barrier Reef, for example, has experienced five major heatwaves in 30 years.

Broadly, making reefs more resilient to these pressures involves:

• resisting, recovering, managing and adapting to shocks across ecosystems
• improving governance structures
• preparing human communities for change.

Awareness of the need to increase reef resilience is growing. For example, it formed the basis of a 2017 blueprint for the Great Barrier Reef and a strategy for the Ningaloo Coast released last year.
But more work is required.

There’s also a need for coordination across Australia’s reef areas. This might include the exchange of knowledge and data between researchers and combined lobbying efforts to better protect reef ecosystems.

What’s more, Traditional Owners must be offered the opportunity to be consulted about, and meaningfully engaged in, protection of reef areas, including co-management of Sea Country.

The Australian Coral Reef Society, of which I am a councillor, last week released an open letter to the federal government, calling for action on climate change to protect reefs. The task has never been more urgent.

There is still a lot of reef worth fighting for – but only if we act now.

The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of Ningaloo marine park managers – in particular, Dr Peter Barnes – to the research she and her colleagues are undertaking.

Kate Quigley receives funding from the Australian Research Council in the form of the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) and holds a joint position as Principal Research Scientist at Minderoo Foundation, a philanthropic organisation.

– ref. Sentinels of the sea: ancient boulder corals are key to reef survival in a warmer world – https://theconversation.com/sentinels-of-the-sea-ancient-boulder-corals-are-key-to-reef-survival-in-a-warmer-world-223207

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dr Anastasia Hronis, Clinical Psychologist; Research Fellow, University of Technology Sydney

A class-action lawsuit filed in the United States against Match Group – the parent company of dating apps Tinder, Hinge and The League – is making headlines around the world.

The claimants accuse Match of having a “predatory” business model and using “recognised dopamine-manipulating product features” to get people addicted to their apps.

So, can dating apps really be addictive? Are we swiping right into a trap? Here’s the science behind how dating apps are influencing our brains.

How do apps give us a dopamine hit?

Dating apps, like many apps these days, are designed to keep users engaged. Like any product on the market, one of the developers’ goals is for the app to be sold and used.

While dating apps are designed to facilitate connections, some people may find themselves developing an unhealthy relationship with the app, constantly swiping left and right.

Dating apps can feel addictive because they activate the dopamine reward system. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter – a chemical messenger in the brain, one of many such chemicals essential for our survival.

One of dopamine’s crucial roles is to influence when and how we experience pleasure and reward. Think about the rush of winning money at a casino, or getting lots of likes on Instagram. That’s dopamine working its magic.

However, dopamine does more that just help us feel pleasure and excitement. It also has a key role in motivating us to seek out pleasurable things. It’s released not only when we experience something pleasurable, but also when we’re anticipating and seeking out a pleasurable experience.

Read more:
The problems with dating apps and how they could be fixed – two relationship experts discuss

Excitement and unpredictability

Certain app features make it more likely we will open our phones and start swiping. When you get a match on a dating app, it feels exciting – that’s dopamine at work.

But an element of unpredictability adds to this excitement. Each time you open the app, you don’t know what profiles you might see, and who might match with you. This element of surprise and anticipation is especially important in getting us hooked.

Imagine if instead of swiping through profiles one by one, you were shown a long list of them at once. It would still feel good to match with people, but that excitement and anticipation of swiping through one by one would be missing.

Additionally, intermittent reinforcement comes into the mix. This is where “rewards” – in this case, matches – are provided at irregular intervals. We know we might eventually get some matches, but we don’t know when or with whom.

Imagine if instead of being drip-fed your matches, you received a list of any matches from the past 24 hours, at 9am each day. Your excitement and desire to check the app throughout the day would likely lessen.

Other small features, such as “hearts” and “roses”, make dating apps socially rewarding. These are all forms of approval. It feels different to receive a heart or a rose compared to something unemotional like a “tick” or “thumbs up”. These social stimuli are rewarding and activate our dopamine, too.

6 addictive signs to watch out for

Not every dating app user will develop an unhealthy relationship to it. Just like not everyone who gambles, plays mobile games, or drinks alcohol develops a problem with those.

However, some people are biologically more vulnerable to addictions than others. A review of the research into problematic dating app use found the people likely to spend more time on the apps are those high on personality traits such as neuroticism, sociability and sensation-seeking. Problematic use of online dating apps is also associated with low self-esteem.

While there’s no current diagnosis of a “dating app addiction”, some people do develop unhealthy app habits and experience day-to-day harms as a result.

These six “addiction components” outline some of the signs you might be developing an unhealthy relationship with dating apps:

1. salience (dating app use dominates your thoughts)
2. mood modification (dating apps change your mood)
3. tolerance (your use of dating apps increases over time)
4. withdrawals (distress when dating app use is interrupted for a period of time)
5. conflict (use of dating apps negatively affects your reality)
6. relapse (you return to a previous pattern of dating app use after some interruption)

Oh no, I think I’m hooked on an app!

So, what can you do if you find yourself swiping through those matches more than you’d prefer?

Consider taking a break from the apps for a period of time. Depending on how hooked you feel, stopping completely for a while will help you reset your reliance on them.

Consider what is driving you to spend time swiping: are you feeling bored, sad or lonely? What other ways can you find to soothe these emotional experiences instead of turning to the app?

Make a list of the practical or emotional consequences of swiping, as a reminder of why you want to reduce your use. Perhaps the apps give you a brief rush, but in the long run don’t align with how you want to be spending your time, or don’t make you feel particularly good about yourself.

If you really do feel hooked, it will feel uncomfortable to take a break. Strategies such as mindfulness can help us sit with the discomfort. Consider seeking out professional help from a psychologist if you’re struggling to take time from dating apps.

Lastly, remember that apps, while great for meeting people, are not the be-all and end-all of dating.

In-person events and opportunities to mingle still exist. So, step away from the screen and embrace the excitement, unpredictability and dopamine hit you can get from face-to-face encounters too.

Read more:
Online dating fatigue – why some people are turning to face-to-face apps first

Dr Anastasia Hronis 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. Dating apps are accused of being ‘addictive’. What makes us keep swiping? – https://theconversation.com/dating-apps-are-accused-of-being-addictive-what-makes-us-keep-swiping-224068

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shane Rogers, Lecturer in Psychology, Edith Cowan University

“Outrage culture” is pervasive in the digital age. It refers to our collective tendency to react, often with intense negativity, to developments around us.

Usually this ire is directed at perceived transgressions. The internet wasted no time in raging at Taylor Swift when she received Album of The Year at the Grammys, seemingly frustrated by her lack of acknowledgement of Celine Dion, who presented the award.

Whether or not Swift’s behaviour could be considered rude isn’t the point. The point is the backlash arguably wasn’t proportionate to the crime. This so-called “snub” incident is, therefore, a good example of how quickly and easily people will jump on the online hate train.

Modern outrage culture, which is also known as call-out culture and is linked to cancel culture, often devolves into a toxic spiral. People wanting clout compete to produce the meanest and most over-the-top commentary, stifling open dialogue and demonising those who make mistakes.

Read more:
How news sites’ online comments helped build our hateful electorate

A tale as old as time

Collective outrage isn’t a new phenomenon – nor is it necessarily bad. Humans have adapted to become highly sensitive to the threat of social exclusion. Being called out hurts our feelings, which motivates us to change. We learn how this feels for us and we learn how to use it to influence others.

In pre-digital societies, expressing outrage to shame someone as a group served crucial social functions. It reinforced group norms, deterred potential rule-breakers, and fostered a sense of order and accountability within communities.

Expressing outrage can also challenge norms in a way that leads to positive societal change. The women’s liberation movement in the latter part of the 19th century is a good example of this.

The technological innovations of the internet, smartphones and social media have now enabled communal outrage on a global scale. Multiple societies can be affected at once, as witnessed with the #MeToo movement.

When outrage spirals

We’ve all seen it play out. Someone says or does something “controversial”, some posts draw attention to it and soon enough a whirlwind of comments appears, echoing over and over the person in question is fundamentally bad.

The Johnny Depp and Amber Heard defamation trial is an example where, regardless of how you feel about the case, it’s hard to deny the discourse turned toxic.

The collective moral outrage that drives such negativity spirals has parallels with people brandishing their pitchforks during the 1690s Salem witch trials. Sharing similar beliefs helps us feel like we’re part of the group.

Beyond that, the conviction we witness in others’ comments and behaviour on an issue can stir up our own emotions, in what’s called “emotional contagion”. With our own emotions heightened and our convictions strengthened, we may feel compelled to join the choir of negative discourse.

The overall tone and style of language used by others can also influence how we act and feel. Social modelling dictates that if many others are piling on with negative comments, it can make it seem okay for us to do so, too.

And the more exposed we are to one-sided discourse, the more likely we are to resist alternative viewpoints. This is called “groupthink”.

Social media algorithms are also generally set up to feed us more of what we’ve previously clicked on, which further contributes to the one-sidedness of our online experience.

Scholars have suggested algorithms can prioritise certain posts in a way that shapes the overall nature of commentary, essentially fuelling the flames of negativity.

Read more:
Feed me: 4 ways to take control of social media algorithms and get the content you actually want

Two sides of speaking up

Unlike Salem in the late 1690s, today’s outrage culture is multiplied in intensity and scale due to changing cultural norms around “speaking up”. Combined with the anonymity and global reach afforded by the internet, the culture of speaking up has likely fuelled the kind of vocalisation we see online.

For example, in the past two decades there has been growing societal recognition that it’s good to speak up against bullying. This can be associated with more education on bullying in schools. There’s also a growing trend of encouraging a speak-up culture in workplaces. So it’s not surprising many people now report feeling confident in voicing their opinions online.

It’s also easier to express negative opinions online since we can remain anonymous. We don’t directly witness the emotional pain inflicted upon our target. Nor do we have to worry about the potential threat to our personal safety that would be associated with saying the same horrible thing to a person’s face. As summed up by Taylor Swift herself in You Need to Calm Down:

Say it in the street, that’s a knock-out. But you say it in a tweet, that’s a cop-out.

How can we combat negativity?

Navigating the pitfalls of outrage culture requires us to adopt a more reflective approach before participating in public condemnation. Consider also that outrage culture runs counter to the moral ideals most of us admire, such as:

• everyone makes mistakes
• people are worth more than their worst actions
• people are capable of growth and change, and deserve second chances
• it’s okay to have different opinions to others
• the punishment should fit the crime.

Research suggests positive comments can be a productive counter-influence on negativity spirals. So it’s worth speaking up if you do witness matters getting out of hand online. Before clicking the send button, consider asking yourself:

• do I really believe what I’m about to say or am I going along with the group?
• how might this comment affect the person receiving it, and am I okay with that?
• would I communicate like this if it was a face-to-face situation?

By encouraging reflection, empathy and open dialogue, we can avoid toxic outrage culture – and instead use our collective outrage as a force for positive change.

Read more:
We cannot deny the violence of White supremacy any more

Shane Rogers 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. Outrage culture is a big, toxic problem. Why do we take part? And how can we stop? – https://theconversation.com/outrage-culture-is-a-big-toxic-problem-why-do-we-take-part-and-how-can-we-stop-223645

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michaela Estelle Okninski, Lecturer of Law, University of Adelaide

Voluntary assisted dying is now lawful in every Australian state and will soon begin in the Australian Capital Territory.

However, it’s illegal to discuss it via telehealth. That means people who live in rural and remote areas, or those who can’t physically go to see a doctor, may not be able to access the scheme.

A federal private members bill, introduced to parliament last week, aims to change this. So what’s proposed and why is it needed?

What’s wrong with the current laws?

Voluntary assisted dying doesn’t meet the definition of suicide under state laws.

But the Commonwealth Criminal Code prohibits the discussion or dissemination of suicide-related material electronically.

This opens doctors to the risk of criminal prosecution if they discuss voluntary assisted dying via telehealth.

Successive Commonwealth attorneys-general have failed to address the conflict between federal and state laws, despite persistent calls from state attorneys-general for necessary clarity.

This eventually led to voluntary assistant dying doctor Nicholas Carr calling on the Federal Court of Australia to resolve this conflict. Carr sought a declaration to exclude voluntary assisted dying from the definition of suicide under the Criminal Code.

Read more:
Voluntary assisted dying will begin in WA this week. But one Commonwealth law could get in the way

In November, the court declared voluntary assisted dying was considered suicide for the purpose of the Criminal Code. This meant doctors across Australia were prohibited from using telehealth services for voluntary assisted dying consultations.

Last week, independent federal MP Kate Chaney introduced a private members bill to create an exemption for voluntary assisted dying by excluding it as suicide for the purpose of the Criminal Code. Here’s why it’s needed.

Not all patients can physically see a doctor

Defining voluntary assisted dying as suicide in the Criminal Code disproportionately impacts people living in regional and remote areas. People in the country rely on the use of “carriage services”, such as phone and video consultations, to avoid travelling long distances to consult their doctor.

Other people with terminal illnesses, whether in regional or urban areas, may be suffering intolerably and unable to physically attend appointments with doctors.

The prohibition against telehealth goes against the principles of voluntary assisted dying, which are to minimise suffering, maximise quality of life and promote autonomy.

Doctors don’t want to be involved in ‘suicide’

Equating voluntary assisted dying with suicide has a direct impact on doctors, who fear criminal prosecution due to the prohibition against using telehealth.

Some doctors may decide not to help patients who choose voluntary assisted dying, leaving patients in a state of limbo.

The number of doctors actively participating in voluntary assisted dying is already low. The majority of doctors are located in metropolitan areas or major regional centres, leaving some locations with very few doctors participating in voluntary assisted dying.

Read more:
Voluntary assisted dying is legal in Victoria, but you may not be able to access it

It misclassifies deaths

In state law, people dying under voluntary assisted dying have the cause of their death registered as “the disease, illness or medical condition that was the grounds for a person to access voluntary assisted dying”, while the manner of dying is recorded as voluntary assisted dying.

In contrast, only coroners in each state and territory can make a finding of suicide as a cause of death.

In 2017, voluntary assisted dying was defined in the Coroners Act 2008 (Vic) as not a reportable death, and thus not suicide.

The language of suicide is inappropriate for explaining how people make a decision to die with dignity under the lawful practice of voluntary assisted dying.

There is ongoing taboo and stigma attached to suicide. People who opt for and are lawfully eligible to access voluntary assisted dying should not be tainted with the taboo that currently surrounds suicide.

So what is the solution?

The only way to remedy this problem is for the federal government to create an exemption in the Criminal Code to allow telehealth appointments to discuss voluntary assisted dying.

Chaney’s private member’s bill is yet to be debated in federal parliament.

If it’s unsuccessful, the Commonwealth attorney-general should pass regulations to exempt voluntary assisted dying as suicide.

A cooperative approach to resolve this conflict of laws is necessary to ensure doctors don’t risk prosecution for assisting eligible people to access voluntary assisted dying, regional and remote patients have access to voluntary assisted dying, families don’t suffer consequences for the erroneous classification of voluntary assisted dying as suicide, and people accessing voluntary assisted dying are not shrouded with the taboo of suicide when accessing a lawful practice to die with dignity.

Failure to change this will cause unnecessary suffering for patients and doctors alike.

Michaela Estelle Okninski is affiliated with Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law.

Marc Trabsky’s research for this article received funding from an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE220100064).

Neera Bhatia receives funding from UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council for an unrelated project.

– ref. Voluntary assisted dying is different to suicide. But federal laws conflate them and restrict access to telehealth – https://theconversation.com/voluntary-assisted-dying-is-different-to-suicide-but-federal-laws-conflate-them-and-restrict-access-to-telehealth-223863

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tobias Loetscher, Associate Professor, University of South Australia

People in palliative care are dealing with serious, non-curable illness. Every day can be filled with severe physical, psychological and emotional pain.

Palliative care staff work hard to help make patients as comfortable as possible and provide strong emotional support. Meaningful activities can help but patients often aren’t well enough to do the things they really love, such as travel. We wondered whether virtual reality (VR) could help.

To find out, we supported 16 palliative care patients in an acute ward to do three 20-minute VR sessions, and asked them how they felt before and after each one.

Our study, published this week in the journal BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care, found more than 50% of patients experienced clinically meaningful reductions in symptoms such as pain and depression immediately after a 20-minute VR session.

Importantly, though, some also told us it didn’t help or that they felt unwell after using it. This shows taking a nuanced approach to using VR in palliative care is crucial.

What we did

VR involves using a headset to create an immersive experience that feels 3D, often accompanied by music or realistic sound effects. This computer-generated environment can feel incredibly close to reality.

Previous research has looked at VR use in palliative care but we were especially interested in finding out if personalised VR sessions were associated with meaningful changes in pain and depression symptoms.

Personalised VR means each person experiences content that is meaningful to that individual. So rather than asking patients to choose, for example, between a rainforest and a beach VR experience, we interviewed the patients before their sessions to gauge their interests and create a VR session tailored to them.

For example, one person said they wanted a VR experience that allowed them to explore Paris again. Others had migrated to Australia from the UK so they asked for VR experiences that brought them back to the country where they were born. One person was a big fan of Star Wars, so we provided a VR Star Wars game.

For our study, we asked 16 palliative care patients from an acute ward in a South Australian hospital to participate in three VR sessions using a headset that is now known as Meta Quest 2. The participants, who ranged in age from 48 to 87 years old, used the headset for around 20 minutes per session. The primary VR applications we used were Wander and YouTube VR.

We asked each participant about their emotional and physical symptoms before and after each session.

What we found

We found just 20 minutes of VR immersion could immediately reduce the participants’ subjective feelings of both physical pain and emotional pain (such as depression). At least half of the participants reported significant relief after a single session. After one session, two out of three participants reported relief.

One person told us:

When the service is finished you feel like you’re floating. [It takes a] weight off your shoulders.

Another said:

Well, I’d rather lie here thinking about a fish swimming [or] a Willy Nelson concert than be dying […] I enjoyed it.

One participant told us:

Oh, it’s just amazing, it was nothing like I expected […] it takes you from this world into another beautiful world.

A different person said:

[…] by the time you get to where I am, there’s things you think of, ‘I wish I’d done this, I wish I’d had the chance to have been able to do that’ and then this offers you that experience to have just about feel like you’ve been there.

While the benefits of VR were profound for some, they were not universal.

Some participants reported feeling worse after the VR sessions.

One person said the headset felt too heavy on their cheekbone, another said they experienced nausea after using the VR.

Where to from here?

We and others have now collected good evidence VR can be a helpful palliative care therapy for some patients – but not all. It is not a universal remedy.

More research is needed to better understand which patients will benefit the most from VR and how we can best use it. It’s also worth remembering skilled staff need to be on hand to support a patient to use VR; it’s no good just buying a VR set and expecting patients to use it on their own.

Our study, while limited, shows VR therapy may in some cases have a role to play to help palliative care patients experience moments of joy and comfort despite the seriousness of their illness.

Tobias Loetscher received funding from the Breakthrough Mental Health Research Foundation for this project.

Gregory Crawford has received funding from the NHMRC, the MRFF and Cancer Australia.

– ref. We gave palliative care patients VR therapy. More than 50% said it helped reduce pain and depression symptoms – https://theconversation.com/we-gave-palliative-care-patients-vr-therapy-more-than-50-said-it-helped-reduce-pain-and-depression-symptoms-223186

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alison Poulton, Senior Lecturer, Brain Mind Centre Nepean, University of Sydney

Imagine you or your child has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and after several weeks, or even months, you’ve found a dose of medication you’re happy with.

The problems you previously experienced with ADHD have improved significantly. You’re no longer constantly being distracted by your phone, or procrastinating for long periods instead of getting started on a piece of work. Perhaps your child is focusing better at school.

But always in the back of your mind is a worry: what would happen if you or your child ran out of medication? What if your doctor is ill and cannot prescribe it for you? Or what if your medication is no longer available at the pharmacy?

Many Australians with ADHD who take Vyvanse, a drug commonly prescribed to treat the condition, are facing this medication crisis at the moment. The drug has been in short supply in Australia for the past few months.

Getting the dose right

If you have ADHD and are taking medication, it’s likely you have reached your current dose by a careful process of medication optimisation in consultation with your specialist.

You may have started off with dexamfetamine or methylphenidate tablets, short-acting stimulants that take effect quickly and last for about four hours. During a process called titration, the dose is gradually increased, looking for the dose that works best for you, with the least side effects.

You may have tried modified stimulant formulations – capsules that release the medication more slowly. These include Ritalin LA (long-acting) and Concerta, which both contain methylphenidate and are designed to last either six to eight hours (Ritalin LA) or eight to 12 hours (Concerta).

Or you may have gone straight onto lisdexamfetamine (Vyvanse), a “prodrug” of dexamfetamine. Vyvanse has a protein molecule (lysine) attached which makes it inactive until it has been broken down in the body and releases dexamfetamine. This means a single dose of Vyvanse, like Concerta, may be effective for the entire day.

Although both of these once-daily formulations have similar effects and side effects, you might feel better on one than the other. You might have to try both to find the one which suits you best. Then the dose would be carefully worked out with your specialist.

Read more:
How do stimulants actually work to reduce ADHD symptoms?

Shortages have affected different doses

In August 2023 the first shortages occurred in Australia, affecting the 20mg and 30mg strengths.

Then these lower strengths came back and the 50mg was unavailable. Most recently, since December 2023, most pharmacies have only been able to obtain the 20mg and 70mg capsules.

Splitting the dose (for example prescribing 40g to a patient who takes 20g) can be done by mixing the contents of a capsule in water, and reserving half. But this is not recommended by the manufacturer, who will not guarantee the effectiveness of the half dose kept overnight.

Combining doses if available (say 20g and 30g for a patient who normally takes 50g) would require two new prescriptions. These strengths might not be available at the pharmacy the following month, and writing new prescriptions for each patient month by month is not sustainable.

Stimulant prescribing is heavily regulated, with pharmacies allowed to dispense only one month’s supply at a time. Prescriptions, which last for up to six months, are retained at the patient’s nominated pharmacy and cannot be released to be used elsewhere.

Of course, Vyvanse is not the only ADHD medication. Some people may have been taking Concerta or Ritalin prior to starting Vyvanse, and could revert to their previous dose. Changing medication is not normally a problem, but it might be for someone who responds better to Vyvanse.

Another alternative would be going back to multiple doses of short-acting dexamfetamine. Unfortunately the correct dose of dexamfetamine tablets cannot be calculated from a patient’s Vyvanse dose because of the differences in pharmacokinetics – how long it takes for the drug to start working balanced against how quickly it’s cleared from the body.

So changing to dexamfetamine would have to involve some flexibility to adjust the dose up or down as needed. This may also have a positive side, because the process depends on the person developing a good understanding of their response to each dose of medication.

Read more:
ADHD medication – can you take it long term? What are the risks and do benefits continue?

There’s no ideal solution to this problem. Leaving patients unmedicated is perhaps the worst option because the functional improvement they have come to depend on is withdrawn and the problems associated with untreated ADHD recur. This can leave people in crisis and seeking unproven alternative treatments.

How long will the shortage last?

In Australia, Vyvanse is only available from one company, Takeda, that manufactures it in the United States.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration anticipates the shortages in Australia will last until March or April, depending on the dose.

It can be extremely stressful when your ADHD medication is suddenly unavailable. If you are in this situation and wondering how to manage, remember Vyvanse is not the only formulation available. It’s worth getting in touch with your specialist to find out about the alternatives. This could involve an initial period of dose adjustment, but it might be a great deal better than going without.

Alison Poulton is a director of the Australasian ADHD Professionals Association. She has previously taken part in an advisory panel and received personal fees and non-financial support from Takeda Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures ADHD medications including some mentioned in this article. She has received book royalties from Disruptive Publishing (ADHD Made Simple).

– ref. ADHD drug shortages: what to expect if you take Vyvanse and can’t access your usual dose – https://theconversation.com/adhd-drug-shortages-what-to-expect-if-you-take-vyvanse-and-cant-access-your-usual-dose-223430

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robin Smit, Adjunct Professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Technology Sydney

Australian passenger vehicles are emitting 50% more carbon dioxide (CO₂) than the average of the world’s major markets. And the real-world situation is even worse than official figures show. That’s the finding of a new study comparing the CO₂ emissions performance of cars, SUVs and light commercial vehicles in Australia and overseas.

The comparison suggests Australia will probably fall well short of the economy-wide 2050 net-zero emission target for road transport. To hit the target, policies to cut vehicle emissions have to be intensified and supported by a range of other policies.

This month, the Australian government announced options for a New Vehicle Efficiency Standard (NVES) – not to be confused with the National Electric Vehicle Strategy (NEVS). Each option would set a national limit on grams of CO₂ that can be emitted for each kilometre driven, averaged across all new cars sold.

Mandatory CO₂ emission or fuel-efficiency standards are internationally recognised as a fundamental building block to cut transport emissions. To provide further context and input to the development of an Australian standard, Australia-based Transport Energy/Emission Research (TER) and the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) collaborated on a newly published briefing paper.

The independent analysis shows the urgent need for Australia to adopt a stringent, well-designed and mandatory fuel-efficiency standard. This standard and additional policies are essential to keep up with technological advances and decarbonisation in other developed countries.

Read more:
Labor’s fuel-efficiency standards may settle the ute dispute – but there are still hazards on the road

How did we fall so far behind?

Both fuel efficiency and emission standards aim for roughly the same thing: cutting fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. In doing so, they also cut fuel costs for consumers and improve energy security.

About 85% of the global light vehicle market has adopted these standards over time, in some cases decades ago. The United States, European Union, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan, China, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand, Chile and India all have them. Australia and Russia are the two exceptions in the developed world.

Australia has a long history of debate about making such standards mandatory for passenger and light commercial vehicles. The federal government has released six public consultation documents since 2008, without achieving mandatory standards. This is about to change.

Australia has had voluntary standards since 1978. These targets have not always been met due to lack of enforcement. They have been criticised for lacking both ambition and effectiveness in reducing real-world emissions.

It appears the government’s current proposal will be more ambitious. It potentially aims to converge with US targets in 2027 – though falling short of what is being done in Europe. The Australian standard’s effectiveness in achieving genuine emission reductions and net zero emissions in 2050 will still need to be examined once the design and details are clearer.

Read more:
Why electric trucks are our best bet to cut road transport emissions

How does Australia compare using official figures?

The new study compared the officially reported CO₂ emissions performance of passenger and light commercial vehicles in Australia, China, the EU, Japan and the US. We found CO₂ emissions from the Australian passenger vehicles were 53% higher than the average of these major markets in 2021.

Importantly, without effective action, this performance gap is expected to grow in future years. That’s because these other markets are moving to aggressively adopt standards that drive the transition to a low-or-zero-emissions vehicle fleet.

Read more:
Too big, too heavy and too slow to change: road transport is way off track for net zero

How does Australia compare in reality?

The official Australian figures are based on a test protocol called the New European Drive Cycle (NEDC). It was developed in the early 1970s.

The main problem is that the difference between NEDC test results and actual on-road emissions has steadily increased. Actual on-road emissions were estimated to be about 10% higher in 2007, growing to over 45% in 2021.

Indeed, the EU no longer uses the outdated NEDC protocol. It has adopted a more realistic test procedure, the Worldwide Harmonised Light-Vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP).

The briefing paper used previous research into Australian and international real-world emissions performance to create a more accurate comparison. Whereas the official figures suggest newly sold Australian passenger vehicles have relatively high emissions, at least they appear to have improved each year. The picture is very different when we look at on-road emissions.

Our estimates suggest emissions from newly sold Australian passenger vehicles have actually been rising since 2015. This trend is a result of increasing vehicle size and weight, a shift towards more four-wheel-drive SUVs and large utes, and a lack of mandatory standards or targets.

The Australian real-world emissions performance is also much worse than in the four major markets. Before 2016 the average difference was around 20% higher on average. By 2021, Australian emissions were almost 50% higher for passenger vehicles.

Read more:
The road to new fuel efficiency rules is filled with potholes. Here’s how Australia can avoid them

What does this mean for policy?

Our analysis shows both officially reported and actual on-road CO₂ emissions from new Australian light-duty vehicles are much higher than in other developed nations. The available evidence suggests this poor performance will get worse without stringent mandatory standards in place.

The good news is that the government is acting on the lack of an effective standard. Mandatory standards will likely be adopted this year. The New Vehicle Efficiency Standard is due to take effect in 2025.

However, the standard must be carefully designed to achieve genuine emission reductions for new vehicles.

For instance, the official Australian test protocol (NEDC) is outdated and increasingly underestimates on-road emissions. It provides an unrealistic and skewed picture, undermining effective emission reduction. The government says it intends to adopt a more realistic test protocol.

The standards should also include on-board monitoring of fuel consumption – as the EU is now doing. It’s vital to measure real-world fuel efficiency and emissions of new vehicles and to make this information public to ensure standards are achieving their goals. But the latest government report didn’t mention it.

A mandatory fuel-efficiency standard is long overdue in Australia. It can help close the performance gap between Australia and the rest of the world. So we’d better make sure it works.

Robin Smit is the Founder of and Director at Transport Energy/Emission Research (TER), which collaborated on the briefing paper discussed in this article.

– ref. Australian passenger vehicle emission rates are 50% higher than the rest of the world – and it’s getting worse – https://theconversation.com/australian-passenger-vehicle-emission-rates-are-50-higher-than-the-rest-of-the-world-and-its-getting-worse-222398

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne

They can recover from fire. Grow back from a bare stump. Shrug aside bark loss that would kill a lesser tree. Endure drought and floods.

Eucalypts are not interested in dying. They’re survivors. The world’s 800-plus species are almost all found in Australia, a continent with old, degraded soils and frequent fires and droughts.

In the fossil record, they first appear about 34 million years ago. As the Australian continent dried out, eucalypts gradually emerged as the dominant trees in all but the most arid and tropical areas.

But what is it about eucalypts that makes them survivors? It’s a combination. Leathery leaves. Fire-resistant bark. Dormant buds under bark, waiting for fire. Mallee roots (lignotubers) at ground level to let them regrow. Roots which put out special chemicals to unlock scarce nutrients. And gumnuts which use fire to germinate and get a head-start on any rivals.

In a difficult place to survive, they thrive. Here’s how they do it.

Read more:
New research reveals how forests reduce their own bushfire risk, if they’re left alone

Leaves

Many gum species have leaves which hang vertically. These adaptations are about water. Water in Australia is often scarce, and it makes sense for trees to hold onto it when they have it. Vertical leaves means less direct sun, which means less evaporation. Their dry, leathery leaves also keep the water inside. It also improves their tolerance to bushfire.

Bark

Stringybark, ironbark, candlebark – the bark of eucalypts is used to identify them. But it’s also one of their great adaptations. The bark is often an excellent insulator against hot, dry summers as well as a protective barrier against fire.

Stringy bark is so fibrous that despite singeing and looking black on the surface, it often doesn’t burn, meaning buds beneath it are protected from damage.

Buds

Underneath the bark of a normal-looking eucalypt lie thousands of dormant buds. These invisible “epicormic” buds are a remarkable adaptation, letting the tree rapidly regrow after bushfires, severe insect and animal grazing, storms, droughts or floods.

You can spot epicormic shoots sprouting up and down the trunks of gum trees after a fire, making them look like “toothbrush trees”.

Epicormic shoots can grow 27cm in a single day, or up to 6 metres in a year. When epicormic buds touch soil, they can sometimes develop as roots. This allows fallen trees or even large branches to re-establish and anchor after storms and floods.

You can sometimes see hundreds of woody spines on the trunks of old dead trees. These are a pointy reminder of how many undeveloped epicormic buds lurk under the bark.

Mallee roots (lignotubers)

As remarkable as epicormic buds are, they’re not the recovery mechanism of last resort. That job falls to the bulge at the bottom of many eucalypt trunks, which we often call “mallee roots”.

These are lignotubers, remarkable adaptations possessed by most eucalypts.

To appreciate the complexity and biological beauty of a lignotuber, imagine the trunk of a eucalypt with all its epicormic buds scrunched into a ball at the base of the trunk. The buds have direct access to a large root system able to supply water, nutrients and carbohydrates.

This is a gum tree’s emergency reboot option. Even when the tree above is falling apart, the lignotuber can rapidly regrow the tree at a rate of 6 metres or more in a year.

Roots

The roots of species such as river red gums drive deep into the soil along water courses, searching for subterranean water supplies as a backup in case the river dries up.

For other species, the solution to limited water is to send roots far and wide, often many times further than the tree’s height. In many species, the lignotuber and roots are buried under an insulating layer of soil. This acts as protection against fire.

That’s not all. Many eucalypt species produce “exudates” from their roots – chemicals which leach into the soil and free any locked-up nutrients in poor soils.

Still other exudates seep out to help feed mycorrhizal fungi in the soil. The gum trees do this as part of a wonderful symbiosis, allowing both tree and fungus to thrive. The gum gives sugar, the fungi give water and nutrients.

This underground exchange greatly improves soil quality and lets other species grow in difficult conditions.

Gumnuts

Gumnuts – woody fruits of eucalypts – are familiar to many of us from May Gibbs’ famous Snugglepot and Cuddlepie stories.

These capsules protect the tiny seeds inside from desiccation and fire. After a fire, eucalyptus fruit may be damaged or dry out. This frees the fine seeds, which sprinkle over the soil like pepper over dinner.

Some eucalypts rely not on lignotubers or epicormic buds but on the seeds contained and protected in those woody gumnuts. The seeds fall to the ground and germinate when conditions are right renewing the forest.

Survivors – but not immortal

In the years ahead, we’ll see natural disasters occurring more often and with greater ferocity as the climate changes. And in the aftermath, we will also see the spectacular and rapid responses of eucalypts – one of the world’s great families of survivors.

But we will also see dead forests. Gum trees do perish, despite their abilities to regenerate. Some species such as mountain ash are not coping with pressures such as logging and climate change, while thin-barked snow gums are struggling to cope with new fire regimes. Every living thing has limits.

Read more:
Yes, the Australian bush is recovering from bushfires – but it may never be the same

Gregory Moore 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. Hard to kill: here’s why eucalypts are survival experts – https://theconversation.com/hard-to-kill-heres-why-eucalypts-are-survival-experts-222743

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leonora Risse, Associate Professor in Economics, University of Canberra

More of us have been in paid work this past year than ever before. A big part of that is because more of us have been able to work from home than ever before.

The proportion of Australians in paid work climbed above 64% in May last year, and has stayed there since. At the same time, unemployment has hovered around a half-century low of 4%.

In April last year, female unemployment fell to what is almost certainly an all-time low of 3.3%.

It’s working from home – actually, working from anywhere – that has been the game-changer, as the most enduring change to the way we work to have come out of the pandemic.

The jump in working from home

Before the pandemic, in 2019, the share of the workforce who usually work at least partly from home was 25%. Three years on in 2022, it was 36%.

These numbers from the latest Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey show there’s also been a shift in who’s working from home.

Before the pandemic, a greater share of men than women worked from home. Now it’s a greater share of women.

Among both women and men, the biggest jump has been among parents with young children.

The proportion of mothers with children under five working at least partly from home has leapt from 31% to 43%.

The working-from-home rate for fathers with children under five has jumped from 29% to 39%.

Read more:
Fancy an e-change? How people are escaping city congestion and living costs by working remotely

Which workers, which jobs?

Before the pandemic, managers and professionals were the workers most likely to work from home. They still are, with up to 60% dialling in from the home office for at least part of their work week.

But it’s clerical and administrative workers – occupations that are about three-quarters female – who had the biggest jump in working from home. Their pre-pandemic rate of 18% has soared to 42%.

In terms of industries, finance and insurance led the pack before the pandemic and still do, with rates doubling to 85%.

Working from home is now also the norm in information media and telecommunications (74%) and public administration and safety (72%).

In the traditionally male industry of construction, women’s working-from-home rates have soared from 34% to 45%.

It’s well above the men’s rate of 24%, which is largely unchanged.

While this reflects the different types of jobs that men and women do in construction, it also suggests working from home is a way to boost women’s involvement, even in this industry.

More workers, better-matched

The benefit of working from home for the economy has been fewer obstacles getting in the way of matching jobseekers to employers. Distance and location are no longer the deal-breakers they were.

Better job-matching means less unemployment, and the heightened prospect of finding a good job match encourages jobseekers who in earlier times might have given up.

In finance and insurance – the industry with the biggest and fastest-growing rate of working from home – the proportion of jobs that were vacant fell from 2.5% before the pandemic to just 1.7% by the end of 2023.

Return-to-office mandates would set us back

Making workers return to the office for jobs that can be effectively done from home would unravel the economic benefits that have been achieved.

Fewer people, especially women and parents with young children, would put themselves forward for work. The pool of skills that employers are looking for would shrink. And job-matching in the labour market becomes less efficient.

The result would be more Australians unemployed, and more Australians dropping out of the paid workforce, than if we had continued to embrace working from home.

Read more:
Can employers stop you working from home? Here’s what the law says

Working from home still comes with challenges. Workers who are less visible in the office are more likely to be overlooked.

But it has a wider economic benefit we have a chance to hold on to.

The extraordinary transformation of our labour market means it shouldn’t be seen as a “favour” to workers, but as a favour to us all.

Leonora Risse receives research funding from the Trawalla Foundation and the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia. She is a member of the Economic Society of Australia and the Women’s in Economics Network. She declares that she works partly from home, for family care-giving reasons.

– ref. Working from home is producing economic benefits return-to-office rules would quash – https://theconversation.com/working-from-home-is-producing-economic-benefits-return-to-office-rules-would-quash-223091

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane Kelsey, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

New Zealand Trade Minister Todd McClay will be one of three deputy chairs (alongside ministers from Panama and Cameroon) at the 13th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Abu Dhabi next week.

Whether this proves to be an honour or a poison chalice for McClay will depend on who defines “success” and how.

The bar for the conference – known as MC13 – will be set very low. It may be judged simply by whether the ministers reach an agreed declaration, and what fallout there might be, given the power politics at play.

Nearly half the WTO ministerial conferences since its creation in 1995 have not produced a substantive outcome document. But despite the low expectations, the stakes are very high.

A body in crisis

The WTO faces an ongoing existential crisis, with all three of its core functions in various states of collapse.

The dispute and enforcement mechanism has been paralysed since late 2019, because both US Republican and Democrat administrations have vetoed new appointments to the WTO’s Appellate Body.

The Doha Development Round of multilateral trade negotiations, launched in 2001, has never concluded. Instead, smaller groups of mainly developed countries, including New Zealand, are conducting unmandated plurilateral negotiations.

These centre on topics such as electronic commerce and how all kinds of services are regulated domestically. These are priorities for developed countries, but leave the different priorities of developing countries behind.

And the notification mechanism to monitor compliance with trade agreements is breached more often than honoured, as developing countries struggle to cope with their obligations.

Read more:
World Trade Organization steps back from the brink of irrelevance – but it’s not fixed yet

Deferred decisions

The previous ministerial conference in Geneva in 2022 was proclaimed a “success” because it produced a partial agreement on unsustainable fisheries subsidies.

But the hard question of restricting harmful subsidies paid to large international fishing fleets was deferred to this year’s meeting and remains unresolved.

Solving the impasse over the Appellate Body was given until 2024, which the US now insists means the end of the year. Whichever party wins the presidential election, the US will continue its veto. Donald Trump may go further if he returns to the White House and revive threats to quit the WTO entirely.

Read more:
Governments spend US$22 billion a year helping the fishing industry empty our oceans. This injustice must end

Several member countries that want to protect their pharmaceutical industries continue to block a proposal by South Africa and India to waive patent rights for coronavirus therapeutics and tests.

These patent rights are guaranteed under the Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS) and there is still no agreement on a “TRIPS waiver”. Its opponents want the issue declared dead.

Also dating back to 2001 is a permanent resolution on the public stockpiling of food grains, which India insists is essential for food security. This is something the Cairns Group of agricultural exporters, including New Zealand, vehemently opposes as distorting free trade.

With an election pending, and protests from Indian farmers demanding the country withdraw from the WTO, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government continues to demand an outcome.

‘Reform by doing’

Agreement on these big issues seems a long way off, just days out from the Abu Dhabi conference. And a prolonged WTO General Council meeting last week failed to resolve almost anything.

Big power politics is driving the process, and not just by the US and EU. China is exerting enormous pressure on developing country governments to endorse an unmandated agreement on “investment facilitation”.

This would create rules to streamline foreign investment, but would be onerous for developing countries to implement. It needs consensus to become a WTO agreement.

South Africa and India have resolutely challenged the systemic consequences of these plurilateral negotiations as undermining the multilateral system and sidelining developing countries’ priorities.

Read more:
Intellectual property waiver for COVID vaccines should be expanded to include treatments and tests

They were stridently attacked for this by China at last week’s General Council, as well as by WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

But the plurilateral approach continues an agenda dubbed “reform by doing” by Okonjo-Iweala, a former managing director of the World Bank who holds dual Nigerian and US citizenship.

Essentially, it means bypassing the WTO’s constitutional rules and formal bodies to redesign the WTO along the lines demanded by its powerful members and approved by the director-general.

Claims of bias were reinforced by the WTO’s (now deleted) pro-patent Valentine’s Day tweet this year, just days after the TRIPS waiver talks had broken down: “Your love is like a patent, so rare and true / A work of art that only I can view / And just like some IP rights, it can never expire / Our love is like a never-ending fire.”

Read more:
New Zealand is overdue for an open and honest debate about 21st-century trade relations

Exclusionary and manipulative

Developing countries have heavily criticised Okonjo-Iweala for what they see as the exclusionary and manipulative practices used to secure an outcome at MC12. She reportedly pushed back against such complaints.

MC13 is shaping up to repeat these patterns, with negotiations on crucial issues scheduled simultaneously for small rooms that can accommodate only a subset of members, whom the director-general will choose.

New Zealand can use its privileged position as deputy chair to ensure the conference is conducted ethically, according to the WTO’s mandate: multilateral, member-driven, rules-based, non-discriminatory, transparent, with meaningful participation in consensus-based decisions.

If not, it will share the responsibility for enabling power politics to further destabilise the WTO.

Jane Kelsey is attending the WTO ministerial as a representative of the Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG), and as an invited Guest of the Chair. She advises a number of developing country governments on these issues. She is not paid by, and this is not written on behalf of, any of them.

– ref. Privilege or poisoned chalice? As deputy chair at next week’s WTO meeting, NZ confronts an organisation in crisis – https://theconversation.com/privilege-or-poisoned-chalice-as-deputy-chair-at-next-weeks-wto-meeting-nz-confronts-an-organisation-in-crisis-223849

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jon Richardson, Visiting Fellow, Centre for European Studies, Australian National University

As its two-year anniversary approaches, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been pushed into the background of public attention by the war in Gaza.

The intense focus on Gaza has prompted comparisons between the two conflicts that tend to obscure or minimise the scale of destruction in Ukraine. “Ukraine fatigue” has also deepened around the world, as the fighting drags on along relatively static front lines.

This is why, on the anniversary of the invasion, it’s important to take stock of the damage done to Ukraine and its people over the past two years. To do this, I’ve drawn on extensive reports from United Nations agencies, non-governmental organisations and international, Ukrainian and Russian media.

The overall scale of the destruction, as well as the repression of Ukrainian people and erasure of Ukrainian identity in territories annexed by Russia, lend support to the accusations that Russia has committed acts of genocide. It’s vital the world not forget this.

Read more:
An inside look at the dangerous, painstaking work of collecting evidence of suspected war crimes in Ukraine

Civilian deaths in the tens of thousands

The Palestinian death toll in Gaza has been widely reported since the war began – it currently stands at more than 28,000. The civilian death toll in Ukraine is far less certain, or discussed.

As of the end of November, the United Nations had verified the deaths of at least 10,000 civilians in Ukraine.

However, this is likely to be a gross underestimate, “just the tip of the iceberg”, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. This is because Russia has blocked UN efforts to investigate in the Russian-controlled areas of southern and eastern Ukraine where most civilian deaths have likely occurred.

The most notorious case is Mariupol, once a city of 450,000, which suffered a devastating bombardment and blockade for almost three months in 2022. Estimates of civilian deaths there range from 22,000 to as high as 87,000.

Mystyslav Chernov, the Associated Press videographer whose documentary of the siege, 20 Days in Mariupol, has been nominated for an Academy Award, estimates between 70,000 and 80,000 people have likely died. Another AP report provides a similar estimate, based on interviews with workers documenting the collection of bodies from the streets.

Unlike Gazan authorities, the Ukrainian government has been reluctant to make estimates of civilian deaths, perhaps for reasons of morale. Ukraine’s war crimes prosecutor did say in February 2023 the total number of Ukrainian civilians killed could be higher than 100,000. Given the destruction in Mariupol and other cities, this seems plausible.

Half a million military casualties

Beyond the loss of civilian lives, one cannot ignore the needless waste of soldiers’ lives on both sides.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine has been forthcoming about their battlefield losses. US estimates last August put Russian soldier deaths at around 100,000 to 120,000 and Ukrainian soldier deaths at 70,000. The US estimated perhaps 500,000 total battlefield casualties (those killed and wounded) on both sides.

The UK Defence Ministry has provided figures in the same ballpark. This also tallies with a joint investigation by the BBC Russian service and independent Russian news site Mediazona, drawing on Russian media and social media. It estimated around 107,000 Russian soldier deaths and 321,000 wounded by late last year.

Most of the Ukrainian losses are young people who enlisted to defend their country from an unprovoked invasion. The stories of the dead have been recounted at length – medics, poets and other creatives, steelworkers, transport managers, students, beekeepers, to name a few.

About 60,000 women have also served in the armed forces, with more than 100 killed in action.

Among the casualties are amputees – perhaps as many as 50,000. By comparison, an estimated 41,000 Britons underwent amputations during the first world war.

International organisations report more than 6.5 million people have fled Ukraine since the war began, while 3.5 million have been displaced inside the country. This is about a quarter of the total pre-2022 population of 41 million.

In addition, about 17.6 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, more than a quarter of whom are considered to be at a “catastrophic” level.

Devastated national infrastructure

The destruction of Ukraine’s infrastructure from thousands of missile and drone attacks has been equally horrific. According to the World Bank and UN agencies, this includes:

• 10% of Ukraine’s housing stock

• 8,400 kilometres of roads

• 13% of Ukraine’s education infrastructure, including nearly 3,600 schools, kindergartens and universities

• more than 1,500 attacks on healthcare facilities

• nearly 4,800 sites in the cultural, heritage and tourism sector

• and extensive environmental devastation, such as the blowing up of the Kakhovka Dam, which flooded hundreds of square kilometres of land and caused some 1 million people to lose drinking water.

Ukraine’s economy shrank by 30% in the first year of the war. The World Bank estimated this month the total cost of rebuilding the country at US$486 billion (A$742 billion) over ten years, which is nearly three times Ukraine’s GDP in 2023.

Violent repression and coerced integration

Russia now occupies about 18% of Ukraine’s territory – an area about the size of South Korea. It officially “annexed” four regions in late 2022, following Crimea’s annexation in 2014. Russia has since embarked on an ambitious program to change these regions’ ethnic composition, erase their Ukrainian identity and potential resistance, and integrate them into the Russian Federation.

As David Lewis of Exeter University explains, the Kremlin hopes to create a new reality on the ground that will be difficult to challenge in future. He reports an army of technocrats is overseeing a comprehensive absorption of the occupied territories, aligning their laws, regulations and tax and banking systems with Russia.

In another study of the Russification of occupied Ukraine, Karolina Hird notes locals are being coerced into getting Russian passports to obtain services such as health care. Similarly, occupation officials use the issuing of birth certificates, pensions, state payrolls and maternity payments to force residents to become reliant on the new government administrations.

The occupiers use violence to cement their control, as well. A special UN commission has documented killings, torture, sexual violence, arbitrary arrests, deportations and rapes.

The Danish Institute Against Torture documented at least 100 torture centres in prisons and police stations in south-eastern Ukraine. They employed such methods as electric shocks, beatings, suffocation, sleep deprivation, mock executions, threats and humiliation:

Our findings suggest that establishing torture chambers and torturing people in them was a routine practice in all places occupied by the Russian forces.

The UN special rapporteur on torture also describes these Russian torture practices across Ukraine as “state war policy”.

In a recent case, human rights groups reported the torture and murder of Ukrainian priest Stepan Podolchak in the Kherson region on February 13. Podolchak had held services in Ukrainian and was under pressure from the Russian security police to change his allegiance to the Russian Orthodox Church.

According to a BBC investigation, thousands of Ukrainians are being held on mostly spurious charges in prison colonies and detention centres inside Russia, with some disappearing or dying.

Mass deportations of children and cultural erasure

A year ago, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, in relation to the forced deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia. Russian officials had openly boasted of their role in the deportations, which they claimed were in the children’s interests.

Ukraine’s government has confirmed the deportations of more than 19,500 children. Some of the few children who have returned from Russia were told in school they would never leave Russia, that Ukraine didn’t exist and had never existed, and they were all really Russians.

As Latvia’s president, Edgars Rinkēvičs, put it recently:

Russia is actively erasing their Ukrainian identity and inflicting unbelievable emotional and psychological damage.

Hundreds of thousands of Russian settlers have simultaneously moved to the occupied regions. Crimean Tatar leaders estimate between 850,000 and 1 million Russians have migrated to Crimea alone since 2014.

This is a direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which obliges an occupying power not to transfer parts of its own population into a territory it occupies.

The occupation regime is also erasing Ukrainian language and culture. This is consistent with Russian nationalist ideology portraying Ukrainian as a mere dialect of Russian and the Ukrainian nation as a fiction. Putin and others on Russian state television have constantly expounded these myths.

Read more:
Are Russian transfers of Ukrainian children to re-education and adoption facilities a form of genocide?

A Russian curriculum has been introduced in more than 900 schools in occupied regions, replacing previous instruction in Ukrainian in some. Hundreds of teachers are believed to have been relocated from Russia.

Amnesty International reports that people risk reprisals for seeking to continue Ukrainian education. Some parents choose to hide their children to avoid them being taken to “re-education” institutions or for adoption in Russia.

At one school in Kherson, Amnesty reported, security officials ordered a mother to send her 15-year-old son back to school or “a bus will come next week and take [him] to an orphanage in Russia”. A school librarian said she secretly arranged meetings with students to give them Ukrainian books to avoid Russian patrols conducting arbitrary searches.

In addition, many Ukrainian streets and towns have been given new Russian names. For example, in Melitopol, a street named after a Ukrainian political theorist now bears the name of Pavel Sudoplatov, an infamous Stalinist secret agent who later boasted of organising Leon Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico.

To many observers, the erasure of Ukrainian nationhood in the occupied territories and frequent denial of Ukraine’s right to exist is evidence the Russian invasion is genocidal in nature. Some 30 genocide scholars, the Genocide Watch organisation and several national parliaments have supported this assertion.

Whether or not the threshold of genocide has been reached, the invasion constitutes the most egregious land grab of a recognised state’s territory since the second world war, as I have argued elsewhere.

It remains a mystery why some people think the Ukrainians, or the international community, would or should accept this land and its people being traded away in negotiations at the point of a gun.

Jon Richardson 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. Unmarked graves, violent repression and cultural erasure: the devastating human toll of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – https://theconversation.com/unmarked-graves-violent-repression-and-cultural-erasure-the-devastating-human-toll-of-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-223337

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Naomi Smith, Lecturer in Sociology, University of the Sunshine Coast

With Taylor Swift pulling in over half-a-million audience members on her Australian tour, we’ve been thinking a lot about fans. In this series, our academics dive into fan cultures: how they developed, how they operate, and how they shape the world today.

For years, people have claimed Elvis Presley is alive and well. Theories that his death was faked to escape the pressures of fame were even stoked by his record label, who, two years after his death, debuted a performer who sounded like and resembled Presley, but performed wearing a mask.

Of course, it was all a publicity stunt.

In the digital age, conspiracy theorising does not require media or record label boosting. Social media acts as a platform and amplifier of fan-led conspiracy theorising.

Have you heard that the Canadian singer Avril Lavigne is dead and has been replaced by a body double called Melissa Vandella? Perhaps you’ve seen TikTok’s theorising that American actor Lea Michelle can’t read?

For years, people who claimed Britney Spears was being held in her conservatorship against her will were considered fringe conspiracy theorists. However, legal events demonstrated this was substantially true. In recent years, Taylor Swift has famously mobilised cryptic clues to tip off fans to upcoming album and tour announcements and so, in a sense, encouraging fans to make conspiracy theories about what she’s doing next.

This leads us to one of the more satisfying aspects of conspiracy theorising: sometimes, they might just be right.

Read more:
Shame, intimacy, and community: fangirls are mocked, but it is more complex than you might think

Decoding Taylor Swift

When we think of conspiracy theories we tend to think of theories that have resulted in societal harms, such as QAnon or COVID-related conspiracies. However, conspiracy theories increasingly include many of the everyday practices of celebrity and fan culture.

Examining Swift’s engagement with her fans reveals that fans are not always “delulu” – a phrase popularised by fans to playfully reference their “delusion” when it comes to conspiracy theorising. The release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) was predicted by fans across social media through the meticulous interpretation of clues including colour-coded tour outfits, significant dates and social media traces left by the singer.

Another popular conspiracy theory within the Swift fandom is the “missing album”.

Prior to the release of 2017’s Reputation, Swift had been operating a clockwork schedule of album releases: one every two years. But there were a little over three years between 1989 and Reputation. The excess space between these release dates led to the theory about a “missing” album called Karma.

In one scene in her music video for her 2019 song The Man, the word “karma” is written in orange graffiti on a wall alongside Swift’s other albums, with adjacent text that says “MISSING: IF FOUND RETURN TO TAYLOR SWIFT”.

Swift’s albums are colour coded, and orange is the colour fans have chosen to associate with the missing album. At the end of her Era’s tour show, Swift sings Karma, a song from her most recent album Midnights, and exits through an orange door.

The clues are all there, the fans say, that Karma is the missing album, and maybe, just maybe, Swift is telling her watchful fans that they were right all along: Karma is coming next.

Read more:
From Deadheads on bulletin boards to Taylor Swift ‘stans’: a short history of how fandoms shaped the internet

An internet archive

Fan conspiracy theorising allows a sense of intimacy at scale. Swift frequently jokes about “seeing everything” fans do and say online, creating a sense of a real dialogue: a call and response between fan theorising and Swift’s output.

Social media has substantially changed our relationship with celebrity, as expectations around access to and intimacy with celebrities has been transformed.

The social media presence of celebrities – necessary to sell themselves in a crowded marketplace – provides fans with access to more digital traces and data points of celebrity behaviour to analyse and dissect. The internet functions as a vast, collective archive, storing and producing a seemingly endless amount of “evidence”.

But there is a trade off. Intense public discourse about Swift’s private life recently prompted her camp to push back against the “invasive, untrue and inappropriate” speculation around her sexuality.

Read more:
‘Shipping’, ‘slash fic’ and ‘Gaylors’: fans can find community through ‘queering’ idols – but is it ethical?

Community building

Platforms create opportunities for fans to collectively analyse evidence, share their theories and gain recognition within the fandom for their “expertise”. The pleasures of feeling like an expert have long been part of fandom, be that arts or sports.

Conspiracy theorising can activate many of the collective pleasures of fandom, such as insider expertise, community building and a sense of discovery through close reading of key texts.

In understanding the pleasures of conspiracy theorising about celebrities, we can gain insight into the pull of more harmful conspiracies. While there is a world of difference between QAnon and celebrity conspiracy theorists, participants in both are seeking community, the satisfaction of “putting the pieces together” and a sense of expertise.

We know from research that conspiracies are almost infinitely flexible. If one aspect is disproven, or fails, the boundaries shift and change to encompass and explain the incongruous.

Fans failed to predict the announcement of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) many more times than they succeeded. Each failure meant a return to the clues, to re-read and reinterpret the signs. Even though fans eventually successfully “predicted” the announcement, in the absence of success, failure is simply folded into the expanding horizon of speculation.

Read more:
From Harry Potter to Taylor Swift: how millennial women grew up with fandoms, and became a force

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. The power and pleasure – and occasional backlash – of celebrity conspiracy theories – https://theconversation.com/the-power-and-pleasure-and-occasional-backlash-of-celebrity-conspiracy-theories-221754

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

Anthony Albanese has said there will be an early budget next year, ruling out a premature election while lamenting the brevity of federal parliamentary terms.

The Prime Minister on Wednesday responded to speculation in some sections of the media about a possible election later this year, after a leaked memo from his chief of staff, Tim Gartrell, referred to going into election year. The memo was announcing the appointment of David Epstein – who has worked in multiple positions for Labor as well as in the private sector – to a senior role in the PM’s office.

Albanese described the speculation as “a bit of a beat up”.

“We expect to have a budget next year in March […] and the term ends in May next year,” he said on the ABC.

He was “absolutely” committed to serving a full term.

Pressed on whether he would wait until May, the final time for the election, Albanese said, “Well, I’ve said that three-year terms are too short, in my view.

“Part of the problem in this country, I think, is that you have the first year after an election and then you have that middle year and then you’re in an election year, which is what we will be in.”

He favoured four-year terms but “it’s been tried twice at referendums and we know that referendums are difficult to carry in this country”.

There was “misinformation”, with people saying “oh, it’ll be terrible, politicians will be here for even longer and it’s a grab for power”. But “it’s actually common sense. Every state and territory has four-year terms, but we don’t federally.”

Epstein will be principal private secretary in the Albanese office.

“It’s a senior person on high level matters,” the Gartrell memo said.
“They identify emerging issues and focus on how they are best managed.

“This is an important role as we enter the election year and David is well-qualified for the role, having worked for Labor in a range of senior roles over five successive governments and opposition.”

The Coalition brought forward the budget before its last two May elections – 2019 and 2022 – as well as using a May budget as a launch pad for the 2016 mid-year election.

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. Anthony Albanese rules out early election – and wishes federal terms were longer – https://theconversation.com/anthony-albanese-rules-out-early-election-and-wishes-federal-terms-were-longer-224080

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Roberts, Lecturer, School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Sydney

The head of Australia’s biggest supermarket chain is to step down. On the face of it, this is not altogether remarkable news. Australian CEOs hold their jobs, on average, for about five years.

Woolworth’s chief executive Brad Banducci has done nearly nine years at the helm, which is worthy of attention because it’s Woolworths. The brand has about 1,400 stores nationwide and boasts a 37% share of the grocery sector. It’s big and that’s the issue underpinning Banducci’s exit.

Commentators, including the former ACCC chief Rod Sims have bemoaned the lack of competition within the sector. Woolworths and rival Coles enjoy a 65% share of the Australian market. I give a nod to the respected Sims as he plays a bit-part in the Banducci departure, which clearly did not go to plan. An announcement confirming the CEO’s retirement was made Wednesday morning.

The Four Corners interview

That announcement followed a woeful media interview by Banducci for the ABC’s Four Corners program. In light of the ongoing cost-of-living crisis affecting all parts of the country, there’s been much said about this overly concentrated grocery market and its impact on ordinary Australians.

So, it would come as no surprise to the Woolworths communications team that such questions would be put to their boss, but the boss appeared ill-prepared and defensive.

Banducci labelled Sims as out-of-touch with current market dynamics as he reminded the interviewer and viewers that the former public servant is now “retired”. This was a hapless point to make, which Banducci quickly recognises and unsurprisingly, was rather keen to remove from the interview.

Read more:
8 ways Woolworths and Coles squeeze their suppliers and their customers

The program’s refusal to play ball prompted Banducci to get out of his chair and stop the interview. The Woolworths attendants successfully persuade him to continue, but from a reputational perspective, the damage was done.

The final straw

So, was the ABC program instrumental in Banducci’s unforeseen announcement? Yes, but it’s not without important context; principally, the state of Woolworths’ financial health, considering that duopoly-like situation. The Woolworths group’s results, released on the same day as the executive’s announcement, showed a $781 million loss, although much of this was due to a couple of major write-downs.

Read more:
I analysed more than 10,000 Reddit posts on supermarket pricing. 5 key themes emerged

This brings us back to the Four Corners interview and the inherent optics of Banducci’s performance, who, it must be said, is normally unflappable when it comes to such questioning.

For further context, this is a big year for the grocer, Woolworths opened its first store in Sydney in December 1924 and much, no doubt, is planned to mark the centenary.

This will be an occasion to reinforce those corporate messages that will probably speak to the brand’s humble beginnings and being a supportive part of Australian communities over that time. In short, Woolworths is Australia, but the Banducci performance demonstrated it wasn’t Rod Sims who was out-of-touch, it was our friendly, neighbourhood grocer.

Out of touch

The program and the surrounding debate about supermarket profits at a time of hardship for many is a painful reminder that those modest beginnings have long gone and now it’s more akin to “us and them”. Woolworths needs to reclaim those ordinary, perceived simple beginnings and be seen as a community member again.

The grocer’s recent Australia Day ruckus illustrates a brand that has lost a sense of self-identity. This is not to judge the decision either way, but to underline the importance of first consulting the community.

Controlling the narrative

Banducci will be replaced by Woolworths veteran, Amanda Bardwell. Bardwell will be the 13th chief executive and knows the business well. The appointment affords Woolworths the much-needed opportunity to start controlling the corporate narrative, which has, in recent weeks, been driven by the media and centres solely on the numbers – specifically, how much is being made by the business and how little of that is, seemingly, making its way to the customer.

The Woolworths purpose speaks of “the communities in which we serve” and creating “a better tomorrow” – to that end, the business should do its darndest to give those communities greater attention.

The Woolworths advertising in 1924 described the store as a place where “goods are so cheap and shopping easy and pleasant”. So, in an attempt to control the story in 2024, Amanda Bardwell would do well going back to when it all started.

Read more:
Why prices are so high – 8 ways retail pricing algorithms gouge consumers

Peter Roberts 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. Brad Banducci checks out from Woolworths, signalling a business out-of-touch with its customers – https://theconversation.com/brad-banducci-checks-out-from-woolworths-signalling-a-business-out-of-touch-with-its-customers-224066

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Savitri Taylor, Associate Professor, Law School, La Trobe University

Last week, 39 foreign nationals arrived in a remote part of Western Australia by boat. This revived dormant debates about border security.

People without visas come to Australia by air and sea, though we only ever seem to hear about the latter. Unlike unauthorised air arrivals, unauthorised maritime arrivals (people without visas that arrive by boat without permission) are given high media visibility. This feeds a narrative that the country has lost control of its borders, which in turn creates a political problem for the government of the day.

But behind the headlines, what actually happens when people arrive in Australia without permission, whether by boat or by plane?

Read more:
Boat arrivals sent to Nauru, and Sovereign Borders commander warns against politicising the issue

What is Australia obligated to do?

Anyone who’s not an Australian citizen is required to have authorisation in the form of a visa to enter and remain in the country.

What Australia can do to deal with unauthorised arrivals is limited by its international treaty obligations. The United Nations Refugee Convention and Protocol oblige Australia to refrain from sending “refugees” (as defined in those treaties) to places where they will face a real chance of persecution.

Under other treaties to which it is a party, Australia is also obliged to refrain from sending anyone, not just refugees, to places where they will face a real risk of certain serious human rights violations.

These treaty obligations are referred to as “non-refoulement” or protection obligations. People who claim the benefit of such protection obligations are called asylum seekers.

What happens to asylum seekers when they arrive?

The processes for people arriving by boat or plane have similarities, but are slightly different.

Australian policy is for unauthorised air arrivals to be given a screening interview to ascertain whether they could be entitled to Australia’s protection under international law. If not, they are returned to their most recent country of departure. Those who are found to have a possible case are given access to the protection visa application process.

The protection visa is Australia’s main domestic mechanism for implementing its international protection obligations. People who initially entered Australia on a valid visa can also apply for a protection visa. Most applicants fall into this group.

Read more:
Who counts as a refugee? Four questions to understand current migration debates

Australia imposes penalties on airlines that bring non-citizens without valid visas here. It also posts its officials at overseas airports to help airlines identify people without visas so they can be refused boarding. As a result, there are very few unauthorised air arrivals to Australia.

Like people who come by plane, unauthorised maritime arrivals go through a screening process.

Those who are deemed not to be asylum seekers are returned to their most recent country of departure. This is usually, but not always, Indonesia.

Unless the responsible minister grants an exemption, unauthorised maritime arrivals who are found to have a possible asylum claim must be transferred to a regional processing country to have their asylum claims determined there.

How has regional processing worked?

Regional processing has a complicated history.

In late 2001, the Coalition government under John Howard entered arrangements with Nauru and Papua New Guinea (PNG) to take unauthorised maritime arrivals to those countries to process their asylum claims. Those arrangements were ended by Labor shortly after it won government in November 2007.

However, a resurgence of unauthorised maritime arrivals led the Gillard Labor government to enter a new set of arrangements with Nauru and PNG in late 2012. These allowed Australia to transfer unauthorised maritime arrivals to processing centres in those countries to have their asylum claims considered by their governments.

The 2012 arrangements left open the possibility that transferees who were found to be refugees might be resettled in Australia. However, when boats kept arriving, the Rudd Labor government decided to get even tougher. In 2013, it announced future unauthorised maritime arrivals would never be resettled in Australia.

After its election in September 2013, the Coalition government implemented Operation Sovereign Borders, which has been continued by the current Labor government. Many activities come under the Operation Sovereign Borders banner, including the interception of unauthorised maritime arrivals at sea by the Australian navy. Regional processing is now also characterised as being part of the program.

The regional processing arrangement with PNG ceased at the end of 2021. As of November 16 2023, there were still 64 transferees remaining in PNG. However, the Australian government’s position is that responsibility for these people lies entirely with PNG and not with Australia.

Nauru is still a regional processing country but under a new agreement. At the time it was signed in late 2021, there hadn’t been any transfers for years. However, it was considered important to maintain an “enduring regional processing capacity” on Nauru as a deterrent to people smugglers.

As previously, the Nauruan government is responsible for processing the asylum claims of transferees and managing them until they depart Nauru or are permanently settled there. However, Australia has contracted and is paying the processing centre’s service providers.

On June 25 2023, it was reported there were no transferees remaining in Nauru. This did not mean that a durable solution had been found for everyone who had been transferred to Nauru up until that time. While some people had been resettled in third countries, others had simply been brought to Australia with the legal status of “transitory persons”. This status prevents them from applying for a visa to remain in Australia unless granted ministerial permission to do so.

Australia’s options for resettling this cohort are limited. It has at its disposal the remainder of 1,250 refugee places promised by the United States in November 2016 and 450 refugee places over three years promised by New Zealand in 2022. Even if all these places are used, hundreds of people will remain in limbo.

What happens to last week’s arrivals?

Since Operation Sovereign Borders began, boats have either been intercepted at sea or have managed to make landfall in Australia every year except 2021.

However, between the start of Operation Sovereign Borders and the end of August 2023, only two out of the 1,123 boat passengers involved to that point had ever been accepted for regional processing. Both cases were in 2014.

This statistic raised serious concerns about the reliability of the screening process as the people screened included many from known refugee producing countries.

Given this history, it was a little surprising when the Australian government transferred 11 unauthorised maritime arrivals to Nauru in September 2023. A further 12 were transferred to Nauru in November 2023. The 39 people found in Western Australia have just been transferred there too.

Read more:
Aus-NZ refugee deal is a bandage on a failed policy. It’s time to end offshore processing

It seems the screening process has been abandoned or has been vastly improved. While the most reliable way for Australia to meet its international protection obligations would be to give all unauthorised maritime arrivals access to its protection visa application process, giving them all access to regional processing is certainly better than sending them back to their country of departure.

However, resettlement in Nauru of those found to be refugees is not realistic. The country, which has a population of approximately 13,000 people, is only 2,200 hectares in land area. To put this in context, Melbourne airport is larger than Nauru.

There is no reason to believe it will be any easier to find third country resettlement for transferees in the future than it has been up to now. For most, the only way out of limbo will be to return home, as eight of those transferred to Nauru in September have already done. Regional processing continues to be a policy failure for which vulnerable people will pay the price.

Savitri Taylor has received funding from the Australian Research Council in the past. She is a member of the Committee of Management of Refugee Legal and a member of the Kim for Canberra party. Views expressed in this article are her own and not attributable to any organisations with she is associated.

– ref. By boat or by plane? If you’re seeking asylum in Australia, the outcome is similarly bleak – https://theconversation.com/by-boat-or-by-plane-if-youre-seeking-asylum-in-australia-the-outcome-is-similarly-bleak-223957

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon McKenzie, Lecturer in Law, Griffith University

The Australian Navy is set to be transformed. On top of existing plans for nuclear submarines, the government yesterday announced a scheme for an “enhanced lethality surface combatant fleet” including six new “optionally crewed” vessels.

The advantages of these vessels, which can operate with or without a crew, are clear. They can operate for longer, with more stealth, and allow military personnel to avoid hostile environments.

Simple remote-controlled craft have been used since at least the 1920s, but increasingly sophisticated uncrewed vessels are becoming more common. Ukraine has used small uncrewed boats against Russian targets in the Black Sea, the United States plans to build a swarm of sea drones to protect Taiwan, and China is developing its own devices.

However, it is so far unclear how these vessels fit within existing international law. Unless their legal status becomes more clear, it may increase the risk of conflict with potentially serious consequences.

What’s the problem with uncrewed vehicles?

The key international treaty regulating the ocean – the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea – was negotiated in the 1970s and early 1980s, well before uncrewed vessels of the kind we see today were a realistic concern.

The convention balances the rights of coastal states with those of maritime powers by dividing the ocean into different zones, with different rules about what states can do in each zone. It’s a complicated system, but in general, states have more control over the use of the ocean closer to their own coasts.

Read more:
Ukraine: how uncrewed boats are changing the way wars are fought at sea

Under the convention, foreign ships and vessels in waters close to the coasts of other states have certain navigational rights. These rights establish where ships can go in the ocean and what they can do when they are there.

Naval vessels also rely on these navigational rights to operate. In particular, where crucial sea lanes are very close to the coast – such as in the Malacca Strait between Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia – ships or other vessels without navigational rights may not have a firm legal footing for passing through.

And in a crisis, it may not be feasible to avoid such waters by finding another route. If states had different views about what actions were permissible, it would increase the risk of conflict.

What counts as a ‘ship’?

So what does all this have to do with Australia’s “optionally crewed systems”?

The first problem is that the convention on the law of the sea gives navigational rights to “ships” and “vessels” without defining what they mean. There is an ongoing debate about whether these categories include uncrewed devices, or whether having people on board is required to qualify for navigational rights.

In my view, the more convincing argument is that uncrewed vessels like the ones Australia plans to purchase should count as ships and vessels.

The convention is designed to be the “constitution of the ocean”, with a very broad scope. This suggests we should also take a broad idea of what counts as a ship or vessel.

What counts as a ‘warship’?

However, uncrewed devices may face a more significant problem: can they be “warships”? This is a special legal category for vessels with the right to engage in belligerent activities – that is, engage in warfare and naval blockades.

Again, it is the lack of people on board that may cause issues. Unlike “ship” and “vessel”, the term “warship” is explicitly defined in the convention.

According to Article 29 of the convention, warships must be, among other things, under the command of a commissioned officer and manned by a crew under armed forces discipline. A plain reading of these requirements suggests that a vessel without people on board cannot be a warship and must stay out of conflict.

Read more:
The government has unveiled its Navy of the future. Will it solve our current problems – or just create new ones?

However, the reason “warship” is defined this way goes back to the 19th century, when states wanted to distinguish their own “warships” from the vessels of privateers. This is why the definition refers to the vessel being under command and with a crew that is part of the armed forces.

The point of the definition is to ensure the warship is controlled by a state. We should understand it as part of the effort by states to keep control of legally authorised violence, not an attempt to restrict certain rights to vessels with crews.

The future of uncrewed vessels and the law

How will this legal dilemma be resolved? The neatest solution – a revision to the convention to clarify the situation – is unlikely, because the political prospects of getting all 169 signatory states to agree to such a change are remote.

The stakes are high. The use of uncrewed vessels may plausibly lead to increased risk taking by states. It is easier to imagine the US sending a fleet of uncrewed vessels in a freedom of navigation operation close to the Chinese coast than risking a crewed fleet.

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What can states do to reduce the risk of miscalculation and conflict?

States like Australia that plan to adopt this technology should look to develop international law in other ways. They can do this by putting their views about what uncrewed vessels are permitted to do on the record.

In doing so, they will contribute to the development of customary international law. Making Australia’s position on these devices more transparent will help create a legal regime that can cope with technological change.

Simon McKenzie has received funding from the Australian Government’s Next Generation Technologies Fund through Trusted Autonomous Systems, a Defence Cooperative Research Centre.

– ref. Australia wants navy boats with lots of weapons, but no crew. Will they run afoul of international law? – https://theconversation.com/australia-wants-navy-boats-with-lots-of-weapons-but-no-crew-will-they-run-afoul-of-international-law-223980

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Iris Lim, Assistant Professor, Bond University

Dealing with chronic urinary tract infections (UTIs) means facing more than the occasional discomfort. It’s like being on a never ending battlefield against an unseen adversary, making simple daily activities a trial.

UTIs happen when bacteria sneak into the urinary system, causing pain and frequent trips to the bathroom.

Chronic UTIs take this to the next level, coming back repeatedly or never fully going away despite treatment. Chronic UTIs are typically diagnosed when a person experiences two or more infections within six months or three or more within a year.

They can happen to anyone, but some are more prone due to their body’s makeup or habits. Women are more likely to get UTIs than men, due to their shorter urethra and hormonal changes during menopause that can decrease the protective lining of the urinary tract. Sexually active people are also at greater risk, as bacteria can be transferred around the area.

Up to 60% of women will have at least one UTI in their lifetime. While effective treatments exist, about 25% of women face recurrent infections within six months. Around 20–30% of UTIs don’t respond to standard antibiotic. The challenge of chronic UTIs lies in bacteria’s ability to shield themselves against treatments.

Why are chronic UTIs so hard to treat?

Once thought of as straightforward infections cured by antibiotics, we now know chronic UTIs are complex. The cunning nature of the bacteria responsible for the condition allows them to hide in bladder walls, out of antibiotics’ reach.

The bacteria form biofilms, a kind of protective barrier that makes them nearly impervious to standard antibiotic treatments.

This ability to evade treatment has led to a troubling increase in antibiotic resistance, a global health concern that renders some of the conventional treatments ineffective.

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Antibiotics need to be advanced to keep up with evolving bacteria, in a similar way to the flu vaccine, which is updated annually to combat the latest strains of the flu virus. If we used the same flu vaccine year after year, its effectiveness would wane, just as overused antibiotics lose their power against bacteria that have adapted.

But fighting bacteria that resist antibiotics is much tougher than updating the flu vaccine. Bacteria change in ways that are harder to predict, making it more challenging to create new, effective antibiotics. It’s like a never-ending game where the bacteria are always one step ahead.

Treating chronic UTIs still relies heavily on antibiotics, but doctors are getting crafty, changing up medications or prescribing low doses over a longer time to outwit the bacteria.

Doctors are also placing a greater emphasis on thorough diagnostics to accurately identify chronic UTIs from the outset. By asking detailed questions about the duration and frequency of symptoms, health-care providers can better distinguish between isolated UTI episodes and chronic conditions.

The approach to initial treatment can significantly influence the likelihood of a UTI becoming chronic. Early, targeted therapy, based on the specific bacteria causing the infection and its antibiotic sensitivity, may reduce the risk of recurrence.

For post-menopausal women, estrogen therapy has shown promise in reducing the risk of recurrent UTIs. After menopause, the decrease in estrogen levels can lead to changes in the urinary tract that makes it more susceptible to infections. This treatment restores the balance of the vaginal and urinary tract environments, making it less likely for UTIs to occur.

Lifestyle changes, such as drinking more water and practising good hygiene like washing hands with soap after going to the toilet and the recommended front-to-back wiping for women, also play a big role.

Some swear by cranberry juice or supplements, though researchers are still figuring out how effective these remedies truly are.

Read more:
Cranberry juice can prevent recurrent UTIs, but only for some people

What treatments might we see in the future?

Scientists are currently working on new treatments for chronic UTIs. One promising avenue is the development of vaccines aimed at preventing UTIs altogether, much like flu shots prepare our immune system to fend off the flu.

Another new method being looked at is called phage therapy. It uses special viruses called bacteriophages that go after and kill only the bad bacteria causing UTIs, while leaving the good bacteria in our body alone. This way, it doesn’t make the bacteria resistant to treatment, which is a big plus.

Researchers are also exploring the potential of probiotics. Probiotics introduce beneficial bacteria into the urinary tract to out-compete harmful pathogens. These good bacteria work by occupying space and resources in the urinary tract, making it harder for harmful pathogens to establish themselves.

Probiotics can also produce substances that inhibit the growth of harmful bacteria and enhance the body’s immune response.

Chronic UTIs represent a stubborn challenge, but with a mix of current treatments and promising research, we’re getting closer to a day when chronic UTIs are a thing of the past.

Read more:
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Iris Lim 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 do I keep getting urinary tract infections? And why are chronic UTIs so hard to treat? – https://theconversation.com/why-do-i-keep-getting-urinary-tract-infections-and-why-are-chronic-utis-so-hard-to-treat-223008

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chien Ju Ting, Research Fellow, Auckland University of Technology

There has been a global push to revitalise Indigenous languages since the late 1980s.

Aotearoa New Zealand has been at the forefront of revitalisation efforts, earning the admiration of campaigners in other countries, including Taiwan.

Te reo Māori became an official language in 1987. Immersion education is an option for students alongside dedicated Māori news media. Te reo Māori is also increasingly used in mainstream schools, universities and public life.

But the work is not finished. Academics and campaigners have expressed concerns te reo Māori could still go extinct by 2100. And the current government has made moves to discourage the use of te reo Māori in official spheres.

New Zealand can learn from the successes and difficulties of countries like Taiwan. The colonial language (Mandarin Chinese) has had dominance in Taiwan for generations, despite efforts to save threatened Indigenous languages, cultures and identities.

The answer for Taiwan – and New Zealand – may lie in supporting the work of grassroots campaigners instead of relying on the government.

The colonisation of Taiwan

Taiwan has 16 Indigenous groups – making up around 2% of the island’s 23.5 million population. Each group has its own unique language and culture. These languages are believed to be the root of the Austronesian language family, encompassing te reo Māori, Hawaiian and several Pacific languages.

The island of Taiwan was governed by mainland China for hundreds of years before being ruled by Japan between the late 19th century and the end of the second world war.

Read more:
Reviving Indigenous languages – not as easy as it seems

Taiwan became the home of the Kuomintang (KMT) – the Chinese Nationalist government – after the faction lost China’s civil war in 1949. The KMT implemented martial law and a Chinese-only language policy. It had a significant impact on the survival of Indigenous languages.

This policy disrupted the sharing of these languages within families, leading to their rapid decline. Mandarin Chinese became the dominant language for communication in all social domains.

While Taiwan was presented to the world as the “democratic China”, there was no democratically elected president until 1996. The election of President Lee Teng-hui marked the start of the “Taiwanisation” movement.

In 2016, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen issued a formal apology to the Indigenous peoples on behalf of the government for “four centuries of pain and mistreatment … indigenous peoples’ languages suffered great losses” .

The revitalisation of Taiwan’s languages

While Indigenous peoples welcomed the gesture, the effectiveness of government measures to revitalise Taiwan’s original tongues remains in question.

Taiwan has introduced a series of policies dedicated to bolstering the revitalisation of Indigenous languages. These efforts started with the Education Act for Indigenous Peoples in 1988 and culminated in the most recent Development of National Languages Act in 2019.

These laws look good on paper and reflect the government’s inclusion of Indigenous peoples as a key part of national Taiwanese identity.

However, linguistic analysis of the policies show that ideologically they act to say “we are not China” rather than creating a positive, long-term framework for language revitalisation. The Education Act, for example, introduced “mother-tongue” classes (classes to teach one of the Indigenous languages).

But these classes are plagued by the question: whose mother tongue gets taught?

Read more:
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By the time these classes were introduced, the vast majority of Indigenous families were speaking Mandarin Chinese in the home, the single most important domain for inter-generational transmission of language.

Even with the Indigenous Language Development Act in 2017, Indigenous languages continue to decline. A 2010 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) report identified six of Taiwan’s Indigenous languages as “critically endangered” and others as “rapidly in decline”.

Very few Taiwanese can claim fluency in any of the Indigenous languages, particularly those with a limited number of speakers, such as Kavalan.

Research shows the usual problems of not enough teachers and materials are a smokescreen. The real problem is the pervasive use of Mandarin Chinese in all facets of Taiwanese life and the failure of “mother-tongue classes” to provide any sort of fluency.

Reclaiming indigeneity

What can Aotearoa New Zealand learn from Taiwan’s experience?

Firstly, it is clear policies might just be words if the government isn’t honest about its intentions. One study found that while the policies are technically for language revitalisation, they are really about enhancing Taiwan’s international reputation and avoiding direct opposition to the one-China ideology.

Additionally, it’s not simple for many Taiwanese Indigenous people to “decolonise” because their families and histories are deeply connected to Taiwan’s past. There’s been intermarriage, urbanisation, relocation and even coercion.

Read more:
Explainer: what is decolonisation?

But what Indigenous communities can do is “recolonise indigeneity” by establishing grassroot language revitalisation efforts, continuing Indigenous journalism and television productions and creating Indigenous art and creative spaces.

Indigenous communities also need to be part of policy-making and participants in all political and cultural domains.

Undoubtedly, Indigenous people and their language contribute to national identities. Taiwanese Indigenous people aren’t Chinese, but the question arises – are they Taiwanese? What matters most to them is being recognised as “Indigenous Taiwanese”, standing alongside their non-Indigenous counterparts.

Chien Ju Ting 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. Taiwan’s Indigenous languages are under threat – what can NZ learn from their successes and failures? – https://theconversation.com/taiwans-indigenous-languages-are-under-threat-what-can-nz-learn-from-their-successes-and-failures-222485

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mike Johnstone, Security Researcher, Associate Professor in Resilient Systems, Edith Cowan University

Not a day goes by without a headline about a victim being scammed and losing money. We are constantly warned about new scams and staying safe from cybercriminals. Scamwatch has no shortage of resources, too.

So why are people still getting scammed, and sometimes spectacularly so?

Scammers use sophisticated psychological techniques. They exploit our deepest human vulnerabilities and bypass rational thought to tap into our emotional responses.

This “psychological warfare” coerces victims into making impulsive decisions. Sometimes scammers spread their methods around many potential victims to see who is vulnerable. Other times, criminals focus on a specific person.

Let’s unpack some of these psychological techniques, and how you can defend against them.

1. Random phone calls

Scammers start with small requests to establish a sense of commitment. After agreeing to these minor requests, we are more likely to comply with larger demands, driven by a desire to act consistently.

The call won’t come from a number in your contacts or one you recognise, but the scammer may pretend to be someone you’ve engaged to work on your house, or perhaps one of your children using a friend’s phone to call you.

If it is a scammer, maybe keeping you on the phone for a long time gives them an opportunity to find out things about you or people you know. They can use this info either immediately or at a later date.

Read more:
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2. Creating a sense of urgency

Scammers fabricate scenarios that require immediate action, like claiming a bank account is at risk of closure or an offer is about to expire. This tactic aims to prevent victims from assessing the situation logically or seeking advice, pressuring them into rushed decisions.

The scammer creates an artificial situation in which you are frightened into doing something you wouldn’t ordinarily do. Scam calls alleging to be from the Australian Tax Office (ATO) are a great example. You have a debt to pay (apparently) and things will go badly if you don’t pay right now.

Scammers play on your emotions to provoke reactions that cloud judgement. They may threaten legal trouble to instil fear, promise high investment returns to exploit greed, or share fabricated distressing stories to elicit sympathy and financial assistance.

Read more:
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3. Building rapport with casual talk

Through extended conversation, scammers build a psychological commitment to their scheme. No one gets very far by just demanding your password, but it’s natural to be friendly with people who are friendly towards us.

After staying on the line for long periods of time, the victim also becomes cognitively fatigued. This not only makes the victim more open to suggestions, but also isolates them from friends or family who might recognise and counteract the scam.

4. Help me to help you

In this case, the scammer creates a situation where they help you to solve a real or imaginary problem (that they actually created). They work their “IT magic” and the problem goes away.

Later, they ask you for something you wouldn’t normally do, and you do it because of the “social debt”: they helped you first.

For example, a hacker might attack a corporate network, causing it to slow down. Then they call you, pretending to be from your organisation, perhaps as a recent hire not yet on the company’s contact list. They “help” you by turning off the attack, leaving you suitably grateful.

Perhaps a week later, they call again and ask for sensitive information, such as the CEO’s password. You know company policy is to not divulge it, but the scammer will ask if you remember them (of course you do) and come up with an excuse for why they really need this password.

The balance of the social debt says you will help them.

5. Appealing to authority

By posing as line managers, officials from government agencies, banks, or other authoritative bodies, scammers exploit our natural tendency to obey authority.

Such scams operate at varying levels of sophistication. The simple version: your manager messages you with an urgent request to purchase some gift cards and send through their numbers.

The complex version: your manager calls and asks to urgently transfer a large sum of money to an account you don’t recognise. You do this because it sounds exactly like your manager on the phone – but the scammer is using a voice deepfake. In a recent major case in Hong Kong, such a scam even involved a deepfake video call.

This is deeply challenging because artificial intelligence tools, such as Microsoft’s VALL-E, can create a voice deepfake using just three seconds of sampled audio from a real person.

Read more:
Voice deepfakes are calling – here’s what they are and how to avoid getting scammed

How can you defend against a scam?

First and foremost, verify identity. Find another way to contact the person to verify who they are. For example, you can call a generic number for the business and ask to be connected.

In the face of rampant voice deepfakes, it can be helpful to agree on a “safe word” with your family members. If they call from an unrecognised number and you don’t hear the safe word just hang up.

Watch out for pressure tactics. If the conversation is moving too fast, remember that someone else’s problem is not yours to solve. Stop and run the problem past a colleague or family member for a sanity check. A legitimate business will have no problem with you doing this.

Lastly, if you are not sure about even the slightest detail, the simplest thing is to hang up or not respond. If you really owe a tax debt, the ATO will write to you.

Mike Johnstone received funding from the EU for a project on authentication and authorisation and from the Australian Government for a project on Forensic Identification of Deep Fakes.

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

– ref. What ‘psychological warfare’ tactics do scammers use, and how can you protect yourself? – https://theconversation.com/what-psychological-warfare-tactics-do-scammers-use-and-how-can-you-protect-yourself-223959

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stuart Richards, Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies, University of South Australia

This review contains mentions of suicide.

What does it mean to be alone? Who do you live for when it seems like you have no one? These are some of the big questions asked in The Rooster, a deceptively simple film from Mark Leonard Winter.

Before opening in cinemas this week, the film played at major film festivals in Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane in 2023 and Hugo Weaving recently won the best supporting AACTA for his performance as the hermit.

Winter’s feature directorial debut, The Rooster is a study of fragile, lonely masculinity.

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Guilt and devastation

Dan (Phoenix Raei) is a lonely country copper, whose morning routine is spent feeding his angry rooster. The film opens in a disorienting fashion that indicates Dan’s own fragile mental state. Before any image is shown, the crackle of Dan’s radio is interspersed with the evening crickets. “Hello? Can you hear me? I am not sure what to do,” Dan speaks into his radio. “Can you repeat that please? I don’t understand. I don’t know what to do.”

The first image we see is of a hanged body swinging in the wind lit by the car’s lights. Dan, in his car, is visible only by his red and blue lights. Suddenly, he looks up. We see a naked woman walking towards the car holding his rooster. Dan wakes up in a fright.

These opening images pose questions of Dan’s mental state for the audience. Who is this woman? Who is the hanged person?

The following day, Dan fails to follow police procedure when dealing with an incident. His childhood friend, Steve (Rhys Mitchell), is caught naked while spying on a girl’s netball team. The day after this, Steve is found dead in a shallow grave. While it is clear he committed suicide, this doesn’t explain the shallow grave. Dan’s superior (John Hughes) blames Dan for Steve’s death, as he failed to alert anyone over Steve’s risk for self-harm.

To make matters worse, Dan also discovers his much-loved rooster killed by a fox. Forced to take time off from work to process his guilt and devastation over Steve’s death, Dan retreats to the bush where Steve was found in search for answers.

How to cope with loss

Dan’s struggle to cope with this loss is depicted through the repeated nightmarish scenes of the bush, Steve clucking like a chicken and the naked woman holding his rooster.

While stumbling through the bush – its haunting beauty captured wonderfully by Craig Barden’s cinematography – Dan finds the hermit’s hut and spies the man having a bath through the window. The hermit initially threatens Dan and tries to drive him off. Dan, however, offers him a drink, which allows the two to have a conversation.

This informal tete-a-tete leads Dan to learn that the hermit was most likely the last person to see Steve alive.

In order to learn more about the hermit’s role in Steve’s death, the two must bond. Dan is introspective and shy; the hermit is prone to violent, angry outbursts. The two men drink heavily, play ping pong – sometimes naked – and help each other process their own hurt.

The film’s narrative is not driven by the investigation into Steve’s death. Rather, it is about two men learning how to cope with the loss in their lives. Through this friendship, both men learn how to share what has led them to being so isolated.

The Rooster is inconsistent in tone. Up until the moment where the two men meet, the film is slow and disorienting. Once the hermit confronts Dan for spying on him, the film kicks into gear, and the chemistry between the two men is the energy the film needs to progress.

For the most part, however, the balance of comedy and drama works. A heavy conversation about suicide quickly shifts, assisted by the two very different performances from Raei and Weaving.

“I can’t see myself in the future,” Dan says. “Your daughter, she’ll remember you. But when I’m gone, I’ll just be gone.”

“You won’t be gone,” the hermit replies. “You’ll be a fucking tree”.

This conversation on life’s failures and “ending things” quickly shifts into the hermit helping Dan release his feelings by crowing loudly like a rooster. A heavy conversation easily shifts into an absurd one.

The dynamics between both characters allows Raei and Weaving to excel in their performances. Winter primarily worked as an actor before this film, and this experience is evident in the space given to the two lead performers here, giving them extended moments to let their characters breathe. Capturing minute shifts in expression are key to Winter’s skill as a director.

The Rooster may be a small character study of two fragile men, but it’s a powerful examination of isolation and moving on.

The Rooster is in Australian cinemas from tomorrow.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

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

– ref. A small film asking big questions: The Rooster is a study of fragile, lonely masculinity – https://theconversation.com/a-small-film-asking-big-questions-the-rooster-is-a-study-of-fragile-lonely-masculinity-222754

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Sussex, Associate Professor (Adj), Griffith Asia Institute; and Fellow, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU, Australian National University

Two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, Ukraine’s resistance remains remarkable. Confident initial predictions of a swift Russian triumph were repeatedly proven wrong. Instead, Russia’s military was beset by poor logistics, corruption, a sclerotic command structure and an inability to counter Ukrainian tactics.

Kyiv’s armed forces successfully prevented a rash Russian attempt to seize the Ukrainian capital and then stopped the entire Russian advance. After six months, they began turning the Russian invaders back, recapturing swathes of territory around Kharkov in the north and Kherson in the south.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was feted by Western leaders, parlaying his personal popularity into commitments of military aid and insisting Ukraine could prevail with a more sophisticated arsenal.

Yet for all these early successes, the war soon devolved into repeated human waves of attacks by Russian conscripts against well-defended Ukrainian positions. The slow drip-feed of Western weapons forced Kyiv to significantly delay its 2023 counteroffensive. This gave Russia’s armed forces time to design deep and elaborate defensive fortifications, minefields and tank traps.

Indeed, thanks largely to Russian efforts, Ukraine is now the most heavily mined country in the world.

Once Ukraine’s counteroffensive commenced, its forces made little headway and took heavy losses, especially given the lack of air support.

Facing personnel and equipment shortages, Zelensky dramatically fired his military chief, Valerii Zaluzhny, earlier this month, opting for a new strategy that seeks to build Ukrainian strength while blocking further Russian advances.

Russia: weakened, but determined

After being humiliated by failing to immediately achieve the objectives of its “special military operation” in early 2022, the Kremlin attempted to cow an obstinately united West through bluff and bluster, while bludgeoning Ukrainian cities and military positions.

It repeatedly rattled nuclear sabres, mobilised isolationist and far-right groups throughout Europe and warned of a looming world war. President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric bordered on unhinged, punctuated by rants about the moral decrepitude of “Satanic” Western culture that only Russian traditional values could resist.

Tellingly, in a rare moment of honesty, Putin also admitted the obvious: invading Ukraine was about restoring what he saw as Russia’s “historic lands”.

While mobilising hundreds of thousands of men for sacrifice in the Ukrainian meat-grinder, the Kremlin sought to project an image of a society overseen by a stable, albeit xenophobic troika. Putin was the wise tsar, the Orthodox Church was the steward of Russia’s conservative soul and the military served as Russia’s armoured bulwark.

With no good news to report, Kremlin propagandists created a bizarre narrative in which Russia was defending itself against NATO aggression, liberally labelling Russia’s opponents as “Nazis”.

But this failed to mask the reality that Russia itself was increasingly becoming Nazified, as its hyper-nationalist “Z” movement made clear. So, too, did repeated genocidal and antisemitic language:

• Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s crude observation that both Adolf Hitler and Zelensky had Jewish blood

• comparisons between Ukrainians and vermin

• and overt calls by Kremlin-sponsored propagandists for a “solution of the Ukrainian question”.

Simultaneously, Russia’s draconian crackdown on internal dissent resulted in lengthy jail terms for anyone found guilty of criticising the war or army.

Russia’s failures also brought the audacious revolt in June 2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, and one of Putin’s closest confidantes. And despite Prigozhin’s subsequently convenient death, the fact he had managed to march largely unchallenged through Russia until voluntarily stopping 200 kilometres from Moscow made Putin look considerably weakened.

However, with the start of 2024, Russia’s forces have started pressing again on the battlefield, making small territorial gains.

A recent report puts the current number of Russian military personnel in Ukraine at 470,000. And although it is believed to have lost a staggering 8,800 armoured fighting vehicles and some 315,000 dead and wounded – fully 90% of the forces it began the war with – the Russian armed forces have finally begun to adapt.

What will the coming year bring?

How the war unfolds in 2024 will have momentous implications for the world – a fact not receiving near enough attention in Western media coverage.

It will determine whether Ukraine is able to retain its territory and begin the painful rebuilding process.

It will be decisive for Putin’s wager that conquest comes without consequences, perhaps emboldening him to sets his sights on other states on its periphery.

It will confirm whether Europe can remain stabilised, secure and united, and whether America will continue to be seen as a reliable ally.

For the Kremlin, the key question is whether it can keep domestic discontent muted long enough for the West to lose interest in the war and withdraw its support for Ukraine. It is unlikely to run out of weapons, having massively ramped up domestic production of armaments and sourcing drones and ammunition from a rogues’ gallery of pariahs: Iran and North Korea.

Ukraine, which is fighting for national survival, faces a tougher and grimmer 2024. It will need to continue absorbing relentless Russian attacks, keep its economy afloat and rebuild its military strength for yet another attempt to evict Russia’s forces.

Zelensky’s famous “I need ammunition, not a ride” response to a US offer to evacuate him in 2022 holds just as true two years later. Without a constant stream of military aid, Ukrainian resistance will be very hard to sustain.

Read more:
Ukraine war: the west is at a crossroads – double down on aid to Kyiv, accept a compromise deal, or face humiliation by Russia

Aid from Ukraine’s most crucial supporter, the United States, has been stymied by the extreme right wing of the Republican Party. This is causing ammunition shortages that are already being measured in Ukrainian lives and territory.

But a far greater threat lies on the horizon, in the real prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency. Putin is well aware Trump will give him a free hand in Ukraine and probably beyond it, too.

Accordingly, he is investing significant efforts to back his candidacy. The extraordinary spectacle of Putin – the leader of a hostile foreign power – using an “interview” with ex-Fox News personality Tucker Carlson to rally the Trump base was a keen indicator of that.

Europe is finally beginning to wake up to the reality a Trump-led US could abandon NATO, in addition to Ukraine. But whether European nations are able to overcome their institutional inertia and webs of entangled interests to stoutly resist Russia on their own remains an open question.

It’s an old adage, but wars are world-shaping. Their outcomes are far-reaching: redrawing maps, establishing new fault lines, and ushering in the birth and death of nations.

Russia’s war against Ukraine is proving to be no different.

Matthew Sussex has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Fulbright Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Lowy Institute and various Australian government departments and agencies.

– ref. Why 2024 could be a grim year for Ukraine – with momentous implications for the world – https://theconversation.com/why-2024-could-be-a-grim-year-for-ukraine-with-momentous-implications-for-the-world-223096

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Rozefelds, Adjunct Assoc Professor Central Queensland University and Principal Curator Geosciences Queensland Museum, CQUniversity Australia

The Australian continent is now geologically stable. But volcanic rocks, lava flows and a contemporary landscape dotted with extinct volcanoes show this wasn’t always the case.

Between 40 and 20 million years ago – during the Eocene to Miocene epochs – there was widespread volcano activity across eastern Australia. In places such as western Victoria and the Atherton Tablelands in Queensland, it was even more recent.

Erupting volcanoes can have devastating consequences for human settlements, as we know from Pompeii in Italy, which was buried by ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. But ash falls and lava flows can also entomb entire forests, or at least many of the plants within them.

Our studies of these rare and unique plant time capsules are revealing exquisitely preserved fossil floras and new insights into Australia’s botanical history. This new work is published in the journal Gondwana Research.

Remarkable preservation

The most common volcanic rocks are basalts. The rich red soils derived from them are among the most fertile in Australia.

But the rocks in which fossils occur are buried under basalts or other volcanic rock, and are called silcretes – the name indicates their origins are from silica-rich groundwaters. Silica is the major constituent of sand, and familiar to most of us as quartz.

What makes the silcrete plant fossils so fascinating is the superfine preservation of plant material. This includes fine roots and root nodules, uncurling fern fronds and their underground stems, the soft outer bark of wood, feeding traces and frass (powdery droppings) of insects, and even the delicate tissues and anatomy of fruits and seeds.

For this fine preservation to occur, first there needs to be a rapid burial, like that from a volcanic eruption. Then, there has to be an abundant source of silica — a condition met when the volcanic rocks began to weather.

The process where silica infills and preserves plant structures is referred to as “silicification” or “permineralisation”. When plant material is buried, it provides acidic conditions that are ideal for this to happen.

And the process need not take millions of years. Overseas studies of plants in hot springs or undertaken in the laboratory have shown that some types of silica will quickly infiltrate wood and plant tissues.

Why are these plant fossils significant?

Because of their rapid entombment by the volcanoes, we can be sure the plants were in situ (that is, their original location) and were actively growing. This means we can gain detailed information about the make-up of these past plant communities.

In other areas where plant fossils might accumulate – such as river deltas – we can never be sure how far the bits of plants were carried, and whether they were from different types of vegetation.

Silicification not only preserves plants, but also leaf litter on the forest floor and even the underlying soil containing roots and root nodules. The fossil plants that are preserved at different sites varies, indicating the presence of distinct plant communities.

The abundance of seeds and fruits at one site near Capella, in central Queensland, even indicated to us that the local volcanic eruptions are likely to have occurred in summer or early autumn during the fruiting season.

The extraordinary preservation of these fossils allows us to compare them with modern plants. In turn, this means we can accurately identify them.

The ferns include fronds and underground stems (rhizomes) of the familiar bracken fern (Pteridium). We have also found the distinctive seeds and lianas of the grape family (Vitaceae), along with evidence of insect damage in the wood. Two sites also had evidence of palms.

While there have been few previous studies on silcrete plants, we have revealed new insights into the history of the modern Australian flora.

Volcanoes shaped plant communities

Volcanic activity both destroys and modifies existing plant communities. It also provides new substrates for plants to colonise.

Several sites contained ferns – this may be because they are among the first living plants to colonise new volcanic terrains via their tiny wind-borne spores. For instance, it has been documented that bracken ferns were pioneer plants of the barren cone of the famous Krakatoa volcano after its eruption in 1883.

But the diversity of seeds and fruits at another site suggests that an existing forest was buried by volcanic activity.

Researchers have suggested that the key factors responsible for the evolution of the Australian fauna and flora during the Cenozoic period (the last 66 million years) were predominantly climate and environmental change. It happened, in part, due to the movement of the Australian continental plate northwards.

But the broad-scale volcano activity that occurred in eastern Australia during the Cenozoic has rarely been invoked as a key driver of such changes.

So remarkably preserved, the silcrete plant fossils are now providing startling new insights into the history of some groups of Australian plants and the vegetation types in which they grew.

The author would like to acknowledge co-author Raymond Carpenter from the University of Adelaide who contributed to this article.

Andrew Rozefelds receives funding from the Herman Slade Foundation and Churchill Trust, Australia.

– ref. A botanical Pompeii: we found spectacular Australian plant fossils from 30 million years ago – https://theconversation.com/a-botanical-pompeii-we-found-spectacular-australian-plant-fossils-from-30-million-years-ago-222512

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeremy Bird, Research Associate, Ecology and Biodiversity, University of Tasmania

One of the largest publicly funded conservation investments in history is starting to pay off on Macquarie Island, our newly published study shows.

Sealers and whalers introduced cats, rats, rabbits and other animals to the island in the 19th century. Their impacts devastated the millions of seabirds breeding on the island. Numbers fell to a fraction of their former populations.

From 2011-14, the last non-native pests were cleared from the island. It was the end of a deadly chapter in the island’s history during which two bird species, a rail and a parakeet, were lost from the planet forever.

We looked for signs of recovery in populations of petrels, a group of highly specialised seabirds. We found that species listed as threatened have recovered to the point where they can be delisted. There’s still a long way to go, though, before their populations return to historical levels.

Read more:
The good news: 25 Australian birds are now at less risk of extinction. The bad news: 29 are gone and 4 more might be

A highly threatened group of birds

Petrels can live for decades and spend most of their lives over the open oceans far from land. Some circumnavigate the Pacific each year.

Petrels return to land only to breed on remote islands that are naturally free of mammalian predators.

Under natural circumstances petrels can be enormously abundant. This means they play important roles in marine food webs. And, by transferring marine nutrients to breeding islands, they enrich whole island ecosystems.

Petrels usually come ashore only at night and nest in underground burrows to ward off predatory birds. However, these behaviours have been no defence against the cats and rats introduced to most of the world’s islands. As a result, petrels are among the world’s most threatened bird groups.

These habits make petrels extremely difficult to study, so good information is lacking. We used novel technologies and new analytical approaches to calculate the population and distribution of four species across Macquarie Island and to compare these with surveys from the 1970s.

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

What did the study find?

Antarctic prions (Pachyptila desolata) remain the most widespread and common of the four species. They survived on the barren, elevated interior of the island in areas relatively inhospitable to predators. There are about 160,000 breeding pairs today, increasing by around 1% each year.

In the 1970s, cats ate an estimated 11,000 white-headed petrels (Pterodroma lessonii) each year. Only 15% of nests were successfully fledging chicks. Today there are about 12,800 pairs with a breeding success rate of about 80%.

White-headed petrels’ range remains smaller than it was, and they were likely close to extinction before cats were eradicated in 2001. Listed as vulnerable in Tasmania, the population is growing by 1% a year and now warrants delisting.

Two species, grey petrel (Procellaria cinerea) and blue petrel (Halobaena caerulea), became extinct on the main island in the 1900s. Grey petrels disappeared altogether, while 500–600 pairs of blue petrels survived on a few coastal rock stacks. Both have now recolonised the main island.

Grey petrels still number only in the low hundreds and blue petrels in the thousands, but are increasing at more than 10% each year. Our data suggest blue petrels no longer qualify as a federally listed vulnerable species. Grey petrels will no longer qualify for listing as endangered in Tasmania if they increase at the same rate until 2026.

Read more:
Penguin paradise and geological freak: why Macquarie Island deserves a bigger marine park

Recovery has only just begun

It is testament to the hard work of all those involved in eradicating invasive species that these bird species are showing signs of recovery. Yet we found ourselves pondering what “recovery” really means.

We don’t know what Macquarie Island was like before humans first visited in 1810. To try to understand this, we identified suitable areas for recovering petrel populations by comparing with analogous islands with different invasive species histories.

The species we studied still occupy only a tiny fraction of the island. They were almost certainly many times more abundant historically. It will take decades for populations to fulfil their ecological roles again – if threats like climate change and avian influenza don’t halt their recovery.

Read more:
Avian influenza has killed millions of seabirds around the world: Antarctica could be next

A vision of an island of abundance reborn

This is our vision of Macquarie Island if these amazing birds make a full recovery.

Days before visitors first sight land, thousands of seabirds swirl around the ship at sea. The white undersides of blue petrels and prions outnumber the spindrift cresting each wave. Rather than ones or twos, there’s a constant stream of white-headed and soft-plumaged petrels.

On the island, all must tread carefully, sticking to managed paths to avoid collapsing burrows in the super-colonies that cover seaward-facing slopes. These areas, once denuded by rabbit grazing, have revegetated. A labyrinth of tunnels through the undergrowth blurs the lines between the surface and underground world.

In places the smell of ammonia is powerful. Even more pervasive is the warm, musty smell associated with petrel plumage.

By day, predatory skuas patrol the colonies, going from burrow entrance to entrance, as the occupants sit silently within. As the sun sinks, a scan from land with binoculars finds the petrels approaching en masse, loitering over coastal waters as they wait for the cover of darkness.

At dusk, black silhouettes swarm like flies up and down the coastal hills. Where once the night was silent save for the wind, the slopes are bubbling with the purr and chatter of blue petrels, the “kwick, kwick, kwick” calls of white-headed petrels and the mournful cries of soft-plumaged petrels. Once a forlorn few, the calls have become an excited cacophony.

Justine Shaw receives funding from the Australian Antarctic Science Program, the Australian Research Council and Department of Industry, Science and Resources, Australia. She is a member of the Commonwealth Government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee, and a director of the Landscape Recovery Foundation

Jeremy Bird and Richard Fuller 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. Ridding Macquarie Island of pests pays off as seabirds come back from the brink – but recovery has just begun – https://theconversation.com/ridding-macquarie-island-of-pests-pays-off-as-seabirds-come-back-from-the-brink-but-recovery-has-just-begun-221992

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Shortis, Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

It is possible, in politics as in life, for several things to be true at once.

It is true that Donald Trump and his plans for a second presidential administration represent an existential threat to American democracy.

It is true that a media imperative for “balance” in political reporting is further degenerating into a “both sides”, false balance framework that is distorting our sense of what is at stake in this presidential campaign.

It is true that hether we think it fair or not, Biden’s age is going to frame coverage of the election. Just this week, for example, the New York Times ran a story with the headline “Which Is Worse: Biden’s Age or Trump Handing NATO to Putin?”.

As others have pointed out, this kind of narrative approach is calcifying. It does not seem to matter, for example, that in his incendiary comments about Biden’s age, special counsel Robert Hur took grossly inappropriate liberties in editorialising. It would not matter if Biden did not make another slip for the entire campaign (which, given what we know about the president, seems unlikely), and it does not matter that these slips may not have anything to do with advancing age.

It is also true that Biden is too old. At 81, he is already too old now, and if he does see out a second term, he will be 86. In the end, that may not affect the outcome of the election – in 2020 and 2022, American voters demonstrated that they saw Trump’s politics as a far greater threat to American democracy, stability and prosperity than Biden’s age.

But that does not change the fact that he is too old. As Fintan O’Toole recently argued,

Biden, fairly or otherwise, is the lightning rod for deep generational discontents and widespread unhappiness at the persistence of an American gerontocracy.

So why, given all these truths, is Biden still – barring any significant changes in the status quo – all but guaranteed the Democratic nomination?

The ‘veep’ problem

In as much as there are any “lessons” from American history, it is generally true that if a president is not running, the vice president gets the first shot at the job. Vice President Harry Truman, for example, succeeded President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and went on to win the 1964 election. Moving closer to the present, examples include Vice President George H.W. Bush’s successful run after President Ronald Reagan’s history-shaping two terms, or Vice President Al Gore’s nomination after he served twice under President Bill Clinton.

The point is, the vice presidency exists precisely for this reason – the VP is second in line for the presidency and so presumably the best choice for leadership after the president. If the president can not or will not run, the VP is all but assured the nomination.

When then-presidential candidate Joe Biden announced Kamala Harris would be his vice-presidential running mate in 2020, he said:

Kamala Harris is the best person to help me take this fight to Trump […] then to lead this nation.

After a hard-fought nomination contest, Biden chose Harris, 20 years his junior and a woman of colour, very much in the context of his commitment to act as a generational “bridge” for the Democratic Party.

In her position as vice president and in the context of history, Harris is the obvious successor to Biden.

So why hasn’t Biden built her a bridge?

Without hearing from the president specifically on this point, we can only speculate based on the evidence we have.

The most obvious answer is that Biden, having chosen her as his second, now thinks – for whatever reason – that Harris is not the right candidate for leadership and/or would not win a presidential election. There has been significant negative coverage speculating about Harris’ lack of political nous and appeal. Given what is at stake this year, it seems likely that Biden is simply not willing to risk it all on Harris.

To be fair to the vice president, this may not actually have anything to do with her political abilities.

Harris has already been on the receiving end of vicious, racist attacks from Trump supporters, including death threats. There is a reason so many conspiracy theories coming from the right focus on powerful women and, more often than not, Black women – on Harris, former First Lady Michelle Obama, and even Taylor Swift. In a febrile political environment, were Harris to be the nominee, it is almost certain sections of the American right would explode.

It is entirely possible that the significant risk to Harris herself, and to American political stability more broadly, are factoring into Biden’s decision to run again, despite the overwhelming focus on his age.

As Jill Lepore has argued, while decisions like this are being made ostensibly (and understandably) to mitigate the risk of political violence, they may end up having the effect of justifying or even encouraging it.

Nevertheless, for these reasons and possibly others, it seems as though Biden will not anoint Harris as his successor.

Simply put, if Biden does not choose Harris, he cannot choose anyone else without catastrophically undermining his own administration and authority.

Even hinting he thinks it should be someone other than himself or his vice president would suggest Biden made the wrong choice to begin with – not a risk he is likely to take, despite the stakes.

Read more:
Will abortion be the issue that swings the 2024 US presidential election?

For want of a better alternative

Whether Biden is unwilling or just feels unable to pass the leadership baton to Harris isn’t really the point. The point is that he won’t do it and is, therefore, stuck.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that circumstances won’t change.

It is entirely possible Biden will change his mind, or become unable to run, or that some other event will force the hand of the Democratic Party.

Practically, it is now too late for another viable candidate to run for the nomination – filing deadlines have mostly already passed, and the challenges of publicity and fundraising are all but insurmountable.

If Biden were to pull out, timing would be crucial, and would likely need to be at or immediately before the Democratic National Convention in August. The best possible scenario in this case is that the contest heads to a brokered convention, in which delegates previously committed to Biden are freed, by him, to vote for another candidate.

Read more:
Joe Biden could still stand down before the election – here’s how and what would happen next

Exactly who that candidate might be is an open question, and another likely reason that Biden and the Democrats more broadly are extremely reluctant to go down this path.

Once again, the obvious candidate is Harris. If it isn’t (perhaps for the reasons outlined above), it’s not clear who it could be, or how deep divisions would run. There are several prominent, popular Democrats who might contest, including Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Governor Gavin Newsom or Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear.

Historically, the in-fighting that would come with such a contest, even if it were amicable, has not played well for Democrats, and would almost certainly put them on the back foot come November. That’s not an insurmountable challenge, and might even be the right choice given the circumstances, but it would be an enormous political risk for a party generally averse to taking big chances.

Biden has called this election a “battle for the soul of America”. Given the existential stakes of this election, Democrats are left with few good choices.

Some truths are self-evident. That doesn’t make them easier to face.

Emma Shortis is Senior Researcher in International and Security Affairs at independent think tank The Australia Institute.

– ref. Some truths are self-evident: Joe Biden is too old. But who could possibly replace him? – https://theconversation.com/some-truths-are-self-evident-joe-biden-is-too-old-but-who-could-possibly-replace-him-223634

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland

You’ve probably seen recent claims online seed oils are “toxic” and cause inflammation, cancer, diabetes and heart disease. But what does the research say?

Overall, if you’re worried about inflammation, cancer, diabetes and heart disease there are probably more important things to worry about than seed oils.

They may or may not play a role in inflammation (the research picture is mixed). What we do know, however, is that a high-quality diet rich in unprocessed whole foods (fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains and lean meats) is the number one thing you can to do reduce inflammation and your risk of developing diseases.

Rather than focusing on seed oils specifically, reduce your intake of processed foods more broadly and focus on eating fresh foods. So don’t stress out too much about using a bit of seed oils in your cooking if you are generally focused on all the right things.

Read more:
9 signs you have inflammation in your body. Could an anti-inflammatory diet help?

What are seed oils?

Seed oils are made from whole seeds, such as sunflower seeds, flax seeds, chia seeds and sesame seeds. These seeds are processed to extract oil.

The most common seed oils found at grocery stores include sesame oil, canola oil, sunflower oil, flaxseed oil, corn oil, grapeseed oil and soybean oil.

Seed oils are generally affordable, easy to find and suitable for many dishes and cuisines as they often have a high smoke point.

However, most people consume seed oils in larger amounts through processed foods such as biscuits, cakes, chips, muesli bars, muffins, dipping sauces, deep-fried foods, salad dressings and margarines.

These processed foods are “discretionary”, meaning they’re OK to have occasionally. But they are not considered necessary for a healthy diet, nor recommended in our national dietary guidelines, the Australian Guide for Healthy Eating.

I’ve heard people say seed oils ‘promote inflammation’. Is that true?

There are two essential types of omega fatty acids: omega-3 and omega-6. These are crucial for bodily functions, and we must get them through our diet since our bodies cannot produce them.

While all oils contain varying levels of fatty acids, some argue an excessive intake of a specific omega-6 fatty acid in seed oils called “linoleic acid” may contribute to inflammation in the body.

There is some evidence linoleic acid can be converted to arachidonic acid in the body and this may play a role in inflammation. However, other research doesn’t support the idea reducing dietary linoleic acid affects the amount of arachidonic acid in your body. The research picture is not clear cut.

But if you’re keen to reduce inflammation, the best thing you can do is aim for a healthy diet that is:

• high in antioxidants (found in fruits and vegetables)

• high in “healthy”, unsaturated fatty acids (found in fatty fish, some nuts and olive oil, for example)

• high in fibre (found in carrots, cauliflower, broccoli and leafy greens) and prebiotics (found in onions, leeks, asparagus, garlic and legumes)

• low in processed foods.

If reducing inflammation is your goal, it’s probably more meaningful to focus on these basics than on occasional use of seed oils.

What about seed oils and heart disease, cancer or diabetes risk?

Some popular arguments against seed oils come from data from single studies on this topic. Often these are observational studies where researchers do not make changes to people’s diet or lifestyle.

To get a clearer picture, we should look at meta-analyses, where scientists combine all the data available on a topic. This helps us get a better overall view of what’s going on.

A 2022 meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials investigated the relationship between supplementation with omega-6 fatty acid (often found in seed oils) and cardiovascular disease risk (meaning disease relating to the heart and blood vessels).

The researchers found omega-6 intake did not affect the risk for cardiovascular disease or death but that further research is needed for firm conclusions. Similar findings were observed in a 2019 review on this topic.

The World Health Organization published a review and meta-analysis in 2022 of observational studies (considered lower quality evidence compared to randomised controlled trials) on this topic.

They looked at omega-6 intake and risk of death, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, mental health conditions and type 2 diabetes. The findings show both advantages and disadvantages of consuming omega-6.

The findings reported that, overall, higher intakes of omega-6 were associated with a 9% reduced risk of dying (data from nine studies) but a 31% increased risk of postmenopausal breast cancer (data from six studies).

One of the key findings from this review was about the ratio of omega-3 fatty acids to omega-6 fatty acids. A higher omega 6:3 ratio was associated with a greater risk of cognitive decline and ulcerative colitis (an inflammatory bowel condition).

A higher omega 3:6 ratio was linked to a 26% reduced risk of depression. These mixed outcomes may be a cause of confusion among health-conscious consumers about the health impact of seed oils.

Overall, the evidence suggests that a high intake of omega-6 fatty acids from seed oils is unlikely to increase your risk of death and disease.

However, more high-quality intervention research is needed.

The importance of increasing your omega-3 fatty acids

On top of the mixed outcomes, there is clear evidence increasing the intake of omega-3 fatty acids (often found in foods such as fatty fish and walnuts) is beneficial for health.

While some seed oils contain small amounts of omega-3s, they are not typically considered rich sources.

Flaxseed oil is an exception and is one of the few seed oils that is notably high in alpha-linolenic acid (sometimes shortened to ALA), an omega-3 fatty acid.

If you are looking to increase your omega-3 intake, it’s better to focus on other sources such as fatty fish (salmon, mackerel, sardines), chia seeds, hemp seeds, walnuts, and algae-based supplements. These foods are known for their higher omega-3 content compared to seed oils.

The bottom line

At the end of the day, it’s probably OK to include small quantities of seed oils in your diet, as long as you are mostly focused on eating fresh, unprocessed foods.

The best way to reduce your risk of inflammation, heart disease, cancer or diabetes is not to focus so much on seed oils but rather on doing your best to follow the Australian Guide for Healthy Eating.

Read more:
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Lauren Ball works for The University of Queensland and receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Queensland Health and Mater Misericordia. She is a Director of Dietitians Australia, a Director of the Darling Downs and West Moreton Primary Health Network and an Associate Member of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.

Emily Burch is an Accredited Practising Dietitian and member of Dietitians Australia.

– ref. If you’re worried about inflammation, stop stressing about seed oils and focus on the basics – https://theconversation.com/if-youre-worried-about-inflammation-stop-stressing-about-seed-oils-and-focus-on-the-basics-221310

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam "Ben" Rohrlach, Mathematics Lecturer and Ancient DNA Researcher, University of Adelaide

After analysing DNA from almost 10,000 people from ancient and pre-modern societies, our international team of researchers have discovered six cases of Down syndrome in past human populations.

Our results, published today in Nature Communications, show people with Down syndrome lived in ancient populations. Although these individuals were very young when they died, they were all buried with care, indicating they were appreciated as members of their communities.

Down syndrome in humans

The DNA in our cells (our genome) is separated into 23 chromosomes, much like a book is separated into chapters. Most people carry two “versions” of the first 22 chromosomes, one from each of their parents. In some cases, people can have a third, extra copy of chromosome 21 (this condition is called trisomy 21).

This extra copy of chromosome 21 changes how the body and brain develop. People with trisomy 21 will have some level of intellectual disability and some characteristic physical features (such as almond-shaped eyes or a shorter height). The physical features that can result from trisomy 21 are called Down syndrome.

However, not every person with Down syndrome has the same physical features, and many of these features are not visible in the skeleton. This has made diagnosing Down syndrome from archaeological remains, which are often damaged and incomplete skeletons, very difficult.

However, we can detect trisomy 21 from even very small amounts of ancient DNA. This is because an additional chromosome 21 will lead to noticeably more DNA from chromosome 21 being present among the DNA that can be extracted from old bones and teeth.

Discovered across different times and places

After screening nearly 10,000 DNA samples, we identified six individuals with Down syndrome.

In our research, we screened nearly 10,000 DNA samples from across the world, dating as far back as when humans were hunter-gatherers. The six individuals we identified with Down syndrome were all from Europe, likely because this is where most of our ancient DNA samples were from.

Read more:
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One individual was buried in the 17th or 18th century in a church graveyard in Helsinki, Finland, under what is now a popular tourist attraction, the Helsinki Senate Square.

Another individual was discovered on the Greek island of Aegina, the closest Mediterranean island to Athens. This individual lived approximately 3,300 years ago, and was buried next to a house, with a rare and intricate bead necklace.

A third individual was discovered at the Bronze Age Bulgarian tell site (a settlement on a man-made hill) of Yunatsite, dating to around 4,800 years ago. This infant was buried under the floor of the home in a so-called “urn burial”.

The remaining three individuals were found in two Iron Age sites in Spain, Alto de la Cruz and Las Eretas, dating to approximately 2,500 years ago. According to the estimates of their age at death, these babies likely did not survive to birth.

However, they were buried with care within homes or within special buildings reserved for rituals. These burials were remarkable, as most people of the region during these times were cremated instead of buried.

We also compared the skeletons of the individuals with Down syndrome to identify common skeletal abnormalities, such as irregular bone growth, or porosity of the skull bones.

“Learning from this work may help to identify future cases of Down syndrome from skeletons when ancient DNA can’t be recovered,” says our co-author Patxuka de-Miguel-Ibáñez of the University of Alicante, the lead osteologist for the Spanish sites in the study.

An unexpected discovery

At one of the same Iron Age Spanish sites, we also identified an infant that carried an extra copy of chromosome 18. This condition, called Edwards syndrome, causes much more severe physical abnormalities, which could be observed in the skeletal remains. This baby likely only survived to 40 weeks’ gestation, but was also given a special burial.

The fact that three cases of Down syndrome and the one case of Edwards syndrome were found in just two contemporaneous and nearby settlements was a surprise to us.

“We don’t know why this happened,” says our co-author Roberto Risch, an archaeologist from The Autonomous University of Barcelona. “But it appears as if these people were purposefully choosing these infants for special burials.”

A view of our past

Today, individuals with Down syndrome live full and happy lives as valued members of our communities. Notably, our research found no adult individuals with Down syndrome. However, this study shows the perinates and infants that were found were clearly buried with care. In the case where a newborn survived, they were cared for until death.

As we discover and analyse more of these sorts of cases, we will be able to investigate the questions of how our near and distant ancestors viewed rare and uncommon genetic syndromes and how they cared for one another in these cases.

Read more:
We thought the first hunter-gatherers in Europe went missing during the last ice age. Now, ancient DNA analysis says otherwise

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. Ancient DNA reveals children with Down syndrome in past societies. What can their burials tell us about their lives? – https://theconversation.com/ancient-dna-reveals-children-with-down-syndrome-in-past-societies-what-can-their-burials-tell-us-about-their-lives-216998

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jason Dutton, Professor of Chemistry, La Trobe University

Over the last 15 million years, Australia has slowly dried out. After humans arrived more than 65,000 years ago, they learned to use fire to their advantage. Today, fire weather is getting more frequent – and fires are following as the world heats up. This month, fires have flared in Victoria, destroying 46 houses, while Western Australia endures a heatwave and braces for potential fires.

We use controlled fire for food, industry and many other uses. But we fear it when it is uncontrolled. For something so common, it’s not well understood.

Fire is chemistry – a set of reactions known as combustion. Here’s what that means – and why parts of Australia are so well suited to fire.

What is fire?

For a fire to start, it needs three things: fuel, an oxidising agent and heat.

In bushfires, the fuel is plant material, the oxidising agent is oxygen in the atmosphere. The heat might come from lightning or the fire itself once it starts.

First, the heat has to get to the fuel. Plants are mostly comprised of cellulose (a natural carbohydrate polymer we can’t digest) and lignin (a complex aromatic hydrocarbon), alongside other organic molecules.

But big molecules such as cellulose and lignin don’t burn easily, unlike small molecules such as propane or ethanol. It takes an external heat source to get them to burn. This is normally in the form of lightning, the cause of most large bushfires. But humans have added other sources – a flicked cigarette, angle-grinders, or sparks from a downed powerline.

A little bit of extra heat won’t do it. But when cellulose and lignin are heated to 300°C, pyrolysis begins and the natural polymers begin to break down into small organic molecules, which promptly evaporate and form a gas.

At these temperatures, this gas rapidly reacts with oxygen in the air to produce carbon dioxide, water vapour – and heat. This is combustion.

As it burns, the gas becomes hot enough to glow, as do any solid particles within it. When we gaze at a campfire, that’s what we’re seeing – burning gas, glowing particles.

Many believe it’s the breaking of chemical bonds in the fuel that produces heat. But it’s actually the opposite. When we break any chemical bond, heat is absorbed. It’s making new chemical bonds that releases heat – the creation of water vapour and carbon dioxide.

These newly formed bonds are stronger than the bonds in the hydrocarbon fuel, meaning heat is released overall. So much heat that pyrolysis is sustained, consuming more fuel and spreading the fire.

What about the water in plants?

Plant material contains water as well as organic compounds.

There’s a unique bit of chemistry which takes place here. When heat first hits plant material, the water within begins to warm. But water has an extraordinarily high ability to store heat.

As water heats up, it begins to evaporate. Evaporation is endothermic, meaning it absorbs heat. That’s why we use it to stop ourselves overheating – we rely on sweat evaporating off our skin and taking heat with it.

This means you need still more energy to increase the temperature and overcome water’s heat absorbing properties. For pyrolysis to occur at all, the water in the plant matter has to evaporate. If there’s still water in the leaves or bark, it won’t burn.

Read more:
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Fire weather and gum trees

Australia’s forests and bushlands are mostly on the east coast, avoiding the arid interior. But they can’t avoid the extremely hot and dry air the deserts produce, especially over summer.

Hot air can hold a remarkable amount of water. Its ability to soak up water roughly doubles every 10°C. So hot, dry air acts like a sponge. It scours the water from plant matter and soaks it up.

Plant material largely comes from gum trees. Our hundreds of species are famously messy, dropping bark, leaves and limbs on the forest floor.

Eucalyptus leaves often contain large amounts of volatile organic oils. In dry conditions, these leaves act as like natural lighter fluid, or “pre-pyrolysed material”.

This is because eucalypts like fire. Fire wipes out competitor species and can trigger gumnut germination.

When a bushfire begins and starts to spread, it’s usually burning the dead, dry litter and grasses, not large living trees with plenty of water.

Dry fuel is one thing. But a bushfire needs wind to spread.

Hot days in Australia are often windy, due to the temperature difference between hot deserts and cold oceans. If a lightning triggers pyrolysis and starts a fire, wind is what makes it spread.

Wind provides fresh oxygen to the fire front, making it more intense. It also blows hot dry air over fresh fuel ahead of the fire front, drying it out. If there’s no wind, fire spreads much more slowly.

What does it take to end a bushfire? A large fire will naturally burn itself out if there’s no more fuel for it. Heavy rain can douse a fire, though coals can keep smouldering and restart fires if dry, hot air arrives again.

Firefighters make firebreaks to try to starve the fire of its fuel, spray water to wet and cool the fuel or apply chemical agents such as fire-fighting foam to prevent oxygen getting in.

If we add more and more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere it traps more heat, leading to hotter days. More heat means fire weather – hot, dry and windy conditions – is more likely. And that means combustion will be more likely in some places. Under climate change, there’s more fire in our future.

Read more:
Before fusion: a human history of fire

Jason Dutton receives funding from The Australian Research Council.

– ref. Fire is a chemical reaction. Here’s why Australia is supremely suited to it – https://theconversation.com/fire-is-a-chemical-reaction-heres-why-australia-is-supremely-suited-to-it-217275

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Juliana Zabatiero, Research Fellow, Curtin University

There have been concerns about screens making kids more sedentary and less active since TV was introduced more than half a century ago.

“Screen use” and “not enough exercise” are (separately) among the top health concerns Australian parents have about their children.

But screens are not necessarily the enemy of exercise. Our research looks at how screens can help children be physically active.

Read more:
‘Screen time’ for kids is an outdated concept, so let’s ditch it and focus on quality instead

How much exercise do kids need?

Australian guidelines around how much physical activity children need to do each day varies, depending on their age. And it’s even important for babies to spend time being active each day.

It’s recommended children up to 12 months old have at least 30 minutes of tummy time and as much interactive floor play as possible each day. Toddlers and preschoolers should be active for at least three hours per day, including energetic play.

For children five and above, it’s recommended at least 60 minutes each day of moderate to vigorous physical activity that makes the heart beat faster, including vigorous activities and activities that strengthen muscle and bone.

Our research

Concerns around screens making children sedentary are at least in part based on outdated ideas that position technology as either “good” or “bad”. Researchers today are more focused on how screens are used and in what context.

We are working on a larger project to develop online resources for parents about using digital technologies with their children.

In this part of the study, we have been exploring ideas on how to use technology to encourage young children to be active.

We gave a group of 13 families with children under five ideas on how to use technology to help their children be more active. Every week for 12 weeks, they received information and ideas from the federal government’s parenting website Raising Children Network, Playgroup WA and ABC Kids.

From this work, three messages to parents stood out:

1. Children can be active while using screens

We tend to think that when children are using screens, they are passive and sitting still.

But our study showed children can certainly be active while watching. So it is useful to provide space for them to do this and encourage them to move in response to what they are watching. This may run counter to traditional instructions to children watching TV to “sit still and be quiet”.

Content that involves music and dance (like the Wiggles) will naturally get children moving. But parents also found it helpful to encourage children to mimic their favourite character’s “action moves” when watching programs such as Spiderman or PJ Masks.

Our study looked at children five and under but older children could use digital games (such as Nintendo Switch’s Sports) that promote physical activity. Or they could use augmented reality apps that get them moving, such as Pokémon Go.

2. Technology can inspire off-screen physical activity

Parents told us they were able to use screens to inspire physical activity after viewing has stopped.

For example after watching Humpty’s Big Adventure parents could encourage children to build an obstacle course. Or watch the Bluey episode Keepy Uppy and then play the game.

This can help introduce variety into children’s physical play, which is important for developing new skills. As we have noted in a previous article, using an idea from a program can also help children transition away from screens without tantrums.

Read more:
3 ways to help your child transition off screens and avoid the dreaded ‘tech tantrums’

3. Taking videos can keep kids excited about moving

Many adults have watches or apps that record their steps and exercise and this helps them stay motivated to move. Technology can similarly be used to promote children’s activity.

Children in our study loved watching videos of themselves being active. Playing these back immediately or later (and sharing with family), reinforced their enthusiasm about how fun it is to be active. It also encouraged children to keep trying with skills.

You could try filming your child racing on their bike, demonstrating their skills on the monkey bars, climbing a tall part of the playground or working on ball skills.

For older children, you can also record dance, choreography or specific sporting skills such as stroke correction in tennis or swimming.

Parents also reported their children enjoyed using a stopwatch app to improve their time when completing a lap on their bike or tackling monkey bars. Other apps, like maps, can help plan a vigorous family walk.

Juliana Zabatiero receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Kate Highfield consults for ABC Kids, with a focus on supporting healthy technology use in play and learning. With colleagues, she receives or has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Leon Straker receives funding from the Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council.

Susan Edwards receives funding from Australian Research Council.

– ref. Screen time doesn’t have to be sedentary: 3 ways it can get kids moving – https://theconversation.com/screen-time-doesnt-have-to-be-sedentary-3-ways-it-can-get-kids-moving-223460

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah McCann, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, The University of Melbourne

With Taylor Swift pulling in over half-a-million audience members on her Australian tour, we’ve been thinking a lot about fans. In this series, our academics dive into fan cultures: how they developed, how they operate, and how they shape the world today.

Fandoms are their own universes of creativity, community, emotions and battles. A common aspect of fandom is fanfiction (or “fanfic”): when fans write stories about their favourite characters or celebrity idols. This work is self-published on dedicated fanfic sites, and stories can get tens of thousands of reads.

Much fanfic involves “shipping”: imagining relationships (“ships”) between characters. When shipping involves two men this is called “slash”, and two women “femslash”. A notable example of slash is fanfic on Johnlock, the ship between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.

However, fandoms are often built around celebrities, not just characters. “Real Person Slash” imagines queer relationships between celebrities, and whole sub-fandoms emerge around queer ships of real people.

This genre is controversial within fandoms because it involves people with actual sexualities/identities. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than among the debates in the Taylor Swift fandom.

Read more:
Shame, intimacy, and community: fangirls are mocked, but it is more complex than you might think

Taylor Swift and ‘Kaylors’

“Kaylors” believe Swift used to date model Karlie Kloss. They also believe several of Swift’s albums were inspired by Kloss as muse/heartbreaker, rather than Swift’s very public boyfriends.

The Kaylor fandom emerged as Swift and Kloss’ friendship developed in the heyday of celebrity social media intimacy, beginning with a tweet from Kloss to Swift in 2012.

Kloss and Swift’s public displays dimmed from public view over several years. Kloss married her long-time partner Joshua Kushner in 2018, and they have since had two children together. In light of this, most fans no longer believe Kaylor “is real”, aka, they believe that Kloss and Swift broke up at some point, or were never together.

It is unclear whether Kloss and Swift’s relationship was impacted by the fandom, and whether this changed their public behaviour.

A shifting fandom

Many Kaylors have now morphed into “Gaylors” who believe Swift is queer, or who simply enjoy undertaking queer readings of Swift’s lyrics.

Taylor’s music frequently expresses themes around yearning, secret desires, intolerant families, and fear of the judgement of others: experiences many queer people can relate to. There is even a whole annual fan retreat, called “Gaylore”, dedicated to fans coming together to analyse Swift’s body of work through a queer lens.

Many within the Gaylor fandom are also queer, though importantly – and unlike other queer spaces in the real world – you do not have to identify or explain your own sexuality to be part of the fandom.

As my colleague Clare Southerton and I have argued previously, queer shipping practices provide a unique space of queer belonging. These are communities where the collective focus is on celebrating and encouraging queer identification and pride, without having to individually identify – or even know – what your own sexuality is.

While no one is pressing Gaylors about their queer legitimacy, perhaps ironically, Kaylorism and Gaylorism is controversial because other fans claim this amounts to speculating on Swift’s sexuality. The heart of the issue with queer shipping and Real Person Slash is the “truth” becomes secondary to the output and desires of the fandom.

Queer desires

Kaylors and Gaylors “queer” their idol, or in other words, encourage queer narratives where there would otherwise be heteronormative assumptions made.

While for the mainstream, Swift is the canonical “All-American” straight woman, Kaylors/Gaylors suggest an alternative reality.

This is perhaps reminiscent of artist Zoe Leonard’s poem I want a President, released in 1992, which begins:

I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia.

Similarly to Leonard, the Kaylors/Gaylors have a desire for their “president” to represent counter-cultural existence. They express a longing for an alternative reality where it is possible that the most famous pop star in the world is a queer woman.

But what about the ethics?

There is some evidence that fan speculation about sexuality is genuinely taxing on celebrities. In his recent memoir Pageboy Elliot Page reflects on the pain caused by conjecture about his sexuality in the public eye before he was ready to come out.

The Kaylor/Gaylor fandom has become so controversial that the main Swift Reddit banned “speculating about Taylor’s sexuality”. In practice, this amounts to any mention of Kaylor, Gaylor or related queer content.

A recent opinion piece in the New York Times about the Gaylor phenomenon also caused a huge debate on the Internet about the ethics of discussing celebrity sexuality.

As some Gaylors have pointed out, given Swift has never “come out” as straight, assuming she is straight because of her public boyfriends is also a form of speculation.

As a result of this fraught debate, Gaylors are sometimes on the receiving end of homophobic sentiments from other fans.

Controversies over Real Person Slash and queer shipping ought to be approached with delicacy from those outside the fandoms. Fandoms are not homogenous groups.

The fights that emerge within these spaces can be intensely emotional, and deeply felt by those caught up.

An understanding of the significance of the community connections built around queer ships, and the subversive desires of these fans in a heteronormative world, must be balanced against the very real ethical concern about the impact of fan speculation, what counts as “speculation” and what causes harm.

Read more:
From Deadheads on bulletin boards to Taylor Swift ‘stans’: a short history of how fandoms shaped the internet

Hannah McCann is an “aca fan” (academic fan) within the Gaylor fandom

– ref. ‘Shipping’, ‘slash fic’ and ‘Gaylors’: fans can find community through ‘queering’ idols – but is it ethical? – https://theconversation.com/shipping-slash-fic-and-gaylors-fans-can-find-community-through-queering-idols-but-is-it-ethical-210971

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Wilson, Co-founder and director of Hate & Extremism Insights Aotearoa (HEIA) and director, Master of Conflict and Terrorism Studies, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

In March and August 2018, up to a year before he attacked two Christchurch mosques, Brenton Tarrant posted publicly online that he planned to do so. Until now, these statements have not been identified.

In fact, for four years before his attack, Tarrant had been posting anonymously but publicly on the online message board 4chan about the need to attack people of colour in locations of “significance”, including places of worship.

In its final report in 2020, the royal commission of inquiry into the terror attacks wrote:

The individual claimed that he was not a frequent commenter on extreme right-wing sites and that YouTube was, for him, a far more significant source of information and inspiration.
Although he did frequent extreme right-wing discussion boards such as those on 4chan and 8chan, the evidence we have seen is indicative of more substantial use of YouTube and is therefore consistent with what he told us.

Given the importance of online environments in radicalising lone actor terrorists, we questioned this and set out to investigate whether right-wing websites were important in Tarrant’s radicalisation.

What we found overturns a great deal of what we thought we knew about him. It also raises serious questions, not only about why this posting was not detected before the attack, but also why it has not been discovered in the five years since the March 15 attacks.

Beyond the manifesto

Having the opportunity to see Tarrant interact candidly with his online community, we see that much of what he stated in his manifesto was propaganda.

When he wrote in his manifesto that he was driven to violence by the lack of a political solution – a realisation that came to him in 2017 – we now know he had been calling for attacks against civilians at least as early as 2015.

Where he claimed he was not driven by antisemitism, we found hatred and conspiratorial distrust of Jews were central to his entire worldview.

Read more:
When life means life: why the court had to deliver an unprecedented sentence for the Christchurch terrorist

Although he claimed in his manifesto that he carried out his attack to preserve diversity and respect for all cultures, the violent racism and Islamophobia in his posting sets him apart, even in the darkest corners of 4chan.

We will be publishing more about Tarrant’s online history, including what radicalised him and what lessons can be learned. Here we introduce some of our initial findings.

Among other revelations, we show that there were numerous opportunities for the public and New Zealand and Australian security services to observe him making very threatening statements online.

We’ve chosen to repeat only a small number of Tarrant’s statements, given their highly offensive nature. However, we still advise caution before reading further.

Read more:
Out of the shadows: why making NZ’s security threat assessment public for the first time is the right move

How we found the posts

Because 4chan posts are anonymous, we used a combination of indicators to identify Tarrant. 4chan’s “politically incorrect” board – referred to as /pol/ – provides the time, date and location of each post, allowing us to match this against Tarrant’s travel to numerous countries over five years.

Tarrant also frequently provided personal information in his posts, and he used the same distinctive language. In some cases, he repeated points we know he made elsewhere. He openly and proudly stated his Australian identity, even as he called for violence.

He also often made specific grammatical errors which make his posting stand out. He uses this style in online writing samples as early as 2011, in his 2019 manifesto, and in a great deal of online posting in between. In combination, these indicators identify Tarrant.

Our team of four researchers reviewed thousands of anonymous posts and hundreds of threads on /pol/. We used the platform’s search function for particular words, phrases and images. As a team we carefully evaluated all posts which included several of the above indicators.

We maintained a very high evidence threshold for including posts in our analysis. We excluded some important statements that were almost certainly written by him, but for which only one or two of the above indicators were present.

What we found

By 2015, Tarrant was calling for mass violence against people of colour. Inspired by Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine Black worshippers in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, Tarrant excitedly claimed “violence is the last resort of a cornered animal”, and “it was always going to come to this”.

It was here Tarrant made clear that white nationalist extremists should target innocent victims in locations of “significance”, such as places of worship.

When other posters claimed Roof should have targeted a “ghetto”, Tarrant became frustrated. He explained that attacking unarmed people in a church is a “very simple tactic” necessary to provoke people of colour into retaliating. He used a highly racist phrase common on the /pol/ board to refer to this strategy.

Read more:
Using AI to monitor the internet for terror content is inescapable – but also fraught with pitfalls

For at least four years, then, Tarrant contemplated and planned on killing people in a location of emotional importance such as a school or place of worship.

In fact, he glorified a wide range of violence, including school and public shootings, the perpetrators of which were driven by psychological or other motives rather than white nationalist ideology.

He advocated for and praised the sadistic and brutal killing of innocent civilians. The key for Tarrant was that this violence was perpetrated by white men. For him, any white violence might trigger the race war and segregation he desired.

As he travelled the world between 2014 and 2018, Tarrant became increasingly focused on Muslims. His hatred persisted after arriving in New Zealand. Sometimes it spiralled into unhinged tirades.

Read more:
Can ideology-detecting algorithms catch online extremism before it takes hold?

In one thread, he claimed he would form and fund an armed band of 4chan users to conduct ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Some of his posting is unusually violent even within the extremism of /pol/. With hindsight at least, it suggests potential opportunities for detection, most obviously by Australian authorities.

For example, in that same thread, he identified himself as Australian four times, and brazenly wrote there was nothing the Australian government could do to stop him.

At the moment of this violent fantasy, he emailed a gun club in Dunedin stating his plans to move to New Zealand. In the same week, he made donations to international far-right leaders.

Operational Security?

The royal commission into the Christchurch terror attacks concluded Tarrant made only “limited lapses” in operational security during his time in New Zealand between late 2017 and March 2019.

This is not the case. He posted regularly on /pol/, which is freely and publicly accessible. His posting was visible to numerous others whose identities he could not possibly know.

Two threads in March and August of 2018 in particular show his hatred of and plans to attack the Muslim community. As such, they presented opportunities for his detection.

In these threads, Tarrant and other users posted angrily about the spread of immigrants in New Zealand, and particularly the presence of mosques in small towns. Very soon, a group of anonymous posters, including Tarrant, discussed violence against the buildings (and the communities that gather in them).

When another user posted an image of a box of matches in reference to the mosques, Tarrant wrote “Soon”.

Revealing he was in Dunedin, Tarrant expressed his anger at the presence of mosques in that city, and in Christchurch and Ashburton to the north, using highly abusive language. When other users called on him to act, he wrote: “I have a plan to stop it. Just hold on.”

Far from maintaining tight operational security as he planned his attack, Tarrant openly (albeit anonymously) discussed violence against mosques in the South Island while in New Zealand.

Read more:
The royal commission report on the Christchurch atrocity is a beginning, not an end

Preventing it happening again

The 4chan community was crucial in Tarrant’s radicalisation (and the examples given here are just a portion of what we have found).

Given what we know about the importance of online environments in the radicalisation of other white nationalist terrorists, it is disturbing this aspect of Tarrant’s path to March 15 has not been investigated more thoroughly.

After all, his final words before the attack were released on the imageboard 8chan, but also intended for 4chan: “It’s been a long ride […] you are all top blokes and the best bunch of cobbers a man could ask for”.

It is hard to imagine a clearer signpost that the real nature of his radicalisation could be found on those forums.

Five years later, it seems we are only beginning to understand why he committed the atrocity, what might have been done to stop it, and how government agencies can work together with specialist extremism researchers to prevent it happening again.

More information about our study will be released at heiaglobal.com. Our research was approved by the University of Auckland Human Participant Ethics Committee. A paper based on this study has been submitted for peer review and publication.

Chris Wilson is the co-founder and director of Hate & Extremism Insights Aotearoa (HEIA).

Ethan Renner, Jack Smylie, and Michal Dziwulski 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. Christchurch terrorist discussed attacks online a year before carrying them out, new research reveals – https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed-attacks-online-a-year-before-carrying-them-out-new-research-reveals-223955

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

The March 2 byelection in the outer suburban Melbourne seat of Dunkley is the third byelection this term but the first in a Labor-held electorate. It has been caused by the death late last year of Peta Murphy, after a long battle with cancer.

Labor’s margin sits at 6.3% in Dunkley, an electorate that has swung between the major parties.

Labor goes into the byelection as the favourite, as it seeks to sell its changes to the Stage 3 tax cuts. Most voters will be better off under the new package than they would have under the original version, although there will be some losers.

Labor’s candidate is Jodie Belyea, from Frankston, who has extensive experience working in the not-for-profit sector. The Liberals are fielding the Mayor of Frankston, Nathan Conroy.

To talk about the byelection, we are joined by the ABC’s election analyst Antony Green, Kos Samaras from the RedBridge Group, which has conducted research in Dunkley, and Tim Costello, former CEO of World Vision Australia and a Dunkley resident.

There are several measures of swing that can be used for byelections, and participants often adopt whichever suits them. Green says:

The best measure in the end is the average swing of about three and a half to four percent [against a government]. That’s the swing since Federation.

How is the government’s recently-announced reworked tax package going down in Dunkley? Drawing on the focus group RedBridge ran this week, Samaras says:

When it comes to the tax cuts announcement made by the Albanese government [it’s] welcomed but [has] not much of an impact in terms of alleviating some of these some of these […] financial problems. […] Their problem is in the hundreds of dollars every week not in the tens.

On voter engagement in Dunkley Samaras finds little interest:

I think the overwhelming sense is that they’re sick of getting mail in the letterbox and their YouTube feed being riddled with advertisements, and it’s annoying them. It’s perhaps a message to the political class out there.

As a resident observer, Costello says Belyea is

doing very well, particularly with women. There’s a lot of women in the area who’ve known her work. […] But it’s a big step up to federal politics when you haven’t been involved.

Conroy is

a very good campaigner. He is very slick and everywhere. And that ‘send Labor a message’ I think is cutting through.

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

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Antony Green, Kos Samaras and Tim Costello on Dunkley contest – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-antony-green-kos-samaras-and-tim-costello-on-dunkley-contest-223961