Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sally White, Research fellow, Australian National University

In the 2019 general election, Indonesians voted more women into the national parliament than ever before.

After the first election of the post-authoritarian period in 1999, women’s representation was a paltry 8.8%, so the rise to 20.9% in 2019 seemed worth celebrating. Indeed, women activists had worked long and hard to reach this point.

Disappointed with the results of the first two elections, they had successfully pushed for a candidate quota, requiring parties to nominate at least 30% women.

This will again be tested in next week’s election. But given the barriers women candidates in Indonesia face, is the quota enough to raise representation?

Read more:
Is Joko Widodo paving the way for a political dynasty in Indonesia?

Representation better, but not enough

Under Indonesia’s open list proportional representation system, parties decide on candidate placement on the list, but voters can choose any candidate. In the past three elections, the quota has meant that in every electoral district at all three levels of parliament, women had to make up at least 30% of candidates. Additionally, one in every three candidates on the party list had to be female.

With such a strong institutional framework, it is not surprising that enthusiasm after the 2019 election was muted. Given the 2014 election had seen a slight fall in women’s representation, activists were relieved. But the result was still well below the aspirational 30% target, and below the international average at the time of 24.3%.

The results were also uneven, with more than 20% of electoral districts not electing any women to parliament. At the provincial and district level, the proportion of women elected to office was even lower, at only 18% and 15% respectively; 25 district parliaments had no women at all elected to office in 2019.

Why do women find it hard to be elected to office in Indonesia, and is this likely to change in 2024?

Barriers of patriarchy, money and name recognition

In many countries, it is said that when women run, they win. The main barrier to greater representation tends to be that women don’t stand for office. When they do, political parties don’t nominate them, or put them in unwinnable positions.

The quota in Indonesia gets around this problem. It encourages women to run and forces parties to nominate them. But our research has revealed that women candidates in Indonesia also face significant barriers from patriarchal attitudes held by many voters about whether women should take on political leadership roles.

Support for women’s political leadership has even dropped over the past decade. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s electoral system allows voters to discriminate against women without having to sacrifice party choice, as they would in a majoritarian voting system like that in Australia.

But the challenges don’t stop there.

Indonesia is a new democracy and political parties receive very little public financing. Candidates are expected to raise their own funds to run their campaigns.

The open-list system means candidates run not just against opponents from other parties, but also against their fellow party members, making politics highly personalised. This has led to a dramatic rise in the cost of elections for individual candidates, with “money politics” coming to dominate election campaigns.

Given that women in Indonesia face high levels of economic inequality, the cost of campaigns makes competing difficult.

Read more:
Indonesia is one of the world’s largest democracies, but it’s weaponising defamation laws to smother dissent

Clientelism also shapes the kind of women candidates that parties choose and where they place them on their lists. Elite women and celebrities are more likely to be nominated as they can finance themselves. They also have the networks and name recognition that can garner votes. In 2019, some 44% of the women elected to the national parliament were members of political dynasties.

While some of these women are no doubt capable politicians, their dominance makes it harder for women candidates to come through grassroots organisations. Parties also spend less time developing women cadres to run as candidates, preferring to reach out to such “vote getters”.

What about this time around?

So what are the prospects for women’s representation in the upcoming elections?

The barriers to women’s election have not changed and are unlikely to change in the short term. As a result, incremental progress is the best that can be hoped for.

Several women politicians were instrumental in the passage of the Anti-Sexual Violence bill that passed last year. It’s possible that this increased visibility will give women a bump.

On the other hand, gender issues have not been central to the presidential or legislative campaigns so are unlikely to be uppermost in voters’ minds.

In fact, we may have reason to be more pessimistic. A seemingly minor change to the regulations on quota implementation means that for the first time in three elections, the requirement for a 30% candidate quota will not be applied in every electoral district party list, but instead for the total number of women candidates of each party.

The changes date back to a controversial regulation issued by the Indonesian Electoral Commission (KPU) in April 2023. The regulation allowed rounding down when assessing the number of women a party has on a candidate list. For example, in electoral districts with eight seats, 30% is 2.4 candidates. Previously, a party would have had to field three women candidates. Now, fractions can be rounded down if under 0.5, so in our example, parties are only required to field two women candidates.

Read more:
The professor, the general and the populist: meet the three candidates running for president in Indonesia

A coalition of democracy and gender activists appealed against this regulation to the Supreme Court, and they won. But the electoral commission has indicated it will not enforce the court’s decision in this election. Democracy activists say that this means almost 18% of party lists do not meet the requirement for 30% women candidates.

It could be that these changes will have little impact. After all, we know that most candidates are elected from the first position on the list.

However, it sets a worrying precedent for women’s representation going forward. Our research shows the 30% candidate quota for women is widely supported in Indonesia. Yet, it has effectively been watered down without public discussion and against the advice of the Supreme Court.

The actions of the electoral commission, apparently at the direction of a male-dominated parliamentary commission, underline again how the foundational institutions of Indonesian democracy are being eroded by the political elite.

Sally White receives funding from the Australian Research Council Discovery Project “Political Representation in Indonesia”.

– ref. Even with a 30% quota in place, Indonesian women face an uphill battle running for office – https://theconversation.com/even-with-a-30-quota-in-place-indonesian-women-face-an-uphill-battle-running-for-office-222387

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Stewart, Professor of Public Policy, UNSW Sydney

There is a growing consensus that environmental problems, particularly the effects of climate change, pose a grave challenge to humanity. Pollution, habitat destruction, intractable waste issues and, for many, deteriorating quality of life should be added to the list.

Economic growth is the chief culprit. We forget, though, that environmental impacts are a consequence of per capita consumption multiplied by the number of people doing the consuming. Our own numbers matter.

Population growth threatens environments at global, national and regional scales. Yet the policy agenda either ignores human population, or fosters alarm when perfectly natural trends such as declining fertility and longer lifespans cause growth rates to fall and populations to age.

That there are still too many of us is a problem few want to talk about. Fifty years ago, population was considered to be an issue, not only for the developing world, but for the planet as a whole. Since then, the so-called green revolution in agriculture made it possible to feed many more people. But the costs of these practices, which relied heavily on pesticide and fertiliser use and relatively few crops, are only now beginning to be understood.

The next 30 years will be critical. The most recent United Nations projections point to a global population of 9.7 billion by 2050 and 10.4 billion by 2100. There are 8 billion of us now. Another 2 billion will bring already stressed ecosystems to the point of collapse.

It’s the whole world’s problem

Many would agree overpopulation is a problem in many developing countries, where large families keep people poor. But there are too many of us in the developed world, too. Per person, people in high-income countries consume 60% more resources than in upper-middle-income countries and more than 13 times as much as people in low-income countries.

From 1995 to 2020, the UK population, for example, grew by 9.1 million. A crowded little island, particularly around London and the south-east, became more crowded still.

Similarly, the Netherlands, one of the most densely populated countries, had just under 10 million inhabitants in 1950 and 17.6 million in 2020. In the 1950s, the government encouraged emigration to reduce population densities. By the 21st century, another 5 million people in a tiny country certainly caused opposition to immigration, but concern was wrongly focused on the ethnic composition of the increase. The principal problem of overpopulation received little attention.

Australia is celebrated as “a land of boundless plains to share”. In reality it’s a small country that consists of big distances.

As former NSW Premier Bob Carr predicted some years ago, as Australia’s population swelled, the extra numbers would be housed in spreading suburbs that would gobble up farmland nearest our cities and threaten coastal and near-coastal habitats. How right he was. The outskirts of Sydney and Melbourne are carpeted in big, ugly houses whose inhabitants will be forever car-dependent.

Doing nothing has a high cost

The longer we do nothing about population growth, the worse it gets. More people now inevitably mean more in the future than there would otherwise have been.

We live very long lives, on average, so once we’re born, we tend to stick around. It takes a while for falling birthrates to have any impact.

And when they do, the population boosters respond with cries of alarm. The norm is seen as a young or youngish population, while the elderly are presented as a parasitical drag upon the young.

Falling reproduction rates should not be regarded as a disaster but as a natural occurrence to which we can adapt.

Recently, we have been told Australia must have high population growth, because of workforce shortages. It is rarely stated exactly what these shortages are, and why we cannot train enough people to fill them.

Population and development are connected in subtle ways, at global, national and regional scales. At each level, stabilising the population holds the key to a more environmentally secure and equitable future.

For those of us who value the natural world for its own sake, the matter is clear – we should make room for other species. For those who do not care about other species, the reality is that without a more thoughtful approach to our own numbers, planetary systems will continue to break down.

Let women choose to have fewer children

So, what to do? If we assume the Earth’s population is going to exceed 10 billion, the type of thinking behind this assumption means we are sleepwalking our way into a nightmarish future when a better one is within our grasp.

A radical rethink of the global economy is needed to address climate change. In relation to population growth, if we can move beyond unhelpful ideologies, the solution is already available.

People are not stupid. In particular, women are not stupid. Where women are given the choice, they restrict the number of children they have. This freedom is as basic a human right as you can get.

A much-needed demographic transition could be under way right now, if only the population boosters would let it happen.

Those who urge greater rates of reproduction, whether they realise it or not, are serving only the short-term interests of developers and some religious authorities, for whom big societies mean more power for themselves. It is a masculinist fantasy for which most women, and many men, have long been paying a huge price.

Women will show the way, if only we would let them.

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

– ref. Population can’t be ignored. It has to be part of the policy solution to our world’s problems – https://theconversation.com/population-cant-be-ignored-it-has-to-be-part-of-the-policy-solution-to-our-worlds-problems-219812

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris F. Wright, Associate Professor of Work and Organisational Studies, University of Sydney

Australian workers are set to have the right to disconnect from their workplaces once they clock off for the day.

This will “empower workers to ignore work calls and emails after hours [from their employers], where those demands are unreasonable”, according to Greens Senator Barbara Pocock who has been driving the change.

Last week, the Senate committee reviewing the “Closing Loopholes” amendments to the Fair Work Act recommended introducing a right to disconnect to support “the development of clear expectations about contact and availability in workplaces”. On Wednesday, the Albanese government indicated it supported the amendment.

Why a right to disconnect is needed

Last year, the Senate Select Committee on Work and Care drew attention to “availability creep” where employees are increasingly expected to complete work outside of work hours.

Smartphones have made it easier for managers to contact workers any time. The shift to remote working during the COVID pandemic caused the boundaries between work and personal life to disintegrate further.

Read more:
Switching off from work has never been harder, or more necessary. Here’s how to do it

According to a 2022 report by the Centre for Future Work, 71% of workers surveyed had worked outside their scheduled work hours often due to overwork or pressure from managers.

This led to increased tiredness, stress or anxiety for about one-third of workers surveyed, disrupted relationships and personal lives for more than one-quarter, and lower job motivation and satisfaction for around one-fifth.

Parliamentary inquiries have highlighted the negative consequences of working outside scheduled hours for mental and physical health, productivity and turnover.

Availability creep has led to significant unpaid overtime which “takes workers away from a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay”.

The impacts are especially acute for certain groups of workers. Those on insecure contracts lack the power to resist availability creep. Those with unpaid care responsibilities are likely to experience intensified work/life balance.

“Roster justice”

The right to disconnect provides a solution to these challenges. The Senate select committee on work and care found such a right can provide workers with “roster justice” by giving more certainty over their working hours.

Many countries in Europe, Asia, North America and South America have already established laws or regulations limiting employers contacting workers outside work hours.

At least 56 enterprise agreements currently operating in Australia provide a right to disconnect. This includes agreements covering teachers, police officers and various banks and financial institutions.

Industrial Relations Minister Tony Burke has indicated the right to disconnect legislation will provide employers with “reasonable grounds” to contact their employees outside work hours. This might include calling employees to see if they can fill a shift.

If enterprise agreements with existing right to disconnect clauses are an indication, the Fair Work Commission will probably be asked to determine what contact outside of work hours is deemed “reasonable”. This approach seems sensible given the long tradition of the commission being asked to rule on what’s “reasonable” in other areas of employment law.

If an employer “unreasonably” expects employees to perform unpaid work outside of normal hours the commission may be empowered to impose a “stop order” — and potentially fines — to prevent the employer from contacting employees outside hours according to Tony Burke.

Unions including those representing teachers and police officers support a right to disconnect. According to the Police Federation of Australia:

Not only do the police see that trauma, deal with the families’ trauma, deal with their colleagues’ trauma, have to investigate, have to go to court, and get media attention but they also have to go home and deal with their families […] The right to disconnect gives those officers that little bit of breathing space.

Employment law experts and human resource specialists also believe there is a strong case for such a right given the negative impacts of availability creep on worker well being.

Employer associations are less supportive. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) told a recent a Senate inquiry a right to disconnect would be “a blunt instrument which will do more harm than good, including for employees”. They claim employers will be less accommodating of employee requests for flexible work arrangements during normal work hours if contact outside these hours is no longer allowed.

A banana republic?

According to ACCI chief executive Andrew McKellar, a right to disconnect would be “the final step in Australia becoming a banana republic”.

But it must be remembered that workers effectively had the right to disconnect before the smartphone. Such a protection needs to be explicit now technology has eroded the once-firm boundaries between work and home.

As the nature of work and employer practices change, it’s essential for employment regulations to respond accordingly. Having a right to disconnect to protect workers from employers encroaching upon their free-time is a necessary response.

Chris F. Wright has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the International Labour Organization, the Australian and NSW governments, and various business and trade union organisations.

– ref. Smartphones mean we’re always available to our bosses. ‘Right to disconnect’ laws are a necessary fix – https://theconversation.com/smartphones-mean-were-always-available-to-our-bosses-right-to-disconnect-laws-are-a-necessary-fix-222738

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Gunn, Lecturer, Monash University

The bush is full up – no room for more renewables, according to Nationals leader David Littleproud. Instead, renewables should be restricted to large solar arrays on commercial buildings in the cities.

The country-focused minor party presumably hopes to capitalise on rural scepticism of large scale renewable projects – especially angst around new transmission lines. On the coast, there have been protests against proposed offshore wind farms.

Unfortunately, fencing off renewables in the cities won’t work. As our recent research on onshore wind shows, intermittent energy sources such as wind can work very well to support a modern grid – as long as we locate wind farms in different places. This ensures we can keep the lights on even if it’s dead calm in some areas.

Of course, rooftop solar may well stack up for households and building owners. But we will need new renewable projects in spread-out locations. Banning renewables from the bush is no solution. What we can do is make sure we’re not duplicating wind farms. Each new wind farm should be in the best possible location.

The best place to build a wind farm

In 2001, renewables supplied 8% of Australia’s energy. In 2023, they supplied almost 40%.

The federal government’s ambitious goal is to supercharge this growth and get to 82% by 2030. That’s a meteoric rise, but it has to be. Climate change is accelerating
Decisions around where to build large renewable projects cannot be left solely to the market – or derailed by protest.

Renewable energy supply is variable by nature. Solar only works at daytime, hydro can be affected by drought or water shortages, and the wind doesn’t blow consistently.

Read more:
Do we want a wind farm outside our window? What Australians think about the net zero transition

That’s not a deal breaker. It just means you have to have a mix of technologies – and place utility-scale farms in different places. This minimises the need for expensive or resource-dependent energy storage such as pumped hydro and batteries.

At present, wind makes up around a third of Australia’s renewable supply – about 11% of total electricity generation in the first quarter of 2023.

But wind blows, then stops. By itself, a wind farm can’t provide power at a consistent rate or in lockstep with demand. The power generated is at the whim of the weather and, in the longer term, climate.

To make wind power consistent, you have to build wind farms in different locations chosen for their unique local wind climate.

At present, Australia’s supply of wind farms is reasonably varied. But it could be better still.

We analysed over 40 years of climate data and found Australia’s currently operating wind farms could be producing around 50% more energy if they had been built in optimised locations.

If we had built this network of farms in an optimal way, we would have slashed how variable wind energy is. At present, the locations of current farms means year-to-year variability is around 40% higher than it could have been.

When we added all wind farms under construction or with planning approval, we found these inefficiencies persist.

We have to get better at placing renewables

Is this bad news? No. It means we can do better. And it means we can reduce the resistance emerging from some rural and regional residents, who feel their landscapes are being taken over to power far off cities.

Building renewable farms in sub-optimal locations is a burden on the environment, since many more farms have to be built to make up the slack, and can lead to increased energy prices for consumers.

Right now, the cost is masked by the fact that wind’s share in the energy market is small. But that will change. The net zero economy we are building will need wind, both onshore and, increasingly, offshore.

Read more:
A clean energy grid means 10,000km of new transmission lines. They can only be built with community backing

To build a wind farm, what usually happens is an energy company will find a landowner who agrees to having a farm on their land in exchange for regular rent. The company then seeks government approvals.

To approve a site for a wind farm, government agencies have to assess many things. How close is it to wetlands home to rare birds? Is the wind resource good enough? To figure out the quality of the wind, regulators usually take measurements at the site and look at historic data. Usually, this pool of data only goes back a few years.

We could do this much better. First, wind power can vary by up to 16%, year to year. La Niña might bring strong winds to a site, while El Niño might bring the doldrums.

To decide on a site based on a couple of years of data means you don’t know the long term average of wind, which could be better or worse than expected.

Second, approvals are site-specific – we don’t compare how similar this potential wind farm will be to farms already built. That means many wind farms simply don’t meet expectations of how much extra power they can supply to the grid.

Once built, wind farms usually operate for decades. If we choose inefficient locations, we’re locked in.

But there’s good news here for the National Party, rural residents and everyone concerned with the energy transition. We can fix this problem.

All it would take is one extra step for renewable developers: demonstrate how your proposed wind farm would improve electricity supply overall. That’s it.

And for government, make sure our planned new transmission lines increase access to high quality wind resources.

These two actions sound simple, but they would make a real difference. We could avoid building wind farms in sub-optimal locations, build fewer overall, and accelerate the shift to cheap clean energy. That’s something the city and country can agree on.

Read more:
How to beat ‘rollout rage’: the environment-versus-climate battle dividing regional Australia

Christian Jakob receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and is the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century.

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

– ref. The Nationals want renewables to stay in the cities – but the clean energy grid doesn’t work like that – https://theconversation.com/the-nationals-want-renewables-to-stay-in-the-cities-but-the-clean-energy-grid-doesnt-work-like-that-205490

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Wood, Program Director, Energy, Grattan Institute

Wholesale power prices are falling steeply in Australia, following two years of surging prices after the Ukraine war triggered an energy crisis. New data shows annualised spot prices for power in Australia’s main grid fell by about 50% in 2023. That brings the cost of wholesale power down towards the levels seen in 2021.

Is that good news for consumers? It will be – but not yet. Energy retailers buy most of their power in advance at set prices, accepting higher average prices for less volatility. That means the cheaper spot prices won’t flow through to you for a while. But they will.

Here’s how the system works.

Read more:
Surging energy prices are really going to hurt. What can the government actually do?

How is power priced?

The way we price electricity will be different depending where you live in Australia.

If you live in Tasmania, Western Australia, regional Queensland or in the Northern Territory, there’s no competition. The state or territory government runs the power system, and prices are set by a regulator.

In South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, and south-east Queensland, the competitive National Energy Market applies. Here, retailers buy power on the wholesale spot market from generators and compete for your business by offering different prices and bundling electricity with other services such as gas or broadband. (Some energy companies are both generators and retailers.)

While the federal government doesn’t set prices in the market, it does have some involvement. In 2019, it introduced a mandatory default market offer, effectively setting a maximum price a retailer can charge customers. Victoria also implemented its own default offer. These changes stemmed from concerns retail competition was overly complicated and not delivering benefits to all electricity consumers.

Default offers were intended as a fair price for power and to work as a safety net so consumers weren’t overcharged.

Retailers compete in part by offering deals set below the default price. Nearly all of us have now signed up for market offers, leaving fewer than 10% of consumers still on a default offer.

The price of electricity in default offers is set by energy regulators, usually on 1 July each year. Competing retailers tend to mirror changes to the default offers in their market offers. That means most, if not all, consumers should start seeing lower default prices reflected in their bills from this date onwards.

But don’t expect falling wholesale prices to be passed on immediately or in full. Buying electricity wholesale is only around 40% of a retailer’s total cost. Retailers also pass through the costs of transmission and distribution.

Ironing out fluctuations

In the National Energy Market, the spot price of power changes every five minutes – often drastically. Prices can be as low as negative A$1,000 per megawatt hour or as high as +$16,000 a megawatt hour if there are outages or intense demand during a heatwave. (Prices can turn negative if there’s an oversupply of power, such as when millions of rooftop solar arrays are putting energy into the grid in the middle of the day, and act as an incentive to boost demand or cut supply.)

You and I don’t want to be exposed to such price volatility. We rely on our retailers to do it, and they do so by taking out multi-year contracts to smooth out the price of power.

That means we are not exposed immediately to sudden increases in price, but it also means we do not benefit from rapid falls. Retail prices, including default offers, will respond to changes in wholesale prices when those changes are reflected in the retailers’ contract prices.

What about politics?

Power prices are political. Everyone uses electricity and bill shock hurts.

At present, the Albanese government is under real pressure over the cost of living. Successive interest rate rises and more expensive petrol and groceries have left many of us feeling poorer.

Could there be direct intervention? Unlikely. Since the National Electricity Market was introduced in 1998, governments have avoided directly regulating prices.

When partial interventions are tried, they tend to have little impact. When the Coalition was in office federally, they introduced the so-called Big Stick laws, aimed at forcing energy retailers to pass on cost savings. To date, the laws have gathered dust.

What we can expect to see are calls to action. For instance, South Australia’s energy minister recently called on retailers to pass on price falls as quickly as possible.

This makes headlines and can put pressure on regulators such as the Australian Energy Regulator. We can expect the pressure of the election cycle to lead to even more calls for regulators to act.

But regulators should respond in line with their clear guidelines, rather than in response to political pressure. After all, governments have given regulators a difficult job to do: deliver fair prices in a rapidly evolving electricity market.

It would be better for the long-term interests of consumers and energy suppliers if they were allowed to get on with it.

What’s next?

As more clean energy comes into the grid, it should push wholesale prices still lower. But the energy transition isn’t as simple as substituting solar and wind for coal. Big investments in transmission and energy storage are needed to connect more renewables and maintain a reliable system. Prices could once again rise sharply if our ageing coal plants give up the ghost before there’s enough renewable generation and storage to take up the slack.

These challenges and risks were inevitable given the scale of our net-zero transition. But the recent trend towards lower prices should give us confidence that more investment in renewables and storage can cover the closure of coal to deliver a reliable, low-emissions future – without threatening affordability.

Read more:
Unsexy but vital: why warnings over grid reliability are really about building more transmission lines

Tony Wood may have interests in companies impacted by the energy transition through his superannuation fund.

– ref. Wholesale power prices are falling fast – but consumers will have to wait for relief. Here’s why – https://theconversation.com/wholesale-power-prices-are-falling-fast-but-consumers-will-have-to-wait-for-relief-heres-why-222495

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Hoggard, DECRA Research Fellow, Australian National University

Since the first detonation of an atomic bomb in 1945, more than 2,000 nuclear weapons tests have been conducted by eight countries: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea.

Groups such as the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization are constantly on the lookout for new tests. However, for reasons of safety and secrecy, modern nuclear tests are carried out underground – which makes them difficult to detect. Often, the only indication they have occurred is from the seismic waves they generate.

In a paper published in Geophysical Journal International, my colleagues and I have developed a way to distinguish between underground nuclear tests and natural earthquakes with around 99% accuracy.

Fallout

The invention of nuclear weapons sparked an international arms race, as the Soviet Union, the UK and France developed and tested increasingly larger and more sophisticated devices in an attempt to keep up with the US.

Many early tests caused serious environmental and societal damage. For example, the US’s 1954 Castle Bravo test, conducted in secret at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, delivered large volumes of radioactive fallout to several nearby islands and their inhabitants.

Read more:
315 nuclear bombs and ongoing suffering: the shameful history of nuclear testing in Australia and the Pacific

Between 1952 and 1957, the UK conducted several tests in Australia, scattering long-lived radioactive material over wide areas of South Australian bushland, with devastating consequences for local Indigenous communities.

In 1963, the US, the UK and the USSR agreed to carry out future tests underground to limit fallout. Nevertheless, testing continued unabated as China, India, Pakistan and North Korea also entered the fray over the following decades.

How to spot an atom bomb

During this period there were substantial international efforts to figure out how to monitor nuclear testing. The competitive nature of weapons development means much research and testing is conducted in secret.

Groups such as the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization today run global networks of instruments specifically designed to identify any potential tests. These include:

• air-testing stations to detect minute quantities of radioactive elements in the atmosphere
• aquatic listening posts to hear underwater tests
• infrasound detectors to catch the low-frequency booms and rumbles of explosions in the atmosphere
• seismometers to record the shaking of Earth caused by underground tests.

A needle in a haystack

Seismometers are designed to measure seismic waves: tiny vibrations of the ground surface generated when large amounts of energy are suddenly released underground, such as during earthquakes or nuclear explosions.

There are two main kinds of seismic waves. First are body waves, which travel outwards in all directions, including down into the deep Earth, before returning to the surface. Second are surface waves, which travel along Earth’s surface like ripples spreading out on a pond.

The difficulty in using seismic waves to monitor underground nuclear tests is distinguishing between explosions and naturally occurring earthquakes. A core goal of monitoring is never to miss an explosion, but there are thousands of sizeable natural quakes around the world every day.

As a result, monitoring underground tests is like searching for a potentially non-existent needle in a haystack the size of a planet.

Nukes vs quakes

Many different methods have been developed to aid this search over the past 60 years.

Some of the simplest include analysing the location or depth of the source. If an event occurs far from volcanoes and plate tectonic boundaries, it might be considered more suspicious. Alternatively, if it occurs at a depth greater than say three kilometres, it is unlikely to have been a nuclear test.

However, these simple methods are not foolproof. Tests might be carried out in earthquake-prone areas for camouflage, for example, and shallow earthquakes are also possible.

Read more:
North Korea tests not just a bomb but the global nuclear monitoring system

A more sophisticated monitoring approach involves calculating the ratio of the amount of the energy transmitted in body waves to the amount carried in surface waves. Earthquakes tend to expend more of their energy in surface waves than explosions do.

This method has proven highly effective for identifying underground nuclear tests, but it too is imperfect. It failed to effectively classify the 2017 North Korean nuclear test, which generated substantial surface waves because it was carried out inside a tunnel in a mountain.

This outcome underlines the importance of using multiple independent discrimination techniques during monitoring – no single method is likely to prove reliable for all events.

An alternative method

In 2023, my colleagues and I from the Australian National University and Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US got together to re-examine the problem of determining the source of seismic waves.

We used a recently developed approach to represent how rocks are displaced at the source of a seismic event, and combined it with a more advanced statistical model to describe different types of event. As a result, we were able to take advantage of fundamental differences between the sources of explosions and earthquakes to develop an improved method of classifying these events.

We tested our approach on catalogues of known explosions and earthquakes from the western United States, and found that the method gets it right around 99% of the time. This makes it a useful new tool in efforts to monitor underground nuclear tests.

Robust techniques for identification of nuclear tests will continue to be a key component of global monitoring programs. They are critical for ensuring governments are held accountable for the environmental and societal impacts of nuclear weapons testing.

Mark Hoggard works for the Australian National University. He receives funding from Geoscience Australia and the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Underground nuclear tests are hard to detect. A new method can spot them 99% of the time – https://theconversation.com/underground-nuclear-tests-are-hard-to-detect-a-new-method-can-spot-them-99-of-the-time-222500

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rieneke Weij, Postdoctoral researcher in Geochemistry/Palaeoclimatology, University of Cape Town

During ice ages, dry, frozen terrain extended over much of northern Europe, Asia and North America. Many plants and animals retreated from these desolate, harsh landscapes and sought refuge in pockets of more hospitable territory.

But what was happening in the rest of the world? For a long time scientists have thought that dry conditions prevailed across the globe during ice ages, and that the warm periods between ice ages were much wetter.

This interpretation has shaped our understanding of where plants, animals, and even humans lived during Earth’s past. However, it may not be correct.

Our new research published in Nature shows ice ages were actually much wetter than previously thought – at least in the subtropical regions of the southern hemisphere (from 20° to 40° south).

Ice ages and hemispheres

Over the past million years or so, Earth’s climate has oscillated between cold ice ages (or “glacial” periods) and warmer “interglacial” periods. Currently we are living through an interglacial period known as the Holocene epoch. It began about 11,700 years ago, following the last glacial period which lasted around 110,000 years.

During glacial periods, temperatures were lower, there was less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and ice sheets covered more of the globe. During interglacials, temperatures were higher, there was more carbon dioxide in the air, and large ice sheets remained only in Greenland and Antarctica.

Evidence from the northern hemisphere shows huge ice sheets spread across the northern parts of Europe, northern Asia and North America during glacial periods, and large areas south of the ice were covered with tundra. The idea that glacial environments were extreme and harsh was then extended beyond these regions because of evidence that glacial periods were mostly treeless with dusty atmospheres pretty much everywhere, including Australia.

However, our new research reveals that parts of glacial periods were in fact wetter than today across much of the southern hemisphere.

Developing a 350,000 year climate record

One way to understand how wet it was in the past is to look at mineral deposits called speleothems, found in underground caves. These deposits, which include stalagmites and stalactites, build up over time as rainwater filters down through soil and limestone into the cave.

We can use the extent of speleothem growth over time to understand changes in water availability. More speleothem growth broadly reflects wetter conditions, while less growth suggests a drier environment.

Our understanding of past changes in the climate and environment of the southern hemisphere has been limited by a lack of well-dated and long-term records.

To address this problem, we collected samples from speleothems in two cave regions in southern Australia, the Naracoorte caves in the southeast and the Leeuwin-Naturaliste caves in the southwest.

Using a dating technique based on the decay of naturally occuring uranium, we determined the age of more than 300 individual speleothem fragments from the caves. As a result, we produced a precipitation record spanning the last 350,000 years.

Wetter and colder, warmer and drier

Our study revealed surprising yet extremely consistent trends. Over the past 350,000 years, wetter times always occurred within the cooler, glacial periods, while interglacials were consistently dry.

We also studied fossil pollen trapped within the same speleothems. It is harder to be a tree under the low atmospheric carbon dioxide of glacial periods, but moisture-demanding herbs and shrubs thrived during the glacial periods but were suppressed during interglacials, confirming the dating evidence.

Next, we used our new records from southern Australia as benchmarks for the subtropics around the southern hemisphere, and compared them with other published records from southern Africa and South America. We found wet glacials and dry interglacials were not confined to southern Australia, but in fact, formed a hemisphere-wide pattern.

Climate model simulations also showed a similar pattern over the last glacial cycle.

Stable environments with abundant water

This new understanding of what conditions were like in the southern hemisphere during glacial periods will change how we interpret the movement and expansion of plants, animals and even humans in the past.

It was previously assumed that, during glacial periods, reduced rainfall forced many plants and animals that needed higher levels of moisture into small liveable zones called “refugia”.

However, our research suggests that – at least in the subtropical southern hemisphere – glacial periods were often times of relatively stable environments with abundant water, even if low levels of carbon dioxide meant plants were slow-growing and relatively unproductive.

Our research calls for a big paradigm shift in how we view past ice-age environments across the Earth.

Rieneke Weij receives funding from the University of Cape Town and the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust.

Jon Woodhead receives funding from the Australian Research Council

Josephine Brown receives funding from the National Environmental Science Program and the Australian Research Council.

Kale Sniderman receives funding from the Australian Research Council

Liz Reed receives funding from Australian Research Council.

– ref. Ice ages were not as dry as we thought, according to surprising new Australian cave study – https://theconversation.com/ice-ages-were-not-as-dry-as-we-thought-according-to-surprising-new-australian-cave-study-222184

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anastasia Powell, Professor, Family & Sexual Violence, RMIT University

Victorian MP Georgie Purcell recently spoke out against a digitally edited image in the news media that had altered her body and partially removed some of her clothing.

Whether or not the editing was assisted by artificial intelligence (AI), her experience demonstrates the potential sexist, discriminatory and gender-based harms that can occur when these technologies are used unchecked.

Purcell’s experience also reflects a disturbing trend in which images, particularly of women and girls, are being sexualised, “deepfaked” and “nudified” without the person’s knowledge or consent.

Read more:
Nine was slammed for ‘AI editing’ a Victorian MP’s dress. How can news media use AI responsibly?

What’s AI got to do with it?

The term AI can include a wide range of computer software and smartphone apps that use some level of automated processing.

While science fiction might lead us to think otherwise, much of the everyday use of AI-assisted tools is relatively simple. We teach a computer program or smartphone application what we want it to do, it learns from the data we feed it, and it applies this learning to perform the task in varying ways.

A problem with AI image editing is that these tools rely on the information our human society has generated. It is no accident that instructing a tool to edit a photograph of a woman might result in it making the subject look younger, slimmer and/or curvier, and even less clothed. A simple internet search for “women” will quickly reveal that these are the qualities our society frequently endorses.

Similar problems have emerged in AI facial recognition tools that have misidentified suspects in criminal investigations due to the racial and gender bias that is built into the software. The ghosts of sexism and racism, it seems, are literally in the machines.

Technology reflects back to us the disrespect, inequality, discrimination and – in the treatment of Purcell – overt sexism that we ourselves have already circulated.

Sexualised deepfakes

While anyone can be a victim of AI-facilitated image-based abuse, or sexualised deepfakes, it is no secret that there are gender inequalities in pornographic imagery found online.

Sensity AI (formerly Deeptrace Labs) has reported on online deepfake videos since December 2018 and consistently found that 90–95% of them are non-consensual pornography. About 90% of them are of women.

Young women, children and teens across the globe are also being subjected to the non-consensual creation and sharing of sexualised and nudified deepfake imagery. Recent reports of faked sexualised images of teenage girls have emerged from a New Jersey high school in the United States and another high school in Almendralejo, Spain. A third instance was reported in a London high school, which contributed to a 14-year-old girl taking her own life.

Read more:
Taylor Swift deepfakes: new technologies have long been weaponised against women. The solution involves us all

Women celebrities are also a popular target of sexualised deepfake imagery. Just last month, sexualised deepfakes of Taylor Swift were openly shared across a range of digital platforms and websites without consent.

While research data on broader victimisation and perpetration rates of this sort of image editing and distribution is sparse, our 2019 survey across the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand found 14.1% of respondents aged between 16 and 84 had experienced someone creating, distributing or threatening to distribute a digitally altered image representing them in a sexualised way.

Our research also shone light on the harms of this form of abuse. Victims reported experiencing psychological, social, physical, economic, and existential trauma, similar to harms identified by victims of other forms of sexual violence and image-based abuse.

This year, we have begun a new study to further explore the issue. We’ll look at current victimisation and perpetration rates, the consequences and harms of the non-consensual creation and sharing of sexualised deepfakes across the US, UK and Australia. We want to find out how we can improve responses, interventions and prevention.

How can we end AI-facilitated abuse?

The abuse of Swift in such a public forum has reignited a call for federal laws and platform regulations, moderation and community standards to prevent and block sexualised deepfakes from being shared.

Stunningly, while the non-consensual sharing of sexualised deepfakes is already a crime in most Australian states and territories, the laws relating to their creation are less consistent. And in the US, there is no national law criminalising sexualised deepfakes. Fewer than half of US states have one, and state laws are highly variable in how much they protect and support victims.

But focusing on individual states or countries is not sufficient to tackle this global problem. Sexualised deepfakes and AI-generated content are perpetrated internationally, highlighting the need for collective global action.

There is some hope we can learn to better detect AI-generated content through guidance in spotting fakes. But the reality is that technologies are constantly improving, so our abilities to differentiate the “real” from the digitally “faked” are increasingly limited.

Read more:
Celebrity deepfakes are all over TikTok. Here’s why they’re becoming common – and how you can spot them

The advances in technology are compounded by the increasing availability of “nudify” or “remove clothing” apps on various platforms and app stores, which are commonly advertised online. Such apps further normalise the sexist treatment and objectification of women, with no regard for how the victims themselves may feel about it.

But it would be a mistake to blame technology alone for the harms, or the sexism, disrespect and abuse that flows from it. Technology is morally neutral. It can take neither credit nor blame.

Instead, there is a clear onus on technology developers, digital platforms and websites to be more proactive by building in safety by design. In other words, putting user safety and rights front and centre in the design and development of online products and services. Platforms, apps and websites also need to be made responsible for proactively preventing, disrupting and removing non-consensual content and technologies that can make such content.

Australia is leading the way with this through the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, including national laws that hold digital platforms to account.

But further global action and collaboration is needed if we truly want to address and prevent the harms of non-consensual sexualised deepfakes.

Anastasia Powell receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS). Anastasia is also a director of Our Watch (Australia’s national organisation for the prevention of violence against women), and a member of the National Women’s Safety Alliance (NWSA).

Adrian James Scott receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Criminology Research Council.

Asher Flynn receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Criminology Research Council and Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS).

Asia A. Eaton receives funding from the National Science Foundation, Meta, SPSSI, and the Australian Research Council. She is Head of Research for Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.

– ref. Whether of politicians, pop stars or teenage girls, sexualised deepfakes are on the rise. They hold a mirror to our sexist world – https://theconversation.com/whether-of-politicians-pop-stars-or-teenage-girls-sexualised-deepfakes-are-on-the-rise-they-hold-a-mirror-to-our-sexist-world-222491

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Treena Clark, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Indigenous Research Fellow, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney

A few years back, I started collecting vintage Australian tourist scarves that portray First Nations people as primitive caricatures and noble savages. Now, I own more than ten scarves with images ranging from Western depictions of First Nations art and objects, to Indigenous people in tokenistic scenes.

Collecting these tourist wares isn’t new. Kitsch items are often gathered and reclaimed by First Nations peoples, artists, designers and academics.

My fascination with kitsch scarves involves wearing them as outfits, which I recently did at the Darwin Country to Couture runway show.

I did so as a creative response to my academic work on First Nations fashion, art and style and to engage with the practice of First Nations garmenting – the use of clothing and adornment as art.

Aboriginalia and Koori Kitsch

Artists such as Destiny Deacon and Tony Albert use several names to describe items with Western depictions of First Nations people, art and objects, including Koori Kitsch and Aboriginalia.

You can find these depictions in souvenirs and bric-a-brac in the form of tea towels, tablecloths, postcards, ashtrays, dolls, scarves, badges and patches.

Destiny Deacon (KuKu/Erub/Mer) has used Koori Kitsch objects for decades. In one work titled Border Patrol (2006), Deacon photographs a white doll atop a tea towel featuring Australian landmarks, plants, animals and Aboriginal people hunting.

Tony Albert’s (Girramay/Yidinji/Kuku-Yalanji) art often features vintage souvenir ashtrays and textiles. Albert has been credited with creating the term “Aboriginalia” to describe the portrayal of Western stereotypes of First Nations peoples and cultures in kitsch items.

Kait James (Wadawurrung) has decolonised vintage souvenir towels through embroidered embellishments to highlight their problematic designs and reclaim them as First Nations art. James recently also disrupted the Barbie doll by creating a custom Aboriginal flag dress and banner saying “Faboriginal Barbie”.

In Kayla Dickens’ (Wiradjuri) 2022 exhibition, Return to Sender, collage backdrops featured enlarged vintage postcards with superimposed images, symbols and text interrogating colonisation and colonial sexual exploitation.

First Nations garmenting

First Nations peoples are also using Aboriginalia within fashion. Paul McCann (Marrithiyel) has embellished couture outfits with vintage textiles depicting First Nations peoples, animals and plants.

One of McCann’s designs at the 2022 Australian Fashion Week, Blinged Out Warrior, disrupted a kitsch item of an Aboriginal man by placing it front and centre on a bedazzled top. This form of work, termed “garmenting”, emphasises contemporary artists’ use of clothes in their pieces.

While Aboriginalia and Koori Kitsch are popular terms, First Nations garmenting is a recent definition yet to reach mainstream use. It’s an emerging trend adopted by many First Nations artists whose work is interested in confronting or reshaping history, highlighting the current world, or imagining a new future.

This could look like creating modern versions of traditional pieces, or critiquing and talking back to colonial clothing forced upon First Nations peoples. Several artists also create works that reflect contemporary protest wear, or futuristic pieces that depict fantasies or predict trends.

Peter Waples-Crowe’s (Ngarigo) Ngarigo Queen – Cloak of queer visibility (2018) features a reworked possum skin cloak with rainbow colours and a train to reference his two identities of Aboriginal and queer.

Kelly Koumalatsos (Wergaia/Wemba Wemba) uses possum fur as a stamp to create cultural fabrics. Significant works use these fabrics to form colonial and Western outfits that speak back to colonisation.

When displaying her garments in galleries, Koumalatsos also includes old family portraits within the works to further contextualise the forced colonial clothes.

Kyra Mancktelow (Quandamooka) specialises in creating garments in sculptural or print form to interrogate colonial histories of forced Western clothing and the removal of cultural wear. The items she recreates range from forced military jackets, to outfits worn in missions, to contemporary forms referencing the history of activism.

Carly Tarkari Dodd’s (Kaurna/Narungga/Ngarrindjeri) exhibition, Royal Jewels (2022), showcased Indigenised versions of jewellery pieces owned by the English royal family. Using cultural weaving techniques to replicate the English monarch’s jewellery collection, Dodd confronts colonisation by turning the tables and inspiring truth-telling about this country’s history.

The artist Coffinbirth (Charlotte Allingham, Wiradjuri/Ngiyampaa) illustrates designs featuring First Nations people in unique outfits across time. Coffinbirth notably reimages or recreates First Nations culture or issues through pop-culture graphics and comic-style art.

Dennis Golding (Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay) creates hand-painted superhero capes to celebrate the power of First Nations identity. He often works with young First Nations people to develop their own versions.

Disrupting, reclaiming and Indigenising

Many First Nations people have an inherent need to expel harmful histories and channel cultural practices creatively.

This can be through artists exhibiting their works, fashion designers telling their stories, or everyday First Nations people who like to practise culture through outfits. When First Nations artists use colonial souvenirs and garments, they can disrupt colonisation and celebrate their culture.

Wearing my kitsch scarves means I join a distinguished group of First Nations artists who use these objects and clothing within their works and creative expressions.

Read more:
A brief look at the long history of First Nations fashion design in Australia

Treena Clark has received funding through the University of Technology Sydney Chancellor’s Indigenous Research Fellowship scheme.

– ref. How First Nations artists are reclaiming colonial objects and celebrating culture through garments – https://theconversation.com/how-first-nations-artists-are-reclaiming-colonial-objects-and-celebrating-culture-through-garments-221495

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Raquel Peel, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, University of Southern Queensland and Senior Lecturer, RMIT University

Research out today from Finland suggests women may find it harder to adjust to later-life divorce and break-ups than men.

The study used population data from 229,000 Finns aged 50 to 70 who had undergone divorce, relationship break-up or bereavement and tracked their use of antidepressants before and after their relationship ended.

They found antidepressant use increased in the four years leading to the relationship dissolution in both genders, with women experiencing a more significant increase.

But it’s too simplistic to say women experience poorer mental health or tend to be less happy after divorce than men.

Read more:
Why breakups are so hard and how to cope with them

Remind me, how common is divorce?

Just under 50,000 divorces are granted each year in Australia. This has slowly declined since the 1990s.

More couple are choosing to co-habitate, instead of marry, and the majority of couples live together prior to marriage. Divorce statistics don’t include separations of cohabiting couples, even though they are more likely than married couples to separate.

Those who divorce are doing so later in life, often after their children grow up. The median age of divorce increased from 45.9 in 2021 to 46.7 in 2022 for men and from 43.0 to 43.7 for women.

The trend of late divorces also reflects people deciding to marry later in life. The median duration from marriage to divorce in 2022 was around 12.8 years and has remained fairly constant over the past decade.

Why do couples get divorced?

Changes in social attitudes towards marriage and relationships mean divorce is now more accepted. People are opting not to be in unhappy marriages, even if there are children involved.

Instead, they’re turning the focus on marriage quality. This is particularly true for women who have established a career and are financially autonomous.

Similarly, my research shows it’s particularly important for people to feel their relationship expectations can be fulfilled long term. In addition to relationship quality, participants reported needing trust, open communication, safety and acceptance from their partners.

Read more:
How last night’s fight affects the way couples divide housework

“Grey divorce” (divorce at age 50 and older) is becoming increasingly common in Western countries, particularly among high-income populations. While factors such as an empty nest, retirement, or poor health are commonly cited predictors of later-in-life divorce, research shows older couples divorce for the same reasons as younger couples.

What did the new study find?

The study tracked antidepressant use in Finns aged 50 to 70 for four years before their relationship breakdown and four years after.

They found antidepressant use increased in the four years leading to the relationship break-up in both genders. The proportion of women taking antidepressants in the lead up to divorce increased by 7%, compared with 5% for men. For de facto separation antidepressant use increased by 6% for women and 3.2% for men.

Within a year of the break-up, antidepressant use fell back to the level it was 12 months before the break-up. It subsequently remained at that level among the men.

But it was a different story for women. Their use tailed off only slightly immediately after the relationship breakdown but increased again from the first year onwards.

The researchers also looked at antidepressant use after re-partnering. There was a decline in the use of antidepressants for men and women after starting a new relationship. But this decline was short-lived for women.

But there’s more to the story

Although this data alone suggest women may find it harder to adjust to later-life divorce and break-ups than men, it’s important to note some nuances in the interpretation of this data.

For instance, data suggesting women experience depression more often than men is generally based on the rate of diagnoses and antidepressant use, which does not account for undiagnosed and unmedicated people.

Women are generally more likely to access medical services and thus receive treatment. This is also the case in Australia, where in 2020–2022, 21.6% of women saw a health professional for their mental health, compared with only 12.9% of men.

Why women might struggle more after separating

Nevertheless, relationship dissolution can have a significant impact on people’s mental health. This is particularly the case for women with young children and older women.

So what factors might explain why women might experience greater difficulties after divorce later in life?

Research investigating the financial consequences of grey divorce in men and women showed women experienced a 45% decline in their standard of living (measured by an income-to-needs ratio), whereas men’s dropped by just 21%. These declines persisted over time for men, and only reversed for women following re-partnering.

Read more:
Women’s probability of being in poverty more than doubles after separation

Another qualitative study investigating the lived experiences of heterosexual couples post-grey divorce identified financial worries as a common theme between female participants.

A female research participant (age 68) said:

[I am most worried about] the money, [and] what I’m going to do when the little bit of money I have runs out […] I have just enough money to live. And, that’s it, [and if] anything happens I’m up a creek. And Medicare is incredibly expensive […] My biggest expense is medicine.

Another factor was loneliness. One male research participant (age 54) described he preferred living with his ex-wife, despite not getting along with her, than being by himself:

It was still [good] knowing that [the] person was there, and now that’s gone.

Other major complications of later-life divorce are possible issues with inheritance rights and next-of-kin relationships for medical decision-making.

Separation can be positive

For some people, divorce or separation can lead to increased happiness and feeling more independent.

And the mental health impact and emotional distress of a relationship dissolution is something that can be counterattacked with resilience. Resilience to dramatic events built from life experience means older adults often do respond better to emotional distress and might be able to adjust better to divorce than their younger counterparts.

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

– ref. Women take more antidepressants after divorce than men but that doesn’t mean they’re more depressed – https://theconversation.com/women-take-more-antidepressants-after-divorce-than-men-but-that-doesnt-mean-theyre-more-depressed-222878

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa Conley Tyler, Honorary Fellow, Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne

A key phrase in foreign affairs at the moment is taking a “whole of nation” approach. It has been cropping up in government documents such as the Defence Strategic Review and International Development Policy.

But what exactly does it mean?

A new report to be launched at Parliament House by the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue provides an explanation.

“Whole of nation” moves beyond the more familiar “whole of government” approach by recognising that foreign affairs should involve, as the name suggests, all facets of Australian life: business and investment, science and technology, education, sports, culture, media and civil society.

At a minimum, a whole-of-nation approach sees global engagement as not just the job of core international policy actors such as the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, but as the role of a far wider constituency.

That means all of us.

Read more:
Foreign policy and the Albanese government’s first 100 days

If you’re in business, you’re potentially a global actor: trade and investment are vital to building Australia’s international relationships. Science and technology co-operation is likewise an intrinsically international pursuit, and where and who you engage with makes a difference to Australia’s international links.

If you’re involved in education, the impact you have on international students informs international perceptions of Australia, while school-and-university-level educational partnerships create important links.

You might be involved in community-to-community links through a faith group, charity or non-government organisation. You might be a farmer or trade unionist interacting with seasonal workers. If you’re a First Nations Australian, you might draw on cultural knowledge and sometimes shared heritage to build links with other peoples. If you’re in the half of the population with recent experience of family migration, you’re part of important diaspora links across the world.

And if you travel, study or work abroad, you’re part of the impressions that other countries’ citizens form of Australia.

So when politicians talk about the “whole of nation” being part of our international engagement, they are talking about all of us. They want to get us thinking about how, as an individual or through a group, we can contribute to Australia’s international goals.

Why is this happening?

There is growing recognition that, given the scale of global problems, governments can’t do it alone.

“Whole of nation” carries a sense of urgency that Australia’s people, economy, society and public institutions must become more alert to their role in the international sphere and better organise themselves to meet these challenging times.

This push for a more purposefully co-ordinated Australian statecraft has been driven by an increasingly challenging and complex external and security environment.

To those focused on the climate emergency, it is self-evident that dealing with a problem of this magnitude will require all Australia’s capabilities to be brought to bear.

Read more:
Australia’s new development aid policy provides clear vision and strategic sense

For those concerned about a worsening geopolitical environment, again it is vital that we take a co-ordinated approach.

There is also a sense of having to do more with what we have. While Australia will continue to grow in most important respects in absolute terms, its relative weight in the Indo-Pacific is likely to diminish as its neighbours continue to grow. A similar shift is happening with relative power moving away from Western countries, including Australia’s traditional allies.

The Indo-Pacific is the epicentre of this century’s great power competition, so it is no small matter for Australia to try to contribute to the region’s stability, prosperity and security.

It means Australia needs to avoid “foreign policy autopilot”. Instead, we need a wider range of participants and resources in Australia’s international policy.

The good news is that Australians see themselves as active in the world, both as individuals and as associations and industries. They are often interested and energetic. The question is how to harness this effectively. A whole-of-nation approach can co-ordinate activity to drive clear and tangible results, tied to foreign policy strategy and goals.

The depth and diversity of Australia’s resources, assets and capabilities need to be identified and harnessed to secure our future. And we will need shared vision and objectives for what Australia’s international engagement is trying to achieve. From there, we will gain a better understanding of the skill sets that each part of our society and economy can contribute.

In short, “whole of nation” means foreign policy isn’t the preserve of a few. In a world of many problems, expect to see more calls for a whole-of-nation approach to international policy.

Melissa Conley Tyler is Executive Director of the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy & Defence Dialogue (AP4D), a platform for collaboration between the development, diplomacy and defence communities. It receives funding from the Australian Civil-Military Centre and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and is hosted by the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID).

– ref. What is ‘whole of nation’ foreign policy and what does it mean for Australians? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-whole-of-nation-foreign-policy-and-what-does-it-mean-for-australians-217907

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sanjoy Paul, Associate Professor, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney

Australians have been hit by large rises in grocery, energy, transport, child and aged care prices, only adding to other cost of living pressures.

While extreme weather and supply delays have contributed to the increases, an inquiry into what’s causing the hikes has confirmed what commentators and consumers suspected – many sectors are resorting to dodgy price practices and confusing pricing.

Headed by the former Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) boss, Allan Fels, on behalf of the ACTU, the inquiry found inflation, questionable pricing practices, a lack of price transparency and regulations, a lack of market competition, supply chain problems and unrestricted price setting by retailers are to blame for fuelling the increases.

The inquiry, which released its final report on Wednesday, is one of four examining price rises. The other three are being undertaken by a Senate committee, the Queensland government and the ACCC, which has been given extra powers by the government.

Prices vs inflation

The inflation rate in Australia peaked at 7.8% in December 2022 and has been gradually dropping since then.

While the inquiry found higher prices contributed to inflation, it reported that businesses claimed it was inflation that caused price rises – making it a chicken-or-egg kind of problem.

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

However, many businesses made enormous profits in 2022-23, which the inquiry said contributed to rising prices and inflation. In most cases, post-pandemic profit margins were much higher than before the pandemic.

How prices are set

Business pricing strategies had a big impact on product prices.

In Australia, businesses often provided partial and misleading pricing information which differed from the actual price. For example, supermarkets were “discounting” products by raising prices beforehand.

These practices helped raise prices and were “exploitative”, the inquiry found.

A lack of transparent pricing information caused a poor understanding by consumers of how prices were set. This was significantly worsened by a lack of competition. While market concentration was a major issue, the inquiry found prices in Australia are way higher than in many other less competitive markets.

Large price increases occurred across many sectors:

AVIATION

While it is free to set any price for airfares, Australia’s largest and highest profile aviation company, Qantas, has been accused of price gouging since the pandemic.

According to the inquiry report, Qantas made a profit of $1.7 billion in 2023 – 208% higher than in 2019. At the same time, its reputation has been badly damaged by unreliable timetables, lost baggage and so-called “ghost” flights (selling tickets for a flight that’s been cancelled or doesn’t exist).

Despite its huge profits and poorer service, Qantas passed on extra expenses to consumers in the form of higher airfares, the inquiry found.

BANKING

The banking industry has a long history of being tardy in passing on the Reserve Bank’s cash rate cuts to consumers. However, when the reserve raised the cash rates, banks immediately increased their standard variable rates and passed them on to customers. This practice keeps the bank’s profit margin higher.

According to the inquiry report, the major banks’ average profit margins have been higher since May 2022 than in the 15 years before the pandemic. For 2022-23, the four big Australian banks’ profit margins were 35.5%, compared to an average of 32.4% from 2005 to 2020.

CHILDCARE

Australian households spent a good portion of their income on childcare, and for many of them, it was unaffordable.

In Australia, the lack of availability and difficulty in switching services makes it even harder for working parents to find alternative options. This indicates parents are forced to pay more if the service providers raise prices.

The inquiry found the childcare sector increased fees by 20% to 32% from 2018 to 2022. Accordingly, Australian households’ out-of-pocket expenses for childcare increased more than the rate of wage growth. For-profit childcare businesses have higher margins than not-for-profit centres.

ELECTRICITY

In recent years, electricity price increases have impacted all Australian households. The inquiry found both wholesale and retail electricity pricing strategies were responsible for these increased prices.

It reported that wholesale price increases were mainly responsible for an estimated 9% to 20% increase in electricity bills in 2022-23.

The report noted the “price bidding system” was largely responsible for increasing wholesale electricity prices.

The inquiry was critical of the profit margin of AGL, a leading electricity retailer:

It would seem that AGL needs to explain why consumers are paying $60.10/MWh more than seems to be justified by cost differentials. That is, for every consumer bill of $1,000 there is an apparent excess to be explained of $205.61 relative to prices charged to large business customers and not accounted for by genuine cost differences.

SUPERMARKETS

Supermarket prices have received the most attention recently with the main providers being accused of price gouging.

As has occurred in other sectors, profit margins were well above pre-COVID levels. In 2023, the margin was more than 3.5% compared to less than 3% in 2017 and 2018.

In Australia, food prices also increased well above the inflation rate.

According to the inquiry, the price increases for groceries between March 2021 and September 2023 varied between 19.2% and 27.3% for different categories, including cheese, bread, milk, eggs, dairy products and breakfast cereals.

Farmers recently accused supermarkets of making too much profit from their crops.

This was backed by the inquiry, which found the disproportionate market power held by supermarkets and food processors was of significant concern.

The report noted that supermarkets increased prices when there was a shortage or cost increase, but the opposite did not happen easily when supplies were plentiful and prices were cheaper.

Issues common to all sectors

Among the issues common to all sectors were weak competition, a lack of price transparency, the difficulty consumers face switching between suppliers and providers, a lack of pricing policies and a lack of consumer awareness.

While the price rises imposed by service providers and retailers were not unlawful, the increases in all sectors were significant and were hurting everyday Australians.

Fels’ recommendations

Many of the recommendations were sector-specific, but the one that applied to all areas related to the lack of regulation and pricing policies.

The ACCC should be empowered to investigate, monitor and regulate prices for the child and aged care, banking, grocery and food sectors, the inquiry found. This was necessary to ensure businesses used fair and transparent pricing.

A review of all existing policies was also recommended. For example, the government should use the current aviation review to remove international and domestic restrictions on competition. It was important aviation stakeholders, such as airlines and airports, were involved in the process.

The report suggested the grocery code of conduct should be mandatory for the food and grocery sector, and a price register for farmers should be created. This should be a government priority to protect farmers from unfair pricing by major supermarkets and food processors.

Change is needed

The current pricing practices for all business sectors must improve for greater transparency and to protect Australian consumers from unfair pricing.

The inquiry report’s findings and recommendations are helpful in ensuring fair and transparent pricing policies and improving the current regulations for price settings.

Implementing the recommendations will improve fair and transparent pricing practices and may help Australians get relief from the cost of living pressure in future.

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

– ref. Supermarkets, airlines and power companies are charging ‘exploitative’ prices despite reaping record profits – https://theconversation.com/supermarkets-airlines-and-power-companies-are-charging-exploitative-prices-despite-reaping-record-profits-222755

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sathana Dushyanthen, Academic Specialist & Lecturer in Cancer Sciences & Digital Health| Superstar of STEM| Science Communicator, The University of Melbourne

King Charles’ cancer diagnosis, which was identified recently during treatment for an enlarged prostate, continues to make news globally.

The type of cancer has not been revealed, but it has been confirmed it is not prostate cancer.

So what can King Charles and the millions of others who are newly diagnosed with cancer each year expect? And how has cancer treatment changed to improve survival rates?

Read more:
The royals have historically been tight-lipped about their health – but that never stopped the gossip

What actually is cancer?

The body constantly makes new cells to help us grow, replace worn-out tissue and heal injuries. Normally, cells multiply and die in a regulated way, so each new cell replaces a cell that is lost. Sometimes, however, cellular processes become dysregulated and cells keep multiplying. These abnormal cells may turn into cancer.

In solid cancers, such as breast or prostate, the abnormal cells form a mass (tumour). In blood cancers, such as leukaemia, the abnormal cells build up in the blood.

Cancerous tumours may spread. They may invade nearby tissue, destroying normal cells. The cancer cells can break away and travel through the bloodstream or lymph vessels to other parts of the body.

The cancer that first develops is the primary cancer. It is considered localised cancer as it has not spread to other parts of the body. If the primary cancer cells grow and form another tumour at a new site, it is called a secondary cancer or metastasis.

Read more:
How does cancer spread to other parts of the body?

Millions of new cases each year

Cancer is becoming more common as the population ages. And King Charles’ diagnosis is one of roughly 19.3 million new cases of cancer diagnosed worldwide each year.

We do not know which cancer King Charles has. However, worldwide,
the most common are lung, colorectal (bowel), stomach, breast, pancreatic, oesophageal, prostate and liver cancers.

The most common cancers can vary between countries, due to a number of factors such as genetics, lifestyle and environment. In Australia, for example, the most common cancers are prostate, breast, skin melanoma, colorectal cancer and lung cancer.

Read more:
I’ve just been diagnosed with cancer, now what?

Cancer accounts for 1 in 6 deaths

Cancer is a leading cause of death, accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020 (nearly one in six deaths) globally.

Worldwide, leading cancer-related deaths are from lung, colorectal, stomach, breast, pancreatic, oesophageal, prostate and liver cancer.

In 2023, there were roughly 165,000 cases of cancer diagnosed and 51,000 cancer deaths in Australia. The top cancer-related deaths are attributed to lung, colorectal, pancreatic, prostate and breast cancers.

Read more:
Why are we more likely to get cancer as we age?

But more people are surviving cancer

Often, when cancer is still localised (has not spread to other parts of the body), it can be removed through surgery or killed with radiotherapy. However, as cancer spreads, more systemic treatments that act throughout the body are required.

Advances in medicine and treatments for cancer have led to more people surviving cancer.

Over the years, there has been a huge shift towards personalised medicine, where each patient is treated based on the genetic make-up of their specific cancer.

Treatment usually includes surgery, radiotherapy, and/or systemic therapy (chemotherapy, hormonal treatments, targeted biological therapies) in combination.

Read more:
How cancer doctors use personalised medicine to target variations unique to each tumour

Technological advances have seen traditional surgical methods move towards robotic surgery, using robotic arms to perform precise, minimally invasive surgeries to remove cancer.

The precision of radiotherapy is also improving. This therapy destroys cancer cells using a controlled dose of radiation to kill or damage cancer cells so they cannot grow, multiply or spread, while sparing surrounding healthy tissue.

In recent years, there has been major progress in systemic therapies such as immunotherapy, antibody therapy and bone marrow transplant therapy. There is also “CAR T-cell therapy”, which harnesses the body’s own immune system to fight against cancer.

Thanks to COVID, mRNA technology and other nanoparticle delivery systems are also an area yielding promising results for cancer vaccines.

With the boom in artificial intelligence, we can now potentially predict, diagnose and select treatments for cancer, with greater precision and accuracy.

Read more:
What are these ‘cancer vaccines’ I’m hearing about? And what similarities do they share with COVID vaccines?

Do treatments work?

With such new treatments, cancer survival rates have improved significantly. In Australia, for example, five-year survival rates improved from 52% to 70% from 1989–1993 to 2014–2018.

Survival rates for some cancers are also better than others. In Australia, cancers with the worst survival rates after ten years are cancers of the brain, liver, lung, oesophagus and pancreas.

An individual’s survival rate also depends on a number of factors. These include their age, lifestyle and environment (obesity, infections, UV exposure, alcohol consumption and smoking), ethnicity and genetics, socioeconomic status, access to treatment, stage at diagnosis, metastasis of disease, type of treatment and whether their cancer is resistant to treatment.

In a nutshell

King Charles’ cancer diagnosis, at the age of 75, is one of millions of new cancer diagnoses globally. While cancer remains a leading cause of death worldwide, survival rates are improving thanks to extensive advances in treatments and treatment options.

Read more:
What happens if King Charles can no longer perform his duties?

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

– ref. King Charles is having cancer treatment. What can he, and others with cancer, expect? – https://theconversation.com/king-charles-is-having-cancer-treatment-what-can-he-and-others-with-cancer-expect-222876

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alice Neikirk, Program Convenor, Criminology, University of Newcastle

More than 6.6 million refugees live in camps located largely in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In these camp communities, unique cultural practices can arise. In our new research, we found the oral histories and healing practices of the Bhutanese refugees in Nepal changed over the decades they spent in camps.

In other words, camps foster new and unique cultural practices.

Camps are dynamic, culturally significant spaces. This finding does not celebrate refugee camps. It does recognise the strength and tenacity of people living in these situations.

But the cultural practices in the Bhutanese camps are now threatened because the refugees and their cultural practices don’t have legal protections. We propose the significance of these cultural practices may provide an alternative pathway to protection.

Protecting remaining refugees

Camps managed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provide legal protection and basic support for people fleeing persecution. But what happens when camps officially close but refugees remain?

Last a year a Bhutanese refugee, and our long-term research partner, asked us this question. He was part of one of the world’s largest resettlement programs for refugees. After decades in camps, between 2007 and 2015 almost all 100,000 refugees from Bhutan were resettled in the United States, Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Not everyone was resettled. Roughly 6,000 refugees remain in Nepal due to old age, ill health and hope for repatriation to Bhutan, and some are newly arrived political prisoners only just released.

These people are still refugees. They cannot go home, and have limited ways to build a new life in Nepal. But the UNHCR has phased out its involvement in the camps. The refugees’ legal protections and food rations are being cut. These refugees are sitting in limbo, with their homes, their community and their unique culture having no legal protections.

For decades Bhutan has refused to take back the people they ethnically cleansed. Nepal refuses to grant them citizenship. There aren’t many pathways to protecting refugees once the UNHCR is not involved.

It is necessary to think creatively to identify possible solutions to protect these remaining refugees.

Read more:
‘They’re really keen for us to do better than they did’: how refugee parents motivate their kids’ learning

Unique cultural practices

We were particularly interested in the refugees’ oral histories and the rituals of their traditional healers, known as jumping doctors.

Oral histories are a key way communities make sense of the past and find meaning in their current situation. While the oldest refugees understood their exile in terms of religious persecution, the generations raised in the camps saw their history primarily in terms of being advocates for democracy.

The oral histories of the Bhutanese refugees changed in the camps as they interacted with the governing organisation, which provided a robust education in democratic values.

Without protections, the remaining refugees may face restrictions in transmitting their oral histories.

Camp management also provided protection and certifications for traditional healers to practice their craft. Their healing rituals involve the creation of healing effigies, drumming, jumping and chanting. In Nepal, the number of traditional healers is dwindling and healers are not recognised via a certification process.

Without the protections from the UNHCR, jumping doctors and their knowledge may disappear.

UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage might be a way to protect these practices and, by extension, the refugees who remain after UNHCR withdraws from a camp.

We tend to think of UNESCO Heritage Sites as physical places like Notre Dame or the Great Barrier Reef.

But UNESCO also safeguards cultural practices, such as dance, theatre, food and craftsmanship. Through the intangible heritage convention, unique cultural practices and practices at risk of being lost can gain recognition. The hope is recognition will support sustainable development, open up funding pathways and ensure cultural knowledge does not disappear.

To gain recognition, a cultural practice must be nominated. Ideally, communities will self-nominate a cultural practice they recognise as significant, is transmitted and recreated across generations, and provides a sense of identity.

We analysed the nomination process and found significant gaps between the goal of having communities nominate their practices and how it is implemented. This means the culture of communities based in refugee camps are at a significant disadvantage.

Towards a fairer process

Currently, nomination forms are only available in English and French. Communities that lack access to education in these languages may struggle to complete the forms. To be accessible to all communities, the form should be available in a variety of languages.

When examining the nomination process, it became clear some minority groups, refugees and stateless people will struggle to have their cultural heritage recognised. This is because governments of nation-states verify the community practice meets the nomination requirements and they ultimately have responsibility for the protection framework.

It is unlikely nation-states will nominate or accept responsibility for protection of cultural activities in refugee camps. The current process means refugees are subject to the whims of nations’ priorities.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The nomination process could be modified so communities can self-verify. Further, it may be necessary that organisations beyond or outside of the nation-state take on responsibility for the protection of intangible cultural heritage.

Linking to a globally recognised brand like UNESCO could provide livelihood strategies for situations like the Bhutanese refugees. For example, the Bhutanese want to build a memorial centre to ensure their oral histories are recorded. International recognition could help them secure funding and create employment opportunities. Global recognition could attract visitors to the memorial centre.

This is not to suggest refugee camps should become tourist destinations, but it may provide a way for them to make decisions about their own cultural practices.

Refugee camps are not generally thought of as culturally significant sites. But it is clear from our work with Bhutanese refugees the camps are sites of important cultural practice but refugees have limited scope to advocate for safeguarding these practices.

A truly community-driven path for cultural heritage protection through UNESCO could be an avenue to achieve this important goal.

Read more:
How social media is breathing new life into Bhutan’s unwritten local languages

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How international recognition of cultural practices could be a new way to protect refugees – https://theconversation.com/how-international-recognition-of-cultural-practices-could-be-a-new-way-to-protect-refugees-220853

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Frew, Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow, Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University

Just beneath your feet, an ancient and silent alliance endures. This alliance between plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi is one of the oldest biological partnerships on Earth.

Going back almost half-a-billion years, this relationship paved the way for plants to make it onto land. These early plants, simple and without the complex root systems of plants today, forged an alliance with fungi. This alliance has been instrumental to the evolution of plant life and has helped shape our ecosystems.

These fungi grow into roots where the plants supply them with the carbon (as sugar and fat) they need to survive. The fungi extend thin root-like threads called mycelia into the soil to make expansive networks that can access nutrients beyond the reach of plant roots.

But these hidden microbes do more than just help plants get nutrients. Plants are constantly dealing with insect pests and diseases, and have done for a long time. To deal with this, they evolved sophisticated defences. AM fungi can dramatically enhance these defences.

So could plants be picking their fungal allies based on their ability to enhance defences against pests and diseases? We recently explored this question and proposed hypotheses around how this could happen. The answer could have huge implications for making agriculture more sustainable.

Harnessing the ancient alliance

Considering the benefits AM fungi can provide plants, it’s no surprise there has been a lot of interest in using them in environmental management. Studies show AM fungi can have huge benefits for ecosystem restoration by supporting the establishment of native plant communities. Their importance to ecosystem function makes it clear mycorrhizal fungi should be included in conservation efforts.

In agricultural systems, fungi can increase crop growth, nutrient uptake and yields. These benefits have been a major focus for researchers since the 1950s.

While there is ample evidence of the benefits AM fungi can provide for crops, results in the field are inconsistent. There can be a mismatch between the nutritional needs of the crops and the ability of the fungi that are present or introduced to the soil to meet those needs.

Do plants pick their fungal partners for defence?

Within the roots of a single plant, numerous fungal species can co-exist, forming complex communities. The species that make up these communities may each offer different capabilities – some are better at defence, while others are better at nutrient uptake. The benefit a plant gets from its fungal partners is, in part, determined by which species are present within its roots.

We can apply AM fungi to the soil but this doesn’t mean these fungi will actually partner up with the plant.

So what determines which fungi gain entry to the roots? Do plants have a say in this? And, if so, how do they choose? These questions have long been on the minds of ecologists and biologists.

At the core of this relationship is a complex exchange system. Plants provide the fungi with carbon they need, and the fungi provide benefits to the plants.

Research has shown a plant will play favourites (at least in some cases) with the fungi. They will partner up and give more carbon to the fungi that provide the most nutrients.

Yet there are significant challenges to exploiting these nutritional benefits in agriculture, where large inputs of nutrients are added to the soil. This can limit our ability to use the fungi in this way by removing plant reliance on the fungi for nutrients.

But can we exploit this partnership for plant defences? Globally, insect pests consume up to 20% of the major grain crops alone.

Given that we know plants can play favourites, could they select their fungi to boost defence? We have developed hypotheses to try to better understand this question, to set the stage for future research.

A complex question with big implications

There are many complications. When a plant is under attack by pests, this compromises its ability to supply carbon to its fungal allies, as its carbon resources are strained. It is still not known how these changes affect the plant’s “choice” of fungal partners.

We need a better understanding of how such choices happen and how herbivores can interfere with the ability of plants to reward those fungi providing the most benefit.

However, if plants can pick out the fungi that help them fight off pests and diseases, it could change the way we think about nature’s partnerships. It has big implications for farming, conservation and restoring damaged environments.

Knowing how plants select fungal allies would pave the way for better-defended crops, reducing the need to apply synthetic pesticides. It would open up exciting possibilities for helping ecosystems recover and thrive.

The possibility that plants can identify and select fungi based on the benefits they derive opens up exciting new frontiers in ecological research. As we explore these underground interactions, we inch closer to harnessing the potential of one of the Earth’s oldest symbioses. It is a reminder of the complex relationships that maintain life on the planet, connections that are as important today as they were 500 million years ago when the first plants reached for the sun above and the fungi below.

Adam Frew receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the British Ecological Society.

Carlos Aguilar-Trigueros receives funding from the Research Council of Finland and the Humboldt Foundation (Germany).

Jeff Powell receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the NSW Department of Planning and Environment and the Future Food Systems Limited Cooperative Research Centre.

Stephanie Watts-Fawkes receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

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

– ref. If plants can pick fungi to help fight pests and diseases, it opens a door to greener farming and ecosystem recovery – https://theconversation.com/if-plants-can-pick-fungi-to-help-fight-pests-and-diseases-it-opens-a-door-to-greener-farming-and-ecosystem-recovery-221994

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katharina Naswall, Professor of Organisational Psychology, University of Canterbury

Most workers will be familiar with this scene: a meeting that goes round and round on a topic – one that may not be important to the priorities of the company. People leave the meeting frustrated and unheard. And the whole experience is repeated the next time everyone meets.

But does this have to be inevitable? Or is there a better way to organise how we interact within teams to support effective decision making?

Team decision making is thought to be critical for organisational success. Yet there are often real challenges that lead to conflict and confusion.

In our ongoing research, we define effective team decision making as a process of understanding a complex problem, identifying alternative solutions, and finally selecting the most appropriate option to meet the team’s objectives.

For this process to work, it is essential there is a culture that promotes diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. This leads to increased experience, intelligence, competence and task-relevant knowledge, as well as better overall problem solving capacity for the team.

Creating a safe environment

But creating an environment where team members feel safe to share their thoughts and opinions, especially if they are not in line with the majority view, is often easier said than done.

This is where the concepts of psychological safety and independent thinking come into play.

Psychological safety means team members can express their ideas and opinions without the fear of negative responses. It permits challenging others – even those in a position of power.

Read more:
Why too many fearless people on a team make collaboration less likely

When team members operate in an environment with high psychological safety, they are more likely to share their diverse perspectives and ideas. This leads to better decision making.

Independent thinking means team members are encouraged to share their perspectives without modifying or moderating them.

This enables them to collectively engage in critical thinking and challenge the status quo. It can lead to more innovative and creative solutions and can also foster a sense of ownership and buy-in among team members.

By supporting independent thinking, teams can develop a culture of continuous improvement and adaptability, essential in today’s rapidly changing business environment.

Feeling safe and included

Our study investigated the relationships between positive team culture factors – psychological safety and independent thinking, as well as inclusion, and their impact on effective team decision making.

Participants from 35 New Zealand-based decision-making teams completed an online survey asking them to recall a complex decision faced by their group. They were also asked whether their group demonstrated effective decision making.

Read more:
Team-building exercises can be a waste of time. You achieve more by getting personal

We found participants who described higher levels of psychological safety were more likely to report effective decision making. For example, over 60% of those who agreed to the statement “I feel safe offering new ideas, even if they aren’t fully formed plans” also agreed with the statement “the selected solutions were of high quality”.

Feeling psychologically safe and able to communicate without fear of negative consequences is important for effective decision making.

Effective decision making was also more likely when team culture encouraged independent thinking. This suggests that to function effectively, teams need different perspectives to improve how information is processed and complexity is addressed. This is further enabled by a psychologically safe environment.

Our findings related to inclusion were mixed and dependent on how it was defined. When inclusion means the appropriate participation of team members in the decision-making process, it was associated with effective decision making.

But when inclusion was defined as being “perceived as an esteemed member of the group and belonging”, it was not significantly related to effective decision making.

Read more:
How showing your emotions at work can make you a better leader

So perhaps feeling “truly part of the team” is not essential, so long as team members are brought into the decision-making process whenever they can add value.

We also found longer tenure within a particular team was positively associated with effective decision making. Familiarity with colleagues has been shown to be especially helpful in ambiguous, uncertain and changing work environments.

Understanding team dynamics for better results

Our study shows both psychological safety and independent thinking are important for effective team decision making.

Leaders play a crucial role in promoting psychological safety within their teams. They can model behaviours that support psychological safety by exhibiting vulnerability, being authentic, and being willing to listen and discuss new and innovative ways of doing things.

Read more:
The five most common mistakes a growing company makes – and how to fix them

It is essential leaders make creating a positive team culture a priority – one that fosters psychological safety and encourages team members to share their unique viewpoints.

Leaders can do this by:

1. Following an effective decision-making process. This involves considering the team’s objectives, understanding the problem or opportunity being addressed, applying a range of perspectives, considering more than one potential solution, and selecting solutions that are best aligned with the team’s objectives.

2. Fostering psychological safety by having a shared set of values and a clear vision to support constructive discussion. Encourage curiosity instead of allowing defensiveness, and frame decision making as a team sport – not a win (or loss) for the individuals whose ideas are supported (or discarded).

3. Supporting independent thinking and expression by allowing team members to share their view before they are exposed to the views of others. This could involve a poll, or pre-meeting written contribution. Leaders should also avoid unduly influencing team members by sharing their view first, or by very narrowly framing the scope for team discussion.

Following this approach, leaders can unlock effective decision making and improve overall performance – banishing unproductive team meetings for good.

This research was supported by Callaghan Innovation R&D Fellowship.

This research was supported by Callaghan Innovation R&D Fellowship.

– ref. Frustrated by tedious and unproductive meetings? These 2 proven strategies can help teams work smarter – https://theconversation.com/frustrated-by-tedious-and-unproductive-meetings-these-2-proven-strategies-can-help-teams-work-smarter-217434

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samina Yasmeen, Director of Centre for Muslim States and Societies, The University of Western Australia

Pakistanis will head to the polls on Thursday to elect a new parliament and prime minister at a time of renewed political turbulence in the country.

The country’s popular former leader, Imran Khan, has been sentenced three separate times in recent weeks to lengthy jail terms. The timing before this week’s election is intended to send a message: the military wants him out of politics using a judicial pathway.

The military, which has directly and indirectly controlled Pakistan’s politics for seven decades, appears determined to reopen the political space for two other parties in the lead-up to the vote.

These are the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party, led by three-time former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, and the Pakistan People’s Party, led by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the son of former president Asif Ali Zardari and assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

So, with Khan in prison and barred from running, which party is likely to win the election and what challenges lie ahead for the new government?

Read more:
Pakistan election: the military has long meddled in the country’s politics – this year will be no different

Khan’s downfall

Khan, a former cricket star, led the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party to victory in the 2018 elections. But he lost the support of the military and was ousted in April 2022 through a no confidence vote in the National Assembly.

Since then, his party, PTI, has remained immensely popular. It dominated byelections in late 2022 to fill seats in the National Assembly that had been left vacant when PTI lawmakers resigned en masse to protest his ouster.

Last year, Khan was barred from politics for five years after being convicted on corruption charges. He maintains the charges were politically motivated. Then came the sentences handed down this year (it’s unclear if they will be served concurrently):

• ten years in prison for breaching the Official Secrets Act

• 14 years in prison for failing to disclose gifts received from foreign leaders, selling them and then not disclosing the amounts earned

• seven years in prison for being in an un-Islamic marriage.

With Khan barred from standing for office and no support from the military, PTI seems very unlikely to secure enough seats to return to power.

The electoral commission made things even more difficult by blocking the party’s use of the cricket bat symbol to identify its candidates. In a country with low levels of literacy, many people rely on these symbols when they cast their ballots.

The commission has instead allocated individual symbols to PTI’s candidates. This will create confusion among PTI’s supporters, who will need to know which symbols have been given to which candidates in their specific electorates.

Given the support among the youth for Khan and the PTI leadership urging its supporters to vote in the elections, the party’s candidates may still secure seats in the national and provincial assemblies. Their chances of forming a government, though, are virtually nil.

The return of an exiled former leader

Sharif, now 74 years old, is considered the frontrunner to be prime minister again – for a fourth time.

Sharif owes his initial entry into politics to the military regime led by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s. His relationship with the military since the 1990s, however, has vacillated between being cordial and antagonistic.

In fact, Sharif blamed former military and spy chiefs for orchestrating his ouster from power in 2017 when he was convicted of corruption. He was subsequently disqualified for life from participating in Pakistan’s politics.

Now he has returned from self-imposed exile to stage another political comeback. With his relationship with the military back in a “cordial” phase, the courts immediately overturned his corruption convictions when he returned to Pakistan late last year, paving his way to run in the election.

Sharif has since introduced the slogan “Pakistan ko Nawaz do”, with the dual meaning of “Give Nawaz to Pakistan” and “Be Generous to Pakistan”.

Bhutto, just 35 years old, hails from a political dynasty, which has laid the groundwork for his rise to power. As the foreign minister in the coalition government that ousted Khan, he has made his mark and is presenting himself as a symbol of new thinking (nai soch) in Pakistan.

Both candidates have been holding rallies across the country, but it remains unclear if either will be able to win a national election. PML-N is strong in Punjab in the east and PPP’s support comes mostly in Sindh in the far south-east.

As such, Pakistan appears to be heading for a coalition government, which will have to address several challenges facing the country.

A struggling economy and spiralling inflation

The most pressing issue for the new government will be to prevent further economic decline and improve the living conditions of ordinary citizens.

Pakistan’s GDP growth rate has fallen from 5.8% in 2021 to about 0.3% in 2023. At the same time, inflation has spiked against the backdrop of devastating floods in 2022, the rise in oil prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the demands of the International Monetary Fund for more sensible economic planning and the removal of unrealistic subsidies. Rates increased from 8.9% in 2021 to a whopping 29.7% in December 2023.

Meanwhile, the rate of people living in poverty in Pakistan has climbed to nearly 40%, more than five percentage points higher than fiscal year 2022.

The new government will also need to revisit Pakistan’s foreign policy. Khan’s allegations of US meddling in Pakistan’s politics soured the country’s relations with Washington, while his less-than-enthusiastic approach to Chinese investment projects strained relations with Beijing.

Even the Gulf states that traditionally had good relations with Pakistan began to recalibrate their south Asian strategies, with a clear tilt towards India.

The new government will also have to devise a new approach to Afghanistan. Despite the euphoria shared by some, particularly Khan, upon the return of the Taliban to government, Islamabad’s relations with Kabul have been affected by the new regime’s reluctance to address the rise in attacks by the Pakistani Taliban (often referred to as Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, or TTP) and other groups.

Read more:
Is terrorism returning to Pakistan?

But the most significant challenge for the new government will be the growing cynicism among Pakistanis around the legitimacy of the electoral process.

Khan’s downfall has drawn attention to the military’s ever-present need to control the government. And this has led to ordinary citizens openly criticising the military, a phenomenon unheard of before. A small minority of people in private gatherings are even questioning the legitimacy of the idea of Pakistan.

The new government will need to work hard to cement its legitimacy in such circumstances. Failing to do that would plunge Pakistan into yet another round of instability.

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

– ref. With Pakistan’s most popular politician in jail and cynicism running high, can a new leader unite the country? – https://theconversation.com/with-pakistans-most-popular-politician-in-jail-and-cynicism-running-high-can-a-new-leader-unite-the-country-222147

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brian Choo, Postdoctoral fellow in vertebrate palaeontology, Flinders University

More than 380 million years ago, a sleek, air-breathing predatory fish patrolled the rivers of central Australia. Today, the sediments of those rivers are outcrops of red sandstone in the remote outback.

Our new paper, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology,
describes the fossils of this fish, which we have named Harajicadectes zhumini.

Known from at least 17 fossil specimens, Harajicadectes is the first reasonably complete bony fish found from Devonian rocks in central Australia. It has also proven to be a most unusual animal.

Meet the biter

The name means “Min Zhu’s Harajica-biter”, after the location where its fossils were found, its presumed predatory habits, and in honour of eminent Chinese palaeontologist Min Zhu, who has made many contributions to early vertebrate research.

Harajicadectes was a fish in the Tetrapodomorpha group. This group had strongly built paired fins and usually only a single pair of external nostrils.

Tetrapodomorph fish from the Devonian period (359–419 million years ago) have long been of great interest to science. They include the forerunners of modern tetrapods – animals with backbones and limbs such as amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.

For example, recent fossil discoveries show fingers and toes arose in this group.

Read more:
When fish gave us the finger: this ancient four-limbed fish reveals the origins of the human hand

Devonian fossil sites in northwestern and eastern Australia have produced many spectacular discoveries of early tetrapodomorphs.

But until our discovery, the poorly sampled interior of the continent had only offered tantalising fossil fragments.

A long road to discovery

Our species description is the culmination of 50 years of tireless exploration and research.

Palaeontologist Gavin Young from the Australian National University made the initial discoveries in 1973 while exploring the Middle-Late Devonian Harajica Sandstone on Luritja/Arrernte country, more than 150 kilometres west of Alice Springs (Mparntwe).

Packed within red sandstone blocks on a remote hilltop were hundreds of fossil fishes. The vast majority of them were small Bothriolepis – a type of widespread prehistoric fish known as a placoderm, covered in box-like armour.

Scattered among them were fragments of other fishes. These included a lungfish known as Harajicadipterus youngi, named in honour of Gavin Young and his years of work on material from Harajica.

There were also spines from acanthodians (small, vaguely shark-like fish), the plates of phyllolepids (extremely flat placoderms) and, most intriguingly, jaw fragments of a previously unknown tetrapodomorph.

Many more partial specimens of this Harajica tetrapodomorph were collected in 1991, including some by the late palaeontologist Alex Ritchie.

There were early attempts at figuring out the species, but this proved troublesome. Then, our Flinders University expedition to the site in 2016 yielded the first almost complete fossil of this animal.

This beautiful specimen demonstrated that all the isolated bits and pieces collected over the years belonged to a single new type of fish. It is now in the collections of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, serving as the type specimen of Harajicadectes.

A strange apex predator

Up to 40 centimetres long, Harajicadectes is the biggest fish found in the Harajica rocks. Likely the top predator of those ancient rivers, its big mouth was lined with closely-packed sharp teeth alongside larger, widely spaced triangular fangs.

It seems to have combined anatomical traits from different tetrapodomorph lineages via convergent evolution (when different creatures evolve similar features independently). An example of this are the patterns of bones in its skull and scales. Exactly where it sits among its closest relatives is difficult to resolve.

The most striking and perhaps most important features are the two huge openings on the top of the skull called spiracles. These typically only appear as minute slits in most early bony fishes.

Similar giant spiracles also appear in Gogonasus, a marine tetrapodomorph from the famous Late Devonian Gogo Formation of Western Australia. (It doesn’t appear to be an immediate relative of Harajicadectes.)

They are also seen in the unrelated Pickeringius, an early ray-finned fish that was also at Gogo.

The earliest air-breathers?

Other Devonian animals that sported such spiracles were the famous elpistostegalians – freshwater tetrapodomorphs from the Northern Hemisphere such as Elpistostege and Tiktaalik.

These animals were extremely close to the ancestry of limbed vertebrates. So, enlarged spiracles seem to have arisen independently in at least four separate lineages of Devonian fishes.

The only living fishes with similar structures are bichirs, African ray-finned fishes that live in shallow floodplains and estuaries. It was recently confirmed they draw surface air through their spiracles to aid survival in oxygen-poor waters.

That these structures appeared roughly simultaneously in four Devonian lineages provides a fossil “signal” for scientists attempting to reconstruct atmospheric conditions in the distant past.

It could help us uncover the evolution of air breathing in backboned animals.

Brian Choo receives funding from the Australian Research Council and is employed by Flinders University.

Alice Clement receives funding from the Australian Research Council and is employed by Flinders University.

John Long receives funding from The Australian Research Council.

– ref. A 380-million-year old predatory fish from Central Australia is finally named after decades of digging – https://theconversation.com/a-380-million-year-old-predatory-fish-from-central-australia-is-finally-named-after-decades-of-digging-219397

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Ordway, Associate Professor Sport Management and Sport Integrity Lead, University of Canberra

For many, elite sport is the quintessential human endeavour. It drives ferocious competition, captures unconditional tribal loyalty, and rewards the victors with fame and fortune.

As the Olympic motto declares, the limits of human performance are there to be tested – faster, higher, stronger. But what would happen if the boundaries were not just pushed, but abandoned altogether?

That’s what PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel wants to do, putting some cash into lawyer Aron D’Souza’s concept of an “Enhanced Games”, where drug testing is out the window and anything goes.

Will venture capital make the Enhanced Games a reality? Despite rhetoric about making sport safer and “the medical and scientific process of elevating humanity to its full potential”, the games are out to make money.

The case for enhancement

The argument in favour of “enhanced” sport declares the current system dishonest and ineffective, as drug use is supposedly already widespread. It calls for athletes to make their own body-boosting decisions, and for their excellence to be rewarded with a more equitable share of the sport-entertainment loot.

As drug use in sport is here to stay, the argument goes, athletes should be permitted to use every advantage they can to secure success. In the world of hyper-commercialised, spectacle-driven sport theatre, athletes and fans alike are desperate to find out what can be done when anything is possible.

Costs to participants

As experts in sport management and integrity, we have a few concerns with this proposed venture.

It’s not that we’re averse to “thinking outside the box” to shake up existing systems, which are sometimes inequitable and unfair. And we agree there’s always more that can be done to reduce the harm elite athletes’ bodies endure.

However, any enhanced entertainment value would come at a cost to the participants. There’s no shortage of evidence demonstrating the dangers of pharmaceutical abuse for performance enhancement, let alone what might happen when used in experimental combinations and dosages.

Read more:
Why it’s time to legalise doping in athletics

Let’s not pretend this will be a kind of harm-reduction strategy to combat banned substance use in sport either, a bit like decriminalising cannabis.

In the Enhanced Games, athletes would be rewarded for “excellence”. That means the race to dope, where inevitably more is better, will not be limited to medicines that have been approved for human use.

What’s sport for?

In addition to damage to athletes, there’s also the damage to sport.

We’d like to think that most committed sport fans would prefer to watch athletes, not injectable avatars. But this event is designed as instantly accessible consumer fodder, not a treat for sporting aficionados.

The Enhanced Games suggests the path to victory is via what many sport fans would regard as cheating. Instead of promoting success via persistence, resilience and hard work, it suggests there is a “magic pill” or “silver bullet” for every challenge.

Even if we leave aside the significant health risks of a “go for it” open category of sport (which presents deal-breaking legal and medical ethics concerns anyway), it challenges the very essence of what sport should be about.

Perhaps we’re being idealistic, but what’s the point of sport if it isn’t at least aiming to be authentic? The main thing these games will “enhance” is the existing problems with elite sport.

More inequality and prospects for exploitation

The idea of the Enhanced Games seems to proceed from the premise that all participants are adults who can make fully informed decisions about their own short-term goals and long-term health in ways that will affect only themselves. This is unlikely to reflect the reality.

Elite sport is not conducted on a level playing field. Access to money, knowledge, power and technology already gives some athletes an edge over others, and the Enhanced Games would exacerbate these inequalities.

The Enhanced Games proposal does not set out how the increased risk to athletes exploited for commercial gain will be managed. The games also proposes to include events in which the burgeoning elite competitors are young and vulnerable, such as gymnastics and swimming, which may have serious implications for these children and their carers.

Winning – but at what cost?

Sport has never been a “win at all costs” proposition. Sport should be part of a society that cares about respect, fun, friendship, health, learning new skills and vitality.

If only the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists could concentrate their money and efforts on bringing the joy of sport to disadvantaged people and help support building thriving communities.

In years to come, we hope to look back on the Enhanced Games with as much interest as sprinter Ben Johnson’s 1998 novelty race against two horses. (Johnson, notoriously banned from normal competition for life after failing multiple drug tests, came third.)

Catherine Ordway has been appointed as a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Social
Science Research Expert Advisory Group (SSREAG) and previously worked for the Australian
Sports Anti-Doping Authority (precursor to Sport Integrity Australia). The University of Canberra has a Memorandum of Understanding with Sport Integrity Australia and is researching several co-funded projects, including on anti-doping.

The University of Canberra has a Memorandum of Understanding with Sport Integrity Australia and is researching several co-funded projects, including on anti-doping.

– ref. Venture capitalists are backing a ‘steroid Olympics’ to find out what happens when athletes are doped to the gills – https://theconversation.com/venture-capitalists-are-backing-a-steroid-olympics-to-find-out-what-happens-when-athletes-are-doped-to-the-gills-222869

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

iuThere are two things the prime minister needs to get into his head about tax. One is that saying he won’t make any further changes no longer works. The other is that negative gearing doesn’t do much to get people into homes.

Anthony Albanese seemed to have taken the first point on board when he spoke to The Insiders on Sunday.

Rather than promising flat out not to change the rules around negative gearing, he merely said he was

supportive of the current rules, we have not considered changes to them

But he was less careful when it came to the virtues of negative gearing. He said there was

a whole lot of analysis that says they encourage investment in housing, the key when it comes to housing is housing supply.

His official advisers in the treasury don’t think negative gearing does much to increase the supply of supply of housing – or, if they do, they omitted it from the six-page briefing note headed “negative gearing”, prepared to help the treasurer answer questions about it in parliament.

Our rules reward bad management

Negative gearing is a particularly Australian tax benefit, which – unlike in other countries – benefits dud landlords: those who can’t make money by renting out properties.

If they lose money (by paying out more in interest, maintenance and other expenses than they are receiving in rent) we let them offset that loss, not only against income from other investments, but also against income from their wage or salary.

It means they can cut their wage for tax purposes, cutting the tax they pay on it. And at the same time, they can hang on to a property they can later sell for a profit, which will be taxed at only half the normal rate, thanks to Australia’s 50% discount on capital gains.

It isn’t allowed in the United Kingdom or the United States. There, if you are a landlord who can’t make money, you can offset your losses against profits from other investments – but not against your wage.

In Canada you can offset rental losses against wages, but there must have been an “an intention to make a profit”. That would probably rule out most Australian negative gearers.

Most gearers don’t build homes

In Australia, an astounding one million of us negatively gear – more than one in nine taxpayers. In 2020-21 they claimed losses amounting to $8.7 billion – 3.5% of the income tax collected – meaning that if they didn’t do it (if they didn’t claim for what seem to be deliberate losses) the rest of us could pay less tax.

What Albanese said on the weekend was half right. Negative gearing encourages investment. Most months, more than one in three new home loans is for an investment property.

But most of those loans don’t increase supply – the thing Albanese says matters.

That’s because the overwhelming bulk of investor home loans go to “investors” planning to buy existing homes – to bid against and likely beat would-be owner-occupiers.

In December 2023, only 23% of the loans to investors was used to build a home or buy a newly-build home. In November only 19%.

As a means of getting more homes built, negative gearing leaks like a sieve. As a means of ensuring Australians continue to rent, rather than buy, it’s effective.

In the 20 or so years since the headline rate of capital gains tax was halved, supercharging negative gearing, the proportion of Australian households renting has climbed from 26% to 30%. If those extra renters become owners, an extra 400,000 Australians would be in homes they could call their own.

How to get better value from gearing

The really bizarre thing is that Albanese has it in his power to ensure negative gearing does exactly what he said it did – supercharge the building of houses.

All he would need to do is what Labor promised to do in 2016 and again in 2019. In those elections, Bill Shorten went to voters promising to limit the use of negative gearing to newly-built homes.

As Shorten put it, taxpayers would

continue to be able to deduct net rental losses against their wage income, providing the losses come from newly constructed housing.

The sieve would no longer leak. Every dollar of tax lost to a negative gearer would help build a home.

What would have happened if Shorten had got his way: if Australia both focused the use of negative gearing and cut the capital gains discount as he had proposed?

Modelling just published in Australian Economic Papers finds the share of households who own their home rather than renting it would have climbed 4.7%.

That’s security worth having, especially if it is accompanied by more homes.

An idea whose time is coming?

Australia’s Treasury has begun publishing estimates of the cost of the present unfocused system of negative gearing. Its latest, released last week, puts the cost at $2.7 billion per year, to which should probably be added a chunk of the $19 billion per year lost as a result of the capital gains concession.

The estimates are new. Until Jim Chalmers became treasurer, his department didn’t publish estimates of the cost of rental deductions.

Chalmers is far from the first treasurer to be curious about what the concession does. Scott Morrison expressed concern about the “excesses” of negative gearing.

And Morrison’s predecessor, Joe Hockey, said on leaving parliament that negative gearing should be skewed towards new housing, so “there is an incentive to add to the housing stock rather than an incentive to speculate on existing property”.

Albanese is normally cautious. But as he is showing us right with his rejigged Stage 3 tax cuts, there are times when he is not.

If he really wants to throw everything he has got at building more homes, he knows what to do.

Peter Martin is Economics Editor of The Conversation.

– ref. How Albanese could tweak negative gearing to save money and build more new homes – https://theconversation.com/how-albanese-could-tweak-negative-gearing-to-save-money-and-build-more-new-homes-222739

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Thomas, Lecturer in Middle East Studies, Deakin University

In recent weeks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeated his rejections of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, saying:

I will not compromise on full Israeli security control over all the territory west of Jordan – and this is contrary to a Palestinian state.

While Netanyahu has never been in favour of a two-state solution, it has had significant support from governments around the world for decades, including the United States, the United Kingdom, European nations, Australia, Canada, Egypt and others.

However, the two-state solution is now further away than it has ever been, with some even proclaiming it “dead”.

But what actually is the two-state solution and why do so many see this as the only resolution to the conflict?

What is the two-state solution?

The two-state solution refers to a plan to create a Palestinian state separate from the state of Israel. The goal is to address Palestinian claims to national self-determination without undermining Israel’s sovereignty.

The first attempt at creating side-by-side states occurred before the independence of Israel in 1948. The year before, the United Nations passed Resolution 181 outlining a partition plan that would split the Mandate of Palestine (under British control) into separate Jewish and Arab states.

The UN’s proposed borders never materialised. Shortly after Israel declared independence, Syria, Jordan and Egypt invaded, sparking the first Arab-Israeli war. More than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from the new state of Israel, fleeing to the West Bank, Gaza and surrounding Arab states.

Read more:
The Nakba: how the Palestinians were expelled from Israel

In recent decades, there have been many different views on what shape a Palestinian state should take. The 1949 “green line” was seen by many as the most realistic borders for the respective states. This line was drawn during the armistice agreements between Israel and its neighbours following the 1948 war and is the current boundary between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza.

However, following the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel captured and occupied the West Bank and Gaza, along with East Jerusalem and Golan Heights. Most current discussions of the two-state solution now refer to creating two states along “the pre-1967 borders”.

This would mean the new Palestinian state would consist of the West Bank prior to Israeli settlement, and Gaza. How Jerusalem would be split, if at all, has been a significant point of contention in this plan.

Why is statehood so important?

The kind of statehood referred to in the two-state solution, known as state sovereignty in international politics, is the authority given to the government of a nation within and over its borders.

State sovereignty was formalised through the League of Nations (the precursor to the UN) and it gives governments complete control to administer laws within their borders, allows them to conduct relations with other states in formal bodies, and protects them from invasion by other states under international law. This status is derived from mutual recognition from other states.

This is something many of us take for granted. The vast majority of people on Earth live in or legally fall under the jurisdiction of a sovereign state.

Read more:
Israel-Palestinian conflict: is the two-state solution now dead?

The state of Israel was formally established in 1948 through the political project of Zionism – the movement to establish a Jewish homeland. The aim was to create a sovereign state – with borders, a government and an army – that would give the Jewish people a political voice and a place free from antisemitic violence.

But it was not until other countries established diplomatic ties with Israel – along with its accession to the UN in 1949 – that it achieved state sovereignty similar to other countries. More than 160 members of the UN now recognise Israel; those who do not include Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Since the end of the Six-Day War in 1967, more than 5 million Palestinians who are not citizens of another nation have been stateless. The West Bank and Gaza Strip remain in an institutional limbo – best described as semi-autonomous enclaves under the ultimate control of Israel.

While 139 members of the UN recognise a state of Palestine, the governing bodies in the West Bank and Gaza (the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, respectively) do not have control over their own security or borders.

As such, the self-determination of Palestinians through the creation of a sovereign state has been a cornerstone of Palestinian political action for decades.

The closest the two sides got – the Oslo Accords

For a time in the early 1990s, significant progress was being made toward a two-state solution. Negotiations began largely as a result of Palestinian uprisings across the West Bank and Gaza. Beginning in 1987, they were known as the First Intifada.

In 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) Yasser Arafat met in Oslo and signed the first of two agreements called the Oslo Accords. At the time, this was not seen as a meeting between equals. Rabin was head of a sovereign state and Arafat was leader of an organisation that had been designated a terror group by the US.

But the leaders were able to formalise an agreement, following major concessions from both sides, that laid the groundwork for the creation of a separate Palestinian state. While the accord did not expressly mention the 1967 borders, it did refer to “a settlement based on UN Security Council Resolution 242” in 1967, which called for the withdrawal of Israel’s armed forces “from territories occupied in the recent conflict”. Arafat, Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres all received Nobel Peace Prizes afterwards.

The Oslo II Accord was signed in 1995, detailing the subdivision of administrative areas in the occupied territories. The West Bank, in particular, was divided into parcels that were controlled by Israel, the Palestinian Authority or a joint operation – the first step toward handing over land in the occupied territories to the Palestinian Authority.

But just six weeks later, Rabin was shot dead by a Jewish nationalist aggrieved by the concessions made by Israel.

Negotiations between the two sides slowed and political will began to sour. And over the next few decades, the two-state solution has only become harder to achieve for various reasons, including:

• the rise of conservative governments in Israel and lack of effective political pressure from the US

• the shrinking political influence of the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas and the rise of Hamas in Gaza, which caused a political split between the two Palestinian territories

• Hamas’ vows to annihilate Israel and refusal to recognise the Israeli state as legitimate

• the continued growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which has turned the territory into an ever-shrinking series of small enclaves connected by military checkpoints

• dwindling support among both Israelis and Palestinians for the model

• continued political violence on both sides.

And of course there is Netanyahu – no individual has done more to undermine the two-state solution than the current Israeli leader and his party. In 2010, a leaked recording from 2001 came to light where Netanyahu claimed to have “de facto put an end to the Oslo accords”.

What alternatives are there?

There aren’t many alternatives and all of them have significant problems.

Some are now advocating for a “one-state solution,” in which Israeli citizenship would be granted to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to create a democratic, ethnically pluralist state.

Although Arabs already make up around 20% of Israel’s current population, the one-state solution would not be politically feasible. According to Zionist ideology, Israel must always remain a majority Jewish state and granting Palestinians citizenship in the occupied territories would undermine this.

Another kind of one-state solution is not feasible for a different reason. The most far-right ministers in Israel’s parliament have championed an idea to expand complete sovereign control over the West Bank and Gaza and encourage mass Jewish settlement in these areas. Such action would draw the ire of the international community and human rights organisations and would be seen as tantamount to ethnic cleansing.

The other option is the status quo. The Hamas attack on October 7 and subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza have shown us that this is not a solution either.

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

– ref. Explainer: what is the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? – https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-the-two-state-solution-to-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict-221872

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathryn Backholer, Co-Director, Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition, Deakin University

An affordable daily diet has edged too far away for many Australians. Food prices have risen sharply since 2021, fuelling cost of living pressures and food insecurity. Some 3.7 million Australian households experienced food insecurity in 2023 – 10% more than in 2022.

Food prices have always been a challenge for many Australians. This is especially true for people on low incomes, refugees, people living in rural areas, single mothers, and people with disability. A basic healthy diet can cost city-dwelling families who are doing it toughest roughly one-third of their income.

So what is the Australian government doing to ease the cost of a supermarket shop? Let’s take a look.

Read more:
Amid allegations of price gouging, it’s time for big supermarkets to come clean on how they price their products

First, how much have food prices increased, and why?

Food prices peaked in December 2022, with an average shopping basket costing 9.2% more than in 2021. Although food prices have eased since that peak, they remain significantly higher now compared to before the pandemic.

Almost all food categories have been hit, but many healthy foods appear to have increased in price at almost double the rate of discretionary (unhealthy) foods.

The COVID pandemic, climate events such as floods and bushfires, and international conflicts have all contributed, to varying degrees. These events have placed undue pressure on food supply chains through food shortages, increased fuel, energy and transport costs and a shortage of workers from farm to fork.

Big supermarkets have also been scrutinised recently. In Australia, supermarkets can set prices, with little transparency. This is against a backdrop of one of the most powerful and concentrated grocery sectors in the world, severely limiting competition.

Claims of supermarket price gouging have inspired public outrage, particularly given the two supermarket giants each pocketed more than A$1 billion in profits in 2022-2023.

Read more:
Are you living in a food desert? These maps suggest it can make a big difference to your health

So what is the government doing to ease the pressure?

The government’s Standing Committee on Agriculture undertook an inquiry into food security in Australia in 2023, and came up with 35 recommendations. While many of these recommendations may indirectly influence food prices, only one explicitly addressed food prices: to provide subsidies for remote community stores so fresh food can be sold at an affordable price. These recommendations are yet to be implemented.

At the end of 2023, the Senate Select Committee on Supermarket Prices was established to “inquire into and report on the price setting practices and market power of major supermarkets”. Submissions to the inquiry recently closed, with the final report due in May.

In early 2024, the government announced an independent review of the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct to ensure the grocery retailers and wholesalers are dealing fairly with suppliers. Although not specifically focused on the shelf price of food, a fairer deal between retailers and suppliers may flow to lower prices for consumers.

Most recently, the Albanese government formally issued a directive to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to carry out a 12-month investigation into supermarket prices. This will have more teeth than other inquiries, allowing the ACCC to use legal powers to gather information, including from the supermarkets themselves.

If wrongdoing is uncovered, the ACCC has the power to take the supermarkets to court. The pressure from the inquiry may also lead to supermarkets voluntarily lowering food prices, in a similar way to previous inquiries.

Read more:
The cost of living is biting. Here’s how to spend less on meat and dairy

What are other countries doing?

In Greece, the government has temporarily forced supermarkets to reduce prices on basic products. For example, the price of at least one type of bread would be lowered and advertised to shoppers at this lower rate. The Greek government has also provided low-income households with a monthly allowance to support grocery costs, among other measures.

The French government has worked with the food sector to secure a commitment from 75 companies to cut their prices. It has also promised regular price checks at supermarkets to ensure prices fall, with financial penalties if they don’t.

In Spain, the value added tax on basic foods, such as fruits, vegetables, pasta and cooking oils, has been eliminated or lowered. Government tax revenue will be reduced for these items, but retained for other non-basic foods (similar to the GST in Australia).

What next for Australia?

The multi-year food price crisis has revealed the vulnerability of our food system. We need to recover from where we are, but we must do so in a way that ensures a more resilient food system with stable food prices over time.

While it’s too early to know what will come of the various food price inquiries, the government is and should continue to provide general cost-of-living support. The recent revised Stage 3 tax cuts are an example of increasing the flow of money to those who need it most, easing pressure at the supermarket checkout.

Read more:
Trying to spend less on food? Following the dietary guidelines might save you $160 a fortnight

Further support for vulnerable households could be implemented by expanding existing social safety nets through increasing income support payments.

The fate of food prices in Australia is, at least for now, uncertain. But one thing is for sure. Unless the government steps up to ease the pressure, too many Australians will keep struggling to put food on the table.

Kathryn Backholer receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Heart Foundation, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the World Health Organization, the National Health and medical Research Council, The Ian Potter Foundation, QUIT Victoria, and The Responsible Gambling Foundation.

Christina Zorbas receives funding from the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

– ref. We’re in a food price crisis. What is the government doing to ease the pressure? – https://theconversation.com/were-in-a-food-price-crisis-what-is-the-government-doing-to-ease-the-pressure-222368

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

Australia looks set to adopt fuel-efficiency standards after the Albanese government on Sunday revealed options for the long-awaited policy. The government says the reform would lead to more cars that are cheaper to run, eventually saving Australians about A$1,000 per vehicle each year.

The announcement comes a decade after the Climate Change Authority first proposed such a standard for Australia. The United States has had such a policy since the 1970s and the European Union implemented mandatory standards in 2009.

The Coalition has already sought to stoke fears among tradies and regional voters by claiming Labor’s policy threatens to take utes off the road. Labor’s policy is designed to address this concern – but the opposition looks likely to continue this scare campaign.

More generally, history tells us the road to fuel-efficiency reform in Australia is a bumpy one. The Albanese government has hazards to negotiate before its proposal becomes law.

A carbon price, by another name

Labor has outlined three options for a fuel-efficiency target, ranging from weak to aggressive. It describes its preferred middle-ground option as the sensible compromise.

The policy design for each of the options would set a national limit, averaged across all new cars sold, stipulating grams of CO₂ that can be emitted for each kilometre driven. This measure depends on fuel efficiency: that is, the amount of fuel burnt per kilometre. The designs differ in the stringency of the targets, the speed of the changes and the treatment of different vehicle classes.

The limit would not apply to individual cars. Instead, each supplier of new light vehicles to Australia would have to make sure the mix of vehicles does not exceed the limit. Low-efficiency vehicles could still be sold, but car dealers would have to balance this out by selling enough high-efficiency vehicles, such as electric vehicles.

Car suppliers that outperform the targets would earn credits that could be sold to those falling short. This system is similar to Australia’s renewable energy target for electricity and the safeguard mechanism for industry pollution.

All three are effectively a carbon price (though the political toxicity of that term means the government would never characterise them as such). Nonetheless, should the fuel-efficiency standards be implemented, Australia would end up with three carbon prices, one for each major energy use.

The government says the preferred option would lead to a saving of 369 million tonnes of CO₂ by 2050.

Read more:
Who’s holding back electric cars in Australia? We’ve long known the answer – and it’s time to clear the road

What about utes?

One tricky path the policy must navigate is allowing for the supply of both small and large vehicles without further exacerbating the trend towards oversized vehicles on our roads.

The government’s preferred option achieves this by allowing higher – but still limited – emissions for heavier vehicles such as utes, vans and SUVs, to account for their natural tendency to use more fuel.

Heavier vehicles are a sticking point in forming vehicle emissions policy in Australia. Who could forget then-prime minister Scott Morrison’s 2019 claim Labor’s electric vehicle policy would “end the weekend” by banning larger cars used to tow boats and the like.

Following Labor’s policy announcement on Sunday, Nationals leader David Littleproud picked up where Morrison left off, saying:

If you take away particularly utes, they’re tools of trade, particularly for people, not just tradies in the cities, but also people in the bush. And if you put a tonne on the back of an electric ute at the moment, you don’t get far.

Anticipating the Coalition scare campaign, the Labor government’s preferred option has been designed with the aim of ensuring a wide range of conventional utes remain on the market.

In the medium term, we can also expect the trend towards larger vehicles to be weakened by measures in Labor’s last federal budget to roll back vehicle tax breaks for small and medium businesses. But that change doesn’t come into effect until mid-year, which means there may be a rush on larger vehicle purchases until then.

Read more:
Electric utes can now power the weekend – and the work week

Ghosts from the past

Labor’s preferred policy option is broadly similar to that put forward by the Climate Change Authority in 2014. Then, the Coalition government appeared to consider the proposal for a time. But it eventually dropped the idea – in part, presumably, due to lobbying by interest groups including the car industry.

There are signs those same groups are gearing up again. The Federated Chamber of Automotive Industries, for example, said on Sunday the government’s targets will “be a challenge” to meet and may lead to more expensive vehicles, or gaps in the supply of utes and SUVs.

But the proposed policy has been welcomed by climate change advocates, the electric vehicle industry and motoring groups. The NRMA described them as “responsible and achievable”, saying “a business-as-usual approach meant that Australian families and businesses were not benefiting from the best technology designed to reduce fuel consumption”.

Progress, at last

The government intends to consult on its preferred model before introducing the legislation, with a view to enacting the policy in January 2025.

Assuming the policy is adopted, Australia would finally shed its unenviable status as the only developed country without such such standards. But we will still be at the back of pack, far behind the EU and only catching up to the US in 2028.

Despite the difficulties, it seems likely Australia will have fuel-efficiency standards in the near future. As with most measures to reduce emissions, the best time to introduce the policy was ten or more years ago. But the second-best time is now.

John Quiggin was a Member of the Climate Change Authority at the time it proposed a fuel efficiency standard

– ref. Labor’s fuel-efficiency standards may settle the ute dispute – but there are still hazards on the road – https://theconversation.com/labors-fuel-efficiency-standards-may-settle-the-ute-dispute-but-there-are-still-hazards-on-the-road-222875

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Tookey, Professor of Construction Management, Auckland University of Technology

Cyclone Gabrielle caused chaos one year ago. Repairs due to that storm and the Auckland floods have required substantial time and resources. Hawkes Bay, parts of Auckland and the Coromandel all still bear the scars of the worst storm to hit New Zealand this century.

The good news is that most initial repairs are complete. The bad news is that the restored infrastructure is just as vulnerable as it was prior to Gabrielle. Restoring infrastructure to the way it was before a natural disaster is not necessarily the best approach for a resilient future.

Cyclone Gabrielle simultaneously exposed New Zealand’s dependence on “horizontal” infrastructure (electricity and roading networks, for example), and how tenuous and potentially prone to damage it is.

The cyclone also revealed the flaws in the country’s planning and consenting processes. There is a history of developing new housing in flood-prone areas – particularly in Auckland. A year after Gabrielle, New Zealand needs to look to the future of climate risk, policy creation and infrastructural investment.

Both the previous and current governments have expressed concerns over future climate impacts. Yet climate risk and related infrastructure investment were comparatively minor themes in the various election debates of 2023.

New Zealand now needs to ask some serious long-term questions:

• How frequently will it be exposed to the costs and chaos of weather events?

• How should it respond to those risks?

• What are the infrastructural investment priorities?

• How should it sequence its responses?

• And how will we pay for these measures?

Read more:
Landslides and law: Cyclone Gabrielle raises serious questions about where we’ve been allowed to build

Political agreement in theory

Failing to ask – let alone answer – those questions means New Zealand can’t plan, can’t build and can’t budget.

In October 2016, the National-led government’s environment minister Paula Bennett announced the ratification of the Paris Climate Accord. The treaty became legally enforceable in New Zealand in 2020 while Jacinda Ardern was prime minister.

Fundamentally, the commitment to addressing climate change is a point of agreement across the political spectrum.

Having ratified the Paris Accord, cuts to the country’s emissions are legally enforceable and time-bound. But New Zealand’s infrastructural planning, investments and commitments remain vague.

Read more:
Massive outages caused by Cyclone Gabrielle strengthen the case for burying power lines

The Ardern government produced “Adapt and Thrive: Building a climate-resilient Aotearoa New Zealand” in August 2022. There was little coverage of this consultation document at the time or since, and the general public is largely unaware of it.

Adapt and Thrive advocates multiple strategies in response to climate change, including “avoid, protect, accommodate, retreat”. All elements of this plan have planning, legislative and resource implications.

But central to the report is the idea of “managed retreat” from flood-prone areas. The report indicates 300,000 dwellings will be directly affected by adverse weather events in the future. At least NZ$100 billion worth of property has been flagged as directly at risk, affecting 72,000 New Zealanders.

It is fair to say that the cost of new housing and infrastructure designed to protect at-risk communities, as well as service relocated ones, will be spectacularly expensive.

Can NZ ‘adapt and thrive’?

It is now time for New Zealand to decide to what degree it wishes to ameliorate the effects of climate change.

If this is a national priority, then planning, budgeting and sequencing need to be committed to. Hundreds of billions of dollars will be needed over a multi-decade, integrated programme of planning, compulsory purchase and infrastructure construction.

With the change of government, however, will that plan be put into action? There are aspects of it that make this questionable.

The different treatment of stakeholder groups around compensation during “managed retreat” will be problematic for the new governing coalition.

For example, Adapt and Thrive proposes 50% compensation for businesses and rental property owners, with zero compensation for bach or second home owners. Relocated communities’ resilience in terms of jobs, economic activity and housing will become contentious.

Adapt and Thrive also proposes limiting of rights of appeal for affected communities. The extensive planning and procurement processes involved make it hard to imagine the right to appeal being entirely quashed. Inevitably, the process of planning, financial commitments and appeals will be drawn out.

Read more:
NZ cities urgently need to become ‘spongier’ – but system change will be expensive

Time for big decisions

To say Adapt and Thrive will be challenging to put into effect is an understatement. If the policy is going to be reconsidered, so be it.

But New Zealand has pressing infrastructural investment needs to facilitate growth and sustainability. The planning and procurement needed to implement such policy is time-consuming and costly. Irrespective of political orientation, there is an absolute need to prioritise it.

Given the huge financial consequences, and inevitable trade-offs in social programmes, education, defence and other budget priorities, a time frame for making big decisions is essential.

Failure to do so will inhibit future growth and housing provision, reduce cost-effectiveness, as well as threaten the sustainability of communities in vulnerable areas. Cyclone Gabrielle made it clear that kicking this particular can down the road is not acceptable.

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

– ref. One year on from Cyclone Gabrielle, NZ still needs a plan to fix its failing infrastructure – https://theconversation.com/one-year-on-from-cyclone-gabrielle-nz-still-needs-a-plan-to-fix-its-failing-infrastructure-221864

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa J. Hackett, Lecturer, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, University of New England

King Charles III has been diagnosed with cancer. This is an unexpected announcement: it is unusual for the royal family to release details of medical conditions to the public.

“Don’t let the daylight in” was how British essayist Walter Bagehot advised the British monarchy to deal with the public in 1867. “[A]bove all things our royalty is to be reverenced […] its mystery is its life,” he wrote.

For Queen Elizabeth II this attitude framed her response to public information about the royals, quipping “never complain, never explain”. Maybe this explains why Princess Kate’s recent abdominal surgery has not been disclosed to the public, with media reports saying she is “determined to keep her medical details private”.

In revealing the fragility of the royal body much of the mystique about them as anointed by God fades away. But the royals’ health has, occasionally, been the subject of official news, and, more commonly, the subject of gossip.

Henry VIII’s ‘soore legge’

Henry VIII’s (1491–1547) health was well-documented and discussed in state-papers and diplomatic dispatches of the day.

In his early years, he was known for his robust health. In his later years, he would be described as “cursed” by his deteriorating health.

As Henry aged, his access to fine food led to an increase of weight. Doctors today might diagnose him with obesity, and it has been speculated by contemporary medical historians he suffered from hypertension and Type II diabetes.

This disease, which can lead to diabetic neuropathy and serious foot complications, could account for the persistent and odorous ulcers on his “sorre legge”, as described by his contemporaries.

Knowledge about Henry’s health was not widespread. The king had sequestered himself in his private apartments. Even his attending physicians did not keep notes, perhaps concerned about being accused of treason in the volatile politics of the time. Most of our knowledge today is gleaned from diplomatic reports sent by diplomats to their own leaders.

Read more:
Henry VIII’s notes in prayer book written by his sixth wife reveal musings on faith, sin and his deteriorating health – new discovery

Queen Anne’s lupus

Queen Anne (1665-1714) had 17 pregnancies, 11 of which resulted in miscarriages or stillbirths, with the remainder all dying in childhood. Despite the regularity of her failed pregnancies, her physician, John Radcliffe, repeatedly declared she was in good health and her miscarriages were due to “the vapours”, a vague diagnosis often attributed to aristocratic women.

It is now believed Anne may have been afflicted with the autoimmune condition lupus.

For Anne’s contemporaries, the name of the illness perhaps mattered less than the real political issue it presented: who would become monarch after her? With no heirs, there was real political fear her Catholic half-brother James Francis Edward Stuart (“The Old Pretender”) would claim the throne.

But the law excluded Catholics from the taking the crown, and ensured Anne would be succeed by her second cousin, George I of Hanover and Britain.

George III and mental illness

George III (1738–1820) famously suffered from bouts of mental illness, more recently been speculated to be caused by Porphyria, a hereditary blood disorder.

Throughout his illness bulletins were issued by his doctors informing the public of his condition.

These were kept deliberately vague, with the aim to reassure the public rather than divulge details. His repeated bouts of illness mean his health was a constant in the media of the time, with frequent, at times twice-daily, updates during episodes.

His illness called into question his ability to be monarch, a situation eventually resolved by the installing of his son, later George IV, as Prince Regent.

Read more:
Who owns the royal body? Public interest in royal health reveals anxieties about our rulers

A family of haemophilia

Queen Victoria has been called the “Grandmother of Europe” due to her many descendants. This also came with a deadly legacy, haemophilia, given the moniker “the royal disease”.

Haemophilia is an inherited disorder which mostly affects males, where the blood does not clot properly. This can lead to severe or spontaneous bleeding which can be dangerous if not treated properly. While the illness can be managed well today, in Victoria’s time little was known about it.

It is believed Victoria passed on the trait to three of her nine children, at a time when life expectancy for those who had the disease was just 13 years old. Two of her daughters were asymptomatic carriers, however her fourth son Prince Leopold (1853-1884) was afflicted with the disease.

While the royal family were careful to manage what information was publicly released about his illness, his status meant it garnered public attention. It was covered in medical journals of the time, and later in newspapers.

As knowledge of the illness grew, both the public and members of the royal family were able to use it to guide decisions on marriages to limit its spread.

A new approach

In the days leading up to Elizabeth’s death on 2022, the media reported her as resting “comfortably” and provided no information on the nature of her illness. Even her death certificate failed to reveal her cause of death, other than as old age.

Charles has signalled he wants to do monarchy differently than his mother. After his recent prostate surgery, his office stated he wanted to inspire men to look after their prostates. Anecdotal evidence suggests more men have sought medical tests in response which is being called the “King Charles effect”.

Now, the announcement of Charles’s cancer diagnosis signals a new approach by the royals.

Read more:
What happens if King Charles can no longer perform his duties?

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The royals have historically been tight-lipped about their health – but that never stopped the gossip – https://theconversation.com/the-royals-have-historically-been-tight-lipped-about-their-health-but-that-never-stopped-the-gossip-222873

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vinh Thai, Professor, RMIT University

Despite most businesses around the world returning to some form of normal after the pandemic, supply chain problems continue to disrupt the manufacturing and availability of new and second hand cars.

This disruption has caused vehicle prices to sky-rocket, adding to cost-of-living pressures already being experienced by most Australians.

Car prices in Australia rose throughout 2023 with an average increase of almost 20% since April 2020, even faster than the consumer price index.

The increase has varied depending on the model, but the biggest increases – of about 25% – have been in the small car sector.

This resembles the situation in Europe where the prices of the cheapest models produced by the five biggest carmakers have increased by an average of 41% since 2019.

The impact of supply not matching demand

The availability and cost of buying new cars in Australia have been impacted by both demand and supply issues.

On the demand side, many new orders have been delayed by time lost during the lockdowns followed by strict social distancing requirements holding up work at all stages of the manufacturing process.

This has been worsened by new car demand increasing across all markets. In Europe, new vehicle registrations rose 11% in October 2023 for 14th consecutive month. The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries in Australia also recorded breaking new vehicles sales in August 2023 with 15.4% increase compared to the same period in 2022.

Read more:
What the Red Sea crisis could mean for the electric vehicle industry and the planet

There has also been an ongoing global shortage of semiconductors to make
computer chips. Not only are these chips commonly used in household devices, they are essential as cars are increasingly automated and electric vehicles become popular.

Geopolitical tensions

The shortage and associated hold ups, has been exacerbated by confict in the Middle East, particularly the Israel-Hamas war as Israel is a major supplier of chips to the world.

Shipping delays caused by the need to re-route car carriers due to attacks by Houthi rebels on ships operated by supporters of Israel in the conflict have also held up supply.

A shortage of the special RORO (roll on, roll off) shipping carriers used to transport cars has added to delays. While demand for car carriers has grown 37% since 2019, the fleet has barely grown.

Problems at the Australian end

When shipments do finally arrive at the Australian ports, they face port congestion. This is caused by several factors:

• large amounts of cargo arriving at Australian ports and terminals at the same time as previously delayed exports are being sent offshore

• higher demand for quarantine checks after pests and seeds were found in 1000s of vehicles being brought in from Asia and Europe last year

• insufficient labour to conduct biosecurity checks and handle cargo

• industrial action, such as the ongoing dispute at DP World-operated ports, affecting productivity.

A second hand solution?

Understandably, when there is a shortage of new cars and prices are high, consumers have turned to second-hand cars which are already in the country. However, this has led to a supply-demand imbalance, reducing the availablity and increasing the cost of this once cheaper option.

The longer the wait for new cars and the higher the costs, the greater the pressure on the second-hand car market.

Read more:
Attacks on cargo ships in the Red Sea threaten Australia’s trade – we need a Plan B

Some strategic customers may worsen the problem by registering to buy several different cars and then only buying the first one that arrives, therefore jacking up the demand and slowing down the process. They may also demand a high price for their used car, putting a vehicle out of reach for some would-be buyers.

It will take time to resolve

Supply will gradually catch up with demand, therefore easing the problem. But the current global geopolitical tensions and industrial action on the wharves, makes it difficult to predict when this will happen.

In the short term, the Albanese government may need to intervene to deter unhealthy trading practices. This could be achieved in the short term by imposing higher taxes on people who register to buy more cars than they need for personal use.

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

– ref. Finding a reasonably priced new car is almost impossible. And the second hand market is not much better – https://theconversation.com/finding-a-reasonably-priced-new-car-is-almost-impossible-and-the-second-hand-market-is-not-much-better-221607

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jess Melbourne-Thomas, Transdisciplinary Researcher & Knowledge Broker, CSIRO

From Kakadu to Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef, to Sydney Opera House and the convict sites, Australia’s list of World Heritage places is incredibly diverse. Each site represents the culture, nature and history of this land, in its own way.

But climate change threatens these sites. Many heritage values are already being eroded. On-ground managers of these and other protected places need practical guidance on how to understand these impacts and respond effectively.

We developed a climate change “toolkit” for World Heritage properties with site managers and Traditional Owners. To our knowledge, it is the first time such guidance has been co-developed and tested with World Heritage property managers and Indigenous experts in this country.

Bringing climate science and Indigenous knowledge systems together promises to produce better results for heritage protection as the climate changes. And there is no time to waste. We must act fast to address these threats to Australia’s unique and special places of global significance, so their World Heritage values can be enjoyed for generations to come.

Mounting climate threats to heritage

Our new research explored climate impacts at three very different sites:

1. Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory
2. Australian Convict Sites, scattered around the country
3. Willandra Lakes Region, southwest New South Wales.

The vast tropical Kakadu National Park is one of four Australian properties listed for both outstanding cultural and natural values. Cave paintings, rock carvings and archaeological sites date back tens of thousands of years. Tidal flats, floodplains, lowlands and plateaus provide habitat for many rare or endemic plants and animals.

But Kakadu is vulnerable to rising sea levels, leading to coastal erosion and saltwater entering wetlands. The region is also experiencing more extreme temperatures and heatwaves, changing fire regimes, more intense cyclones, and increasingly intense extreme rainfall events.

The Convict Sites consist of 11 properties around Australia. Fremantle Prison lies 5,500km west of Arthur’s Vale Historic Area in the east. The Old Great North Road in the north is 1,500km from the Port Arthur Historic Site in the south.

Many convict sites are on coasts and islands where wave action and sea level rise are increasingly damaging structures, landscapes and cultural materials. Convict sites are also vulnerable to storms and bushfires because the buildings are so old.

The arid Willandra Lakes Region contains fossil remains of a series of lakes and sand formations, along with archaeological evidence of human occupation dating back 45,000–60,000 years.

Hot and dry conditions are causing erosion of topsoil, increasingly exposing Aboriginal cultural heritage.

Read more:
Climate change must be a catalyst for reform of the World Heritage system

Tapping into deep knowledge

We worked closely with these sites to develop and test our new toolkit.

An Indigenous Reference Group of Traditional Owners from a number of World Heritage sites in Australia contributed their expert knowledge. This includes practical guidance such as how to engage with and enable Indigenous leadership so Traditional Owners can participate in or lead climate vulnerability assessment and adaptation planning. The toolkit also describes using the right knowledge for the right Country (showing respect for traditional knowledge) and establishing agreements to ensure Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights are protected.

Effectively addressing climate impacts on World Heritage values requires the deep knowledge, values and worldviews of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. This includes practices such as cultural burning to reduce the risk of intense bushfire, or cultural knowledge of long-term changes in water cycles. Tapping into this deep understanding of connections between nature and culture can help support the management of spiritual, living landscapes.

Adapting to climate change

World Heritage site managers can take a broad range of practical actions to adapt to climate change.

These actions, such as firefighting or invasive species control, may not be new. They just need to be undertaken more often or intensely.

Other variations on existing actions may include greater emphasis on physical separation between flammable vegetation and assets such as larger firebreaks, or responding to new invasive species, possibly including shifting ranges of invasive native species.

Some new management actions will be required, such as flood protection, relocating assets and new technological interventions. In cases where climate change is likely to lead to changes in the values of a site, there may be a need to reevaluate management objectives and strategies (such as accommodating new groups of organisms or “ecological communities”, letting some populations decline, and managed retreat of shorelines).

There may also be a need to consider vulnerability at different scales, sometimes across larger areas. In some cases, managers may aim to retain certain values across a wider landscape while accepting local change.

Read more:
Climate adaptation projects sometimes exacerbate the problems they try to solve – a new tool hopes to correct that

Looking ahead

Managers, stakeholders and rights-holders of World Heritage sites and other protected places, such as Ramsar wetlands and marine protected areas, can now use the toolkit to plan for current and future climate threats. They can focus on the parts most useful to them, depending on their capacity and needs. Ultimately, this resource will help protect Australia’s cultural and natural heritage.

The following people were members of the Indigenous Reference Group and are coauthors of our research paper: Bianca McNeair, Lance Syme, Chrissy Grant, Nicholas Pedrocchi, Patricia Oakley, Amy Stevens, Denis Rose, Erin Rose, Jade Gould, John Locke and Lynda Maybanks.

Jess Melbourne-Thomas received funding for this work from the Australian Commonwealth Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.

Brenda Lin received funding for this work from the Australian Commonwealth Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.

Lance Syme is Principal Archaeologist at Kayandel Archaeological Services, providing cultural heritage and archaeological consulting services throughout New South Wales. He is now working part-time for the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on World Heritage. Funding for the work described in this article came from the Australian Commonwealth Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.

Mandy Hopkins received funding for this work from the Australian Commonwealth Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. This led to further support for vulnerability assessments from Budj Bim world heritage property management.

– ref. Climate change will strike Australia’s precious World Heritage sites – and Indigenous knowledge is a key defence – https://theconversation.com/climate-change-will-strike-australias-precious-world-heritage-sites-and-indigenous-knowledge-is-a-key-defence-222393

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anne Twomey, Professor emerita, University of Sydney

King Charles III’s cancer diagnosis will turn minds to the question of what happens if he becomes unable to fulfil his constitutional duties. Buckingham Palace has announced he will continue performing his official paperwork and his weekly meetings with the prime minister throughout his treatment.
But what happens if he becomes seriously ill?

There are three options: counsellors of state, regency and abdication.

Counsellors of state

First, King Charles can delegate some or most of his royal functions to counsellors of state, as happens most commonly when he is travelling overseas. Two counsellors of state act jointly in exercising royal powers such as assenting to laws, receiving ambassadors and holding Privy Council meetings.

The counsellors of state are the spouse of the sovereign and the next four adults in line of succession to the throne – being Queen Camilla, Prince William, Prince Harry, Prince Andrew and Princess Beatrice.

However, Prince Harry is excluded while he is outside the United Kingdom, and in practice Prince Andrew and Princess Beatrice are not called on to act as they are not “working royals”.

As this left only Queen Camilla and Prince William to perform the role, a law was passed in the UK in 2022 to add Princess Anne and Prince Edward to the list.

Counsellors of state may carry out most of the sovereign’s functions while he is ill, but they cannot dissolve parliament, except on his instruction, and they cannot create peers. Whether they can appoint a prime minister remains a matter of debate. Most significantly, they cannot exercise powers with respect to the King’s other realms, such as Australia.

Regency

The second option is a regency. This occurs if the King “is by reason of infirmity of mind or body incapable for the time being of performing the royal functions”. The sovereign does not control when or for how long a regency occurs. Instead, it is initiated by a declaration of three or more of: the sovereign’s spouse, the lord chancellor, the speaker of the House of Commons, the lord chief justice of England and the master of the rolls.

The UK’s Regency Act requires Prince William to be regent, as he is the next adult in line of succession to the crown. The regent has the powers of the King with respect to the United Kingdom, but cannot change the order of succession to the crown.

The Regency Act does not give the regent powers in relation to realms such as Australia and New Zealand. New Zealand resolved the problem by inserting a section into its Constitution Act which provides that whoever is made regent under the law of the UK may perform the royal functions of the sovereign with respect to New Zealand. Australia, however, has done nothing in this regard, so a British regent would have no powers with respect to Australia.

Read more:
What are the legal and constitutional consequences for Australia of Queen Elizabeth II’s death?

Abdication

The final option for an incapacitated monarch is abdication. This leads to difficult questions about how an abdication would operate in relation to each of the realms.

When King Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, it was achieved by both a signed instrument of abdication and the enactment of legislation to which the various realms, including Australia, assented. This is not possible today, as the UK can no longer legislate with respect to Australia.

Abdication would therefore raise difficult questions about whether there needed to be a separate abdication of the King of Australia, to trigger the application of the rules of succession that are now part of Australian law, or whether covering clause 2 of the Constitution, which defines the sovereign by reference to Queen Victoria’s “heirs and successors in the sovereignty of the United Kingdom”, would apply.

Because of the potential constitutional messiness of dealing with the King’s role in his 14 realms beyond the United Kingdom, it is likely abdication would be avoided.

Consequences for Australia

If King Charles were incapacitated and counsellors of state or a regent were appointed, would this cause any real problem in Australia?

The King’s only remaining substantial powers with respect to Australia are the appointment and removal of the governor-general and the state governors. The governor-general’s term is expected to expire in the middle of the year. If King Charles were then seriously ill and unable to appoint a new governor-general, no one could do so, as neither counsellors of state nor a regent could do so.

Instead, the current governor-general, David Hurley, could choose to continue in office, as there is no formal termination of his office until he is replaced.

Alternatively, he could resign and his office could be filled on a temporary basis by a state governor as administrator, as is the usual practice when there is a vacancy in the office. If the office of a state governor becomes vacant, the lieutenant-governor, who is often the chief justice of the state, can exercise the governor’s functions.

However, if a regency were to continue for a long time – perhaps years – this could become unsustainable.

The other consideration is that if there is a regency, there is no power to dismiss a governor-general. So if a constitutional crisis arose, such as that in 1975 with the dismissal of the Whitlam government, the governor-general would know that he or she could act without the prospect of dismissal on the advice of the prime minister. This unbalances the constitutional pressures that are deliberately built into the system, giving a stronger hand to the governor-general and weakening the position of the prime minister.

Read more:
Australian politics explainer: Gough Whitlam’s dismissal as prime minister

The problem could be addressed in the same way as the rules of succession to the throne were changed in 2015 to remove gender discrimination. It would involve each state enacting a law requesting the Commonwealth to enact a law that recognised the authority of a regent to exercise the sovereign’s powers with respect to Australia.

While it is not essential to fix this problem, it would still be wise, as a matter of orderly constitutional housekeeping, to address it before any real difficulties arise.

Anne Twomey has received grant funding from the Australian Research Council and occasionally does consultancy work for governments, Parliaments and inter-governmental bodies. She has also written books about the constitutional aspects of the Crown.

– ref. What happens if King Charles can no longer perform his duties? – https://theconversation.com/what-happens-if-king-charles-can-no-longer-perform-his-duties-222870

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kit Messham-Muir, Professor in Art, Curtin University

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains themes and references to historical events which may be distressing.

Yhonnie Scarce, a Kokatha and Nukunu artist, has emerged in recent years as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists. Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, curates a survey of significant works by Scarce from the last few years.

The exhibition presents a “best-of” for a wider West Australian public who may not be familiar with the South Australian artist. At the same time, it’s an opportunity for Western Australia’s art followers to see a range of works not previously assembled in Perth.

A translucent shower

The exhibition is installed across two levels, conjoined through an architectural void that invites spectacle. In this void, Scarce’s glistening Thunder Raining Poison (2016-17) hangs from the ceiling by hundreds of wires.

Scarce’s works are so steeped in the contemporary art idiom that, despite the centrality of glass throughout this exhibition, we might not at first consider her a “glass artist”. Yet in Thunder Raining Poison, and in her two other “cloud” works, Cloud Chamber (2020) and Death Zephyr (2016), the artist draws our attention to the fragility and beauty of the material.

Each of these cloud works are clusters of hanging glass yams. This potato-like tuberous root vegetable, which urban-dwelling Australians may not be familiar with, grows throughout the bush.

In Scarce’s aesthetic and material, yams signify death. The sensitivity of the exhibition’s themes, and perhaps the low lighting, seem to demand quiet in the space. In this silence we hear the gentle chiming of the hand blown yams, reinforcing their fragility.

Hanging in clusters, these clear and black glass yams evoke the dynamism of clouds collapsing into sheets of rain – black rain – falling after the nuclear bomb tests that were carried out on Scarce’s traditional lands in South Australia, between 1952 and 1963. Born in Woomera, Scarce is descended from the Lake Eyre Kokatha people and the Southern Flinders Ranges Nukunu people.

The works resonate with another Indigenous work in the gallery’s collection that isn’t currently on display: Lin Onus’s installation work, Maralinga (1990), which depicts an Aboriginal woman and children facing, in horror, a mushroom cloud signified by radioactive symbols. Yet Scarce’s material dialect is much more poetic.

Nuclear colonialism

Australian nuclear colonialism is a recurrent theme in the exhibition, with the upstairs gallery including three of Scarce’s Glass Bomb works from the Blue Danube series (2015).

Perhaps the most poignant work with this theme is Fallout Babies (2016). Set in a corner space, this work is partially surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling photograph of a graveyard with the buried bodies of children from communities that were exposed to the fallout from the bomb testing. The bodies are metaphorically represented by bulbous glass plums, which speak of fertility and promise.

Hollowing Earth (2016-17) is made of materials quite literally infused with trace amounts of uranium. It glows a luminous green under the black-lit gallery. The glass vessels in Hollowing Earth represent bush bananas, another recurrent bush food in Scarce’s aesthetic cypher. The glass surfaces of many of these voluminous glowing bodies are torn while the glass is still hot and malleable.

Read more:
As the world pushes for a ban on nuclear weapons, Australia votes to stay on the wrong side of history

Bush bananas also appear in the work In The Dead House (2020), a work previously installed in the old mortuary in Adelaide Botanic Gardens as part the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Laid out on a vintage mortuary trolley, fragile glass bodies are ripped wide open.

The work references early 20th century Adelaide coroner, Ramsay Smith, who profited from exporting Aboriginal remains to British museums. Smith is notorious for having decapitated the corpses – and the bush bananas echo heads and bodies that have been violently disgorged.

Moments of gentle beauty

Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day includes some moments of gentle beauty found in the love of family and tragic ancestry. Both Remember Royalty (2018) and Dinah (2016) belong to stories of trauma, institutionalised racism and inhumane colonial abuse. But these are also moments in this exhibition that actively seek to restore pride that was once brutally taken.

Dinah includes a cropped photograph of the artist’s great grandmother, Dinah Coleman, taken in the 1920s without her consent. She was at Koonibba, a Lutheran mission near Ceduna, South Australia.

As the wall text notes, the photo was quite possibly taken by the anthropologist Norman Tindale, who visited in 1924. This suggests it was an anthropological image that subjected Dinah to a dehumanising scientific gaze. Scarce’s cropped photograph of Dinah restores her dignity and humanity.

Similarly, Remember Royalty takes images of Scarce’s close ancestors and enlarges them on fine vintage fabrics. They look out at an audience in 2024, returning their gaze as equals. Not surprisingly, this complex and sensitively presented work was acquired by London’s Tate Modern gallery in 2022.

As with the other works in this exhibition, we have the opportunity to contemplate this work in its raw yet visually seductive materiality, before this and the other works are once again dispersed.

Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day is at the Art Gallery of Western Australia until May 19.

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Kit Messham-Muir is the Lead Chief Investigator on ‘Art of Peace’, a three-year ARC Linkage project in partnership with the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) and National Trust (NSW) and in collaboration with academics from University of New South Wales, University of Melbourne, University of the Arts London and California State University. Art of Peace receives a Linkage Project grant (LP210300068) from the Australian Research Council over three years (2023-2026). He is not involved in any way with the curation or exhibition of Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day at AGWA.

– ref. Yhonnie Scarce’s glass works are a glistening, poignant exploration of how nuclear testing affected First Nations people – https://theconversation.com/yhonnie-scarces-glass-works-are-a-glistening-poignant-exploration-of-how-nuclear-testing-affected-first-nations-people-221868

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Woods, Professor of Health Economics, University of Technology Sydney

Australia’s subsidised aged care services now help around 1.5 million older people to receive care and support. Taxpayers contributed A$28 billion to the various programs in 2022-23. And yet the system is governed by an act that was first passed in 1997.

A lot has changed over the past two and a half decades – more people are living longer with chronic conditions and impairments that necessitate care, more of that care helps people stay in their own home, older people have more choice and control, and quality and safety are subject to tighter regulation and improved enforcement.

These and many other reforms are welcome. But as a result, the 1997 Aged Care Act has become a patchwork of change upon change. So when is the new act due, and what does it aim to achieve?

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What we know so far

Following the report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, the government is rewriting the act with a view to it commencing on July 1 2024 – less than five months from now.

Parts of an initial draft of the act have been released for public consultation. The proposed act adopts a rights-based approach to caring for older Australians, and consolidates and simplifies multiple pieces of existing legislation.

Some of the improvements will include:

• establishing a complaints commissioner to increase the independence and transparency of investigating aged care complaints

• increasing whistleblower protections so older people, their families and aged care workers feel comfortable about exposing unacceptable treatment from a provider

• streamlining access to aged care through a single-assessment process, rather than older people having to be assessed by different organisations depending on their particular care needs.

But several significant issues have yet to be addressed. The partial draft of the act lacks any provision relating to the proposed fees, payments and subsidies, or about how people with different needs will be prioritised and how aged care places will be allocated to them.

The act also makes many references to the government making rules about how the aged care system will actually operate. As always, the devil is in the detail but the rules have not yet been made public.

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The new act also attempts to address the fundamental concern that Australia’s Constitution doesn’t provide the federal government with powers to make laws specifically for “aged care”. This is unlike the government’s powers over banking, marriage, the age pension and many other matters.

Instead, the act attempts to patch together a range of other powers, such as for providing sickness and hospital benefits and making binding international treaties (including disability support) under its external affairs powers.

It is unclear whether this approach will make the system too complex, compared with seeking agreement from the states to refer their powers to the federal government, or to enact a common set of laws on which both levels of government agree.

Federal Parliament will have the final say on what the act will contain and when it is passed.

How does this fit with other recent changes?

The new act aims to provide an enduring structure that brings the current aged care system, including recent reforms, into a single consistent regulatory regime.

The newly introduced residential care workforce standards, for instance, will be carried over to the new act. They include the requirement for 24/7 cover by registered nurses so nurses are always available to care for a resident when needed, at any time of the day or night.

The new levels of care minutes that nurses and other personal care workers must provide to residents will also be part of the new act.

The act will also include the Star Ratings for individual aged care homes. These help inform residents about the quality of the care their homes provide.

Read more:
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Will this be it for a while?

The recent changes to aged care are not the end of the decade-long reform journey.

In the immediate future there will be changes to payment arrangements for care as the government responds to the – yet to be released – report of the Aged Care Task Force.

Following that, a new Support at Home program is being designed to consolidate and streamline the current home care packages, short-term restorative care and respite care. Having already been deferred twice in recent years, the current proposed start date is July 1 2025.

The drafting of a modern, simplified act is an important opportunity to provide the best legislative regime for caring for older Australians.

But such an opportunity comes only once every decade or two. While the new legislation needs to put older people at its centre, it must also facilitate a system that is sustainable and sufficiently robust to support them to access subsidised care when they need it.

The broad framework is there, but there are less than five months to get the details right.

Read more:
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Michael Woods is Professor of Health Economics at the UTS Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation. He is Policy Advisor to the UTS Ageing Research Collaborative (UARC) and Chairs the Editorial Board of Australia’s Aged Care Sector. He undertakes policy research for the Commonwealth Government and the aged care sector. Michael was a former Deputy Chair of the Productivity Commission. He has no funding or other conflicts of interest related to this article.

Eugenia Tsihlis is a Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Law at UTS, within the UTS Ageing Research Collaborative (UARC). She has contributed to the Australia’s Aged Care Sector reports and UARC submissions in response to the proposed new Aged Care Act. Eugenia has no funding or other conflicts of interest related to this article.

– ref. Changes are coming for Australia’s aged care system. Here’s what we know so far – https://theconversation.com/changes-are-coming-for-australias-aged-care-system-heres-what-we-know-so-far-222757

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tamika Worrell, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Critical Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University, Macquarie University

It is well documented that Australian teachers face challenges incorporating Indigenous perspectives and content in their classrooms. The approach can sometimes be somewhat tokenistic, as if the teacher is “ticking a box”. We need a more culturally responsive teaching workforce.

Generative AI is advancing at a fast pace and quickly finding a place within education. Tools such as ChatGPT (or Chatty G as the kids say) continue to dominate conversations in education as these technologies are explored and developed.

There are many concerns around academic integrity and things to consider on how to best introduce and control this technology in practice.

As teachers continue to look for ways to meet Indigenous content requirements, it makes sense they would turn to generative AI to assist them in an area they struggle with. But using these tools could do more harm than good.

Indigenous peoples’ concerns around AI

Indigenous people have raised a range of concerns around generative AI. These include the risks these technologies pose for Indigenous people and knowledges.

For example, AI-generated art is causing a significant threat to Indigenous peoples’ incomes, art and cultural knowledges.

The lead image of this article was created using the generative AI platform Midjourney. The prompts included the terms Indigenous, artwork, colourful, artificial intelligence, Aboriginal, Western Sydney and painting styles.

This shows that with AI, anyone can easily produce “Indigenous-style” art and content. This poses a threat to Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights.

With AI being trained on vast data sets primarily from the western corpus of knowledge, there are also concerns relating to Indigenous data sovereignty – the right to “govern the collection, ownership and application of data about Indigenous communities, peoples, lands and resources”.

Generative AI can also perpetuate misinformation that harms Indigenous communities. This happened during the Voice referendum campaign, when fake, AI-generated images of Indigenous “no” voters were published on social media.

Importantly, there is also the potential impact to Country due to the environmental costs of data centres – an issue that must be addressed as more generative AI tools come online.

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How do these concerns translate into the classroom?

All students should see themselves reflected in the classroom. This especially applies to Indigenous students, as attested by Closing the Gap targets for educational attainment.

A 2022 report by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership states:

The legacy of colonisation has undermined Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ access to their cultures, identities, histories and languages. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students have not had access to a complete, relevant and responsive education.

Children need both “windows and mirrors” in the classroom. American education scholar Rudine Sims-Bishop has aptly put this in the context of children’s literature:

When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.

Students need to see themselves reflected in the curriculum, including the technologies used.

By using generative AI, teachers risk perpetrating and promoting inaccuracies and spreading false information instead of meaningfully engaging with Indigenous values and knowledge systems.

This can potentially harm the student–teacher relationship, which is incredibly important, particularly for Indigenous students.

Late last year, the Australian government released a framework for generative AI in schools. It offers “guidance on understanding, using and responding to generative AI” to everyone involved in Australian school education.

The framework also affirms the necessity of respecting Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights. But we need more extensive work to ensure teachers can do this appropriately. Currently, there is a lack of research that looks at the intersection between generative AI and Indigenous content inclusion in the classroom.

Indigenous futures and AI

Generative AI, and other forms of AI, have extensive potential to benefit Indigenous people and their communities. Many Indigenous people are engaging with the technologies to this effect.

For example, you can take a virtual trip to the Torres Strait Islands, spend time at the AI Marae in New Zealand or engage with the Indigenous Protocols and AI Laboratory

But to make room for what is seemingly an inevitable future that involves AI, work needs to be done in policy and professional bodies to ensure Indigenous inclusion at all levels – from development to use.

Teachers and students must be supported with the necessary resourcing to promote critical thinking when engaging with generative AI. Teachers will look to the relevant government bodies, whereas students will look to their teachers for guidance.

It is clear we need further guidance on Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights, and culturally appropriate AI use for educators.

Generative AI still has much to learn, and Indigenous knowledges have much to teach it.

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

– ref. Generative AI in the classroom risks further threatening Indigenous inclusion in schools – https://theconversation.com/generative-ai-in-the-classroom-risks-further-threatening-indigenous-inclusion-in-schools-222254

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liz Ritchie-Tyo, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Monash University

When a tropical cyclone forms, people who live in its path anxiously monitor news of its direction – and strength. If a Category 5 storm with wind speeds of 250 kilometres per hour is heading for you, you prepare differently than you would for a Category 1 with wind speeds of 65 km/h.

In a hotter world, cyclones are expected to become less common but more intense when they do form. That, according to new research, means it might be time to consider introducing a Category 6 to the hurricane scale used in the United States to better communicate the threat.

But do cyclone scales need a new category for more severe storms? Only one hurricane in the Western Hemisphere has yet gone past the 309 km/h winds the researchers nominate for a Category 6. And the whole idea of storm scales, including Australia’s own tropical cyclone scale, is that Category 5 storms are those likely to do catastrophic damage. It’s hard to see what a Category 6 could offer.

What is worth exploring is how we can better communicate what specific threats a given storm poses. Is it carrying more water than average, making flooding a bigger risk? Or are unusually intense winds likely to bring more water ashore in storm surges?

In December, Cyclone Jasper made landfall as a Category 2 storm in northern Queensland. Despite being at the lower end of severity, it dumped huge volumes of water and triggered devastating floods. Residents and farmers criticised the Bureau of Meteorology for not fully conveying the size of the threat. More specific warnings could help.

What are storm scales for?

The world’s tropical cyclone warning centres classify cyclones using simple intensity scale systems based on maximum wind thresholds. Cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are different names for the same tropical storms.

There are several different intensity scales in use. The Saffir-Simpson scale is used by the US National Hurricane Center for hurricanes forming in the central and eastern North Pacific and North Atlantic basins. Different scales are used in the Australian, North Indian, Southwest Indian, and western North Pacific basins. Importantly, every scale in use is open-ended, meaning their final category is based on winds greater than a certain threshold – but with no upper limit.

Tropical cyclones can pose many threat to us while at sea, as they approach and make landfall, and even afterwards.

These threats include the intense winds near the eye of the tropical cyclone, the ring of damaging winds which can extend hundreds of kilometres from the eye, wind-driven high seas, storm surge, heavy rainfall and associated flooding and mudslides.

We can’t say one of these is definitively more deadly or damaging than any other threat. Tropical Cyclone Oswald, a 2013 Category 1 storm, led to heavy rainfall and flooding through Queensland and New South Wales, while the 1992 Category 5 Hurricane Andrew caused catastrophic wind damage – but little rain or storm surge damage when it hit Florida.

Read more:
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So do we really need a Category 6?

The researchers suggest a Category 6 on the Saffir-Simpson scale would be for storms with winds over 86 metres per second (309 km/h).

They suggest five tropical cyclones have now passed that threshold since 2013. Certainly, Hurricane Patricia (2015) would meet that threshold. But this is the only one which meets their criteria in the last 40 years, as it was well observed by US aircraft missions. The other four were not in the Western Hemisphere – they were typhoons affecting Asia. In these areas, meteorologists do not use aircraft reconnaissance to confirm wind speeds. Estimates of wind speeds can vary substantially. That means the wind speeds of these four cannot be verified.

To make their case, the researchers also use the maximum possible intensity a tropical cyclone could reach in a given environment. It’s useful to scientists because it can be directly calculated from climate projections and is often used to explore how tropical cyclone intensity might change in the future. But it has an important limitation – tropical cyclones rarely reach their maximum potential intensity.

In their original formulation of the Saffir-Simpson scale, Herb Saffir and Bob Simpson described a Category 5 hurricane making landfall as one which would cause catastrophic destruction of all infrastructure. The Australian Tropical Cyclone Scale has different thresholds but similar reasoning for a Category 5 storm.

Based on the understanding that winds at Category 5 and above lead to catastrophic outcomes, it’s hard to see how adding a Category 6 would help the public. If a Category 5 means “expect catastrophic consequences”, what would Category 6 mean?

How can we best communicate cyclone threats?

Scientists came up with tropical cyclone intensity scales as a way to clearly communicate the nature and size of the damage likely to occur. They are not intended to be comprehensive, as they’re based on a single wind speed valid only for the area near the eye, where the most intense winds occur.

Fundamentally, these scales are meant to measure how well our buildings and infrastructure can survive the wind force and also protect us. If our building codes, evacuation plans, and other protective strategies ever improved to the point where Category 5 storms no longer lead to catastrophic loss, it might make sense to introduce a Category 6. But we’re not at that point. The catastrophic loss from a Category 5 or Category 6 would look the same: catastrophic.

What we should do is explore whether we can improve the scale in different ways. Can we keep their simple, effective messages while also capturing the different threats a weather system like this can pose?

Read more:
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Liz Ritchie-Tyo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Is it time for a Category 6 for super cyclones? No – warnings of floods or storm surges are more useful – https://theconversation.com/is-it-time-for-a-category-6-for-super-cyclones-no-warnings-of-floods-or-storm-surges-are-more-useful-222736