The trial underway in 12 Melbourne supermarkets intends, once again, to provide customers with an in-store option for recycling “scrunchable” food packaging.
It’s estimated Australia uses more than 70 billion pieces of soft plastic a year. Most of it still ends up in landfill or blows into streets and waterways, polluting our rivers and oceans. So 12 stores won’t cut it in the long term.
But starting small is a good idea. REDcycle collapsed under its own weight, stockpiling recyclable material with nowhere to go. The new scheme will feed new, purpose-built waste processing facilities so it has much better prospects.
Australia’s Soft Plastics Taskforce is behind the new trial. The taskforce is a coalition of the three major supermarkets: Woolworths, Coles and Aldi. It was established in the wake of REDcycle’s demise and is chaired by the federal government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.
The taskforce assumed responsibility for roughly 11,000 tonnes of soft plastic, formerly managed by REDcycle, across 44 locations across Australia.
Addressing the lack of soft plastics recycling infrastructure in Australia is a top priority. This is the main reason REDcycle was unable to process the mountains of soft plastics it had stored around the country.
Much like the original REDcycle scheme, the new small-scale trial in Victoria has identified several potential end markets for used soft plastic. After treatment, it could become an additive for asphalt roads, a replacement for aggregate in concrete, or a material for making shopping trolleys and baskets.
To be a successful and lasting solution, the scheme must be cost-effective and suitably located, with established markets for the recycled products.
Plastic packaging is typically made from the petrochemicals polyethylene or polypropylene, and often contains a mix of materials, including various types of plastics and additives for flexibility and durability. This blend of materials makes it difficult to separate and recycle effectively.
There’s also less demand for recycled soft plastics, compared to other plastics. Many manufacturers prefer using brand new or “virgin” plastics or recycled rigid plastics instead, such as recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET), leaving limited avenues for recycled soft plastics to find new uses.
We need to make it economically viable to recycle low-value plastics such as soft plastic packaging. Placing recycling facilities closer to communities and transport can save money and reduce emissions. So local, decentralised, small-scale recycling or reprocessing infrastructure is the way to go.
Fit-for-purpose facilities can develop the specialised processing and manufacturing techniques needed to handle soft plastics. This takes care of the contamination problem and creates new options for developing recycled products.
Local recycling initiatives also foster community engagement and awareness. We need to encourage individuals to participate actively in recycling efforts, and foster local businesses focused on resource recovery. To this end, we are currently exploring innovative enterprise-based recycling solutions in remote First Nations communities in Queensland.
The high cost of cheap packaging
Soft plastics are lightweight, flexible and inexpensive to produce. This has made them popular choices for packaging. But this ignores the problems of disposal, including harm to nature and people. There has to be a better way.
Recycling soft plastic packaging does face numerous obstacles. These stem from complex composition, contamination risks, sorting and processing challenges, scarce recycling infrastructure and limited demand for the end product.
Tackling these challenges requires collaborative efforts from industry players, policymakers, consumers and researchers. We need to develop innovative local solutions and reduce consumption of single-use plastic.
Holding producers accountable for the end-of-life management of their products is paramount. In the meantime, local, decentralised recycling infrastructure offers a promising solution to improve the efficiency and sustainability of soft plastic recycling, while empowering communities to contribute to a circular economy.
The trial in Victoria raises hopes of a working solution for post-consumer soft plastic. This time they are starting on a small scale. That should make it easier to manage the volume of material available for recycling and avoid secret stockpiles. Ultimately this approach could see “micro-factories” cropping up across the country, turning what was once waste into viable, useful products.
Anya Phelan 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.
Childcare is probably Australia’s largest industry, most of it unpaid.
We know this because of Australian Bureau of Statistics time use surveys. Since 1992 these surveys have recorded what thousands of Australians say they do with their time in diaries kept for 48 hours.
But if the Bureau of Statistics proceeds with its current plans for scaling down the survey we soon won’t be able to tell.
Australia has not only led the world in recording time use, but also in recording simultaneous activities – what Australians do when they multitask.
In 1997 the survey found that whereas the average time spent on childcare as a main activity was about two hours per day, the average when simultaneous activities were taken into account was closer to seven hours per day. Among the simultaneous activities were preparing meals and washing clothes.
In 2013 the scheduled five-yearly update was shelved to make budget savings. It wasn’t revived until 2020-21, but amidst the chaos of COVID, physical diaries were replaced with online diaries without an expectation they be completed in real time.
Online, without context
Now the bureau wants to keep it that way. It has told a meeting of stakeholders it plans to conduct the survey each year instead of once every five years, but online rather than via diaries in order to make it less tiring for respondents. It would be cheaper too.
It also wants to exclude simultaneous activities.
This means we will no longer get a good read on the total amount of childcare and other domestic activities we are doing. Our surveys will also no longer be directly comparable to those of other countries.
Missing as well would be contextual information such as who else is present, location, mode of transport, and use of mobile phones and other devices.
Time-use expert Lyn Craig of the University of Melbourne says that without the contextual data the bureau proposes to leave out we won’t be able to capture the full dimensions of care work, including whether the breakdown by gender is changing.
Michael Bittman, who was seconded to the ABS for the first national time use survey and has chaired United Nations committees on time-use methodology, says the proposed changes will “take Australia from being a leader to a laggard”.
Lighter than the world’s lightest
The International Labour Organisation has designed a light one-day time use survey that will take just 15 minutes to complete, intended for poor countries.
What Australia’s bureau is proposing looks as if it will take even less time, making it one of the poorest time use surveys on the planet.
The survey needn’t be annual, as year-on-year changes are usually small. A substantial survey conducted once every five years would be much better.
Where the bureau thinks a survey is important, it conducts it face-to-face. That’s what it does with Australia’s six-yearly Household Expenditure Survey, the one used to determine what Australians spend their money on, which forms an input to the consumer price index.
It’s a question of priorities
That expenditure survey requires far more work on the part of the respondent than the time use survey, including access to mortgage documents and piles of bills.
If the bureau remains committed to doing the time use survey online, it should do it in a way consistent with the best practice in the rest of the world.
International researchers are developing an electronic light diary that collects information about secondary activities and contexts. It has been approved for use in nine countries.
Those who specialise in time-use research say the bureau’s current plan is destined to fail. There’s a good deal of women’s unpaid work it won’t capture.
In 1988 New Zealand economist Marilyn Waring wrote a famous book called Counting for Nothing about how women and the environment were invisible in policymaking.
If the bureau proceeds as planned, it will take us back toward those days.
Julie Smith is a member of the ABS Time Use Expert Reference Group.
Marian Sawer 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne
Tasmanian Liberal Premier Jeremy Rockliff today announced the Tasmanian election would be held on March 23, more than a year early. The election was called early owing to disagreements between the Liberals and former Liberal MPs Lara Alexander and John Tucker. The Liberals had lost their parliamentary majority when these two MPs defected in May 2023.
Tasmania uses the proportional Hare Clark system for its lower house elections. At this election there will be 35 members elected, up from 25 previously. Tasmania uses the same five electorates for state and federal elections, with seven members to be elected per electorate, up from five previously. The quota for election will be one-eighth of the vote or 12.5%, down from one-sixth or 16.7%.
Tasmania’s upper house has elections every May for two or three of its 15 seats, with members serving six-year terms. The upper house will not be contested at this election.
The two most recent polls were an early January YouGov poll and a late November EMRS poll. The YouGov poll gave the Liberals 31%, Labor 27%, the Jacqui Lambie Network (JLN) 20%, the Greens 15% and independents 7%. If this poll were repeated at an election, the JLN would hold the balance of power.
The EMRS poll was far better for the Liberals, suggesting they had recovered from a slump in May. The Liberals had 39%, Labor 29%, the Greens 12% and all Others 19%. This poll did not ask for the JLN. The Liberals would still fall short of a majority if this poll were repeated at the election.
Tasmania is the only Australian jurisdiction that is currently governed by the conservative parties. However, the Liberal National Party is likely to win the October Queensland election, so even if Labor takes power in Tasmania, unified Labor government probably won’t last long.
Federal YouGov poll: 69% support tax changes but Albanese’s ratings drop
A national YouGov poll, conducted February 2–7 from a sample of 1,502, gave Labor a 52–48 lead, unchanged from the mid-January YouGov poll. Primary votes were 36% Coalition (down one), 32% Labor (steady), 14% Greens (up one), 8% One Nation (up one) and 10% for all Others (down one).
Albanese’s net approval was down three points to -16, while Dutton’s net approval was up three points to -8. Albanese led Dutton by 45–38 as preferred PM, a narrowing from 45–35 in January.
On the changes to the stage three tax cuts, 69% supported the changes while 31% supported the original stage three proposal. Supporters of all parties favoured the changes, including 55% of Coalition voters.
Labor gains in Essential poll
In a national Essential poll, conducted February 7–11 from a sample of 1,148, Labor led by 50–46 including undecided (48–46 two weeks ago). This is Labor’s largest lead in Essential since early October.
Primary votes were 34% Coalition (steady), 31% Labor (down one), 14% Greens (up one), 7% One Nation (steady), 1% UAP (down one), 9% for all Others (up two) and 5% undecided (steady). Preference flows favoured Labor more than last fortnight.
Respondents were asked to rate Albanese and Dutton from 0 to 10. Scores of 0–3 were counted as negative, 4–6 as neutral and 7–10 as positive. Albanese was at 35–33 negative (37–32 in December), while Dutton was at 33–32 negative (37–28 in December).
By 56–16, voters supported the revised stage three tax cuts when told there would be more benefits for lower and middle-income earners, and less to higher-income earners. However, by 53–47, they thought it is never acceptable to break an election promise over it being acceptable if circumstances change.
By 59–15, voters supported employees’ “right to disconnect”. On Taylor Swift’s upcoming Eras Tour in Sydney and Melbourne, 76% said they weren’t interested in seeing her, 21% wished they were going to see her, 3% were seeing her and 3% didn’t know who she was.
Labor down in a Redbridge poll
A national Redbridge poll, conducted January 30 to February 7 from a sample of 2,040, gave Labor a 51.2–48.8 lead, a 1.6-point gain for the Coalition since the last Redbridge poll in December. Primary votes were 38% Coalition (up three), 33% Labor (steady), 13% Greens (steady) and 16% for all Others (down three).
Despite the narrow Labor lead on voting intentions, Labor held a 32–28 lead on economic management, which is usually a relative strength for the Coalition.
On negative gearing, 39% said it should be left alone and 39% said it should be phased out or scrapped immediately. By 60–22, voters supported the changes to the stage three tax cuts, but by 51–33 voters agreed that if Labor breaks the promise to deliver the original cuts, I can’t trust them in the future.
Morgan and Dunkley byelection polls
I previously covered a national Morgan poll that gave Labor a 50.5–49.5 lead. Labor’s lead increased to 53–47 in last week’s Morgan poll that was conducted January 29 to February 4.
In this week’s Morgan poll, conducted February 5–11 from a sample of 1,699, Labor led by 52–48. Primary votes were 37% Coalition (steady since last week), 34.5% Labor (up 1.5), 12% Greens (steady), 4.5% One Nation (down 0.5) and 12% for all Others (down one).
The federal byelection to replace the deceased Labor MP Peta Murphy will be held on March 2. A uComms poll of Dunkley for The Australia Institute, conducted February 5–6 from a sample of 626, gave Labor a 52–48 lead from primary votes of 40.1% Labor, 39.3% Liberal, 8.2% Greens, 1.6% Libertarian and 10.8% for all Others.
Preferences were respondent-allocated, and Labor would be higher if the previous election preferences were used. Labor won Dunkley by 56.3–46.7 at the 2022 election, so this poll suggests a 4% swing to the Liberals. Seat polls are unreliable. Eight candidates will contest the Dunkley byelection.
In other byelection news, the South Australian state byelection in Dunstan to replace former Liberal premier Steven Marshall will be held March 23. Marshall won Dunstan at the 2022 election by 50.5–49.5 against Labor.
The Poll Bludger reported Monday that uComms polls for The Australia Institute in the teal independent held seats of Kooyong, Mackellar and Wentworth, conducted February 5 from samples of 602 to 647. In Kooyong, teal MP Monique Ryan led the Liberals by 56–44, in Mackellar teal MP Sophie Scamps led by 54–46 and in Wentworth teal MP Allegra Spender led by 57–43.
US Democrats gain federal House seat at byelection
I covered the United States federal byelection for New York’s third congressional district for The Poll Bludger. Democrats easily gained from the Republicans. I also covered the latest presidential primaries that show both Donald Trump and Joe Biden cruising to their parties’ nominations.
Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Eccleston, Professor of Political Science; Director, Tasmanian Policy Exchange, University of Tasmania
After months of speculation about an early election and a battle to keep minority government alive, Tasmanian Premier Jeremy Rockliff – Australia’s last remaining Liberal Premier – has called an election for March 23, three years into a four-year term.
In making the announcement, Rockliff said he wanted the stability of majority government.
“I’m not going to allow myself or my government to be held to ransom for the next 12 months. It’s bad for Tasmania, it’s bad for Tasmanians.”
What issues are likely to dominate the campaign? What is the likely outcome, and will it have any implications beyond the shores of Australia’s island state?
What’s been going on?
The Tasmanian Liberals have governed since 2014, but recently Rockliff has had to manage a series of ructions.
There have been seven reshuffles since the 2021 election, sparked in some cases by high profile ministerial resignations.
In mid-May 2023, two government back benchers quit the party to sit on the cross bench, citing a range of grievances.
Lara Alexander and John Tucker’s agreement with Rockliff to guarantee supply and confidence in the House lasted until early February when the premier issued a second ultimatum effectively demanding the rebel MPs support all government legislation.
Given neither of the independents were willing to cede their independence an early election became inevitable. Now, the real question is whether Tasmanian voters will blame the premier or the rebel MPs for taking them to the polls a year early?
Due to Tasmania’s 25-seat Lower House (which has been restored to 35 members for this election), these events have stretched Rockliff’s talent pool and contributed to a feeling among voters that the government is approaching its used by date.
Rubbing salt in the wound, Labor and the Greens have relished pointing out that a party which had promised to deliver stable majority government was now in minority. Indeed, Jeremy Rockliff cited
the need restore majority government and avoid “governing with one hand tied behind my back” as a justification for going to the polls a year early.
Given Tasmania’s proportional Hare Clark electoral system, where candidates only need to secure about 15% of the vote after preferences to win a seat, it seems inevitable that forming government will require some form of power sharing or coalition arrangement.
This is reinforced by polling data that suggests Tasmanian voters are turning their backs on both major parties. A YouGov poll conducted in January had both Liberal and Labor polling around 30% (31% Liberal, 27% Labor), with the Jacquie Lambie Network (20%), Greens (15%) and other independents (7%) sharing the remaining 40%.
The key issues
This all suggests that well established campaign strategies will once again be trotted out.
The government will talk up the strong (but slowing) economy and run a scare campaign against
minority government. This approach has served the Liberals well in the past, but their current minority status may undermine the pitch.
Labor, the Greens, independents, and the Jacqui Lambie Network will all point to the failure to address persistent housing, hospital, and transport challenges, as well as growing concerns about transparency and accountability.
One wildcard is government support for Hobart’s proposed waterfront AFL stadium. Most Tasmanians want an AFL team, but many have concerns about the mooted funding
model in which the government covers most of the cost – and the financial risk.
Finally, the rise and dominance of hyper-local issues is making it hard for parties to develop and deliver a cohesive long-term strategy for the state. History shows that laundry lists of election promises don’t provide the basis for good government.
Mainland pundits will be watching the election closely for two main reasons.
Firstly, the March poll will be an early test of electoral support for a more conservative Liberal party in Tasmania and beyond. While Rockliff is a moderate, the conservative faction of the Tasmanian Liberals is in the ascendancy with former long-serving federal senator Eric Abetz seeking to make a comeback in the state seat of Franklin.
Abetz will likely be elected, but it remains to be seen whether this occurs despite a broader swing against the Liberals.
If the party can retain government in Tasmania, it may provide an early indication that the national political tide is turning.
Secondly, the election may provide further evidence of fragmentation in Australian politics.
If significant numbers of Tasmanians, particularly those from regional and less well-off communities, vote for independents or minor parties, the major parties will have some serious soul searching to do. They’ll need to rethink their strategies for future state and national elections.
What does the crystal ball say?
Tasmanian elections are notoriously hard to predict.
Given the most likely outcome will be some form of coalition or power-sharing arrangement, negotiations after polling day will be just as important and interesting as the vote itself.
Will the Liberals be willing to form a minority government, and would Jeremy Rockliff be prepared to lead it?
After ten years in the wilderness (not such a bad place to be in this part of the world!) Labor is desperate to govern, but will be reluctant to enter into an agreement with the Greens due to past experience. They may, however, be willing to govern with the support of the Jacqui Lambie Network and/or independents.
Tasmanian politics has always had a unique and interesting dynamic, and the March election is unlikely to disappoint. The real test is whether members of the next Tasmanian Parliament are able to put the interests of the community above petty politics to deliver the good government Tasmanians deserve.
Richard Eccleston is an appointed a member of two public advisory boards providing advice to the Tasmanian government.
Robert Hortle 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.
The world’s coral reefs are close to 25% larger than we thought. By using satellite images, machine learning and on-ground knowledge from a global network of people living and working on coral reefs, we found an extra 64,000 square kilometres of coral reefs – an area the size of Ireland.
That brings the total size of the planet’s shallow reefs (meaning 0-20 metres deep) to 348,000 square kilometres – the size of Germany. This figure represents whole coral reef ecosystems, ranging from sandy-bottomed lagoons with a little coral, to coral rubble flats, to living walls of coral.
Within this 348,000 km² of coral is 80,000 km² where there’s a hard bottom – rocks rather than sand. These areas are likely to be home to significant amounts of coral – the places snorkellers and scuba divers most like to visit.
You might wonder why we’re finding this out now. Didn’t we already know where the world’s reefs are?
Previously, we’ve had to pull data from many different sources, which made it harder to pin down the extent of coral reefs with certainty. But now we have high resolution satellite data covering the entire world – and are able to see reefs as deep as 30 metres down.
We coupled this with direct observations and records of coral reefs from over 400 individuals and organisations in countries with coral reefs from all regions, such as the Maldives, Cuba and Australia.
To produce the maps, we used machine learning techniques to chew through 100 trillion pixels from the Sentinel-2 and Planet Dove CubeSat satellites to make accurate predictions about where coral is – and is not. The team worked with almost 500 researchers and collaborators to make the maps.
The result: the world’s first comprehensive map of coral reefs extent, and their composition, produced through the Allen Coral Atlas.
The maps are already proving their worth. Reef management agencies around the world are using them to plan and assess conservation work and threats to reefs.
We combined satellite data with real world observations. Here, Dr Eva Kovacs tows a GPS on the Great Barrier Reef. Allan Coral Atlas, CC BY-SA
Where is this hidden coral?
You can see the difference for yourself. In the interactive slider below, red indicates the newly detected coral in reefs off far north Queensland.
This infographic shows the new detail we now have for the Tongue Reef, in the seas off Port Douglas in Far North Queensland.
Our maps have three levels of detail. The first is the most expansive – the entire coral reef ecosystem. Seen from space, it has light areas of coral fringed by darker deeper water.
Then we have geomorphic detail, meaning what the areas within the reef look like. This includes sandy lagoons, reef crests exposed to the air at low tide, sloping areas going into deeper water and so on.
And finally we have fine detail of the benthic substrates, showing where you have areas dominated by coral cover.
Coral can’t grow on sand. Polyps have to attach to a hard surface such as rock before they can begin expanding the reef out of their limestone-secreting bodies.
Some of our maps include fine detail of benthic substrates, meaning where coral is most likely to be and the substrates (seafloor) available to the polyps, such as existing coral, sand, rubble, or seagrass.
It’s a crucial time for the world’s coral reefs. We’re discovering the full extent of shallow water reefs – while other researchers are finding large new black coral reefs in deeper water.
But even as we make these discoveries, coral reefs are reeling. Climate change is steadily heating up the sea and making it more acidic. Coral polyps can’t handle too much heat. These wonders of biodiversity are home to a quarter of the ocean’s species.
Making these maps took plenty of underwater research as well as satellite data. This photo shows Dr Chris Roelfsema conducting a photo transect in a remote area of the Great Barrier Reef. Allen Coral Atlas, CC BY-SA
In good news, these maps are already leading to real world change. We’ve already seen new efforts to conserve coral reefs in Indonesia, several Pacific island nations, Panama, Belize, Kenya and Australia, among others.
Mitchell Lyons receives funding from Australian Research Council and Australian Commonwealth Government. Mitchell Lyons works for the University of Queensland and the University of New South Wales.
Stuart Phinn receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Queensland and New South Wales state governments, Geoscience Australia and other Commonwealth agencies, and SmartSAT CRC. He works for the University of Queensland and was the founding director of Earth Observation Australia and Australia’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN).
Director Kyle Edward Ball’s feature film debut, Skinamarink, achieved unexpected commercial success last year after going viral on TikTok.
Hailed by some critics as the best horror film of 2023, or even the scariest of all time, Skinamarink is a work of experimental slow cinema. The film’s ambiguous and grainy imagery exudes the aura of a degraded, possessed VHS tape.
These aesthetics might seem to conflict with TikTok’s torrent of short, attention-grabbing videos. Yet TikTok has cultivated a hive of creative energy at the intersection of art and horror. Alongside YouTube, the platform has also helped to create pathways to international horror-film careers.
Bite-sized nightmares
YouTube and TikTok provide spaces where horror filmmakers can hone their craft and develop distinct voices, in collaboration with a community of users who provide input, theories and feedback.
A unique form of horror storytelling emerges from such engaged online communities, as they cultivate environments where creators can test new ideas and develop creative ingenuity. This leads to a creative dynamic I call “participatory experimentation”. It’s expanding the boundaries of the horror genre.
Ball’s distinctive aesthetic was developed via his YouTube channel Bitesized Nightmares. Here, he shared experimental videos based on his nightmares. He then invited viewers to share their own “nightmares” in the comments so he could depict them in subsequent videos.
One of these nightmare visions is shown in the short film Heck (2020), the prototype for Skinamarink. Avant-garde in its approach, Heck is a work of art as well as horror. Its experimental beginnings on YouTube are key to its unsettling aesthetic power.
An upcoming cinema screening of Heck at RMIT’s Capitol Theatre, as part of an art/horror program I’ve co-organised with the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, evidences the growing recognition of such digital horror content as “art” in spaces we may not normally expect. This is a significant cultural development.
The global horror hit Talk To Me (2023), one of Australia’s most successful films ever at the US box office, was also germinated via a YouTube channel. Directors Michael and Danny Philipou have more than 1 billion views and nearly 7 million subscribers on their channel, RackaRacka. It was here that they honed their unique blend of horror and zany, violent comedy.
YouTube has been home to boundary-pushing art-horror since its inception in 2005. Other notable examples include David Firth’s animated series Salad Fingers (2004-), Becky Sloan and Joe Pelling’s Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared (2011-) – which became a TV series in 2022 – and Michelle Lyon’s Funnie Horsie (2012-2016).
TikTok is now also emerging as an important site for this aesthetically rich “uncanny and weird” creative content. It’s not surprising Skinamarink went viral on TikTok when you consider the app’s category of “analog horror” had 2.3 billion views as of when this article was written. The closely related “liminal spaces” category had 4.9 billion views.
Although “analog” typically refers to pre-digital audiovisual technology, “analog horror” refers to horror content which may be produced digitally, but which has an eerily nostalgic technological quality. This content is often suffused with a hazy grain, reminiscent of Skinamarink’s cursed videotape aesthetic.
Analog horror videos may be depictions of creepy inhuman (but human-like) creatures, such as in this TikTok video.
Or they may depict mundane domestic spaces that become threatening once you realise the hallways have off-kilter corners, or the exits are impossible to access. Such imagery of everyday spaces evacuated of purpose, and instead injected with dread, produces the “uncanny”: a feeling of the familiar merged with the unfamiliar.
The creepy house in Skinamarink is a compelling example of this. Throughout the film, the cosily familiar space of a childhood bedroom becomes deeply unfamiliar and unsettling as doors and windows disappear and the ceiling suddenly seems to become the floor.
TikTok’s user-friendly bag of special-effects tricks, such as retro-cam filters, green screens, body warping and face-morphing enable everyday users to experiment with these horror aesthetics with a community of like-minded enthusiasts.
But while analog horror is being driven in new directions on TikTok, it has long been a mainstay of YouTube. One influential example is Marble Hornets (2009), which depicts the “Slender Man”, the internet’s most famous bogeyman.
The Mandela Catalogue (2021) is a more recent example from YouTube. It has had a substantial influence on how the genre has crystallised on TikTok. This eerie series by Alex Kister depicts an alternative reality in which “alternates” (malevolent doppelgangers of real people) have overrun Wisconsin. Doppelgangers are another element of the uncanny.
The future of experimental art-horror
Participatory art-horror experimentation on social media is having a global cultural moment. Last year, prestige film studio A24 (which also distributed Talk To Me) contracted 16-year-old Kane Parsons to direct his first feature based on his eerie YouTube video The Backrooms.
Director Jane Schoenbrun’s films also harness the themes and aesthetics of analog horror. Like Skinamarink, their debut feature, We’re All Going To the World’s Fair (2021), is an unapologetically creepy work of experimental slow cinema. The film unfolds largely through the vlog of an isolated teen YouTuber as she embarks on a (possibly deadly) online “challenge”, narrating her experience to her followers from her bedroom.
Schoenbrun’s upcoming second feature, I Saw the TV Glow (2024), another product of A24, similarly refracts aesthetics and themes of online horror genres such as analog horror and liminal spaces. It has been described as a “surreal coming-of-age horror film”, a “masterpiece” and Sundance’s hottest movie.
The careers of Ball, Parsons, Schoenbrun and the Philipous showcase how experimental horror trends on TikTok and YouTube have successfully crossed into the mainstream. As emerging filmmakers harness social media to build their creative visions, we can expect participatory experimentation to keep expanding the frontiers of the horror genre.
Jessica Balanzategui receives funding from the Australian Children’s Television Foundation, the City of Melbourne, and Creative Australia. Jessica is currently working with the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art to run public programs associated with their major exhibition, From the other side.
Bushfires broke out yesterday in western Victoria during a day of extreme weather conditions across the state. Although authorities have reported the situation is easing, emergency services continue to fight blazes in the Grampians National Park around the towns of Bellfield and Pomonal.
While the air quality in Australia is generally good, events such as bushfires can have a significant effect. Smoke can travel long distances and reduce air quality throughout a city or region.
The combustion of vegetation produces a range of gases, including carbon monoxide, as well as fine particles, often described as PM2.5 (particles of 2.5 micrometres in diameter or less). These particles can remain suspended in the air for extended periods and, owing to their tiny size, can penetrate deep into the lungs when inhaled.
Exposure to PM2.5 in bushfire smoke can result in a range of symptoms including coughing, throat irritation, as well as irritation to the eyes and nose. It can make existing conditions such as asthma worse and increase hospital presentations.
Ultimately, poor air quality can affect all of us, with even healthy people experiencing symptoms when exposed to high concentrations of bushfire smoke.
There are, however, things we can do to protect ourselves.
Air quality indexes are based on measurements of PM2.5 and other pollutants. On air quality indexes lower numbers indicate higher air quality, and vice versa. A number of websites provide air quality index information, for example IQAir for locations around Australia, or World’s Air Pollution for locations globally.
There are also apps such as AirRater which can provide useful information in addition to air quality values, such as pollen levels.
Although a number is much more informative from a research point of view, these sorts of services also provide air quality ratings such as “poor, “fair” or “good”, which can be helpful for people who may be unfamiliar with what the numbers mean.
Notably, these sources indicate the air quality around Victoria remains good at present.
When looking at air quality index values or PM2.5 concentrations, it’s important to note these do not identify the sources of the particles, so not everything counted as PM2.5 on even a smoky day is necessarily bushfire smoke. But PM2.5 values are a good indicator of overall air quality.
A growing number of air quality monitors are available to buy for home use, which measure single pollutants or a number of pollutants.
However, these instruments are not the same as those used in statutory air quality monitoring stations (which provide data for websites like those mentioned above). Statutory stations are set up by regulators or government agencies and use instruments that must meet national or international standards.
In many cases the accuracy of low-cost devices may not be well established. And effective calibration – where the measurements are verified using an alternative method, as would happen in a statutory monitoring station – might not be possible, particularly by end users.
Stay inside
When the air is noticeably smoky, or the air quality index is high, it’s best to remain indoors with doors and windows closed if you can.
The threshold at which you make this decision may depend on your personal circumstances. For example, healthy people can generally continue outdoor activities when the air quality is “fair”. However, someone with a respiratory condition might need to decrease or stop outdoor activities at this point. If the air quality is “very poor”, everyone should stay indoors.
If you have a particularly leaky home – say if you notice a draft, or odours from outside when the doors and windows are shut – then smoke ingress may be an issue. In this case, you may like to go elsewhere (for example, a friend’s house, or a public building with filtered air), provided it’s safe to do so.
A high-powered air cleaner or purifier with a HEPA (high efficiency particulate air) filter may also offer some benefit, especially for people with respiratory conditions.
If you get one of these, remember placement is important. Portable units may work for a single room, but not a whole house. Consider the best location for these devices (probably the room where you spend the most time).
Ultimately only the air which passes through the filter will be treated, so the size of the unit must be appropriate for the space. The Victorian government offers some advice on how to ascertain what sort of unit will be suitable for your space.
When staying indoors it’s safe to use air conditioners, provided they recirculate the air already in the house (and the windows and doors are closed). Reverse-cycle air conditioners are a good option if you have them. Any system which draws in outside air without treatment should be avoided.
Wear a mask if going outside
If you need to go out when the air quality is poor, a P2 (or N95) mask provides protection from smoke particles in the air (but not gases such as carbon monoxide). For effective protection, the mask should be fitted properly and worn for the duration of your time outdoors.
Respirator masks may not be a good option for those with existing health conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, so in these cases people should seek medical advice.
Ryan Mead-Hunter receives funding from NHMRC and the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people. The name of the Aboriginal man in this article was how he was referred to, and his relative has requested we honour this name.
Truth-telling is at the heart of a new research project we are currently leading that re-examines the legacy of the Hann Expedition, which travelled Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula in 1872.
Our project seeks to rewrite this period of history – and others – to honour the voices and experiences of Aboriginal people whose contributions to colonial-era expeditions have long been overlooked.
The Hann Expedition began in Mt Surprise, Queensland, in April 1872, and made a loop across the peninsula before finishing at the Junction Creek Telegraph Station seven months later. The team consisted of six white men and an Aboriginal guide. The purpose was to map and record “unknown” parts of Queensland and determine whether the lands would be feasible for mining and pastoral development.
Apart from geological descriptions and mapping, the expedition is credited with recording and collecting specimens of at least 149 plants previously unknown to Western science. However, using records from the expedition, we found these species were likely only located with the help of the young Girramay man, Jerry, who was their guide.
Jerry was derogatorily referred to as “the blackboy”, and his important role in the expedition has never been fully acknowledged.
The importance of Aboriginal knowledge to the expedition compelled us to further examine the encounters the men had with other Aboriginal people along the route. This likely included Olkala, Kuku Yalanji, Lama Lama and Guugu Yimithirr people.
In one of these encounters, botanist Thomas Tate and Jerry found a young Aboriginal boy near a lagoon and took him back to their camp. The boy’s family immediately retrieved him and returned the next day, threatening the team with weapons.
In other encounters, the team unsuccessfully tried to communicate with Aboriginal people, seeking information that would be useful to their expedition.
Our research team also found a detailed map created by Norman Taylor, the expedition’s geologist, which includes observations about encounters with Aboriginal people, as well as environmental details not recorded elsewhere.
The original map had been held in the Queensland State Archives since at least the 1980s, but had not been connected to other materials from the expedition. Although a detailed analysis of the map has only just begun, it suggests local Aboriginal people helped the expedition navigate difficult terrain along their route, particularly along the coast.
Our work takes its lead from Indigenous scholars and practitioners, such as Rose Barrowcliffe, Fiona Foley, Julie Gough, Natalie Harkin, Shino Konishi, Jeanine Leane and Djon Mundine, and others. Their work has been instrumental in critiquing the silencing of Aboriginal voices in colonial history. Wiradjuri scholar Jeanine Leane calls this a form of “cardboard incarceration”.
Our research team includes descendants of the 1872 expedition, such as the project lead and co-author, Peter Taylor (a descendant of Norman Taylor’s), and co-researcher and co-author Cameo Dalley (a great-granddaughter of Tate’s).
In addition, Nicole Huxley, a Gudjala leader, is a descendant of Jerry. Ms Huxley and her family wanted Jerry’s story to be told, in particular his role in keeping the expedition team alive at dangerous points in their travels.
As descendants, each of us has inherited different family narratives about what took place on the expedition, and whose contributions were central.
The Balkanu Cape York Development Corporation, which supports the land and development interests of Aboriginal people on Cape York, has also partnered with the project. Further funding will support our research and the involvement of Traditional Owners along the expedition route, including Olkala, Kuku Yalanji, Lama Lama and Guugu Yimithirr people.
As Gerhardt Pearson, the executive director of Balkanu, says:
…following the Hann Expedition, the violence and dispersal of Indigenous people was so devastating, the memories and stories of this period still haunt many people.
The united commitment of the descendants and their detailed knowledge of this expedition will be incredibly valuable in working with Elders across the cape who still grieve about their own history.
Part of this process involves what is referred to as “rematriation”, or the reunification of Indigenous people and their knowledges with Country. This can include Indigenous people taking over the management of collections of artefacts and other specimens from the colonial era.
In our project, this includes botanical collections now held in the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (London), the National Herbarium of Victoria at the Royal Botanic Gardens (Melbourne), and the Queensland Herbarium. These institutions are keen to develop protocols for involving Indigenous communities in the interpretation and management of collections.
Truth-telling was a vital component of the Uluru Statement from the Heart signed by over 200 Indigenous delegates from around Australia. However, the failed referendum on a Voice to Parliament last year arguably demonstrated an apathy towards such processes at a national level.
This project shifts focus to local and regional approaches to truth-telling and the importance of individuals and families in taking responsibility for their role in shaping history. This is even more important for those of us with ancestors responsible for the intergenerational trauma experienced by Aboriginal people.
For the white descendants involved in our project, this will require us to sit uncomfortably in the privilege we have inherited because of this violence and think meaningfully about what can be done in the present.
Selective memory can be a tool of colonisation, and this project goes directly to the responsibilities of the descendants of colonisers to challenge this.
Nicole Huxley is affiliated with North QLD Land Council, Jumbun Limited, Ngrragoonda RNTBC Aboriginal Corporation, Joint Coordinating Committee Member Qld – DSDSATSIP.
Cameo Dalley and Peter Taylor 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.
For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
Shakespeare, Richard II
ABC produced post-mortem documentaries on national governments have a distinguished pedigree. The latest instalment, Nemesis, dealing with the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison years, is the fourth of these series since the pioneering Labor in Power screened in 1993 chronicling the Hawke-Keating era. The Howard Years (2008) and The Killing Season (2015) followed examining respectively the Howard and Rudd-Gillard governments.
The changing tone of the titles of these series is telling. Though Labor in Power and The Howard Years had their fair share of preoccupation with leadership rivalries, they were also concerned with the substance of the governments. By contrast, The Killing Season and Nemesis focus predominantly on the leadership wars that blighted Australian politics between 2007 and 2022.
The most striking takeaway from Nemesis is that the Coalition’s decade in office from 2013 to 2022 was a time of abject irresponsibility. Rather than dedicated to delivering effective public policy, the Coalition spent a large part of that time consumed by infighting and ravaged by a cycle of treachery and retribution. It was blood sport feigning as government. And even when the leadership stabilised under Scott Morrison from August 2018, there was little guiding purpose.
There is no questioning that Nemesis is a significant piece of television documentary making. Eighteen months in creation, it is based on interviews with 60 participants. Mark Willacy, the reporter and interviewer of the programs, was surprised how easy it was to recruit the interviewees. Their motivations for participating were a mixture of a debt to posterity, vindicating actions and score settling.
But there are also some notable non-participants, most conspicuously Tony Abbott, who became the first former prime minister to decline to be interviewed in the three-decade history of these programs. We can only speculate why Abbott, who is also unusual among former prime ministers in not having written an account of his term of office, refused to participate. Perhaps his “action man” persona disinclines him to reflection, perhaps the memories of his unfulfilling two years in office are too painful to revisit, or perhaps he recognised that participating would only mean further debasement. Other high profile non-participants include Julie Bishop, the senior woman and deputy leader of the Liberal Party for the majority of the Coalition’s term in office, and Peter Dutton.
For keen students of Australian politics, Nemesis contains few major revelations. The series mostly confirms what we knew. But to witness the sheer awfulness of the era distilled into four and a half hours of television is both gripping and sobering.
The Abbott years
The first episode deals with the Abbott years. It is remarkable how early his prime ministership unravelled, beginning with the government’s first budget delivered by Joe Hockey in May 2014, notoriously invoking “a nation of lifters, not leaners”. It was a catalogue of swingeing cuts and broken promises (Abbott had pledged no cuts to health or education during the 2013 election campaign). When some Liberal colleagues dared to broach with the prime minister the budget’s breaches of trust, he dismissed them with angry invective.
The Abbott government never really recovered. The prime minister’s other problems included internal resentment at his overbearing chief of staff, Peta Credlin, and his own leadership idiosyncrasies. The latter was exemplified by his captain’s call to knight Prince Philip on Australia Day 2015. This rendered him a national laughing stock.
One new thing we learn about the Abbott years is that the prime minister proposed deploying the military to Ukraine in the wake of the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 by Russian-backed separatists that killed 38 Australian citizens and residents. He was thankfully talked out of the plan by Angus Houston, who Abbott had appointed as a special envoy to Ukraine to repatriate the bodies of the Australian victims.
The end for Abbott came less than two years into the job. Easily forgotten, Nemesis revisits the so-called “empty chair spill” of February 2015, prompted by a backbencher motion to declare the leadership vacant.
Despite there being no challenger — Malcolm Turnbull was biding his time until Abbott’s leadership “burnt down to the water line” — the spill motion garnered 39 votes providing a comical scenario of a sizeable minority of the party preferring an empty chair to the incumbent. Chastened by that result, Abbott then caused incredulity among colleagues by proclaiming that “good government begins today”. Effectively his leadership was now on death watch, with Turnbull and his allies circling and counting numbers.
In September 2015, Turnbull struck. He sanctifies the challenge as in the national interest: “I owed it to Australia”. Scott Morrison was party to the deposition and would be rewarded with the position of treasurer in Turnbull’s government, though he characteristically dissembles about the role he and his lieutenants played in Abbott’s fall. Nemesis has a delicious footnote to Turnbull’s ousting of Abbott. The former recalls that in the weeks that followed he reached out to inquire about his predecessor’s wellbeing. According to Turnbull, Abbott did not welcome the approach, telling him “to fuck off”.
The Turnbull years
Episode two, the most compelling of the series, commences with the Turnbull prime ministership’s buoyant beginnings. The public were relieved to see the back of Abbott and welcomed enthusiastically the ostensibly progressive Turnbull. He soared in the polls.
But his leadership was compromised from the start. Attorney-general in the government, George Brandis, refers to the Faustian bargain Turnbull had made to win the prime ministership. He had agreed to not rock the conservative boat in crucial areas like climate change and same sex marriage. With time, this eroded his authenticity.
Turnbull’s hope was that a decisive election victory in 2016 would empower him to assert his true political colours. Yet, as Nemesis records, the opposite happened. The double dissolution election of July was ruinous to his leadership. The eight-week campaign was too long, his performance on the hustings uninspired. Losing the electoral fat that Abbott had won in 2013 and returned to office with the barest majority, the result diminished Turnbull’s authority and emboldened his conservative critics, not least a vengeful Abbott.
As Nemesis tells it, notwithstanding some achievements on the international stage led by Turnbull and Julie Bishop, there were few bright spots for the government after that. The successful same sex marriage plebiscite of the second half of 2017 occurred on Turnbull’s watch but, fascinatingly, Liberal champions of that measure are grudging about his leadership on the issue. The suggestion is that he was circumspect in his advocacy, fearing a right-wing blowback.
As when he lost the Liberal leadership to Abbott in December 2009, it was climate change policy that finally lit the fuse under Turnbull’s prime ministership. The National Energy Guarantee (NEG), a policy crafted by Josh Frydenberg, was meant to end the climate wars but instead became a lightning rod for conservative dissent in the winter of 2018. With the NEG meeting resistance in the Coalition joint party room, Turnbull retreated, symptomatic of his prime ministership.
The fulcrum of Nemesis’s narrative of Turnbull’s prime ministership is a blow by blow account of his extraordinary week-long overthrow in August 2018. For this cause, he would dig in and fight. With regicide in the air, the week opened with Turnbull endeavouring to salvage his leadership by calling a surprise spill motion. Dutton, the right-wing hard man who Turnbull scathingly describes as “a thug”, challenged for the leadership, losing relatively narrowly. Eric Abetz, Abbott’s henchman, recalls mirthfully that at that point Turnbull’s leadership was “over and out”. Revenge was sweet.
Mortally wounded, Turnbull nevertheless remained determined to stave off Dutton, the conservative’s candidate. A revelation about events during that febrile week is that Turnbull considered heading off his opponents by calling an election. It is a remarkable admission, and we are left to wonder whether the governor-general would have granted an election in those circumstances and if the government would have completely imploded in the event of him taking that course.
In recounting his downfall, Turnbull seems strangely blind to the parallel between his deposition of Abbott in 2015 and the conservative insurrection of August 2018. It takes chutzpah for him to protest that the latter was “an obscene parody, a complete travesty of democracy”.
With support leaching away, including the defection of senior ministers, Turnbull bowed to the inevitable. Choosing not to stand in a second leadership ballot, it became a three way contest between Dutton, Bishop and Morrison, with the latter manoeuvring through the middle to prevail. Morrison insists he only entered the race when it was clear that Turnbull’s leadership was terminal. Turnbull alleges otherwise, accusing Morrison of having “played a double game”. The episode ends with Turnbull offering another pungent character assessment, this time of his successor: “duplicitous”.
The Morrison years
Nemesis concludes with Morrison’s prime ministership. The leadership conflict might have been over but it is still has many unedifying moments. Being most recent, the story is familiar with even fewer surprises. It errs towards generosity to Morrison, not fully capturing why his leadership became a byword for inauthenticity, a prime minister whose obsession with the theatre of politics consistently trumped substance.
The documentary springs directly to Morrison’s self-proclaimed “miracle” re-election of May 2019. Christopher Pyne puts a more realistic note on the result observing that many in the Coalition “decided they had won the election because they were geniuses as opposed to the fact that we had won because Labor had thrown it away”. As a consequence, a “lack of humility infected” the government.
The episode recalls many of the notorious statements made by Morrison, which by suggesting he was evading responsibility, was a bully or lacked empathy corroded his public image, especially among women voters. “I don’t hold a hose, mate” (after disappearing to Hawaii in the midst of the Black Summer bushfires), “she can go” (monstering Australia Post CEO, Christine Holgate), and “not far from here such marches, even now, are being met by bullets” (about a women’s justice rally at Parliament House) are examples.
Asked about the comments, Morrison admits to poor choices of words. Yet, he is equally quick to complain of his words being “weaponised” and to protest that he was misrepresented. The effect conveys that he continues to struggle to accept responsibility. An unfortunate habit of smugness when explaining himself adds to this impression.
Nemesis shows that the COVID pandemic was both a blessing and curse for the Morrison government. Fighting the pandemic gave the government a purpose that it otherwise lacked. The early decisions such as creating the national cabinet and intervening in the economy headlined by the JobKeeper program were its finest hours.
Things went awry, however, as the pandemic progressed. Political game playing resurfaced and tensions with the premiers festered. And then, of course, there were delays in procuring and distributing vaccines. Health bureaucrat Jane Halton is damming: “manifestly we had longer lockdowns than we actually needed to have because we didn’t have supply and rollout as others”.
Nemesis devotes considerable time to the AUKUS pact and the reneging on the agreement to buy submarines from France. Morrison paints AUKUS as the proudest legacy of his prime ministership. He was concerned that the French built conventional submarines would have been “obsolete before they got wet”. He is unfazed that French President Emmanuel Macron labelled him a liar: “I’ve got big shoulders”. Turnbull, who signed the agreement with Macron for the purchase of the French submarines, provides the critical commentary on AUKUS: “Morrison sacrificed Australian security, sovereignty and honour”.
The picture that emerges of the final months of Morrison’s prime ministership is of a divided government that was a spent force. A commitment to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 brought relations with the Nationals to breaking point. It was too little too late to change the public’s opinion that the Coalition was a laggard on climate change action.
Morrison then expended dwindling political capital by fruitlessly pursuing religious rights protections, causing ructions with Liberal moderates. Nemesis draws a connection between Morrison’s evangelical religious faith and this prime-ministerial frolic. The viewer is also invited to draw the dots between his faith and his politically disastrous and morally culpable handpicking of the anti-transgender Liberal candidate Katherine Deves to contest the 2022 election.
Morrison’s colleagues are unsparing in assessing him as politically toxic by the time of the 2022 election. Some even approached Treasurer Josh Frydenberg about challenging Morrison’s leadership: Frydenberg rebuffed their overtures. Tim Wilson, like Frydenberg a casualty of the Teal insurgency, compares the depth of public sentiment against the prime minister to “having a 10,000 tonne boulder attached to your leg”.
Morrison’s secret commandeering of five ministries was the sting in the tail of his prime ministership. Nemesis records the shock and appal of his colleagues when those actions were revealed. His explanations of his behaviour are unpersuasive as are his expressions of contrition. He says he has apologised to former treasurer Frydenberg and that they have “reconnected and as good a friends as you could hope for”. Frydenberg puts it differently: “it impacted the relationship and does to this day”. We are left with the suspicion that once again Morrison is bending the truth.
A decade of banality and pettiness
What can we take away from all this? Participants in the documentary draw on classical allusions in making sense of the chaos. We are told, for instance, that the leadership feud between Abbott and Turnbull was Shakespearean. Yet what Nemesis exposes is the banality of these events and the pettiness of the actors. One searches vainly for a sense of higher mission or nobility of bearing.
None of the three major protagonists emerge well. Abbott is deeply eccentric, leery of criticism and hopelessly incapable of adjusting to the positive tasks of governing; Turnbull is bloated with self-regard, merciless about the faults of others and yet timorous when he had the chance to make his mark; and Morrison is deceitful and bullying, a man whose governing declined into vacuity.
There have been other occasions in the past when national leadership has descended into tawdriness. The Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard years were defined by internecine warfare, but at least Gillard exhibited resoluteness in the way she governed and dignity in the way she left office.
The post-Menzies Liberal triumvirate of Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon were respectively overwhelmed by the office, reckless and pygmy like. We can go back further for episodes of leadership delinquency to the debilitating feuding between Earle Page and Robert Menzies on the eve of the second world war and even further to the egomaniacal and conflict ridden prime ministership of Billy Hughes.
Yet arguably the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era represents a nadir when it comes to Australian national leadership.
Focussed on the blood-letting and human follies of the Coalition years, Nemesis is silent on the bigger forces roiling national politics, the eroding bases of the major parties and a hyperactive and polarised media to name the obvious.
The task of leadership has become more fraught in this environment. Yet this does not afford an alibi for the degraded governance of 2013-22. Successful incumbents from the past — Alfred Deakin, John Curtin, Ben Chifley, Robert Menzies, Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard — provide a template for prime-ministerial achievement in all seasons. It begins with being steadfastly bound to a larger purpose, without which politics can easily degenerate into destructive vanities and mindless absurdities as Nemesis painfully illustrates.
As ghastly a spectacle as it presents, this is its powerful lesson.
Paul Strangio received funding from the Australian Research Council in the past.
New Zealanders traditionally show their love for a special other on Valentine’s Day, so what better time to reveal which insect they feel the most affection for?
The second annual Bug of the Year contest has been won by the red admiral butterfly. It received a total of 2,275 votes from the nearly 17,000 votes cast by New Zealanders at home and abroad.
One of our most spectacular butterflies, the red admiral inherits the crown from last year’s inaugural winner, the native bee, or ngaro huruhuru (Leioproctus fulvescens).
While a butterfly beat the other bugs, the Mt Arthur giant wētā, the ngāokeoke (velvet worm) and the titiwai (glowworm) were close behind, with thousands of votes each.
The Entomological Society of New Zealand began the competition to shed light on the underrepresented and stunningly unique bugs of Aotearoa New Zealand. As interest grows, it is hoped more people will be inspired to create and maintain habitats for these often-endangered species.
Aotearoa is home to over 20,000 different species of bugs – more correctly known as terrestrial invertebrates. They range from vibrant butterflies and iconic wētā to secretive velvet worms and carnivorous land snails. And those are just the species described so far.
There are ten times as many bug species in New Zealand than there are native plants, and over a hundred times more than native bird species. Yet most people don’t know much about them.
Moths and butterflies aren’t so different
The red admiral is easily recognisable by its vibrant red and black wings. Its Māori name, kahukura, translates directly as “red cloak or garment”, but can also refer to the atua (deity) represented by the top bow of a double rainbow.
The closely related kahukōwhai, or yellow admiral, has similar colouring, except the underside of its upper wings is creamy yellow. Red admirals are endemic – only found in New Zealand – whereas yellow admirals are also native to Australia.
Aotearoa has over 2,000 species of lepidoptera – butterflies and moths – and roughly 90% of these are endemic. You might be surprised to know there are no clear differences between what are commonly called butterflies and those called moths.
Only 17 of our lepidoptera species are popularly referred to as butterflies. But many of the other 98% – so-called moths – are active during the day and can also be beautifully patterned and coloured.
Because they feed from floral nectar sources and transfer pollen in the process, moths and butterflies are important pollinators. They are also staples in the food chain, forming a large portion of native bird diets.
Gardens as butterfly habitats
Like many butterflies worldwide, red admirals are less common than they used to be. While recent gardening advice has begun to include bee-friendly planting, it is also important to think of other invertebrates, like butterflies, when we plan and cultivate our backyards.
The Moths and Butterflies of New Zealand Trust conducts an online course on how to assess, create and maintain butterfly habitats.
Lepidoptera differ from some other invertebrates in that females prefer to (or exclusively) lay their eggs on specific host plants. If preferred host plants are not available, caterpillar survival can be low.
So, while having a variety of flowering plants for adults to feed from is important, providing host plants for caterpillars to develop on is crucial.
It is well known that monarch butterfly caterpillars need to feed on milkweed (swan plant). Similarly, Muehlenbeckia species such as climbing ohuehue and shrubby tororaro are important host plants for many native butterflies, as well as many native moths.
Lack of suitable hosts may be one reason red admirals are becoming increasingly uncommon. Recent research has shown the females prefer laying eggs on native nettles, and larvae raised on native nettles outperform those raised on introduced nettles.
Experiments show that the tree nettle ongaonga (Urtica ferox) is an ideal host for red admiral caterpillars. But ongaonga is often removed due to its extremely painful stinging hairs.
Pollinator protection
Besides planting with butterflies and moths in mind, there are many other actions you can take in the garden to help make it suitable for thriving pollinator populations.
Some of the biggest threats to insect populations in Aotearoa and the world are related to urbanisation, deforestation and agricultural intensification: loss of habitat and food sources, and pesticide use.
Introduced predators also threaten our unique bugs. Invasive vespula wasps and rodents are a menace to native butterflies and moths. But predator control systems such as backyard trapping can make a difference.
Future articles will offer seasonal advice on gardening and lifestyle practices to help bugs in your backyard. This will include the best times to spot native and introduced bugs, and other ways to promote invertebrate conservation and biodiversity.
Whether you’re already a bug lover or still a bit bug-tentative, it’s important we all help invertebrate populations in Aotearoa survive and thrive.
When the first cane toads were brought from South America to Queensland in 1935, many of the parasites that troubled them were left behind. But deep inside the lungs of at least one of those pioneer toads lurked small nematode lungworms.
Almost a century later, the toads are evolving and spreading across the Australian continent. In new research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, we show that the lungworms too are evolving: for reasons we do not yet understand, worms taken from the toad invasion front in Western Australia are better at infecting toads than their Queensland cousins.
An eternal arms race
Nematode lungworms are tiny threadlike creatures that live in the lining of a toad’s lung, suck its blood, and release their eggs through the host’s digestive tract. The larva that hatch in the toad’s droppings lie in wait for a new host to pass by, then penetrate through its skin and migrate through the amphibian’s body to find the lungs and settle into a comfortable life, and begin the cycle anew.
Parasites and their hosts are locked into an eternal arms race. Any characteristic that makes a parasite better at finding a new host, setting up an infection, and defeating the host’s attempts to destroy it, will be favoured by natural selection.
Over generations, parasites get better and better at infecting their hosts. But at the same time, any new trick that enables a host to detect, avoid or repel the parasites is favoured as well.
So it’s a case of parasites evolving to infect, and hosts evolving to defeat that new tactic. Mostly, parasites win because they have so many offspring and each generation is very short. As a result, they can evolve new tricks faster than the host can evolve to fight them.
The march of the toads
The co-evolution between hosts and parasites is most in sync among the ones in the same location, because they encounter each other most regularly. A parasite is usually better able to infect hosts from the local population it encounters regularly than those from a distant population.
But when hosts invade new territory, it can play havoc with the evolutionary matching between local hosts and parasites.
Since cane toads were released into the fields around Cairns in 1935, the toxic amphibians have hopped some 2,500 kilometres westwards and are currently on the doorstep of Broome. And they have changed dramatically along the way.
The Queensland toads are homebodies and spend their lives in a small area, often reusing the same shelter night after night. As a result, their populations can build up to high densities.
For a lungworm larva, having lots of toads in a small area, reusing and sharing shelter sites, makes it simple to find a new host. But at the invasion front (currently in Western Australia), toads are highly mobile, moving over a kilometre per night when conditions permit, and rarely spending two nights in the same place.
At the forefront of the invasion, toads are few and far between. A lungworm larva at the invasion front, waiting in the soil for a toad to pass by, will have few opportunities to encounter and infect a new host.
Lungworms from the invasion front
When hosts are rare, we expect the parasite will evolve to get better at infecting the ones it does encounter, because it is unlikely to get a second chance.
To understand how this co-evolution is playing out between cane toads and their lungworms, we did some experiments pairing hosts and parasites from different locations in Australia. What would happen when toad and lungworm strains that had been separated by 90 years of invasion were reintroduced to each other?
To study this we collected toads from different locations, bred them in captivity and reared the offspring in the lab under common conditions. We then exposed them to 50 lungworm larvae from a different area of the range, waited four months for infections to develop, then killed the toads and counted how many adult worms had successfully established in their lungs.
As expected, worms from the invasion front were best at infecting toads, not just their local ones. Behind the invasion front, in intermediate and old populations we found that hosts were able to fight their local parasites better than those from distant populations.
While we saw dramatic differences in infection outcomes, we have yet to determine what biochemical mechanisms caused the differences and how changes in genetic variation of host and parasite populations might have shaped them.
Lee A Rollins receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Rick Shine receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Greg Brown 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.
Half a million homes and businesses in Victoria were left without power late on Tuesday following a major power outage. The disruption occurred when severe winds knocked over several high-voltage electricity transmission towers, causing all four units of the Loy Yang A coal-fired power station to trip and go offline.
Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio described the blackout as “one of the largest outage events in the state’s history”.
The event has prompted questions about the reliability of the state’s electricity grid. But it’s important to note these extreme winds would have seriously disrupted any power system. It has little to do with the mix of renewable energy and conventional fossil fuels.
As climate change worsens, we have much work ahead to ensure our electricity grids cope with severe weather events. But in this case, the fact that a complete system blackout was avoided is testament to the resilience of the system.
A day of wild weather
An extreme storm, including strong winds and lightning, tore through Victoria on Tuesday afternoon. It caused two transmission lines near Geelong to collapse, prompting several generators to disconnect from the grid and cutting power to parts of the network.
Other customers lost power after the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) ordered “load shedding”. This involves temporarily cutting off electricity supply to some customers to keep the network stable and prevent damage.
According to a statement from AEMO, the storm also damaged hundreds of powerlines and power poles and restoring electricity to all customers “may take days if not weeks”
The disruption to electricity transmission caused AGL’s Loy Yang A generator to go offline. This was an automatic response known as a “fault ride-through” mechanism. It’s much like a fuse blowing if you have a short-circuit at home.
When large electricity loads are rapidly and unexpectedly removed from the system, electricity supply and demand are no longer matched. It’s a dangerous situation and means electricity generators can be badly damaged or even destroyed if they don’t disconnect from the network.
It appears that Loy Yang A was the first generator to disconnect. The effect was to reduce supply and help bring the system back into balance, preventing a system-wide outage.
All generators have protection systems that stop them from being damaged in these kinds of events. Loy Yang A tripped up to protect itself from permanent damage and in doing so actually kept the system stable. It did what the system is designed to do.
The disruption to electricity transmission caused AGL’s Loy Yang A generator to go offline. Shutterstock
What part did renewables and coal play?
When transmission lines fail, the whole system is affected. This includes all types of generators – wind, solar, gas, hydro and coal. The power outages on Tuesday were unrelated to the proportion of renewables and fossil fuels in the energy mix.
It’s possible that old coal power generators are more sensitive to transmission disruptions than newer technologies. But it’s far too early to say whether this had anything to do with Tuesday’s event.
Battery storage may have helped steady the grid. Batteries have ultra-rapid responses to these kinds of disuptions and can add or subtract power from the grid within milliseconds to keep the grid stable.
And looking ahead, one benefit of renewable energy systems is that they tend to be much more widely “distributed” geographically than coal generators. So when power lines go out, having a more distributed network actually provides more resilience.
Lessons from South Australia
In September 2016, wind storms in South Australia also blew over transmission lines. Cascading disconnections by generators meant the entire grid went black in a matter of seconds, causing a statewide outage.
It will take months to analyse all the data from the Victorian blackout. But it may well show that the lessons learned from SA blackout saved the Victorian grid.
For example, AEMO was reportedly unaware about the exact settings of “fault ride-through” mechanisms on wind farms before the SA blackouts. This has since changed, and may have helped minimise the impacts in Victoria.
A warmer future
We know more severe weather events are predicted under climate change. It will manifest in many different ways: strong wind events, heatwaves, bushfires and floods.
All infrastructure, but especially energy infrastructure, is vulnerable under these conditions. It means all of us – researchers, the market operators, and generator operators – must work hard to make energy systems more resilient as we move into an uncertain future.
Half a million homes and businesses in Victoria were left without power late on Tuesday following a major power outage. The disruption occurred when severe winds knocked over several high voltage electricity transmission towers, causing all four units of the Loy Yang A coal fired power station to trip and go offline.
Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio described the blackout as “one of the largest outage events in the state’s history”.
The event has prompted questions about the reliability of the state’s electricity grid. But it’s important to note these extreme winds would have seriously disrupted any power system. It has little to do with the mix of renewable energy and conventional fossil fuels.
As climate change worsens, we have much work ahead to ensure our electricity grids cope with severe weather events. But in this case, the fact that a complete system blackout was avoided is testament to the resilience of the system.
A day of wild weather
An extreme storm, including strong winds and lightning, tore through Victoria on Tuesday afternoon. It caused two transmission lines near Geelong to collapse, prompting several generators to disconnect from the grid and cutting power to parts of the network.
Other customers lost power after the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) ordered “load shedding”. This involves temporarily cutting off electricity supply to some customers to keep the network stable and prevent damage.
According to a statement from AEMO, the storm also damaged hundreds of powerlines and power poles and restoring electricity to all customers “may take days if not weeks”
The disruption to electricity transmission caused AGL’s Loy Yang A generator to go offline. This was an automatic response known as a “fault ride-through” mechanism. It’s much like a fuse blowing if you have a short-circuit at home.
When large electricity loads are rapidly and unexpectedly removed from the system, electricity supply and demand are no longer matched. It’s a dangerous situation and means electricity generators can be badly damaged or even destroyed if they don’t disconnect from the network.
It appears that Loy Yang A was the first generator to disconnect. The effect was to reduce supply and helped bring the system back into balance, preventing a system-wide outage.
All generators have protection systems that stop them from being damaged in these kinds of events. Loy Yang A tripped up to protect itself from permanent damage and in doing so actually kept the system stable. It did what the system is designed to do.
The disruption to electricity transmission caused AGL’s Loy Yang A generator to go offline. Shutterstock
What part did renewables or coal play?
When transmission lines fail, the whole system is affected. This includes all types of generators – wind, solar, gas, hydro and coal. The power outages on Tuesday were unrelated to the proportion of renewables and fossil fuels in the energy mix.
It’s possible that old coal power generators are more sensitive to transmission disruptions than newer technologies. But it’s far too early to say whether this had anything to do with Tuesday’s event.
Battery storage may have helped steady the grid. Batteries have ultra-rapid responses to these kinds of disuptions and can add or subtract power from the grid within milliseconds to keep the grid stable.
And looking ahead, one benefit of renewable energy systems is that they tend to be much more widely “distributed” geographically than coal generators. So when power lines go out, having a more distributed network actually provides more resilience.
Lessons from South Australia
In September 2016, wind storms in South Australia also blew over transmission lines. Cascading disconnections by generators meant the entire grid went black in a matter of seconds, causing a statewide outage.
It will take months to analyse all the data from the Victorian blackout. But it may well show that the lessons learned from SA blackout saved the Victorian grid.
For example, AEMO was reportedly unaware about the exact settings of “fault ride-through” mechanisms settings on wind farms before the SA blackouts. This has since changed, and may have helped minimise the impacts in Victoria.
A warmer future
We know more severe weather events are predicted under climate change. It will manifest in many different ways: strong wind events, heatwaves, bushfires and floods.
All infrastructure, but especially energy infrastructure, is vulnerable under these conditions. It means all of us – researchers, the market operators, and generator operators – must work hard to make energy systems more resilient as we move into an uncertain future.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Lindenmayer, Professor, The Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University
Forty years ago when my colleagues and I did spotlighting surveys, the southern greater glider was the most common animal we’d see. Now, this amazing species is endangered. In many areas it is hard to find; in others it has been lost altogether.
Australia has a disproportionately large number of in-danger species, and their decline follows a well-trodden path. Common species become uncommon, then uncommon species become rare. Rare species become threatened or endangered. Then tragically, endangered species go extinct.
Australia leads the world in native mammal extinctions – roughly 10% have become extinct since British invasion. The southern greater glider is heading towards this fate.
That’s why ecologists were shocked by a recent announcement by New South Wales environment authorities that we believe loosens protections for southern greater gliders in logging areas.
A marsupial to cherish
The southern greater glider is an iconic marsupial. It’s one of three species of greater gliders found in eastern Australia. It was listed as vulnerable to extinction under national environment law in 2016, then uplisted to endangered in 2022.
Greater gliders are amazing animals. Their diet is low on nutrients, comprised almost entirely of eucalypt leaves and buds. Yet they are the world’s largest gliding marsupial, weighing up to 1.3 kg and capable of gliding up to 100m through a forest.
Southern greater gliders have white bellies and thick back fur that ranges from pure white to jet black.
The species is highly dependent on forest habitat and, in particular, large trees with hollows where they shelter and breed. But sadly, extensive glider habitat has been burnt, logged or both. Climate change poses a further risk.
We have long been concerned for the southern greater glider. In the wet forests of Victoria, for example, their numbers have declined by 80% since 1997. In 2007, the species became regionally extinct at Booderee National Park, south of Sydney.
When the southern greater glider was upgraded to endangered, Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said the new listing would “ensure prioritisation of recovery actions to protect this iconic species”. She noted that habitat protection and land clearing were “primarily the responsibility of state governments”.
You might think, then, that state governments would now be working harder to protect greater glider habitat. But a recent decision in NSW suggests little has changed.
What the changes mean
The NSW Environment Protection Authority this month announced changes to rules in logging operations. It claims the amendments constitute “new protections” for greater gliders. But many ecologists, us included, believe the changes are designed to make logging easier and will leave the species at greater risk.
At present, Forestry Corporation staff undertake pre-logging habitat searches for trees that might contain hollows. They must retain eight of these trees per hectare but can log right up to the tree base. The staff must also look for den trees (where an animal is actually seen entering or leaving a tree hollow) – although this is problematic as gliders are active at night and the surveys take place during the day. If a den tree is found, it must be protected and a 50m area around it retained.
Under the proposed new rules, Forestry Corporation will have to keep more large hollow-bearing trees per hectare – 14 instead of the current eight in high-density glider areas, and 12 instead of the current eight in low-density areas. A 50m exclusion zone will remain around known recorded locations of greater glider dens, but there will no longer be a requirement to specifically find or protect den trees.
This means actual habitat where greater gliders currently occur, and occupy den trees, may not be protected. We believe this will increase the gliders’ rate of decline and fast-track it towards extinction.
The new rules were due to begin on February 9, but were postponed by a week. In a statement, the authority said it was “consulting with stakeholders and considering their feedback to ensure we find the most appropriate way to address concerns while achieving long-term protections for this endangered species”.
If the authority is serious about protecting greater gliders, it will move to strengthen not weaken protections for greater glider habitat.
Logging glider habitat is nonsensical
Since the southern greater glider was listed as vulnerable in 2016, its habitat continued to be destroyed. This is poor management for many reasons:
gliders often die on site when their habitat is disturbed
young forests recovering after disturbances tend to be hotter and drier, which is bad for gliders because they are heat-sensitive
removing hollow-bearing trees not only destroys a key part of glider habitat immediately, but it can take decades (if not centuries) for forest to become suitable again
Human activity has left few remaining refuges for the southern greater glider. Any remaining habitat should be subject to the highest protections.
Logging those refuges is nonsensical given the large body of scientific work demonstrating its negative effects. And tinkering around the edge of logging rules will have limited benefits.
Australia has already lost so many wonderful mammal species. Do we want the southern greater glider to suffer the same fate? If not, let’s stop destroying the forests our species need to survive.
David Lindenmayer receives funding from the Australian and Victorian Governments and the Australian Research Council. He is a member of the Biodiversity Council and Birdlife Australia.
Kita Ashman works for WWF Australia and is an Ambassador for Paddy Pallin.
Sam Altman, chief executive of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, is reportedly trying to find up to US$7 trillion of investment to manufacture the enormous volumes of computer chips he believes the world needs to run artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Altman also recently said the world will need more energy in the AI-saturated future he envisions – so much more that some kind of technological breakthrough like nuclear fusion may be required.
Altman clearly has big plans for his company’s technology, but is the future of AI really this rosy? As a long-time “artificial intelligence” researcher, I have my doubts.
Today’s AI systems – particularly generative AI tools such as ChatGPT – are not truly intelligent. What’s more, there is no evidence they can become so without fundamental changes to the way they work.
This definition, like many others, is a little blurry: should we call spreadsheets AI, as they can carry out calculations that once would have been a high-level human task? How about factory robots, which have not only replaced humans but in many instances surpassed us in their ability to perform complex and delicate tasks?
While spreadsheets and robots can indeed do things that were once the domain of humans, they do so by following an algorithm – a process or set of rules for approaching a task and working through it.
One thing we can say is that there is no such thing as “an AI” in the sense of a system that can perform a range of intelligent actions in the way a human would. Rather, there are many different AI technologies that can do quite different things.
Making decisions vs generating outputs
Perhaps the most important distinction is between “discriminative AI” and “generative AI”.
Discriminative AI helps with making decisions, such as whether a bank should give a loan to a small business, or whether a doctor diagnoses a patient with disease X or disease Y. AI technologies of this kind have existed for decades, and bigger and better ones are emerging all the time.
Generative AI systems, on the other hand – ChatGPT, Midjourney and their relatives – generate outputs in response to inputs: in other words, they make things up. In essence, they have been exposed to billions of data points (such as sentences) and use this to guess a likely response to a prompt. The response may often be “true”, depending on the source data, but there are no guarantees.
For generative AI, there is no difference between a “hallucination” – a false response invented by the system – and a response a human would judge as true. This appears to be an inherent defect of the technology, which uses a kind of neural network called a transformer.
AI, but not intelligent
Another example shows how the goalposts of “AI” are constantly moving. In the 1980s, I worked on a computer system designed to provide expert medical advice on laboratory results. It was written up in the US research literature as one of the first four medical “expert systems” in clinical use, and in 1986 an Australian government report described it as the most successful expert system developed in Australia.
I was pretty proud of this. It was an AI landmark, and it performed a task that normally required highly trained medical specialists. However, the system wasn’t intelligent at all. It was really just a kind of look-up table which matched lab test results to high-level diagnostic and patient management advice.
There is now technology which makes it very easy to build such systems, so there are thousands of them in use around the world. (This technology, based on research by myself and colleagues, is provided by an Australian company called Beamtree.)
In doing a task done by highly trained specialists, they are certainly “AI”, but they are still not at all intelligent (although the more complex ones may have thousands and thousands of rules for looking up answers).
“There are now thousands of similar systems in use around the world, using a technology which makes it very easy to build such systems, provided by Beamtree, an Australian company” and originally based on research by myself and colleagues.“
The transformer networks used in generative AI systems still run on sets of rules, though there may be millions or billions of them, and they cannot easily be explained in human terms.
What is real intelligence?
If algorithms can produce dazzling results of the kind we see from ChatGPT without being intelligent, what is real intelligence?
We might say intelligence is insight: the judgement that something is or is not a good idea. Think of Archimedes, leaping from his bath and shouting “Eureka” because he had had an insight into the principle of buoyancy.
Generative AI doesn’t have insight. ChatGPT can’t tell you if its answer to a question is better than Gemini’s. (Gemini, until recently known as Bard, is Google’s competitor to OpenAI’s GPT family of AI tools.)
Or to put it another way: generative AI might produce amazing pictures in the style of Monet, but if it were trained only on Renaissance art it would never invent Impressionism.
Generative AI is extraordinary, and people will no doubt find widespread and very valuable uses for it. Already, it provides extremely useful tools for transforming and presenting (but not discovering) information, and tools for turning specifications into code are already in routine use.
These will get better and better: Google’s just-released Gemini, for example, appears to try to minimise the hallucination problem, by using search and then re-expressing the search results.
Nevertheless, as we become more familiar with generative AI systems, we will see more clearly that it is not truly intelligent; there is no insight. It is not magic, but a very clever magician’s trick: an algorithm that is the product of extraordinary human ingenuity.
Paul Compton was a founder of Pacific Knowledge Systems, later renamed Beamtree, but no longer has any involvement
with the company.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton says Labor’s proposed fuel efficiency standard for new cars would push up the price of a Mazda CX30 “by about $19,000”.
Given that right now the Mazda CX30 costs A$33,140, that’d be one hell of an increase.
So what should we really expect if Australia finally introduces fuel efficiency standards here – decades after the US and Europe? What could it cost us upfront for buying new cars? And how much could we save later in lower fuel bills?
Here’s what we do know, based on decades of international experience, new federal government analysis – and even cost estimates from a previous Coalition government.
Car efficiency standards are common overseas
Labor is proposing a so-called new vehicle efficiency standard of the kind proposed by the Coalition in 2016, championed by the Coalition in 2022, and common in the rest of the world.
Here’s how it works in Europe, the United States and Japan, and just about every advanced economy other than Russia and Australia.
Every car manufacturer has to meet an average efficiency standard for the new vehicles it sells each year, whether expressed in miles per gallon (the US) or carbon dioxide emitted per kilometre (Europe).
Europe has been doing it since 2009. When it tightened its standards in 2020, average CO₂ emissions of new passenger cars sold fell 12% and a further 12.5% the following year.
After decades of being the odd one out, Australian passenger cars on average use 20% more fuel than passenger cars in the US.
And that isn’t only because Australians like SUVs and utes. In both Australia and the US, SUVs and utes account for four out of every five new light vehicles sold.
But the new SUVs and utes sold in Australia produce on average 24% more emissions than those sold in the United States. The new smaller cars sold in Australia produce 31% more.
Standards change the mix of what’s sold
Efficiency standards don’t prevent carmakers from selling inefficient vehicles. What they do is ensure they make those vehicles more efficient, or balance their sales with sales of more efficient ones.
At the moment, it means the vehicles sold in the US and elsewhere get advanced emissions technologies not generally offered in Australia.
Volkswagen says Australia is a dumping ground for older and less efficient cars. Shutterstock
It’s easy to understand why. With efficient vehicles prized in the US, Europe, and other places, because they are needed to balance up the sales of less efficient vehicles, they get diverted to those places – rather than Australia.
In the words of Volkswagen Group Australia chief Michael Bartsch, it makes Australia a “dumping ground” for older and less efficient vehicles.
Labor has put forward three options for targets: a slow start, a fast start, and its preferred option: “fast but flexible”.
Its preferred option would require carmakers selling in Australia to catch up with the standards of countries including the United States by 2028.
For motorists, the biggest benefit is fuel savings – calculated at A$107 billion between now and 2050. Against that sit vehicle technology, electricity and battery replacement costs of half as much, leaving motorists a long way ahead.
But would it push up the price of cars, as Dutton suggests?
But common sense suggests it’ll make the price of gas guzzlers somewhat more expensive, and lean, fuel-efficient machines less expensive, as carmakers
adjust the mix of what they trying to sell.
When the Coalition looked at this back in 2016, it found the standard it proposed would increase the price of an average-performing petrol passenger vehicle by between $800 and $2,000, and the price of an average-performing diesel light commercial vehicle by between $750 and $2,000.
At the petrol price at the time, $1.30 per litre – far less than we’re paying now – motorists would have been ahead after four years.
Maybe Labor’s plan will push up car prices more than the Coalition’s 2016 plan, because it is more ambitious, as Dutton suggests. Or maybe it will push up prices by less because vehicle technology has improved.
In the US, a statistical analysis of prices from 2003 to 2021 found “no systemic, statistically significant increase in inflation-adjusted vehicle prices” during two decades in which standards were tightened and fuel economy improved 30%.
And standards will need to tighten. Cars and other light vehicles account for 13% of Australia’s carbon emissions. Both this government – and its Coalition predecessor – committed to cutting Australia’s net emissions to zero by 2050.
Without vehicles pulling their weight, along with heavy industry and electricity, we won’t get there.
Peter Martin is Economics Editor of The Conversation.
Valentine’s Day is associated with red and pink, representing passion and romance. But there’s another hue with a secret, sensual history longing for embrace: green.
The colour of nature and fertility, green is deeply connected to love in traditions throughout the world. In these times of conflict, 2024 is the year we should remember what connects rather than divides us, and embrace green as the colour of love.
In the ancient Indian chakra tradition, green is the colour of the heart. The heart organ has long been associated with love. A chakra, conceptualised as a wheel of whirling energy, balances particular emotions and the health of the body. The heart chakra at the centre of the chest represents loving-kindness, compassion and care.
Green has a range of cross-cultural meanings to do with balance, peace and hope. Islam associates heavenly paradise with the colour. It is important in the Catholic faith for hope and life, as in Judaism, where it means renewal. In China, jade is considered powerful and fortunate, as is pounamu jade in Maori culture. Scottish serpentine is still believed by some today to boost creativity.
In European mediaeval folklore, the colour was associated with both being lucky or unlucky in love. It symbolised a young woman’s sexuality, and being “greensick” was a term for a youth in unrequited love.
Mary Magdalene was depicted wearing green sleeves. Robin Hood and Maid Marian wore it in the greenwoods, the home of lovers.
During the Renaissance, pastoral and woodland settings symbolised nature, pleasure, freedom and lack of convention, as Arden does in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: an alternative Green World, an erotic Eden.
Bawdy Renaissance madrigals such as Now is the Month of Maying included references to a “barley break” (a roll in the hay) and lads and lasses making merry upon the “greeny grass”.
‘And now they never meet in grove or green’ from act two, scene one of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1908. The Cleveland Museum of Art
Hidden greens
Old songs give us some clues to the secret, erotic symbolism of the colour green and its fateful relationship to women’s sexuality.
The Tudor version of Greensleeves contains suggestive lyrics regarding crimson stockings with gold above the knee and pumps as white as milk, and a grassy-green gown. According to a romantic myth, Henry VIII wrote Greensleeves to woo Anne Boleyn.
The lyrics go back to Celtic myths about the joining of the May Queen with the Oak King, also called the Green Man or “Jack in the Green”. Their union is consummated on May Day, also known as Beltane.
Rituals still practised today in magic and pagan communities connect May Day festivities to the hand-fasting or marriage of the god and goddess, encouraging desire to flame and convention to be cast aside outdoors.
Green got a downgrade during the Middle Ages and beyond. Dubbed the fairies’ colour, who were associated with nature and said to be jealous of human good fortune, it became unlucky for brides and even today is warned against being worn at weddings.
Follower of Hans Schilling, illuminator and from the Workshop of Diebold. Lauber Jupiter Gives Danae a Gift of Gold, 1469. Getty Museum
In the Middle Ages, healers and wise-women who held vital medicinal plant and herb use, as well as some who may have practised folk magic for alluring charms and love potions, were persecuted for their knowledge as witches. The female witch is so associated with green that in The Wizard of Oz she was given green skin.
A contradictory colour
Green carries negative connotations such as poison, jealousy and envy: the green-eyed monster.
Greenwashing or green-sheening are terms for the promotion of dubious environmental products. In Green Sense a treatise that explores botanical aesthetics, cultural studies academic John Ryan argues the contradiction of green comes from it being the shade of growth and decomposition: both birth and death.
In The Key of Green cultural historian Bruce Smith suggests green has the power to upset. It has no fixed meaning and encompasses vast mental territory. Part noun, part adjective, part adverb and part verb, we see green, and we can also shop, build, vote and think green. We can feel green: during the Renaissance, he writes, being possessed by the passions was likened to wearing green spectacles. Smith also contends that we can hear colours: to hear green would be to listen longingly, as we do to love songs.
Green flags possibility for growth and change. It revives bodies and souls. In the philosophy of mediaeval mystic Hildegard of Bingen, viriditas – meaning greenness and vitality – signified the life force that makes all things fresh and new.
Louis Jean François Lagrenée, Mars and Venus, Allegory of Peace (Mars et Vénus, allégorie sur la Paix) 1770. Getty Museum
Today greening power is being celebrated and revived. Across the globe, there are calls for the growth of love. Whether we celebrate our relationships in pastel or Barbie pink, passionate red, or all the colours of the rainbow, perhaps, this Valentine’s Day, we can widen our arms to embrace a little green.
Elizabeth Reid Boyd 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.
With patches marketed for sleep, detox, immunity and hangovers, they are being talked up as near magical fix-all stickers. Manufacturers claim they are easy-to-use, convenient and ethical when compared with other types of vitamin products. Some even come with cute floral designs.
So do they work, are they safe, and why would you use one instead of just taking a vitamin tablet?
Vitamin patches are adhesives designed to deliver vitamins or nutrients to your bloodstream directly through the skin.
You peel away the backing, place it on a hairless area of skin where it is less likely to be bumped, and then the patches release their vitamins over a period of 12 to 24 hours.
Two dominant brands that market in Australia sell patches that contain various chemical and plant ingredients.
There are patches for menopause symptoms that claim to include plant extracts of gotu kola, damiana, black cohosh, valerian, skull cap, oat seed and ginger. Patches promising an energy boost offer caffeine, taurine, gluconolactone, green tea extract and vitamins B3, B5 and B6.
In Australia, vitamins are considered pharmaceutical products and are regulated by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. Vitamins are generally approved as listed medicines, meaning the ingredients have been assessed for safety but not for efficacy (whether they do what they promise).
Being a listed medicine also means vitamins are manufactured in a factory with good manufacturing practices, so you can be assured the ingredients listed on the packaging have been sourced properly and are provided at the correct concentration.
However, there are no items listed as vitamin patches on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods. This means they currently can not legally be supplied or purchased in Australia. It doesn’t matter if they are being sold from a physical store or online within the country. The TGA won’t stop you from buying them from overseas, but they advise you not to do so because you can’t be assured of quality and safety.
Vitamins and supplements listed by the TGA are produced in factories with stringent quality standards. Shutterstock
There is also insufficient evidence that vitamins delivered in this way work. Not all drugs and chemicals can be delivered through the skin. Ordinarily, to be absorbed through the skin a chemical needs to be lipophilic, meaning it likes fats and oils more than water.
So, the form in which the vitamins have been produced and supplied will dictate whether they will get into the skin. For example, a water extract of a plant is less likely to be absorbed when compared with an oil-based extract.
A small 2019 study of patients at risk of nutrient deficiencies after bariatric (weight-loss) surgery gave some of them a daily multivitamin patch for a year. Those patients had lower blood concentrations of several vitamins and were more likely to have vitamin D deficiency when compared with patients given oral vitamins. The study concluded transdermal vitamin patches were not as effective as oral supplements.
Another issue with vitamin patches is that they contain very low concentrations of ingredients and you may therefore get an ineffective dose, even if all the vitamin in the patch is 100% absorbed through the skin.
For example, one particular patch that is marketed for immunity states that it contains 3 milligrams of vitamin C, which is likely insufficient if taken to supplement a low vitamin C diet. The health condition called scurvy is thought to occur when daily vitamin C intake drops lower than 7 milligrams per day.
In contrast, a typical vitamin C tablet contains 500 milligrams. The recommended daily intake of vitamin C is around 45 milligrams per day – more if a woman is breastfeeding.
Nicotine patches work by providing a sustained release of the drug into the skin. Shutterstock
When other medicines are supplied in a patch formulation it is usually because a constant supply of the drug is needed in the body; think smoking replacement nicotine patches, menopausal hormone therapy and some types of pain relief.
There is no reason why you would need the slow release, continuous supply of vitamins that patches promise – but there may be other reasons to choose them over tablets and gummy products.
One selling point used by the marketers is that patches are a “cleaner” form of vitamins. A vitamin in tablet or gummy form will contain inactive ingredients called excipients. Excipients do various tasks in medicines from binding ingredients together, making the medicine look and smell nice, to ensuring drugs don’t break down during storage. The presumption is that patches don’t contain and release any, or very few, excipients into your body.
But many patches don’t list all their ingredients – just the active vitamins – so this claim can not be tested. Some patches may still contain a large number of excipients, some of which may irritate the skin.
For example, one type of nicotine patch contains 12 excipients including acrylic acid and vinyl acetate, which are chemicals used to help stick the patch to the skin.
A patch may be worth investigating for people who have trouble swallowing or chewing. In this instance it could be difficult to take a solid tablet or gummy to get your vitamins.
As there are no vitamin patches approved by the TGA in Australia, you should not buy them.
If at some point in the future they become listed medicines, it will be important to remember that they may not have been assessed for efficacy.
If you remain curious about vitamin patches, you should discuss them with your doctor or local pharmacist.
Nial Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, a member of the Australasian Pharmaceutical Science Association, and a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Nial is the chief scientific officer of Vaihea Skincare LLC, a director of SetDose Pty Ltd a medical device company, and a Standards Australia panel member for sunscreen agents. Nial regularly consults to industry on issues to do with medicine risk assessments, manufacturing, design, and testing.
Jasmine Lee 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.
Pulling the plug seems less about the cost of living or misuse of tax revenue than simply sweeping clear the previous administration’s legislation. Transport policies, plans and projects have fallen at an astonishing speed since the coalition government was formed.
One of its first acts was to cancel the clean car discount that helped create a market for electric vehicles by subsidising their cost. Unsurprisingly, sales of EVs took a plunge in January. At the same time, a higher registration fee for “high-emitting vehicles”, dubbed the “ute tax”, was abandoned.
As the new government took office, transport agency Waka Kotahi quickly announced a freeze on cycling, walking and public transport projects. Road projects seem unaffected.
Other car-centric policies include plans to roll back hard-won speed limit reductions, cancel light rail projects in Wellington and Auckland, and nix a second multimodal Auckland harbour crossing.
Transport minister Simeon Brown recently doubled down on this when he announced that any additional harbour crossing would be for the exclusive use of vehicles – directly excluding consideration of cycling, walking and rail.
Missing in all this is a clear vision of what will replace all the lost policies.
Cost of living or climate
The now defunct regional fuel tax was put in place by the Labour government in 2018. It was meant to last ten years and raise NZ$1.5 billion to help fund a list of projects: the Eastern Busway, new electric train units for the City Rail Link, improved bus links to the airport, and redevelopment of the downtown ferry terminal.
The tax also funded road safety initiatives, road corridor improvements, bus and cycle lanes, red light cameras and speed humps. These were all clearly listed in the fuel tax legislation – and are clearly needed: Auckland road deaths hover around 50 people per year.
The government has also announced that legislation to axe the ARFT would specifically ban spending any remaining funds (estimated to be over $380 million) on cycle or bus lanes. This is despite strong arguments in favour of sustainable travel modes, as global temperatures surpassed the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold last year.
Instead, the official rationalisation for ending the ARFT has centred on the cost of living. For instance, Simeon Brown has argued drivers with a Toyota Hilux could save “around $9.20 every time they fill up”.
Based on the Hilux’s 80-litre fuel tank and an average 12,000 kilometres per year travelled, that equates to about $92 per year, or $1.77 per week. The savings shrink significantly for smaller, more efficient vehicles.
Meanwhile, the government has announced plans to enact a road user charge for battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. On top of removing the clean car discount, this makes low-emitting vehicles less competitive on price.
Failure to plan
Shifts in funding priorities are part of politics, of course. But the latest U-turns bring into sharp focus a lack of direction on infrastructure. This includes previous governments, National and Labour alike, which have failed to lock in sustainable forward planning.
Nothing exemplifies this more than the on-again, off-again plans for an expanded or new Auckland harbour crossing. After several false starts under the previous Labour government, the new government again cancelled the plans in favour of “providing extra lanes for traffic” and “enhancing the existing busway”.
This is despite 70 years of evidence showing that adding more roads worsens congestion. As the adage goes, failing to plan is planning to fail.
Consequently, New Zealand’s vehicle ownership rates are among the highest in the world. Per-capita road deaths are higher than in many peer nations. At the same time, rates of walking, cycling and public transport use remain stubbornly low – due mainly to a lack of supply, rather than insufficient demand.
Nationally, rail networks remain under-developed, despite clear demand and excellent examples of success internationally.
Decades of see-sawing government priorities mean New Zealand’s biggest and most economically important city has no clear plan to transition out of its fossil fuel dependence.
Unless long-term transport planning and related infrastructure projects are elevated out of the political cycle, it is hard to be optimistic about sustainable progress.
Timothy Welch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Sherlock, Visiting Fellow, Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University
Indonesians are going to the polls to elect a new president on Wednesday. There are three candidates running, alongside their vice presidential candidates.
According to opinion polls, the favourite is Prabowo Subianto, leader of the Greater Indonesia Party (Gerindra), a populist and nationalist party he founded in 2008. A former army general, Prabowo has already stood unsuccessfully for president twice before. He is also the defence minister in the cabinet of the current president, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.
The other contenders are Ganjar Pranowo, a former governor of the large province of Central Java and a member of Indonesia’s biggest party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), and Anies Basweden, an independent candidate who was governor of the city of Jakarta.
Prabowo is the frontrunner, but it’s unclear whether he will win an absolute majority of votes in the first round. If he fails to win 50.1% of the vote, there will be a runoff election between the two leading candidates in June.
Voters are also casting votes in parliamentary elections, which include:
580 seats in the House of Representatives (DPR), with more than 9,900 candidates
152 seats in the Regional Representative Council (DPD), designed to represent the regions, with around 670 candidates
and local parliaments in each of the 38 provinces and 416 districts.
In total, there are over 2,700 separate electoral contests being held for around 20,500 seats. All are the responsibility of Indonesia’s independent election commission (the Komisi Pemilihan Umum, or simply KPU) to administer impartially and efficiently.
Indonesia is the world’s third-largest democracy after India and the United States – and all three are holding elections this year. But since Indonesia is holding five separate polls on one day, it is often touted as the largest and most complex single-day election in the world.
Indonesia is an archipelago with about 6,000 inhabited islands, some of them remote and with limited infrastructure. The distance from Aceh in the west to Papua in the east is some 5,100 kilometres (3,200 miles), wider than the continental US.
It is a massive undertaking to organise an election of this size, from procuring polling station equipment to managing a huge election staff to ensuring the public trusts the integrity and fairness of the vote. The election commission does a remarkable job making sure the vote happens on time and the ballot counting occurs quickly and without tampering.
To get an idea of the size of the task facing the KPU, let’s look at the presidential election first.
There are 204 million registered voters in Indonesia, so the KPU has to print and distribute this many ballots across the country for the presidential vote alone, with a few million extra in case polling stations run short.
The commission is then required to deliver, count and return the ballots to over 820,000 domestic polling stations, in addition to more than 3,000 stations overseas. Since there may be a second-round, runoff election, the KPU must be ready to repeat the whole exercise in a few months. This time it would need a different set of ballot papers showing the two final candidates.
But things get really complicated when it comes to the contests for Indonesia’s various national and regional parliaments, even though these get relatively little attention compared to the presidential poll.
The presidential election involves a simple majority count of three candidates. But the national and regional parliaments are conducted through a proportional representation system, the same used in countries like Germany and New Zealand, and for the Australian Senate. Under this system, parties win seats in proportion to the votes they receive. For example, a party winning 20% of the votes will take up around 20% of the seats in the chamber.
Adding to the complexity, voters in Indonesia are not compelled to vote just for a party, but can choose an individual candidate within a party’s list. So, when voters arrive at the polling station, they are presented with a huge ballot paper for the national parliament alone, which lists, on average, 118 candidates.
And they must also make choices for three other chambers – in addition to the presidential vote.
An unglamorous, but remarkable democratic achievement
So, how well has Indonesia done in this massive task of making democratic elections work?
After languishing under a dictatorship and rigged elections for four decades under the rule of Soeharto, the country has done remarkably well since embracing democracy in the late 1990s.
In fact, Indonesia rarely receives recognition for this transformation. In a world where democracy seems increasingly under pressure, Indonesia has managed five peaceful and democratic transfers of power. In comparison to neighbouring states in Southeast Asia, where one-party dominance is widespread or democratic progress has been crushed under military coups, Indonesia stands out as a bastion of democratic politics.
None of this is to say that Indonesia’s system is flawless. In fact, domestic and international observers have increasingly noted the reemergence of authoritarian instincts among the country’s leaders and the rise of dynastic politics in which incumbents engineer the elections of family members.
And this not only applies to prominent figures from the Soeharto days, such as the leading presidential contender Prabowo. Jokowi has also been accused of paving the way for a political dynasty by using his son’s candidacy to ensure he’ll have influence in a Prabowo presidential administration.
But when it comes to the electoral contest itself, Indonesia’s election commission, while not perfect, has delivered reliable and trustworthy outcomes.
The administration of free and fair elections is an unglamorous job, but it is crucial for maintaining public trust in the political system. It also ensures that candidates and parties accept the results and are not tempted to launch coups or deliberately obstruct the post-election process.
Given the strains placed on the United States’ long-established democracy in recent years, Indonesia’s achievement in making elections work should not go unnoticed.
Stephen Sherlock 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.
Chart by Keith Rankin.Chart by Keith Rankin.Chart by Keith Rankin.
Generally, more people die in winter. Not surprising, though some years have significantly more deaths than others, and the timing of ‘peak death’ each year varies between the wintery months. These charts show the deaths, determined from weekly data, of people named Smith, New Zealand’s most common surname last century.
The numbers shown are nine-week moving totals, meaning that for the last week of July the data runs from the beginning of July to the end of August. The next datapoint drops the first week of July, and includes the first week of September. (This method addresses the randomness of death, and the randomness associated with the Smith sample.)
Secular Trend?
It is somewhat surprising that the numbers of deaths in 1973 were not much higher than in 1950. The population of New Zealand in 1973 was 3.0 million; in 1950 it was 1.9 million. More people should mean more deaths. But the age structures were quite different. In 1950, there were relatively many older people – thanks to the 1870 to 1895 baby boom. In 1973, there were fewer older men thanks to both World War One, and to the deceleration in birth numbers from the 1890s. With the partial exception of the early 1920s, that reduced birth rate lasted from around 1900 to 1945; though there was variation, with say the early 1940s having many more births than the early 1930s.
But, what goes around comes around. There was another baby boom from 1945 to 1975; a boom that is only just starting, in the 2020s, to markedly influence death tallies. So, as annual death numbers have been only on a slow incline in the lifetimes of those alive today, annual death numbers are set to increase dramatically. Just as individuals die, so do generations. And big generations die bigly.
(We also note that, in the 1940s and 1950s, infant mortality was much higher in New Zealand than in the 1970s.)
Mortality Peaks
The higher peaks in these charts can be attributed to influenza outbreaks. In addition, the winter seasonal highs are linked to the set of viruses – including coronaviruses – which we collectively know as the ‘common cold’.
Superficially, these charts suggest that ‘the flu’ and ‘the common cold’ are New Zealand’s grimmest reapers; are, together, New Zealand’s biggest public health nuisance. Further, the peaks in these charts seem to be getting higher relative to the troughs in the more recent data. Should this be a matter of concern? Didn’t we, by the 1970s, reach a state of hubris about infectious diseases?
Old Age
Death and taxes are (allegedly) the two principal certainties of life. If we don’t die of one thing, we die of something else. So, an increase of deaths triggered by ‘minor’ respiratory viruses can be explained, mainly, by a relative decrease in deaths from other causes such as heart disease and cancer.
And there may be more to it than that. The seasonal circulation of non-novel respiratory viruses may represent a kind of natural vaccination programme. So, at least for otherwise healthy working-age (and younger) people, the presence of these viruses in our temperate ecosystems may be contributing to our increased longevity. Less smoking and sugar, combined with more (not less) exposure to respiratory viruses, may be the essence of why life expectancies have risen in recent decades.
If so, then, the presence of highly seasonalised death patterns may represent a collective solution rather than a collective problem. On balance, influenza may be our friend, not our enemy. It may determine the timing of death in old-age rather than be a significant cause of premature death.
(Tactfully, Queen Elizabeth’s death certificate in 2022 simply attributed her death to ‘old age’. Old Age is a real thing, and not an expression of casual ageism. Indeed, ‘old age’ was the most important and truthful part of her death story; though, as is usual, a single attribution is not the whole story of a person’s death.)
Dry Tinder
Outbreaks of influenza (and other respiratory) viruses work like forest fires. Thus, after years with relatively few winter seasonal deaths, there is a build-up of ‘fuel’ meaning that there will soon be a year or two of higher numbers of seasonal deaths. Followed by years of below-average winter deaths. This is a normal pattern. When there is a large build-up of people of advanced age, there will be more deaths from old age. That’s the normal cycle of life. How do people die of old age? More often than not, such deaths are triggered by a seasonal infection.The aim of public health policy is to maximise the numbers of people who die of old age; minimising the numbers who die prematurely.
These charts, to a large extent, represent deaths due to old age. They also indicate years of more virulent strains of influenza.
The Charts
In the purple 1946-1955 chart, we see 1950 and 1953 as the years of elevated winter deaths, suggesting more dangerous influenza strains. We also notice secondary death peaks in late spring, early summer. In 1949 and 1952 these secondary peaks were higher than the primary winter peak for that year. Presumably, the end of the year is a time when people circulate more; and there will be more vulnerable people if the winter death tally was unusually low.
Looking at the red 1955-1964 chart we see 1956 looking much like 1950, suggesting two low-mortality years would be followed by a higher mortality year, presumably the ‘dry tinder’ effect.
1957 and 1958 were the years of the ‘Asian Flu’ pandemic (a novel strain of influenza), and it shows in the New Zealand data for both years; higher death tallies in years which would otherwise have had significantly fewer deaths. Many of these additional deaths will be of people who would otherwise have lived a few years longer. (Unlike the extremely lethal 1918 strain, most non-elderly people with good general health seem to have weathered this pandemic OK.)
As is normal after a respiratory pandemic (and this is certainly true in Eastern Europe after Covid19, where public health measures substantially subsided in the latter part of 2020), the death tallies for the next couple of years (1959, 1960) is significantly down. 1961 and 1964 were higher winter mortality years, as per the three-year pattern. (1963 had a sharp mortality peak, probably a nasty flu strain, followed by unusually low spring mortality.)
Looking at the blue 1964-1973 chart, 1968 to 1970 reflects the ‘Hong Kong Flu’ pandemic. Whereas the 1957 influenza strain was first reported around January of 1957, the 1968 pandemic strain was first reported in the middle of that year. There was no sign of it in New Zealand in 1968, or in early 1969. Then, in mid-1969, with a mix of ‘dry tinder’ and a lethal influenza strain, there was a longer than usual mortality peak. Then, after a short pause, the pandemic really hit in December, and lasted until August 1970. Like the 1918 pandemic influenza peak, and some of the Covid19 peaks, this was a summer shock.
1971 and 1972 were also high mortality years, suggesting that many who died from influenza in the early months of 1970 had been of working age rather than old age. There were still many frail old people in the population after 1970; people born during the first baby-boom era.
By 1973, we start to get the impact of diminishing relative numbers of older people; a combination of Word War and falling birth rates around the year 1900.
Prognostication
These charts show pandemic and substantial epidemic influenza outbreaks in New Zealand. And they show how ‘old age’ deaths follow a seasonal pattern; commonly triggered by a respiratory virus which would be weathered by the vast majority of people who did not have the characteristics of old age. These viruses are part of the wider ecosystem of which humans are very much a part. Further, the ecosystem of seasonal viruses is maintained by periodic appearances of virulent novel viruses.
There is no reason to believe that life expectancies could be raised by taking public health measures to eliminate influenza and ‘cold’ viruses. Rather, these viruses fine-tune our immune systems, and without that fine-tuning, average life-expectancy would probably fall. Indeed, one cannot imagine the possibility of healthy populations in the crowded metropolises of the world without regular exposures to non-lethal respiratory viruses; exposures tantamount to natural vaccination.
Note
From 1974, not all historical deaths can be accessed online. The rule is that, for today (13 February 2024), only deaths of people born on or before 13 February 1944 will be accessible. This means that 1974 data will not be comparable with 1973 data, because it will miss about a half of infant deaths. We should also note, however, that by 1974 infant mortality rates were substantially lower than they were in the 1940s and 1950s; meaning that late 1970s’ Smith data will remain broadly comparable. A substantial majority of the ‘Smithometer’ Smiths after 1973 will be older people.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
While Labor resists calls to change Australia’s system of negative gearing and the Greens push for changes, there’s a chance change could come from somewhere else altogether – Australia’s legal system.
As surprising as it might seem, the legal precedent that allows one million Australians to negatively gear investment properties can be challenged.
That challenge could come from Tax Office, which in my view could launch a test case to clarify what at the moment is a pretty wobbly foundation.
Negative gearing is what happens when an investor (usually a property investor) makes a loss on the investment (usually by paying out more in interest and other costs they receive in rent) and then uses that loss to reduce their salary or wage for taxation purposes in order to pay less tax.
Much of its apparent legality relies on a 1987 Federal Court ruling in a case brought by the Tax Office against a family trust controlled by a Victorian surgeon.
In saying that it is open to challenge, I acknowledge that negative gearing as practiced has been regarded as legal for some time, and that the Tax Office issued a binding ruling saying so in 1995.
I’ll explain why I think the precedent is ripe for a challenge, and then discuss the political and other difficulties the Tax Office would face in mounting such a challenge – difficulties I think could be overcome.
The problematic precedent
The legality of negative gearing for income tax purposes currently rests on the interpretation of the general deduction section of the Income Tax Act, as well as the fact that the so-called loss quarantining rules that specifically prohibit negative gearing apply only to small marginal businesses.
The general deduction section allows taxpayers to deduct from assessable income any loss or outgoing to the extent that “it is incurred in gaining or producing your assessable income”.
This means that losses unrelated to the pursuit of an income can’t be deducted.
Where such expenses are only partly related to gaining income, the section allows that part of them be deducted, with the rest not.
The case related to a residential property purchased by a family trust with a large borrowing, in circumstances where the trust rented the property to the controller of the trust (a surgeon) for his family to live in.
In court, the Tax Office argued that the loss shouldn’t be allowed as a deduction because the property wasn’t really rented out. The “rent” was just a familial contribution to costs.
The Tax Office made other arguments as well, among them that the interest expense was private or domestic because the trust was just a mechanism to provide the surgeon and his family with a home to live in.
Naturally, the court’s focus was directed at responding to the Tax Office’s arguments. It held that the rent was a market rent and allowed the deduction.
This meant it didn’t deal with the more important question of whether negative gearing losses were incurred in gaining or producing assessable income.
Losses need to be in pursuit of income
My respectful opinion is that the judgment can’t govern negative gearing as it is usually practiced today, and for that matter, could not have governed it as it was usually practiced back in 1987.
In the standard negative gearing situation, the taxpayer who incurs a rental loss after deducting rental expenses is seeking three things:
rent
capital growth for the purpose of making a profit
use of the loss to reduce other taxable income to reduce tax owed.
In other words, the advantage sought is not limited to the rent.
The first of the three advantages (to obtain rent) satisfies the deduction test – it is connected to the pursuit of an income. The second and third do not.
Regardless of purpose, the courts have held that, to be deductible, expenses need to be objectively “incidental and relevant” to earning income.
Again – objectively – interest expenses are only partly directed at obtaining rent; they are also directed at obtaining tax deductions and capital growth.
After all, who would spend money in order to obtain a smaller amount of money unless some other advantage was being pursued?
That means interest expenses ought to be separated into their deductible (negatively-gearable) and non-deductible portions.
The problem is there seems not to have been a case that considered and decided on these questions. Janmor didn’t, and I know of no other case that did.
The Tax Office ought to seek a ruling
If the Tax Office wanted to be certain about whether negative gearing is legal as it is presently practiced, it could bring a test case in an attempt to obtain a definitive judgment.
It would need to convince a majority of the Full Federal Court (which comprises three or five judges), and perhaps the High Court.
It would face considerable challenges. The first has little or nothing to do with the law; it is political. The Tax Office would get complaints.
Politicians may even accuse the Tax Office of stepping into politics, but this would be a baseless claim because all it would be doing is testing the scope of the law.
The Tax Office regularly tests the boundaries of deduction provisions by bringing cases to the courts, even where political sensitivities are involved.
Tax advisers might also complain. Their criticism would be along the lines of “why didn’t you bring this earlier”?
It is a criticism to which the Tax Office might not have a ready answer.
Dale Boccabella 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rob Cover, Professor of Digital Communication and Co-Director of the RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre, RMIT University
The Australian government has brought forward plans to criminalise doxing, bringing nationwide attention to the harms of releasing people’s private information to the wider public.
The government response comes after the public release of almost 600 names and private chat logs of a WhatsApp group of Australian Jewish creative artists discussing the Israel-Hamas war.
As a result, some of the people whose details were leaked claim they were harassed, received death threats and even had to go into hiding.
While we wait for new penalties for doxers under the federal Privacy Act review, understanding doxing and its harms can help. And there are also steps we can all take to minimise the risk.
What is doxing?
Doxing (or doxxing) is releasing private information — or “docs”, short for documents — online to the wider public without the user’s consent. This includes information that may put users at risk of harm, especially names, addresses, employment details, medical or financial records, and names of family members.
The Australian government currently defines doxing as the “malicious release” of people’s private information without their consent.
Doxing began as a form of unmasking anonymous users, trolls and those using hate speech while hiding behind a pseudonym. Recently, it has become a weapon for online abuse, harassment, hate speech and adversarial politics. It is often the outcome of online arguments or polarised public views.
It is also becoming more common. Although there is no data for Australia yet, according to media company SafeHome.org, about 4% of Americans report having been doxed, with about half saying their private emails or home addresses have been made public.
Doxing is a crime in some countries such as the Netherlands and South Korea. In other places, including Australia, privacy laws haven’t yet caught up.
Doxing is harmful because it treats a user as an object and takes away their agency to decide what, and how much, personal information they want shared with the wider public.
This puts people at very real risk of physical threats and violence, particularly when public disagreement becomes heated. From a broader perspective, doxing also damages the digital ecology, reducing people’s ability to freely participate in public or even private debate through social media.
Although doxing is sometimes just inconvenient, it is often used to publicly shame or humiliate someone for their private views. This can take a toll on a person’s mental health and wellbeing.
It can also affect a person’s employment, especially for people whose employers require them to keep their attitudes, politics, affiliations and views to themselves.
Studies have shown doxing particularly impacts women, including those using dating apps or experiencing family violence. In some cases, children and family members have been threatened because a high-profile relative has been doxed.
Doxing is also harmful because it oversimplifies a person’s affiliations or attitudes. For example, releasing the names of people who have joined a private online community to navigate complex views can represent them as only like-minded stereotypes or as participants in a group conspiracy.
There are steps you can take online to protect yourself from doxing without having to complete withdraw. Engin Akyurt/Pexels
What can you do to protect yourself from doxing?
Stronger laws and better platform intervention are necessary to reduce doxing. Some experts believe that the fear of punishment can help shape better online behaviours.
These punishments may include criminal penalties for perpetrators and deactivating social media accounts for repeat offenders. But better education about the risks and harms is often the best treatment.
And you can also protect yourself without needing to entirely withdraw from social media:
never share a home or workplace address, phone number or location, including among a private online group or forum with trusted people
restrict your geo-location settings
avoid giving details of workplaces, roles or employment on public sites not related to your work
avoid adding friends or connections on social media services of people you do not know
if you suspect you risk being doxed due to a heated online argument, temporarily shut down or lock any public profiles
avoid becoming a target by pursuing haters when it reaches a certain point. Professional and courteous engagement can help avoid the anger of those who might disagree and try to harm you.
Additionally, hosts of private online groups must be very vigilant about who joins a group. They should avoid the trap of accepting members just to increase the group’s size, and appropriately check new members (for example, with a short survey or key questions that keep out people who may be there to gather information for malicious purposes).
Employers who require their staff to have online profiles or engage with the public should provide information and strategies for doing so safely. They should also provide immediate support for staff who have been doxed.
A national commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children will be established by the Albanese government, an initiative long sought by Indigenous advocates.
The commissioner will especially focus on the vexed issue of the high proportion of children in out-of-home care. Indigenous children are almost 11 times more likely to be in out-of-home care than non-Indigenous children.
Delivering the 2023 Closing the Gap Annual Report and the 2024 Implementation Plan, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told parliament:
The National Commissioner will be dedicated to protecting and promoting the rights, interests and wellbeing of First Nations children and young people, as well as calling on their strengths, sense of hope, and ideas for change.
The Commissioner will address the unacceptable rates of out-of-home care. What it all comes down to is strengthening families and keeping children safe.
The government also announced $707 million for a new remote jobs program to deliver 3000 jobs, and initiatives and funding for remote training hubs in Central Australia, justice policy partnerships, Wifi services in remote communities and an expansion of the junior rangers program.
Asked whether the funding announced is new or old money, the government said the jobs and justice commitments were new dollars, with the Wifi and training from existing funds.
Albanese said after then-prime minister Kevin Rudd’s Apology to the Stolen Generations 16 years ago, only 11 out of 19 socioeconomic outcomes for Indigenous people were improving. “Just four are on track to meet their targets,” he said.
“What should give us pause is that outcomes have worsened for four critical targets – children’s early development, rates of children in out-of-home care, rates of adult imprisonment, and tragically suicide.”
He said the debate before the Voice referendum had “brought into sharp focus the disadvantage and inequality” of Ingenious people.
“This government remains determined to move reconciliation forward and seek better results for Indigenous Australians.”
Albanese indicated the government was still committed to treaty and truth telling which, with a Voice, were key elements of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. But he did not indicate how it would pursue them, saying simply “As we take the time needed to get Makaratta and truth-telling right, the work of treaty goes on at a state and territory level. There will be a diversity of processes, reflecting the diversity of First Nations across the continent.”
Albanese stressed the importance of listening to Indigenous people.
Canberra must be willing to share power with communities. To offer responsibility and ownership and self-determination. To let local knowledge design programs, to trust locals to deliver them and to listen to locals when they tell us what’s working and what isn’t.
That’s a culture change we have to drive – in this [parliament house] building, in the public service and across governments at all levels.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton again urged a royal commission into the sexual abuse of children in Indigenous communities.
Dutton, replying to the PM, said the findings of such an inquiry “would certainly support the work of this national commissioner”.
Dutton called for the specifics of the jobs program. “From which sectors, industries and employers will these jobs come? What infrastructure is or will be put in place to support these jobs?”
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.
Another year, and another Closing the Gap report comes before the parliament and the Australian people. This year, however, the scene is somewhat different. The 2024 Closing the Gap report is the first since Australians resoundingly rejected the proposal to enshrine a First Nations Voice to Parliament in the Constitution.
That proposal would have given Indigenous peoples across this country a much greater say in the decisions that affect us, and given us more control over our own affairs and in our own communities. But it failed at the ballot box. Every jurisdiction (bar the ACT) voted “no” to putting this idea into our Constitution, ensuring its longevity and stability, and allowing our input into our affairs to become mainstream.
With that in mind, it’s unsurprising that in this year’s Closing the Gap report, the government outlines that just four of the 19 targets are on track to be bridged. Yes, four out of 19. That’s a little more than one in five. Not only that, but four measures have got worse. Government is continuing to fail our communities. And we all had a chance to fix it.
The government has announced some welcome measures, including creating a National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People – a long overdue initiative. It’s also committed to building remote training hubs and improving community wifi services for around 20 remote communities. Small measures, but they don’t address the structural nature of our powerlessness.
While the referendum failed, there clearly remains a dire need in our communities for fundamental change. So what does the Closing the Gap Report this year represent for mob? How can the way government interacts with Indigenous people and communities be improved?
Many people have asked since the failed referendum, “what’s next then?”, as if there were a litany of plans B through Z waiting in the wings to solve what is arguably the greatest social issue this country faces, that of Indigenous disadvantage. This question has become a staple of pundits and commentators trying to look smart following a referendum process during which they fundamentally failed on the civics, the politics and the journalism of Indigenous issues.
Before we ask about what comes next though, we must ask what has come already, and whether efforts at closing the gap over the past three years, since the agreement was overhauled by the Morrison government, have worked.
The Productivity Commission, in a “scathing” report issued last week, was very clear that what this country is doing is not working, and without fundamental change to the government’s approach, never will.
The commission’s view is that progress in implementing the priority reforms of the Closing the Gap Agreement has been “weak, and reflects tweaks to, or actions overlayed onto, business-as-usual approaches”. Its overarching finding was that “there has been no systematic approach to determining what strategies need to be implemented to disrupt business-as-usual of governments”, and “fundamental change is needed”. The commission noted:
The Agreement requires government decision-makers to accept that they do not know what is best for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
The commision’s view on what has gone wrong not just in the past three years of the Closing the Gap Agreement, but also more fundamentally what has gone wrong in the past three centuries of policy towards Indigenous people in this country is one shared by our communities. There is a reason our communities voted “yes” in the referendum by overwhelming margins.
The one thing to understand about the gap in outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples is that it is not something that ever needed be this way. It is not a natural phenomenon. As the Productivity Commission found, “it is a direct result of the ways in which governments have used their power over many decades”.
There are some good things in this year’s announcments: $707 million to help create jobs in our communities over the next three years, and a replacement of the much-maligned Community Development Program (CDP), and which includes a $185 million Community Jobs and Business Fund for local and community-owned businesses.
There is also the National Skills Agreement, which includes a dedicated stream of funding for closing the gap to support community-controlled registered training organisations. There is also more funding to expand Indigenous ranger programs for our youth.
These things are good, but what is needed more is a reset to the government’s approach.
Acting Lead Convenor of the Coalition of Peaks, Celeste Liddle, has rightly noted that “implementation of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap has been patchy and governments have been too slow to deliver the commitments and promises they have made.” The Productivity Commission has echoed this view, saying “business-as-usual must be a thing of the past”.
How do we overcome these barriers? For too long government has ignored our people’s views and positions on the issues that affect us. Our self-determination and control of our own agendas has been absent from the discussion. The Voice to Parliament would have been one way for that to start to be mended, but the Liberal/National Coalition decided they weren’t ready for that.
So, what indeed comes next? Governments need to prioritise Indigenous peoples and communities in decision-making. That means meaningful transformation, capacity-building, and genuine co-design, not half-hearted “consultation” on policies for which the government merely wants consent. It likely means the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and all that that provides. These are just starting points, but they will get us somewhere.
Also, next time you run into one of the many MPs and shadow ministers who campaigned against a Voice to Parliament, ask them what their plan is to close the gap and empower Indigenous peoples and communities.
James Blackwell is a Member of the Uluru Dialogue at UNSW.
Australia is in the grip of an escalating extinction crisis. Since colonisation, 100 native plant and animal species have become formally listed as extinct due to human activities. The actual number is undoubtedly far higher.
Surveys suggest Australians want to prevent extinctions, regardless of the financial cost. But when it comes to the crunch, how much do we really care?
In emergency situations, there is a long-held convention that official responders such as firefighters first attempt to save human life, then property and infrastructure, then natural assets.
Our research published today investigated whether this convention reflects community values. We found the people we surveyed valued one human life more than the extinction of an entire non-human species – a result both fascinating and troubling.
What are we willing to lose?
Catastrophic events force us to make hard choices about what to save and what to abandon. In such emergencies, our choices reveal in stark detail the values we ascribe to different types of “assets”, including plant and animal species.
Our priorities will become even more crucial under climate change, which is bringing worse bushfires and other environmental catastrophes. If nature is always saved last, we can expect recurring biodiversity losses, including extinctions.
The unprecedented loss of biodiversity in the Black Summer fires was a taste of what’s to come. The fires burnt the entire known range of more than 500 plant and animal species and at least half the range of more than 100 threatened species. The catastrophe led to at least one extinction – of a mealybug species in Western Australia.
The losses prompted reflection on our priorities. The final report of a New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into the bushfires, for example, questioned if this hierarchy of protection should always apply.
Our new research investigated community values on this issue. The findings were illuminating.
The survey involved 2,139 Australians. Respondents ranked the assets they would save in a hypothetical bushfire, choosing from the following options:
a person not warned to evacuate
a person who had ignored advice to evacuate (and so implicitly taken responsibility for their own safety)
a population of 50 koalas (of which many other populations exist elsewhere)
one of only two populations of a wallaby species
the only population of a native snail species (which would become extinct if burnt)
the only population of a native shrub species (which would become extinct if burnt)
a flock of 50 sheep
a house, shed and tractor
two items of Indigenous cultural significance (a rock art gallery and a tree carving).
Survey respondents overwhelmingly gave the highest ranking to the two options involving saving a human life – even if that person had been repeatedly told to evacuate and even if, as a consequence, a snail or shrub species became extinct.
Saving a person who had not received evacuation warnings was rated highest, ahead of saving a person who ignored evacuation advice. Saving the koala population was next preferred, followed by saving the wallaby population.
The remaining options had negative scores, meaning that respondents were more likely to choose them as least important than most important
Scores for each asset, calculated as the number of times (out of five possible choices offered for that asset) a respondent chose the asset as their highest priority minus the number of times the asset was chosen as the lowest priority. Author provided
Amongst the biodiversity assets, decisions based on conservation consequences would have meant the top priority was preventing the extinction of the snail and shrub populations. Next in line would have been the wallaby population, then a relatively less consequential loss of koalas.
But the results were the opposite: people prioritised the koalas over the wallabies, with less concern for the shrub and the snail. Ranked even lower were the items of Indigenous cultural significance. Saving the house and shed had lowest rankings.
The results are revealing
We take several key messages from the survey results.
First, the conventional hierarchy of protection during fire – prioritising human life, then infrastructure, then biodiversity – does not always reflect societal values. Sometimes, protecting natural assets is more important than protecting at least some infrastructure. In the Black Summer fires, the attempts to save crucial populations of the imperilled Wollemi Pine showed such protection of biodiversity assets is possible.
Second, our society values one human life more than the millions of years of evolution that can be eclipsed almost instantaneously in the extinction of another species.
Third, our regard for nature is far from egalitarian. In this case, the preference for saving koalas is consistent with previous studies that show we care far more for iconic cute mammals than other species.
Fourth, animal welfare issues may trump consideration for conservation consequences. We suspect that the haunting imagery of koalas suffering in the Black Summer wildfires may have contributed to them being prioritised ahead of more imperilled species.
And finally, our results were troubling for the conservation of poorly known species, the extinctions of which are increasing around the world. These losses have been largely disregarded or unmourned by society.
It suggests the case for saving such species needs to be better made. Australia’s invertebrate fauna is highly distinctive, fascinating and vital for the health of our ecosystems. To prevent mass losses of invertebrate species, we must take action now.
Australia’s invertebrate fauna is highly distinctive. Pictured: a recently discovered Tasmanian snail, Attenborougharion rubicundus, named after Sir David Attenborough. Australian Museum
Rethinking our priorities?
The world is becoming more perilous. There’s a high risk of losing much of the nature that surrounds us, supports us and helps define us as Australians.
We must think carefully about what future we bequeath to our children and to future generations. This may require reconsidering our priorities – and in some cases, making different choices.
John Woinarski is affiliated with Charles Darwin University, the Biodiversity Council, Australian Wildlife Conservancy and Invertebrates Australia.
Stephen Garnett works for Charles Darwin University. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is affiliated with BirdLife Australia.
The National-led coalition government is off to a fast start internationally. In envisioning a more central role for the ANZAC alliance with Australia, and possible involvement in the AUKUS security pact, it is recalibrating New Zealand’s independent foreign policy.
At the inaugural Australia-New Zealand Foreign and Defence Ministerial (ANZMIN) meeting in Melbourne earlier this year, the focus was on future-proofing the trans-Tasman alliance.
Detailed discussions took place on the defence and security aspects of the relationship. This included global strategic issues, the Indo-Pacific region, and the relevance of the partnership in the Pacific.
But the stage for this shift in New Zealand’s independent foreign policy had already been set by the Labour government in 2023.
In his foreword to the country’s first National Security Strategy last year, then prime minister Chris Hipkins wrote that New Zealand “faces a fundamentally more challenging security outlook”. The strategy document called for a “national conversation on foreign policy”.
Christopher Luxon’s administration is taking the logical next step by increasing cooperation with Canberra.
In or out of AUKUS?
New Zealand’s independent foreign policy emerged in the mid-1980s from the debris of the ANZUS alliance. It flourished in a historically rare era of muted great power rivalry and unprecedented economic globalisation.
It is abundantly clear that our holiday from history is over.
New Zealand’s independent foreign policy has to be redefined in response to present strategic circumstances rather than past interpretations, however well they may have served us. These historic positions, recently put forward by former National leader Don Brash and former prime minister Helen Clark, have run their course.
At the sharp end of this recalibration is AUKUS, the technology partnership involving Australia, the UK and the US. New Zealand has expressed an interest in participating in “pillar two” of the agreement, involving non-nuclear technology sharing.
A joint statement released after the ANZMIN consultations stated that AUKUS was discussed as “a positive contribution toward maintaining peace, security and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific”.
a stark manifestation of Cold War mentality [which] will undermine peace and stability, sow division and confrontation in the region, and thus runs against the common interests of regional countries pursuing peace, stability, and common security.
Few neutral observers will be persuaded by Beijing’s characterisation.
Labour on the fence
AUKUS emerged in 2021, initiated in Canberra as a response to economic and diplomatic sanctions imposed on Australia by China in 2020.
New Zealand’s participation will invariably strengthen the ANZAC alliance. It is hard to see how non-involvement will not weaken that alliance.
This is something the Labour opposition will need to consider carefully. Having asked for a national foreign policy conversation while in government, it is now signalling disquiet over AUKUS membership.
Labour’s Foreign Affairs Spokesperson David Parker said recently that “we’re questioning [AUKUS’] utility and whether it is wise”. His associate spokesperson Phil Twyford told parliament AUKUS is an “offensive war-fighting alliance against China”.
It is unclear how this position is consistent with Labour’s progressively stronger support for the ANZAC alliance and AUKUS since 2021, and its earlier willingness to explore participating in pillar two.
The future of independent foreign policy
Truth be told, the Luxon administration’s interest in AUKUS is a consequence of China serving as the architect of its own strategic problems.
Before the Beijing Olympics in 2008, China enjoyed a generally positive relationship with a range of countries across Asia and the Pacific.
New Zealand is committed to advancing its interests in a way that contributes to regional stability in what the ANZMIN joint statement described as “the most challenging strategic environment in decades”.
If New Zealand’s elected government determines that AUKUS is in the national interest, then it must seek the broadest consensus possible domestically. It also needs to unapologetically pursue that path internationally.
That is the essence of foreign minister Winston Peters’ response when asked whether Wellington’s interest in AUKUS would negatively affect relations with China:
China is a country that practises something I have got a lot of time for – they practise their national interest […] and that’s what we’re doing.
We are entering a new era for New Zealand’s independent foreign policy, one that includes a rebooted ANZAC alliance, with a possible AUKUS dimension.
Nicholas Khoo has received research funding from the Australian National University, Columbia University, and the Asia New Zealand Foundation in Wellington. He is a Non-Resident Principal Research Fellow with the Institute of Indo-Pacific Affairs in Christchurch.
Western Australia has introduced a limit on ham in school canteens. Parents are reportedly confused and frustrated. So what has changed and what evidence is it based on?
Reclassifying processed meats
The WA Department of Health has reconfigured its system for classifying food and drink in public schools. It uses a traffic light approach, allocating green, amber or red colours to foods and drinks.
Ham and other processed red meats have been moved from an “amber” label to a “red” label.
green items must account for at least 60% of items on a menu
amber items must account for less than 40% of items on a menu
red items cannot be on the menu.
There’s one catch. The new guidelines allow ham to be sold as if it is an amber item, only two days per week, if ham was already on a canteen’s menu prior to the reconfiguration.
Ham can still be sold two days a week if it’s already on the canteen’s menu. Shutterstock/WBMUL
Why restrict ham?
Singling out nutrients or foods as “good” or “bad” can lead to confusion and polarised views on diet. Rather than focusing on individual foods, long-term health outcomes are more closely linked to overall dietary patterns.
Ham itself is not inherently considered junk food. It’s a source of protein and many other nutrients.
However, certain types of ham products – especially highly processed or cured hams – are less healthy options for several reasons:
High sodium content
Many commercially available hams, especially highly processed and cured varieties, can be high in sodium, which is salt.
Excessive sodium intake is associated with health issues such as high blood pressure and can increase the risk of heart disease and strokes.
On average, Australian children consume more sodium than the recommended upper limit: 600 mg a day for children aged four to eight and 800 mg a day for those aged nine to 13.
The World Health Organization says reducing sodium is one of the most cost-effective ways nations can improve the health of their populations.
Some processed hams may contain additives, preservatives and flavour-enhancers we should limit.
Saturated fat
While ham is a good source of protein, certain cuts can be higher in saturated fat.
Any ham sold in canteens under the new rules (where ham is treated as an “amber” food until the canteen menu changes) must have less than 3g of saturated fat per 100g.
The methods to process and cure ham may involve smoking, which can produce compounds such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. In large quantities, these may cause health concerns, including increasing the risk of bowel cancer.
What are some ham alternatives?
Lean, minimally processed ham, prepared without excessive sodium or additives, can potentially be a part of a healthy overall diet. And parents in WA can continue packing ham in their child’s lunchbox.
When choosing ham, read the labels and select products with a lower sodium content, minimal additives and healthier preparation methods.
When looking for low-salt alternatives to ham, there are several options to consider:
turkey breast. Turkey is a lean meat and can be a good substitute for ham. Look for low-sodium or no-salt-added varieties
chicken breast. Skinless, boneless chicken breast is a versatile and low-sodium option. Grilling, baking or roasting can add flavour without relying on salt
smoked salmon. While salmon naturally contains some sodium, smoked salmon tends to be lower in sodium than cured ham. Choose varieties with little or no added salt
roast beef. Choose lean cuts of roast beef and consider seasoning with herbs and spices instead of relying on salt for flavour
homemade roasts. Prepare your own roasts using lean meats such as pork loin, beef sirloin or lamb. This way, you have more control over the ingredients and can minimise added salt
grilled vegetables. These can be a tasty alternative to meat. Eggplant, zucchini, capsicum and portobello mushrooms have a satisfying texture and flavour
beans and legumes. Beans, lentils and chickpeas can be used as alternatives in various dishes. They are naturally low in sodium and high in protein and fibre.
Consider planning ahead, involving your kids, reducing pre-packaged foods, balancing cost and convenience, and giving your kids lunchbox accountability.
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.
One of the essential skills students need to master in primary school mathematics are “multiplication facts”.
What are they? What are they so important? And how can you help your child master them?
What are multiplication facts?
Multiplication facts typically describe the answers to multiplication sums up to 10×10. Sums up to 10×10 are called “facts” as it is expected they can be easily and quickly recalled. You may recall learning multiplication facts in school from a list of times tables.
The shift from “times tables” to “multiplication facts” is not just about language. It stems from teachers wanting children to see how multiplication facts can be used to solve a variety of problems beyond the finite times table format.
For example, if you learned your times tables in school (which typically went up to 12×12 and no further), you might be stumped by being asked to solve 15×8 off the top of your head. In contrast, we hope today’s students can use their multiplication facts knowledge to quickly see how 15×8 is equivalent to 10×8 plus 5×8.
The shift in terminology also means we are encouraging students to think about the connections between facts. For example, when presented only in separate tables, it is tricky to see how 4×3 and 3×4 are directly connected.
In today’s mathematics classrooms, teachers still focus on developing students’ mathematical accuracy and fast recall of essential facts, including multiplication facts.
But we also focus on developing essential problem-solving skills. This helps students form connections between concepts, and learn how to reason through a variety of real-world mathematical tasks.
By the end of primary school, it is expected students will know multiplication facts up to 10×10 and can recall the related division fact (for example, 10×9=90, therefore 90÷10=9).
Learning multiplication facts is also essential for developing “multiplicative thinking”. This is an understanding of the relationships between quantities, and is something we need to know how to do on a daily basis.
When we are deciding whether it is better to purchase a 100g product for $3 or a 200g product for $4.50, we use multiplicative thinking to consider that 100g for $3 is equivalent to 200g for $6 – not the best deal!
Multiplicative thinking is needed in nearly all maths topics in high school and beyond. It is used in many topics across algebra, geometry, statistics and probability.
This kind of thinking is profoundly important. Research shows students who are more proficient in multiplicative thinking perform significantly better in mathematics overall.
In 2001, an extensive RMIT study found there can be as much as a seven-year difference in student ability within one mathematics class due to differences in students’ ability to access multiplicative thinking.
These findings have been confirmed in more recent studies, including a 2021 paper.
So, supporting your child to develop their confidence and proficiency with multiplication is key to their success in high school mathematics. How can you help?
Below are three research-based tips to help support children from Year 2 and beyond to learn their multiplication facts.
1. Discuss strategies
One way to help your child’s confidence is to discuss strategies for when they encounter new multiplication facts.
Prompt them to think of facts they already and how they can be used for the new fact.
For example, once your child has mastered the x2 multiplication facts, you can discuss how 3×6 (3 sixes) can be calculated by doubling 6 (2×6) and adding one more 6. We’ve now realised that x3 facts are just x2 facts “and one more”!
Strategies can be individual: students should be using the strategy that makes the most sense to them. So you could ask a questions such as “if you’ve forgotten 6×7, how could you work it out?” (we might personally think of 6×6=36 and add one more 6, but your child might do something different and equally valid).
This is a great activity for any quiet car trip. It can also be a great drawing activity where you both have a go at drawing your strategy and then compare. Identifying multiple strategies develops flexible thinking.
Practising recalling facts under a friendly time crunch can be helpful in achieving what teachers call “fluency” (that is, answering quickly and easily).
A great game you could play with your children is “multiplication heads up” .
Using a deck of cards, your child places a card to their forehead where you can see but they cannot. You then flip over the top card on the deck and reveal it to your child. Using the revealed card and the card on your child’s head you tell them the result of the multiplication (for example, if you flip a 2 and they have a 3 card, then you tell them “6!”).
Based on knowing the result, your child then guesses what their card was.
If it is challenging to organise time to pull out cards, you can make an easier game by simply quizzing your child. Try to mix it up and ask questions that include a range of things they know well with and ones they are learning.
Repetition and rehearsal will mean things become stored in long-term memory.
3. Find patterns
Another great activity to do at home is print some multiplication grids and explore patterns with your child.
A first start might be to give your child a blank or partially blank multiplication grid which they can practise completing.
Then, using coloured pencils, they can colour in patterns they notice. For example, the x6 column is always double the answer in the x3 column. Another pattern they might see is all the even answers are products of 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. They can also notice half of the grid is repeated along the diagonal.
This also helps your child become a mathematical thinker, not just a calculator.
The importance of multiplication for developing your child’s success and confidence in mathematics cannot be understated. We believe these ideas will give you the tools you need to help your child develop these essential skills.
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.
In the aftermath of elections, one of the issues usually discussed in the media is the amount of people who turned out to vote. This is known as “participation” or “voter turnout”.
Several factors, such as the weather, can affect turnout. For example, the Republican primaries in Iowa on January 15 were held in very cold temperatures (subzero wind chills and a blizzard). Commentators have identified the cold as a factor that negatively influenced turnout, as many Republican voters decided to stay at home, even though Iowa is (almost) always cold in January.
The Republican primaries were held not only on a cold day, but on a working Monday. Yes, a Monday. This may not sound all that strange to the US public, who are used to voting on Tuesdays in their general elections, but it could for Australians who are used to voting on Saturdays. Australia is one of only a few countries that vote on Saturdays, along with Cyprus, Malta, Iceland, Latvia, Slovakia, Taiwan and New Zealand.
But, does it matter when we vote? Does it affect voter turnout? Do we know if more people vote during the weekend than, say, on a Tuesday? We analysed data from thousands of elections across the globe to find out.
We looked around the world to see when people vote. We collected turnout data for 3,217 national elections between 1945 and 2020 in 190 countries. We then collated the data and created an original dataset on turnout.
The first thing we can assess is which day of the week most global elections are held.
The graph shows, in general, voting takes place on weekends (more than 60% of elections), with Sunday being the preferred day. The day on which the fewest elections are held is Friday.
We could also examine how many countries choose a given day of the week to hold their elections. The graph below shows that 94 countries chose a Sunday for polling day, while just eight went with a Friday.
Interestingly, this preference for Sunday elections is not evident in countries with a significant Protestant Anglo cultural influence, in which public activities other than going to church tended to be restricted on Sundays. For example, in Australia, everything used to be closed on Sundays: bars, cinemas, shops, and there were no sporting events (the restrictions were gradually lifted from the 1980s).
How does that affect voter turnout?
So is there any relationship between the day on which you vote and participation?
The studies currently available show varying results. For example, a 2004 study that considered 29 countries found that when the election was held on a Sunday, participation was higher. However, when the analysis was expanded to 63 countries, the day of the election did not seem to affect participation.
As the graph above shows, the median voter turnout is around 70% for every day of the week.
For example, the average participation on Sundays was 71.6% while on Fridays it was 70%.
Therefore, it does not appear that the day on which the election is held is related to the level of participation.
This answer is simplified, of course. We are mixing democracies and authoritarian countries, places where there is mandatory voting and places where there is not, presidential and parliamentary systems, and countries that hold elections with either one or two rounds, among many other factors.
When to vote (and whether to vote or not) is an issue that matters. Participation is unequal and is used strategically, especially in countries where voting is not compulsory. In some countries, wealthier voters tend to show higher participation rates than poorer voters. This is a pattern that has been identified in the United States and Europe but not necessarily in other countries such as India or Indonesia.
Participation is strategically used by political parties promoting (or disincentivising) voting in different ways and to differing extents. There are blatant examples of parties strategically managing voting around the world. In Kenya, polling booths in some areas have more staff than others, skewing how many people are able to cast a vote before closing time. In the US, strict voter ID laws have acted to suppress the votes of some racial and ethnic groups.
Some instances are more insidious. In 2008, Spanish campaign director Elorriaga Pisarik, in referring to undecided socialist voters, declared “if we can generate enough doubts about the economy, immigration and nationalist issues, maybe they – the socialist voters – will stay at home”.
Participation also has an intrinsic value. Imagine two scenarios: one in which the candidate wins the election with 51% support, in an election that had a 90% turnout. Then imagine another election where the candidate wins by the same margin but in an election with a 30% turnout. Although both victories are valid, we tend to attribute greater legitimacy to the one that has brought more people to the polls.
In a year when more than half the world’s population will vote in a national election, it’s worth including data in the global discussion.
Ferran Martinez i Coma receives funding from Australian Research Council DP190101978.
Diego Leiva 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.
My obsession for public pools began when I was growing up in Perth at the iconic 1960s Beatty Park. Living in Melbourne I swam in the “aqua profonda” of the Fitzroy pool, listened to the underwater music (which in the 1980s was novel) at the Prahran pool and lapped at the pool that attracts attention for being named after a drowned prime minister — the Harold Holt. So, I was looking forward to Black Swan State Theatre Company’s new production The Pool, and it doesn’t disappoint.
Playwright Steve Rodgers’ love of swimming is the play’s genesis. A regular lap swimmer, Rodgers was struck by the diversity of people who gathered at pools and started to imagine their stories. What followed were interviews with workers at community pools and in aged care, teenagers, family and friends, and a play that celebrates the pool and its capacity to create community.
Directed by Kate Champion, the production of this play has been cleverly conceived as a site-specific work at the Bold Park Aquatic Centre’s outdoor Olympic pool. Given Perth’s current heatwave, this venue is welcomed. But beyond this, it enables us to experience the pool’s atmosphere – the smell of chlorine, sound of water lapping at the sides – and to be part of the action.
Seated poolside, we observe the goings on in and around the pool just as Rodgers did. But we don’t have to imagine the stories. Equipped with headphones, we eavesdrop on conversations and are privy to the characters’ inner thoughts in carefully woven monologues, as these characters reminisce, reveal long held secrets and whisper their fears.
Given Perth’s current heatwave, this poolside venue is welcomed. Daniel J Grant/BSSTC
The Pool’s characters represent the diversity of people who gather at pools and the myriad of reasons they go.
Loved-up teens Safiyah (Edyll Ismail) and Ananda (Tobias Muhafidin) are escaping the censuring gaze of adults. The over-60s trio of Roy (Geoff Kelso), wife Greta (Polly Low) and her buddy Val (Julia Moody) are healing their ageing bodies and family rifts.
Roy and Greta’s 40-year-old daughter Joni (Emma Jackson) is facing her fears. Quinn (Anna Gray) is looking for recognition. Morgan (Carys Munks) is seeking freedom.
Keeping these regulars afloat are poolside staff Kirk (Joel Jackson) and Sandra (Kylie Bracknell) with their own reasons for being there. The actors, from equally diverse backgrounds and with a range of acting experience, create a convincing ensemble.
The actors are from diverse backgrounds and with a range of acting experience. Daniel J Grant/BSSTC
Passion for the pool
Conviction and authenticity are at the heart of this production. Rodgers’ passion for water and the pool washes through his play. The dialogue is carefully crafted to sound natural and not overwritten, allowing the audience to piece the stories together as we would in life. It also allows space for Champion’s expert direction.
In the program, Champion writes she has “always been drawn to art that recreates a sense of authenticity”. She has achieved this in The Pool with details that blur the distinction between reality and theatre.
As we are ushered into the space, swimmers are in the pool, prompting somebody near me to speculate on whether they were actors or actual lap swimmers. As a finale, members of the audience can choose to join the cast in an aqua aerobic session.
The Pool is greatly enhanced in its subtle shifts away from realism. Daniel J Grant/BSSTC
The actors’ movement in and around the pool and their entrances and exits are carefully choreographed not only to retain focus on the main action but to replicate the rhythms and patterns of people at public pools.
The Pool is greatly enhanced in its subtle shifts away from realism. Champion picks up on the aesthetics of the public pool, focusing on the sensuality of its water and beauty of its objects: handrails, ramp, deckchairs and lane ropes. Actors’ interactions with these features have been shaped to highlight the grace in our everyday movements.
Key to this poetic strain is a chorus of swimmers who appear throughout. They are sublime, morphing from being regulars lounging, lapping, diving and performing impressive bommies to performing carefully choreographed water sequences that frame and comment on scenes.
Their inclusion greatly contributes to the poignancy of the play.
A place of connection
Crucial to all this is the audio. The use of headphones for the audience creates an intimacy with the characters. Composer and sound designer Tim Collins’ finely nuanced score supports the action without dominating, and without any hitches.
As a finale, members of the audience could choose to join in. Daniel J Grant/BSSTC
There are more than 2,000 swimming pools open to the public in Australia. They have been sites of protest and social change. This production shows they are also a space where we can have a laugh, shed our skins and find or lose ourselves – and ultimately find connection with others.
At a time when we sorely need it, The Pool speaks to our humanity. The opening night audience left buoyed.
Black Swan State Theatre Company’s The Pool is on until 25 February.
Helen Trenos 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By A J Brown, Professor of Public Policy & Law, Centre for Governance & Public Policy, Griffith University
Shutterstock
Making it safer for insiders to speak up about wrongdoing is crucial for public integrity in Australia. Ask anyone, from the public servants who tried to speak up against Robodebt, to Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, again at the front end of whistleblower protection reforms.
But what it will take to make reform a reality has long been the issue. This is particularly salient as the federal government consults on how to better protect whistleblowers in the public sector, including contractors. In addition, reviews are underway or looming for other whistleblower protections in the Corporations Act, Taxation Administration Act, and the aged care sector, to name a few.
Naturally, the key to improved protections is making them work. This is why many years of research support the need for a dedicated Whistleblower Protection Authority to fully enforce our “speak up” laws, irrespective of what improved protections they contain.
Together with Transparency International Australia and the Human Rights Law Centre, we have released draft design principles for a Whistleblower Protection Authority, informed by our research and the experience of many who have blown the whistle.
Here are our five key recommendations for this crucial reform.
1. The agency must actually protect whistleblowers
The first priority is to fill the gaps in what institutions currently do to implement whistleblower protections, given these types of laws have already been around for years.
Several federal bodies have the task of fighting wrongdoing and ensuring integrity, including the new National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC).
Yet, drawing on international research, we found when it comes to the crunch, out of 15 key official functions required to make whistleblowing laws work, only four of those were currently fully provided for. This leaves substantial or total gaps for the remaining 11.
Of these weak or missing roles, the most important are powers to independently investigate claims of detriment or vengeful harm to whistleblowers, and to ensure remedies are found. This massive and obvious gap lies at the heart of the need for institutional reform.
2. Capture the financial benefits of whistleblowing
What does effective protection look like? Our research found that even in deserving cases, more than half (56%) of public-interest whistleblowers are suffering serious direct or indirect repercussions. In turn, only about half (49%) of these are receiving any remedies to address the impacts – with less than 6% receiving any compensation.
This is despite the huge benefits whistleblowers bring to government and taxpayers by uncovering wrongdoing, including financial benefits through penalties imposed, court settlements or money saved.
A whistleblowing agency needs full resources to support whistleblowers in compensation claims, provide legal assistance, and mediate with agencies to secure remedies.
A Whistleblower Protection Authority could also administer a reward scheme where a proportion of the penalties, savings or income gained by the Commonwealth from whistleblower disclosures is channelled back into compensation.
Whistleblower reward schemes in other countries have had great success, which is especially relevant for protections that also apply across the private sector. This was highlighted last week by former Australian Competition and Consumer Chair Allan Fels.
3. Protect whistleblowers across all sectors
Whistleblowers don’t just exist in the public sector. And even when it comes to revealing public sector wrongdoing, many whistleblowers are located in private companies that deliver government contracts. They can also be consultants, or witness wrongdoing involving other companies, even if not their own, and can still face detriment.
This is why a major 2017 parliamentary inquiry recommended consistent whistleblower protections across the sectors under federal laws, including a “one stop shop Whistleblower Protection Authority”.
International standards support a consistent, seamless approach, so whistleblowers do not fall through the cracks or face extra costs and barriers due to differences in rules and enforcement. Our research shows great similarities in how reports of wrongdoing are handled between the sectors.
With most federal whistleblowing laws up for review, it’s the perfect time to move to a simpler approach, with an authority able to ensure public interest whistleblowers are protected irrespective of where they come from.
4. Ensure agencies respond properly to whistleblowers
We can only be sure that whistleblowers are being protected – and their disclosures dealt with – if they are on the radar of their own organisation, with an independent agency there to make sure that’s the case.
Our best guess is that perhaps only 10% of actual Commonwealth whistleblowers are being identified as such under the current public interest disclosure regime. Upwards of 1,200 public officials who need support and protection every year are not even on the radar.
Under-reporting is a problem everywhere. But every year, NSW government agencies identify four times as many whistleblowing disclosures as the federal government (on a pro rata basis), while the Queensland government reports seven times as many. This confirms the federal regime is broken.
Robodebt is a good example. Several staff raised concerns about the unlawful and unfair nature of the scheme, as aired in the royal commission. They have rightly been praised as “whistleblowers” by the Minister for Government Services Bill Shorten, but none seems to have triggered the necessary responses and legal protections.
A Whistleblower Protection Authority will close these gaps by checking how well agencies are recognising disclosures and being an independent doorway where whistleblowers can go confidentially for guidance and support.
5. An independent, standalone body
A Whistleblower Protection Authority could be located in various places in our system. For example, independent MPs Cathy McGowan and Helen Haines have previously put forward legislation that included a new whistleblower protection commissioner as part of the NACC.
The crucial thing is for whistleblower protection to be recognised as a standalone job. It must have an independent statutory commissioner supported by adequate resources and staff, who cannot be diverted onto other jobs.
The authority will still need to work in close partnership with other agencies, especially those that already investigate whistleblowing disclosures.
However, independence is crucial, so the authority can act impartially to conciliate disputes between whistleblowers and organisations, investigate when whistleblowers allege detriment for raising their concerns, and act as a powerful circuit breaker against reprisals.
For example, we recommend any federal agency who proposes taking legal action against a whistleblower – such as in the ongoing prosecutions of Richard Boyle by the Australian Taxation Office, or David McBride by Defence – must first prove to the authority that the action is justified.
It’s time to get the design of this crucial body right. It’s not enough for workers and officials, who serve us every day by raising their concerns, just to have protections on paper. We need an authority that will finally ensure these protections work fully, in practice.
A J Brown AM is Chair of Transparency International Australia. He has received funding from the Australian Research Council and all Australian governments for research on public interest whistleblowing, integrity and anti-corruption reform through partners including Australia’s federal and state Ombudsmen, Australian Securities & Investments Commission, and other regulatory agencies, parliaments, anti-corruption and private sector bodies (see most recently ‘Whistling While They Work 2: Improving Managerial and Organisational Responses to Whistleblowing in the Public and Private Sectors’ (https://whistlingwhiletheywork.edu.au/). He was a member of the Commonwealth Ministerial Expert Panel on Whistleblowing (2017-2019). He was also a proposed expert witness in public interest defence proceedings brought by David McBride.
Jane Olsen has previously worked at the NSW Ombudsman and the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission. She was a team member of both Australian Research Council-funded Whistling While They Work projects (1 and 2) and of the expert groups that developed the Australian and international standards on whistleblowing.
In 1875, trillions of Rocky Mountain locusts gathered and began migrating across the western United States in search of food. The enormous swarm covered an area larger than California. Three decades later, these grasshoppers were extinct.
This fate is all too common for migratory species. Their journeys can make them especially vulnerable to hunting or fishing. They may move between countries, meaning protecting the species in one jurisdiction isn’t enough. And it’s hard for us to even know if they’re in trouble.
Today, we get a global glimpse of how migratory species are faring, in the first-ever stocktake produced by the United Nations Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species. The report shows falling populations in close to half (44%) the 1,189 species tracked by the convention. The problem is much worse underwater – 90% of migratory fish species are threatened with extinction.
Their decline is not inevitable. After all, the migratory humpback whale was headed for rapid extinction – until we stopped whaling.
Why are migratory species at higher risk?
Every year, birds weighing about 300 grams leave Siberia and fly non-stop to Australia. Some bar-tailed godwits fly 13,000 km without stopping – one of the longest known continuous migrations.
Their journeys are critical for their life cycles – to find food, mates or a better climate. To undertake these journeys, animals must be in good condition with plenty of fat stores, and they must have safe flyways, swimways and pathways.
On land, roads and fences carve up migratory routes for animals like wildebeest. At sea, fishing trawlers chase migrating schools of fish and often accidentally collect sea turtles, albatrosses and whales. On seashores, development or land reclamation take away vital resting points for migrating shorebirds.
What the report shows us is that migration between countries is getting harder and harder. While a few species are benefiting greatly from farming and artificial wetlands, many more are being severely harmed.
Even the largest migrations can be stopped by fences or other barriers. Mcknub/Shutterstock
Overexploitation is the top risk
Human exploitation of migratory species – taken as food, bycatch or exterminated as “pest” species – is the main reason why these species are in decline.
Animals often migrate in large groups, making them an appealing target for hunting or fishing. This is why we no longer have species such as the passenger pigeon, once numbering in their billions but hunted to extinction in 100 years.
Marine species are often out of sight, out of mind. But this report is a huge red flag for ocean ecosystems. Oceanic shark and ray populations have fallen 71% since 1970, which coincides with an 18 fold increase in fishing pressure. Bycatch in commercial fisheries is a huge problem for sharks, turtles, mammals and birds, but it can be massively reduced with existing technology, if deployed across all fleets
Overexploitation can be stopped. In 1981, Australia and Japan agreed to stop hunting Latham’s Snipe, a migratory shorebird that travels between the two countries. It’s the same story for humpback whales, which have returned in large numbers – and created a new industry, whale-watching.
Populations of sharks and rays have plummeted since 1970 – and fishing pressure is to blame. Orin/Shutterstock
On fences and stepping stones
Direct killing of migratory animals isn’t the only threat. Clearing forests and grassland for farming destroys habitat. Light pollution can mess with navigation, climate change plays havoc with the timing of migration, and underwater noise pollution can confuse marine migrants. Even simple actions like building fences, roads and dams can disrupt migrations over land and through rivers.
Many migratory species need stepping stones: resting sites linking up their whole migratory route. If just one site is lost – or if animals are intensely hunted there – the whole chain can collapse.
Once identified, key areas have to be protected, which is where we often get stuck. But there are glimmers of hope. Last year conservation of these areas in the ocean got a boost when the world’s nations agreed to better protect the high seas beyond national jurisdictions, which fills a planet-sized gap in biodiversity governance.
This is a groundbreaking report, but it has limitations. First, it only covers species listed under the UN convention, a tiny fraction of all migratory species. Listing unlocks stronger protections and urgently needs to be rolled out to more species.
For instance, around 60 migratory fish species are covered – but more than 1,700 others are not. Of these unprotected species, almost 25% are threatened, near threatened or there’s not enough data to know.
That’s to say nothing of insects. To date, only one insect is listed on the convention, the famous Monarch butterfly which migrates from the United States to Mexico. But millions of tonnes of insects migrate through the airspace each year, and we have largely no idea what they are, where they’re going or how they’re faring.
We now know much more about why migratory species are in decline. But we’re still not acting to protect them adequately.
More than 90% of the world’s migratory birds aren’t adequately protected by national parks and other protected areas. Only 8% of the world’s protected land is joined up, preventing migrating animals from moving safely across their routes. Because of this, animals have to make daring sorties across unprotected land or sea to complete their journeys.
So what can be done? Agreements between countries can create more action, but in practice, each country needs to actually do what it has already promised.
Animal migrations have collapsed on our watch. We need to do all we can to stem the losses and begin recovery if we want future generations to be able to experience nature in all its glory.
Richard Fuller receives funding for migratory species research from the Australian Research Council and the National Environmental Science Program.
Daniel Dunn receives funding from the Australian Research Council for a Discovery Project focused on understanding migratory connectivity in the ocean, and leads the development of the Migratory Connectivity in the Ocean (MiCO; mico.eco) system, which has been previously supported by the German International Climate Initiative (IKI) and UNEP-WCMC, the authors of the UN report.
Lily Bentley works on the Migratory Connectivity in the Ocean (MiCO; mico.eco) system, which has been previously supported by the German International Climate Initiative (IKI) and UNEP-WCMC, the authors of the UN report.
In recent weeks, New Zealand’s Supreme Court has delivered a landmark decision on a case brought by Māori elder Mike Smith against a group of New Zealand’s largest corporate greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters.
The Supreme Court overturned lower court rulings which had struck out Smith’s ambitious claim seeking to establish civil (tort) liability for those emitters’ contributions to climate change. Smith argued these contributions had a negative impact on his family’s and tribe’s land, water and cultural values.
With the Supreme Court decision, Smith has won the right to present his full case before the High Court.
While only the beginning of what could be a long legal process, the Supreme Court’s decision has attracted local and international attention as one that “may open a new avenue in climate law”.
The case against the corporate emitters
In 2019, Smith sued seven New Zealand-based corporate entities in his capacity as an elder of the Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu iwi (tribes) and climate change spokesperson for a national forum of tribal leaders.
The defendants include New Zealand’s largest company Fonterra (responsible for around 30% of the world’s dairy exports), along with other corporate entities involved in industries either directly emitting GHGs or supplying fossil fuels such as oil, gas or coal.
Smith argued the activities and effects of the corporate defendants amount to three forms of “tort” or civil wrong: public nuisance, negligence, and a new form of civil wrong described as a “proposed climate system damage tort”.
The first two causes of action – public nuisance and negligence – have long lineages in the common law.
As touched on in the Supreme Court decision, public nuisance claims were used by claimants affected by various forms of pollution and other harm during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.
Many of the leading common law tort cases – especially on public nuisance – were decided well before the emergence of modern scientific understanding and consensus on climate change.
A major issue for the Supreme Court (and now the High Court, where this claim will proceed) was whether longstanding rules and principles of tort liability should be adjusted in light of the contemporary, existential challenges presented by climate change.
This might involve adapting established tort categories of public nuisance and negligence. It might also involve fashioning an entirely new “climate system damage” tort.
A key plank of the corporate emitters’ argument was that the courts “are ill-suited to deal with a systemic problem of this nature with all the complexity entailed”. They argued the courts should leave those inherently political issues to the politicians.
The Supreme Court rejected that argument. Unless parliament has, through statute, clearly displaced civil obligations – and the court found that it had not – a judicial pathway is “open for the common law to operate, develop and evolve”.
Defendants typically argue it is impossible to show the global emission contributions of a small group of even relatively large entities can be evidentially linked to the climate-related harm experienced by plaintiffs. In this case, the seven corporate emitters are associated with around 30% of total New Zealand emissions.
However, New Zealand contributes less than 0.2% of global emissions. As the High Court judge put it, “the defendants’ contribution to […] global emissions is minute”. To accept Smith’s claim “would be to expose (them) to an undue burden of legal responsibility, way beyond their contribution to damaging global greenhouse gas emissions”.
The Supreme Court did not agree that the challenges of causation or proximity necessarily doom Smith’s case to failure. The court suggested that there may be scope for adjusting the causation rules to better reflect the nature of modern environmental issues like climate change.
Smith’s position (in part) is that instead of requiring litigants to prove that damage to their land and resources is directly attributable to the activities of one or more corporate emitters, the legal test should be adjusted to establish civil liability if defendants have materially contributed to the global problem.
But the Court didn’t think these difficult questions could be resolved without a full trial.
What role for tikanga and where now?
An important dimension of the case which distinguishes it from similar proceedings overseas is the relevance of a body of indigenous custom, law and practice known as “tikanga Māori”.
Recent Supreme Court decisions have accepted and applied tikanga as the “first law of New Zealand” including in relation to environmental protection.
The Court followed that approach in this case, accepting that crucial aspects of Smith’s case rely on tikanga principles.
Smith is not just suing on his own behalf, “but as a kaitiaki (carer) acting on behalf of the whenua (land), wai (freshwater) and moana (sea) – distinct entities in their own right”. The court pronounced that “addressing and assessing matters of tikanga simply cannot be avoided”.
With Smith’s claim having been reinstated, the parties now return to the High Court. Unless there is legislative intervention, the normal pretrial steps of discovery, evidence exchange and preparation will proceed. It promises to be one of New Zealand’s hardest fought and most closely watched private law climate cases.
Vernon Rive has previously received funding from the New Zealand Law Foundation.
Both my parents worked for 30-plus years for their employers – they had lifelong careers at a single company. Growing up, they taught me the importance of “loyalty” and “commitment”.
But in a rapidly changing world, the concept of a job for life has become as rare as a dial-up internet connection.
This shift from stable, long-term employment and single-employer careers to a world where frequent job changes are the norm comes directly from globalisation, rapid technological advancements and the changing ideas about work.
Why such rapid change now?
Globalisation has turned the world economy into a giant, interconnected web. This has made job markets fiercely competitive and talent and opportunities in the labour market more diverse and digitally accessible.
Jobs can be widely publicised and explored online and are no longer tied to your city of birth. Add to this the rapid technological progress. We now live in a world where the skills you learned yesterday might not be enough for today’s job market.
The job market is transforming, with new careers emerging as automation and artificial intelligence (AI) advances. Risks and price policies can be efficiently assessed using AI, making insurance underwriters redundant while advanced software in banking and finance mean data analysis can be automated.
Online booking has reduced demand for travel agents and desktop publishers are being replaced by user-friendly software, which allows people to create their own materials. These changes highlight the need for professionals to update their skills and adapt to a technologically evolving job market.
As a result, career paths have become fluid and multi-directional. It’s no longer just about climbing the corporate ladder and getting a regular paycheck; it’s about exploring different paths, switching jobs and industries and sometimes even venturing into freelancing and the gig economy.
Work is no longer just about climbing the corporate ladder and getting a regular paycheck. ESB Professional/Shutterstock
Workers’ priorities have been changed by the pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown this trend into overdrive. It has highlighted the need for workers and employers to be flexible to adjust to remote work, evolving job demands and uncertain prospects. Many people have reevaluated their career choices. They want greater work/life balance and adaptability in a changing world.
Increasingly, many workers are developing a personal brand, which involves building a narrative based on their individual skills. This is enriched through online education and skill development courses which makes them stand out in the workplace and more likely to access better opportunities.
But if employers don’t provide opportunities to use these skills, employees might decide to look elsewhere.
Does moving jobs equal disloyalty?
Loyalty is defined as an employee’s commitment to their organisation and its goals. It means a willingness to put in extra effort and to uphold the company’s values and objectives. Loyal workers often identify strongly with their workplace, are reliable and view the organisation positively, even during tough times.
Many people have re-evaluated their lives since the pandemic with many seeking greater work/life balance. Antonio Guillem/Shutterstock
When long-term employees change workplaces, it does not mean they are disloyal. It signifies a change in priorities and a redefined loyalty bond. Employees are loyal to their employer and its interests while working there. But they also seek mutual growth and expect to be recognised and rewarded.
Career paths are now a kaleidoscope of experiences and opportunities. Instead of a career identity being about a company brand, it is about skills, experiences and the meaningfulness of the work. This transformation means career decision-making is more intricate, considering personal aspirations, market trends and family considerations.
How are employers coping with this shift?
Employers are rethinking strategies for career development with emphasis on providing diverse and flexible career opportunities, supporting continuous learning, and acknowledging unconventional career paths. This approach is not only in response to the changing nature of work but also a strategy to attract and retain talent in a highly competitive job market.
And for the individuals stepping into the workforce, the message is clear: take charge of your career development. Be proactive, embrace change, continually update your skills and be ready to navigate through transitions and uncertainties. In these dynamic career landscapes, adaptability and resilience are your best allies.
The ability to adjust quickly to new roles, learn new skills, and navigate uncertain job markets is essential for career success in the modern era.
In summary, the career landscape is evolving as is the nature of commitment. The new mantra for organisations and individuals is adaptability, continuous learning and resilience. As the world of work evolves, the key to success is embracing change and crafting a fulfilling, meaningful career that aligns with personal interests and life goals.
Ruchi Sinha 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.
Stadium concert attendance is on the rise in Australia. This month, more than one million people are expected see P!NK and Taylor Swift on their Australian tours, which quickly sold out the country’s biggest stadiums. Both artists added extra dates to meet demand, following extended runs by Ed Sheeran and Foo Fighters in 2023.
What’s drawing such massive crowds to these events? And how can you maximise your fun (in a safe way) when sharing a space with 100,000 other people?
What’s behind the concert boom?
State governments have begun to lift decades-old limits on large stadium concerts. Event caps have gone from six to 12 events per year at Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium, and from four to 20 events per year at the Sydney Cricket Ground precinct. The press releases from both of these announcements trumpeted the benefits for tourism and local economies.
This popularity continues, with ticket prices rising amid a cost-of-living crisis. Consumer research shows people under age 35, and the one-third of Australians who rent their homes, have made the biggest reductions in discretionary spending. But the overall trend is towards saving week-to-week and “splurging” on big events such as concerts.
The ‘peak music experience’
Live music is a space where extraordinary things happen. We can celebrate who we are and what’s important to us, individually and collectively. We can have intense feelings and express them in uncommon ways, exploring different – or “more real” – versions of ourselves.
All of this creates memorable experiences that resonate deeply with us and keep us coming back time and again. I call these “peak music experiences”. My research drawing on in-depth interviews with music lovers, media analysis, and participant observation identifies common elements of the peak live music experience.
With that in mind, here are six things to help you get the most out of your next concert.
1. Company
A crucial factor in any concert experience is whom we share it with. The heightened feeling and expression that live music enables can create powerful moments that sociologists call “epiphanies”. Epiphanies reveal and encapsulate what specific people mean to each other.
So when tickets go on sale, and you’re considering whom to call, remember your choice can elevate your concert experience – and your relationship with that person or group.
2. Venue
Music is inseparable from its setting. In live music, this is a feature. Concert halls and dive bars are perfect settings for certain types of experience. But if you’re seeing one of the world’s biggest acts, where better to do so than a giant cauldron of humanity under the stars?
Stadiums have drawbacks, mostly related to their sheer scale and associated logistics. But the journey, the waiting, the challenges, and especially the fellow travellers, often contribute to the unpredictable magic of live music. So plan ahead and leave plenty of time, but also enjoy the whole ride!
3. Sound
Live music doesn’t just sound different than music in your loungeroom; it feels different. High volume, as much as the mass movement of bodies, makes live music a physical experience. Experts suggest the best sonics are in front of the mixing desk, off-centre and not too close to the stage – but this must be balanced with the view! It’s a good idea to pack ear plugs in case your ears need a rest.
4. Presence
A good live show requires the performer to be present, not just physically but also emotionally. This is where we judge their authenticity or “realness”. This isn’t an objective quality, but a reflection of our personal tastes and values. Do you prefer flawless virtuosity or relatable vulnerability?
Such notions are deeply ingrained in us. So when choosing a concert, consider how it might confirm or challenge your ideals. Both can be good! And don’t forget to be present yourself.
A good performer ensures they have strong presence throughout their show. Shutterstock
5. Fandom
Concerts aren’t just about enjoying and judging the performer(s); they’re also about us. The costly pilgrimage and elaborate ritual to celebrate this very specific thing you love, surrounded by people who love it too, helps join the dots of our fragmented lives.
Just getting to see a favourite artist or song is the source of many people’s peak music experiences. The moral: if it’s an act you really love, always go if you can.
6. Collective feeling
Have you noticed the moment when a roaring crowd becomes aware of itself and roars a bit louder? Live music is about more than just the artist, their performance, or even us. It’s also about other people.
Music synchronises not only our actions but our subjective experience. We feel together, whether in rapt silence or wild abandon. We become a part of something greater – especially at massive concerts with crowds in the tens of thousands. So my tip: join in.
Safety and sustainability
Finally, don’t forget to keep safe. Australia’s love of outdoor events exposes us to extremes, which are a growing reality. Taylor Swift’s recent Brazilian concerts coincided with a heat wave with tragic consequences, highlighting the responsibility of event organisers.
You can manage risks by making plans in advance, knowing your limits, and considering important information such as the availability of water, food, safe spaces and venue exits. Event organisers should provide this information.
The music industry and governments are also beginning to address issues of sexual harassment, accessibility, drug safety and diverse representation, with a view to making the live music experience available and equitable for all.
The Albanese government will commit $707 million for a new Remote Jobs program that will create 3000 jobs over the next three years.
In its first major Indigenous affairs initiative since the defeat of the referendum last year, the government says this is the initial step in replacing the widely-criticised Community Development Program (CDP) with “real jobs, proper wages, and decent conditions”.
On Tuesday the government will release a report for 2023 on closing the gap and its implementation plan for 2024. Jobs will be a centrepiece of the new initiatives but there will be other measures including on health and connectivity.
Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney said the new program would “put communities in the driver’s seat to create local jobs and businesses”.
“For too long, people in remote communities have missed out on economic opportunities and have been stuck in cycles of poverty,” she said.
“People in remote communities should have access to the benefits and dignity of work – for themselves, their families and the next generation.”
The government says the program, starting in the second half of this year, will be “grounded in self-determination”, allowing communities to decide what jobs are created, such as in community services and the care sector, hospitality and tourism, horticulture and retail.
There will be a new $185 million Community Jobs and Business Fund to which local and community-owned businesses can apply to finance equipment and capital needs.
The jobs program will be implemented in partnership with Indigenous people, with the government stressing “it will be about remote communities deciding what will make the biggest difference locally”. It won’t be “a one-size-fits-all program”.
The new program will operate where the CDP already exists.
CDP Regions and Providers Map
A scathing Productivity Commission report last week stressed the importance of self-determination, and criticised governments for not getting into the mindset required for shared decision-making with Indigenous people.
The commission said it had heard a clear message from Indigenous people about “the lack of power sharing needed for joint decision-making, and the failure of governments to acknowledge and act on the reality that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people know what is best for their communities”.
At present two key closing the gap employment targets are not on track or not on track in key areas.
Target 7 is to increase the proportion of Indigenous youth aged 15 to 24 who are in employment, education or training to 67% by 2031. It’s not on track.
Target 8 is to increase the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 25 to 64 who are employed to 62% by 2031. This target is not on track in the Northern Territory, where a high proportion of Indigenous people live in remote communities and are unemployed.
Assistant Minister for Indigenous Australians and Indigenous Health Malarndirri McCarthy said: “As a former participant of a remote jobs program myself, I know all too well the importance that meaningful employment has on economic empowerment, health, happiness, and general wellbeing”.
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.
The federal government has so far not applied to have any of those released from immigration detention after the November High Court judgement re-detained, according to figures released on Monday.
The government raced legislation through parliament in December to enable it to apply to a court for preventative detention orders.
Under sustained opposition questioning in the House of Representatives, Immigration Minister Andrew Giles said the government’s regime was modelled on the Coalition’s high risk offenders legislation, which had seen a lengthy time for any application to be made.
Figures released during Senate estimates hearings showed 24 of the 149 detainees released have been arrested and charged with offences – six for breaches of visa conditions and 18 for offences under state and territory law.
At the end of January, 113 of the ex-detainees had been required to wear ankle bracelets.
Details of the ex-detainees’ offences committed before their detention were released on Monday. They showed seven had been convicted of murder or attempted murder and 37 of sexually-based offences, including child sex offences.
Some 72 had convictions for assault and violent offending, kidnapping, and armed robbery; another 16 had convictions for domestic violence and stalking.
Thirteen had convictions for serious drug offences, less than five for serious people smuggling crimes and less than five for offences described as a “Low level or no criminality”.
Numbers include overseas offending in some cases.
The ex-detainees cannot be deported because no other country will take them or they are stateless.
The opposition unsuccessfully pressed Giles on whether any of the 36 people who were not wearing ankle bracelets had committed offences since leaving detention. In Senate estimates the government took the question on notice.
Giles declined to go into “operational matters”.
He said “the management of everyone in that cohort has been subject to the expert advice of the men and women of the community protection board”.
Giles repeatedly stressed the people had had to be released under the High Court decision, which would have been the case under any government. The court found they could not be indefinitely detained.
“Since then, we have been working around the clock to ensure the community is kept safe.
“We have done so by putting in place layers of protection. One of which is, of course, the regime that was the subject of legislation […] at the end of last year” providing for preventative detention.
Giles said the government’s preventative detention regime was modelled on the high-risk offenders scheme of the Coalition government.
“It took more than three years for the first continuing detention order application after that regime was enacted.
“And 10 months was the shortest period of time for an application to be made to the court under the members opposite.”
Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said Senate processes had forced the government to “cough up” a whole lot of information. “Hopefully the government actually gets off their proverbial and makes an application to the court.”
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.
Anyone who has drunk alcohol will be familiar with how easily it can lower your social inhibitions and let you do things you wouldn’t normally do.
But you may not be aware that mixing certain medicines with alcohol can increase the effects and put you at risk.
When you mix alcohol with medicines, whether prescription or over-the-counter, the medicines can increase the effects of the alcohol or the alcohol can increase the side-effects of the drug. Sometimes it can also result in all new side-effects.
The chemicals in your brain maintain a delicate balance between excitation and inhibition. Too much excitation can lead to convulsions. Too much inhibition and you will experience effects like sedation and depression.
Alcohol works by increasing the amount of inhibition in the brain. You might recognise this as a sense of relaxation and a lowering of social inhibitions when you’ve had a couple of alcoholic drinks.
With even more alcohol, you will notice you can’t coordinate your muscles as well, you might slur your speech, become dizzy, forget things that have happened, and even fall asleep.
Medications can interact with alcohol to produce different or increased effects. Alcohol can interfere with the way a medicine works in the body, or it can interfere with the way a medicine is absorbed from the stomach. If your medicine has similar side-effects as being drunk, those effects can be compounded.
Not all the side-effects need to be alcohol-like. Mixing alcohol with the ADHD medicine ritalin, for example, can increase the drug’s effect on the heart, increasing your heart rate and the risk of a heart attack.
Combining alcohol with ibuprofen can lead to a higher risk of stomach upsets and stomach bleeds.
Alcohol can increase the break-down of certain medicines, such as opioids, cannabis, seizures, and even ritalin. This can make the medicine less effective. Alcohol can also alter the pathway of how a medicine is broken down, potentially creating toxic chemicals that can cause serious liver complications. This is a particular problem with paracetamol.
At its worst, the consequences of mixing alcohol and medicines can be fatal. Combining a medicine that acts on the brain with alcohol may make driving a car or operating heavy machinery difficult and lead to a serious accident.
Who is at most risk?
The effects of mixing alcohol and medicine are not the same for everyone. Those most at risk of an interaction are older people, women and people with a smaller body size.
Older people do not break down medicines as quickly as younger people, and are often on more than one medication.
Older people also are more sensitive to the effects of medications acting on the brain and will experience more side-effects, such as dizziness and falls.
Women and people with smaller body size tend to have a higher blood alcohol concentration when they consume the same amount of alcohol as someone larger. This is because there is less water in their bodies that can mix with the alcohol.
What drugs can’t you mix with alcohol?
You’ll know if you can’t take alcohol because there will be a prominent warning on the box. Your pharmacist should also counsel you on your medicine when you pick up your script.
The most common alcohol-interacting prescription medicines are benzodiazepines (for anxiety, insomnia, or seizures), opioids for pain, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and some antibiotics, like metronidazole and tinidazole.
Medicines will carry a warning if you shouldn’t take them with alcohol. Nial Wheate
It’s not just prescription medicines that shouldn’t be mixed with alcohol. Some over-the-counter medicines that you shouldn’t combine with alcohol include medicines for sleeping, travel sickness, cold and flu, allergy, and pain.
Next time you pick up a medicine from your pharmacist or buy one from the local supermarket, check the packaging and ask for advice about whether you can consume alcohol while taking it.
If you do want to drink alcohol while being on medication, discuss it with your doctor or pharmacist first.
Nial Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, a member of the Australasian Pharmaceutical Science Association, and a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Nial is the chief scientific officer of Vaihea Skincare LLC, a director of SetDose Pty Ltd a medical device company, and a Standards Australia panel member for sunscreen agents. Nial regularly consults to industry on issues to do with medicine risk assessments, manufacturing, design, and testing.
Kellie Charles was a previous Board Member of the Australasian Society of Clinical and Experimental Pharmacologists and Toxicologists.
Associate Professor Tina Hinton has previously received funding from the Schizophrenia Research Institute (formerly Neuroscience Institute of Schizophrenia and Allied Disorders). She is currently a Board member of the Australasian Society of Clinical and Experimental Pharmacologists and Toxicologists.
Jasmine Lee 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.
“Why do we shiver when we feel cold?” – Syeda, age 10, from Karachi
What a cool question, Syeda!
Our bodies like to be nice and warm, usually around 37°C. This allows our internal functions to work at their best. But our bodies are constantly losing heat to the outside air.
When it’s cold outside, or if we jump into a cold swimming pool, or even if the air-conditioning is a bit strong, our body temperature can lower, sometimes to levels that are uncomfortable.
If our body temperature drops too low, our heart, nervous system and other organs are not able to work normally. If it falls to extremely low temperatures, called hypothermia, this can cause some organs to completely fail.
Luckily, our bodies have their own internal heaters to protect us against small changes in temperature. This is mostly thanks to the actions of our muscles, through a process called thermoregulation. It’s this process that leads our bodies to shiver when we’re chilly.
Muscles are our bodies’ personal heaters
When our muscles twitch, they generate movement. This is called “muscle contraction”, and can involve the muscles tightening and shortening.
Muscle contractions help us walk around, smile, lift heavy objects and high-five each other.
Moving our muscles also generates a bit of heat. With many muscles moving most of the time, this helps our bodies stay nice and warm.
We’ll often hunch our necks, tense up, and rub our shoulders when cold. Shivering usually follows to help warm us up. Christian Moro
The more our muscles move, the more heat they generate. This is why you might feel hot and bothered after running around or playing sports.
On the other hand, when we stop moving our muscles, we start to cool down. This is one of the reasons we cover up with bedsheets at night.
Shivering is the rapid contractions of our muscles over and over. This doesn’t generate any significant movement, but instead releases heat that helps to warm us up.
Most of the time we don’t have control over when our brain tells our muscles to shiver. We have special sensors throughout our body that pick up when our system is cold, and our brain then responds by telling the muscles to start shivering.
And we aren’t the only ones who shiver! All mammals have the ability to shiver, so your pet cat or dog might shiver when they’re cold too. Even birds shiver.
When it’s a chilly day outside, you might also notice you get goosebumps. Goosebumps happen when tiny muscles connected to the hair follicles (from which our hair grows) tighten. This causes the little hairs on our arms to stand up, helping to trap in warm air and slow down body heat loss to the outside.
How can you ‘chill out’ your shiver?
Thermoregulation is key to maintaining a nice, consistent body temperature, which keeps our internal organs happy.
While shivering can help us warm up, it’s best to make sure you wear the right clothes if you’re going to be out in the cold.
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.
