Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steve Macfarlane, Head of Clinical Services, Dementia Support Australia, & Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Monash University

The term “sundowning” is sometimes used to describe a tendency for people living with dementia to become more confused in the late afternoon and into the night.

At the outset, I should emphasise the term “sundowning” is overly simplistic, as it’s a shorthand term that can encompass a vast number of behaviours in many different contexts. When assessing changed behaviours in dementia, it’s always better to hear a full and accurate description of what the person is actually doing at these times, rather than to just accept that “they’re sundowning.”

This set of behaviours commonly described as “sundowning” often includes (but is not limited to) confusion, anxiety, agitation, pacing and “shadowing” others. It may look different depending on the stage of dementia, the person’s personality and past behaviour patterns, and the presence of specific triggers.

Why then, do such altered behaviours tend to happen at specific times of the day? And what should you do when it happens to your loved one?

Read more:
When someone living with dementia is distressed or violent, ‘de-escalation’ is vital

Fading light

We all interpret the world via the information that enters our brains through our five senses. Chief among these are sight and sound.

Imagine the difficulty you’d have if asked to perform a complex task while in a darkened room.

People living with dementia are just as dependent on sensory input to make sense of and correctly interpret their environment.

As light fades towards the end of the day, so too does the amount of sensory input available to help a dementia patient interpret the world.

The impact of this on a brain struggling to integrate sensory information at the best of times can be significant, resulting in increased confusion and unexpected behaviours.

Read more:
Serving up choice and dignity in aged care – how meals are enjoyed is about more than what’s on the plate

Cognitive exhaustion

We have all heard it said that we only use a fraction our brain power, and it is true we all have far more brain power than we typically require for most of the day’s mundane tasks.

This “cognitive reserve” can be brought to bear when we are faced with complex or stressful tasks that require more mental effort. But what if you just don’t have much cognitive reserve?

The changes that ultimately lead to symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease can begin to develop for as many as 30 years before the onset of symptoms.

During that time, in simple terms, the condition eats away at our cognitive reserve.

It is only when the damage done is so significant our brains can no longer compensate for it that we develop the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

So by the time someone first presents with very early dementia symptoms, a lot of damage has already been done. Cognitive reserve has been lost, and the symptoms of memory loss finally become apparent.

As a result, people living with dementia are required to exert far more mental effort during the course of a routine day than most of us.

We have all felt cognitively exhausted, run down and perhaps somewhat irritable after a long day doing a difficult task that has consumed an extreme amount of mental effort and concentration.

Those living with dementia are required to exert similar amounts of mental effort just to get through their daytime routine.

So is it any surprise that after several hours of concerted mental effort just to get by (often in an unfamiliar place), people tend to get cognitively exhausted?

What should I do if it happens to my loved one?

The homes of people living with dementia should be well-lit in the late afternoons and evenings when the sun is going down to help the person with dementia integrate and interpret sensory input.

A short nap after lunch may help alleviate cognitive fatigue towards the end of the day. It gives the brain, and along with it a person’s resilience, an opportunity to “recharge”.

However, there is no substitute for a fuller assessment of the other causes that might contribute to altered behaviour.

Unmet needs such as hunger or thirst, the presence of pain, depression, boredom or loneliness can all contribute, as can stimulants such as caffeine or sugar being given too late in the day.

The behaviours too often described by the overly simplistic term “sundowning” are complex and their causes are often highly individual and interrelated. As is often the case in medicine, a particular set of symptoms is often best managed by better understanding the root causes.

Read more:
These 12 things can reduce your dementia risk – but many Australians don’t know them all

Steve Macfarlane is affiliated with HammondCare and the RANZCP.

– ref. What is ‘sundowning’ and why does it happen to many people with dementia? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-sundowning-and-why-does-it-happen-to-many-people-with-dementia-208005

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Skeels, Postdoctoral Researcher, Macroevolution and Macroecology Group, Australian National University

The animals in Australia are super-different to those in Asia. This goes without saying; we know Australia is full of weird and wonderful creatures found nowhere else on Earth, such as the platypus and the koala.

But it may surprise you to know that many of our most iconic critters came from Asia and arrived only recently (in geological terms, at least).

These most recent members of Australia’s characteristic fauna include many lizards, such as goannas and thorny devils, and other animals including hopping mice, flying foxes and the kookaburra. Yet the traffic was largely one way – there are far fewer representatives of Australian fauna in Asia than there are Asian fauna in Australia.

Why is the situation so asymmetrical? In a study published today in the journal Science, my colleagues and I analysed information about the distribution and habitat of 20,433 species of land-dwelling vertebrates – as well as climate and plate tectonics over the past 30 million years – to find out.

Drifting continents on a cooling planet

The story begins more than 200 million years ago.

Dinosaurs were still a fairly new group walking the Earth, and Australia was part of a supercontinent called Gondwana. This giant landmass included modern Antarctica, South America, Africa, Australia and India.

Gondwana had just broken off from another supercontinent, called Laurasia, which was smooshed together from modern North America, Europe and Asia. The separation of Gondwana and Laurasia removed the last land connection between Australia and Asia.

Now, Gondwana itself began to fall part pretty shortly after separating from Laurasia. Each piece of Gondwana gradually became isolated and began its own independent journey. Many of these journeys led them back to Laurasia.

Read more:
Breaking new ground – the rise of plate tectonics

India collided with Eurasia and formed the mighty Himalaya; South America crashed into North America, forming the snaking land bridge of Panama; Africa bumped into Eurasia, forming the Mediterranean Sea; and Australia began on a collision course with Asia.

Australia untethered its final Gondwanan connections between 45 and 35 million years ago, when it broke off from Antarctica.

At that time, Australia was much further south than it is today. As it drifted northwards, the increasing space between Australia and Antarctica kick-started the Antarctic circumpolar current, which cooled the planet dramatically.

Read more:
Explainer: how the Antarctic Circumpolar Current helps keep Antarctica frozen

Australia was isolated, cooling down and drying out. A unique set of animals and plants began to evolve.

Intercontinental stepping stones

Meanwhile, the Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates began to collide, forming thousands of islands in the Indonesian archipelago, including today’s Lombok, Sulawesi, Timor, and Lesser Sunda Isles.

These islands don’t belong to either the Australian continental shelf (also known as Sahul), which includes Australia and New Guinea, or to the Asian continental shelf (known as Sunda), which includes Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and Bali.

This in-between zone is known as Wallacea, after the 19th century British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace. He first observed a difference in the types of animals found on either side of what is now called Wallace’s line.

The islands became stepping stones between two continents whose groups of species hadn’t seen each other in a very, very long time. But, as our new research shows, only particular kinds of animals were able to make the crossing and establish themselves on the other side.

Wet and dry

The first factor determining which animals spread between continents was their ability to cross the ocean.

Of all the groups of animals that moved between Asia and Australia, we found the staggering majority were birds.

But this wasn’t the only key to success.

Animals also needed to be able to thrive in their new location, where the environment may have been quite different. We found animals that could tolerate a broad range of wetter and drier environments were more likely to make the move successfully.

This makes sense. Sunda is wet and Sahul is dry, and if you can tolerate more of that wet–dry spectrum, you are better equipped to move between these regions.

But we still have a big question. Why did more animals move from Sunda to Sahul than in the other direction?

A lot can change in 30 million years

The final piece of the puzzle is considering how these crucial factors – the ability for species to disperse and establish themselves in new environments – have changed over time.

We know Sunda has been dominated by lush tropical rainforest since before Australia broke away from Antarctica. Later, when the stepping-stone islands began to pop up, they also had the kind of humid equatorial climate favoured by the rainforest vegetation, and later animals, from Sunda.

In Australia, however, similar rainforests were shrinking and being replaced by grasslands and woodlands in most areas.

What this means is that as animals move from Sunda, through the stepping-stone islands, to New Guinea and the northern tips of Australia in Sahul, they experience a band of similar humid tropical climate.

However, most animals in Sahul evolved on the Australian mainland, most of which was much drier. So moving from mainland Australia, through New Guinea and the stepping stones, to Sunda, requires adaptations to a very different environment.

And Australian animals that did manage to make their way onto the stepping-stone islands would have likely met competition from Sunda groups already happily existing in their preferred tropical climate.

Answers are a long time in the making

Climate and geography are some of the most important things that shape evolution and the distributions of different species. Taking the long view, deep into the past, helps us understand the world around us.

Simple questions – like “why are there no kangaroos in Asia but hopping mice in Australia?” – have answers that are hundreds of millions of years in the making.

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

– ref. Why are there hopping mice in Australia but no kangaroos in Asia? It’s a long story – https://theconversation.com/why-are-there-hopping-mice-in-australia-but-no-kangaroos-in-asia-its-a-long-story-209067

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Rich, Senior lecturer in History and International Relations, Curtin University

As Saudi Arabia continues to open up internationally, it is yet again in hot water over its human rights record. The current controversy revolves around the kingdom’s increasing presence in the sporting world and accusations of “sportswashing”.

In recent years, the Saudis have thrown the heavy weight of their Public Investment Fund into partnerships with Western institutions like the PGA, Formula One racing and World Wrestling Entertainment.

Riyadh is also luring top soccer players like Cristiano Ronaldo to its national league and using Lionel Messi as an influencer to promote the kingdom.

Recently, Saudi Arabia has signalled its interest in holding women’s tennis tournaments and even potentially hosting the 2030 FIFA World Cup, as well.

While the precise dollar figure of all of these efforts is difficult to determine, it has easily reached into the billions.

‘Sportswashing’ atrocities?

But the Saudi sport blitz has been received with less enthusiasm by many outside onlookers.

Human Rights Watch and many Western commentators describe it as simple “sportswashing” – an effort to distract the world’s attention from its continual disregard for international human rights.

For instance, the kingdom has racked up a well-documented record of human rights violations during its eight-year proxy war in Yemen.

Despite Riyadh’s murky peace deal with the Houthi fighters in Yemen in April, the war will remain a stain on its humanitarian record for the foreseeable future.

The lack of any meaningful reparations following the peace deal also raises the question whether the deal was simply a way for the Saudis to disengage from the war at a time when a serious rebranding campaign was needed.

Read more:
Peace may finally be returning to Yemen, but can a fractured nation be put back together?

At home, political freedoms and rights remain tightly constrained by the regime. Despite moves to relax some restrictions on women and religious minorities, these reforms have paradoxically come with increasingly harsh measures towards peaceful dissidents.

Only last year, female activists Salma al-Shehab and Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani received prison terms of 34 years and 45 years, respectively, for their engagement with social media posts criticising the regime.

More recently, several Howeitat tribesmen were sentenced to death on terrorism charges for peacefully protesting a megacity project that threatened their ancestral village.

Building a new Saudi brand

But while obfuscating human rights issues is certainly part of the equation when it comes to the kingdom’s sports mania, its motivations are far more strategic than simple bait-and-switch tactics.

At their core, these actions fit within a broader effort outlined in the Saudi Vision 2030 campaign to rebrand the country and normalise it within the wider liberal international order.

For many outside observers, the kingdom has long been an outlier on the international stage. It’s been characterised as a primitive backwater cut off from the outside world and ruled over by a despotic monarchy that has relied on a combination of oil wealth and Islamic extremism to maintain its hold on power.

Such reductive depictions ignored a far more complex, rich and colourful history. However, few in the West were keen to explore this more nuanced viewpoint (at least if my book sales are anything to go by).

Saudi royals have historically been content with such stereotypes, too, provided they maintained their sovereignty and security at home. The kingdom made little effort with soft power initiatives outside the Islamic world.

The international art, culture and sporting worlds were seen as being in stark contrast to the psychological and cultural norms of the Wahhabi orthodoxy that has long governed Saudi public life.

This all changed in 2015, however, with the ascension of King Salman and his chosen heir, Prince Mohammad bin Salman. The younger bin Salman quickly assumed de facto control over many of the country’s key portfolios.

In contrast to his conservative predecessors, the prince was seen as a “disruptor” with little regard for tradition. Like with many of the Silicon Valley tech-bros he emulates, bin Salman likes to move fast and break things. This includes everything from traditional religious institutions to architectural rules.

Bin Salman’s vision is to remake the Saudi brand as a modern authoritarian technocracy in the mould of the United Arab Emirates or Qatar. He wants to emulate these successful case studies through economic reform, military modernisation, technological innovation, cultural modernisation and the opening of the kingdom to cosmopolitan cultural engagement and exchanges.

A new platform to engage with the world

These efforts took a hit, however, after the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Bin Salman denied being personally involved in the murder, counter to what US intelligence reports concluded. But some believed the global anger of Khashoggi’s killing could have
damaged the prince’s reputation badly enough to hamper his future as a statesman.

Memories can be remarkably short-lived, though. And five years on from the killing, bin Salman’s rebranding agenda is charging ahead with increased urgency. This is where the Saudi sporting onslaught comes in, and why it needs to be understood.

Control and influence over these sports provide the kingdom with enormous cachet. Saudi Arabia can use this new stature to engage in cultural outreach with the world, influence global opinion and portray itself as modern and dynamic.

To characterise all of this as mere sportswashing may be catchy, but reduces a much broader and strategic effort.

Indeed, implicit in the notion of sportswashing is that the Saudis are suddenly concerned about the country’s association with human rights violations.

But looking at the examples of Qatar and the UAE, authoritarian regimes are able to flout international norms and laws on human rights and still fit quite comfortably within the wider liberal international order. The reason: the countries serve a valuable function in sustaining that same system.

While human rights abuses will undoubtedly continue to plague the Saudis’ efforts, bin Salman is betting big they won’t stand in the way of other states and companies engaging with an increasingly open and cosmopolitan kingdom. If history is anything to go by, he may just be right.

Read more:
Big money bought the PGA Tour, but can it make golf a popular sport in Saudi Arabia?

Ben Rich receives funding from The US State Department.

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

– ref. Is Saudi Arabia using ‘sportswashing’ to simply hide its human rights abuses – or is there a bigger strategy at play? – https://theconversation.com/is-saudi-arabia-using-sportswashing-to-simply-hide-its-human-rights-abuses-or-is-there-a-bigger-strategy-at-play-208468

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, University of South Australia

The price of eggs is rising. So many of us may be looking for cheaper alternatives.

First, the bad news. Nothing can replace a boiled, poached or fried egg.

Now, the good news. Lots of other ingredients can make foods puff and rise, give your meal a rich taste, or hold together ingredients.

So try using some of these egg substitutes and save the real eggs for your breakfast.

Read more:
How to save $50 off your food bill and still eat tasty, nutritious meals

Why are eggs so popular?

Eggs are incredibly nutritious. They’re a rich source of protein, vitamins A and D, pigments called carotenoids, and minerals.

Eggs are also versatile. We use them to make a range of savoury and sweet foods, sauces and drinks, not to mention breakfast.

Their popularity and versatility lies in the unique characteristics of the two main parts of the egg – the white and yolk. Each contribute different properties in cooking.

Egg yolk is about 55% water, 27% fats, 16% protein (with small amounts of carbohydrate). Egg white is about 10% protein and 90% water, with only traces of fat and carbohydrates. Different types of protein in egg white contribute to them foaming when whisked.

Read more:
Five foods that used to be bad for you … but now aren’t

Eggs are versatile

Eggs have a different role in different types of cooking.

1. Eggs are a raising agent

Beaten or whisked eggs act as a raising agent by creating pockets of air in foods, which expand with cooking, making the foods puff and rise. This gives baked products like cakes, biscuits and muffins volume and an airy feel.

Using just the egg white leads to a remarkably light and delicate foam, as we see in meringues. In mousse and souffles the whites and the yolk are beaten separately, then mixed together. This leads to a light, airy and smooth texture.

2. Eggs hold together other ingredients

Eggs combine ingredients and hold them together during cooking. This gives foods – such as vegetable or meat patties – their structure.

3. Eggs bind other liquids

The liquid from eggs binds other liquids from other ingredients in the recipe into a soft, moist and tender mass. We see this in scrambled eggs, omelettes and egg custard.

4. Eggs act as emulsifiers

The egg yolk contains different proteins (livetin, phosvitin) and lipoproteins (lecithin). These act as emulsifiers, allowing fat and water to mix together in foods such as mayonnaise and hollandaise sauce.

5. Eggs boost flavour

The fat in egg yolks helps carry and release the flavour of some fat-soluble components of food. These foods may taste differently without the eggs. Eggs also contribute to foods feeling soft in the mouth.

As eggs have different roles in cooking, you may need different egg substitutes depending on the outcome you want. Here are some cheaper (and vegan) options.

Read more:
Eight cracking facts about eggs

Aquafaba

Aquafaba is the liquid drained from cans of bean – typically from chickpeas as it has the most neutral flavour. This is the all-round winner, especially as most of us probably throw it away without realising what a gem it is.

Aquafaba is versatile. You can whip it up like egg whites to form a foam that can be used to make meringue (even pavlova), gelato, in baked goods, and for binding ingredients in patties. It also contains emulsifiers and can be used to make mayonnaise.

You’ll need different quantities of aquafaba depending on the recipe. Generally, though, you use about two to three tablespoons of aquafaba to replace the volume of fluid from an egg.

On the downside, aquafaba can taste a bit beany. So it is best to use it with stronger flavours to overcome this.

Nutritionally, aquafaba has small amounts of carbohydrate (about 2.6g/100 millilitre), and negligible levels of protein (about 1.3g/100 millilitre).

You can also freeze aquafaba.

Vinegar and baking soda

Mixing a teaspoon of baking soda with a tablespoon of vinegar can replace an egg in most baked goods. This produces carbon dioxide, which is trapped into air pockets, and makes foods rise.

This is a very cheap option, however its success may be limited by how heavy the rest of the ingredients are. This combination also has very little nutritional value.

Read more:
Is apple cider vinegar really a wonder food?

Commercial egg replacements

These are available at most supermarkets, are very cheap compared with eggs, have a long shelf life, and are easy to use, with instructions on the packaging.

Typically, they contain different starches from potato, tapioca and pea protein (which act as leavening agents and form foams), along with raising agents. They are recommended for use in baked goods. However they have very little nutritional value compared to an egg.

Flaxseed meal and chia seeds

Use either a tablespoon of flaxseed meal, or chia seeds, added to about three tablespoons of water. Allow the mixture to sit for a few minutes to form a gel.

The gels can be used in baked goods, however this option isn’t as cheap as the others, and has a slight nutty taste.

Both these seeds provide nutritional value. They are both rich in the plant-based omega-3 fatty acid called alpha-linolenic acid. We can convert this fatty acid into healthy omega-3 fatty acids, but at a slow rate. These seeds also provide fibre, polyphenols and antioxidants.

Read more:
Does TikTok’s chia-lemon ‘internal shower’ really beat constipation? Here’s what science says

Tofu

Tofu, which is made from soybeans, is widely available and fairly cheap. It has the most “eggy” appearance and so makes it ideal as a substitute for scrambled eggs and in quiche. However, you will need to use silken tofu and puree it.

Tofu is highly nutritious and provides protein, fat, calcium, polyphenols and anti-oxidants.

You could also use soy flour. Add one tablespoon to three tablespoons of water, then use immediately in baking and for binding ingredients together. However, soy flour does not contain calcium, which tofu does.

Read more:
Is fake meat healthy? And what’s actually in it?

Mashed fruit

Mashed bananas or applesauce are also used as egg substitutes. These mainly act to bind and hold moisture in the food and help carry the flavours.

You also get the nutritional value of the fruit. Due to the natural sugar that in fruit, this will sweeten your baked goods so you will need to drop the sugar by about a tablespoon (or more) for each piece of fruit you add.

Evangeline Mantzioris is affiliated with Alliance for Research in Nutrition, Exercise and Activity (ARENA) at the University of South Australia. Evangeline Mantzioris has received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, and has been appointed to the National Health and Medical Research Council Dietary Guideline Expert Committee.

– ref. Eggs are so expensive right now. What else can I use? – https://theconversation.com/eggs-are-so-expensive-right-now-what-else-can-i-use-207837

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

Today will be a moment of truth for hundreds of thousands of Australians and for what the federal court has condemned as a
“shameful chapter” in Australian public administration.

This morning, the Governor-General will be presented with the final report of the royal commission into the automated debt-recovery system known as Robodebt.

Announced in the lead-up to the 2016 federal election by the then treasurer, Scott Morrison, and then social security minister Christian Porter, the scheme promised to save the budget $2 billion with smarter use of technology to “better manage our social welfare system and ensure that every dollar goes to those who need it most”.

Instead, the court found the Commonwealth simply asserted that some 433,000 Australian benefit recipients owed it back money – calculations it later admitted “did not have a proper legal basis”.

Unlawful, yet it happened

What Robodebt did was assume that people receiving benefits while earning income received stable income over a whole year, allowing it to average an entire year’s income to estimate how much they earned per fortnight.

A report I prepared for the royal commission, using data provided by the department of social services, found that in reality very few benefit recipients who received income did so at a steady rate.

More than 93% of those with earnings while on youth payments did so unevenly, as did 95% of those receiving income while on Newstart or Austudy, and 90% of those receiving income while getting parenting payments.

Robodebt was unlawful both because the Social Security Act requires payments to be calculated on the basis of the income received in the fortnight for which the payment was made, and because it reversed the onus of proof, effectively requiring people to prove they didn’t owe what it said they owed.

Looking beyond who’s to blame

Today’s report will rightly prompt lots of discussion about who was to blame, as well as the impact of the scheme on people made to repay money they did not owe and those who administered it.

But we must also look at how we repair the systems that allowed it to happen.

I have argued elsewhere that while the decisions leading to Robodebt were made by individuals, they were also made within a layered context of precedents, established processes, and social, economic, and political environments.

The most important aspects of this deeper political environment included

• the strong commitment of political parties to reduce budget deficits

• the formal and informal budgetary rules about spending and savings

• the size of social security and welfare (around 35% of Commonwealth spending)

• the highly targeted nature of the social security system

• and political and popular judgements about social security recipients and their “deservingness”.

This encouraged the government to present a scheme intended to cut the budget deficit as one that would ensure integrity in the social security system, using – as it turned out – very imperfect methods of matching data.

Read more:
Why robodebt’s use of ‘income averaging’ lacked basic common sense

What was pushed aside was that the Social Security Act is intended to be beneficial legislation. It’s supposed to ensure support is provided to people during periods of reduced income due to job loss, family breakdown, illness or disability, or when caring for others or retired from work or when studying.

Providing that support when needed made it a powerful instrument for stabilising the economy and society and reducing inequality.

Robodebt undermined trust in that system. It will need to be rebuilt.

Identifying the reforms to public administration and political practice that are needed will be the most important things to look for in the report.

We have to make sure Robodebt can’t happen again.

Read more:
‘The culmination of years of suffering’: what can we expect from the robodebt royal commission’s final report?

Peter Whiteford receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is a member of the Interim Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee. He prepared a report for the Royal Commission into Robodebt on the policy and research issues raised by the program. This report was prepared without charge.

– ref. The Robodebt royal commission will tell us who’s to blame, but that’s just the start – https://theconversation.com/the-robodebt-royal-commission-will-tell-us-whos-to-blame-but-thats-just-the-start-208916

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Nguyen, Lecturer in Fine Arts, Monash University

Hụi is a constant but often hidden feature of life for many Vietnamese-Australians.

This clandestine loan-savings scheme was a way for low-income Vietnamese refugees to buy their first family car, start a small business or make a home deposit. In Vietnam, Hụi is also called Họ, Phường or Biêu.

These activities had existed for centuries before being recorded in 19th-century colonial texts. They survive today in rural areas and overseas diaspora communities who have struggled to secure bank loans and legal credit.

It is interesting that multiple cultures across the Moana-Pacific use the term “Hui” to describe a collective gathering or negotiation.

The Chinese character 會 (Huì) denotes a longhouse where meetings and secret societies take place. In Hawaiian, Hui stands for a club, community partnership or extended family. Similarly for Māori, Hui represents a meeting, congregation or conference.

With rising cost of living and housing unaffordability, it feels particularly relevant to understand how so many Vietnamese refugees, arriving with almost nothing, managed to join the property market during the historically high interest rates and property booms of the 1980s and 2000s.

Vietnamese diaspora

The Fall of Saigon in 1975 coincided with the lifting of the White Australia Policy and a Fraser government that accepted over 70,000 South-East Asian refugees.

With this mass intake, fragmented resettlement programs and unreliable social and legal services compounded the realities of post-traumatic stress and poverty. The outer suburbs where our families could afford to live – Cabramatta, Footscray, Richmond, and Inala – quickly gained a reputation for gang violence, becoming infamous as the drug-riddled Vietnamese ghettos of the eastern seaboard.

Despite these obstacles, our families managed to secure new wealth by playing Hụi.

Read more:
War’s physical toll can last for generations, as it has for the children of the Vietnam War

Collective sharing

This narrative is not some miraculous journey of refugee achievement. Instead, it involves the under-acknowledged privileges of class within the diaspora.

A portion of Vietnamese refugees who had the resources to escape war were from the highly educated professional middle class or the entrepreneurial merchant class.

Class affiliations meant people could reconnect through well-established social networks to form tightly regulated Hụi clubs wherever we resettled.

These small groups of between 20 to 40 members would individually scrape together a monthly payment, often around $500, to hand over to a Chủ Hụi: the Hụi Boss in charge of collecting and managing the operation.

Monthly payments could range anywhere between $200 and $5,000, depending on the risk tolerance and income bracket of each club.

If a Hụi member urgently needed cash for a family emergency, or to quickly secure a house deposit, they would competitively bid for the cash pool. The higher their bid, the less they would take home. The winner was the person with the highest bid.

For example, if your bid of $65 wins at a $500 per month club, then every other member in the club will only pay you $500 less $65. In this case, it would be $435 per member for your month.

In a club of 30 members, your winning $65 bid grants you a one-time take-home amount of $13,050 from a possible $15,000.

Members can only ever “win” once per cycle. Eventually, over a cycle of 30 months – one month per member – everyone has a turn at taking home the cash pool.

These collective savings schemes were risky, with no legal recourse if members decided to Dựt Hụi, or “do a runner”.

To discourage breaking Hụi, clubs regularly administered retaliatory punishment through organised crime and gang violence.

Today, our aunties still play Hụi. Maintaining their social, class and wealth networks, they now fund regular plastic surgeries, overseas holidays and home renovations. Within a few short decades, our Hụi families have re-entered the middle class.

But, as artists, we believe Hụi is more than the property market.

Intrinsically collective and self-determined, Hụi encourages unexpected forms of cultural agency and mobilisation beyond institutional permission or containment.

Playing the Đông Sơn Drum

Learning from ongoing strategies and calls for the repatriation and reclamation of ceremonial objects by First Nations leaders, our art project RE:SOUNDING aims to access cultural instruments and reintroduce their sounds and musical traditions to the broader Vietnamese community.

The Đông Sơn Drum is an ancient ceremonial instrument woven into the mythology and identity of Vietnamese people. These drums are held in colonial museums and ethnographic collections the world over. Those remaining in Vietnam are similarly preserved in institutional silence.

Over the past six years, we have been seeking permission from multiple museums to record sounds from these drums. However, it was only when various family members drew from their Hụi takings that we were finally afforded access. We had the quick cash to purchase a Đông Sơn drum when it came up at a local estate auction.

The reluctance of museums to let us even touch our ceremonial instruments meant our only option was to draw from Hụi to buy back this cultural asset.

RE:SOUNDING has since played and made accessible the Đông Sơn Drum to audiences at Footscray Community Arts Centre, the Australian War Memorial, the Sydney Opera House and currently MÌNH at the Fairfield City Museum and Art Gallery.

The capacity to reclaim culture through social forms of rematriation, beyond institutional forms of repatriation, demonstrates how Hụi facilitates both economic and cultural participation.

Having helped many Vietnamese refugees to enter the property market, Hụi now offers us a way to reclaim our cultural inheritance without seeking permission and approval from museums that had stolen these objects in the first place.

Read more:
What an exhibition by artists of the Vietnamese diaspora says about home and belonging

James Nguyen receives funding from The Australian Council for the Arts, Copyright Agency + ACCA commission, ARROW Collective, and Arts NSW.

Victoria Pham currently receives funding from the Cambridge Trust as a holder of ‘Cambridge Trust International Scholarship’. In that past she has received funding from The Australian Council for the Arts, Create NSW, ARROW Collective and the Arts Council of England.

– ref. How we’re using the Vietnamese ethnic savings scheme ‘Hụi’ to buy back our cultural heritage – https://theconversation.com/how-were-using-the-vietnamese-ethnic-savings-scheme-h-i-to-buy-back-our-cultural-heritage-204802

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Holly Thorpe, Professor in Sociology of Sport and Gender, University of Waikato

The ten-year coaching ban handed down this week by Athletics New Zealand to national pole vault coach Jeremy McColl is merely the latest in a long line of investigations to reveal the failure of sports organisations to protect sportswomen.

The independent investigation into McColl found “serious misconduct” over a “number of years” with women athletes under his supervision. This included harassment, “inappropriate sexual references” (including through social media and texting) and poor response to injuries.

The case is both unique and sadly familiar. At least 12 New Zealand sports bodies have come under scrutiny in recent times for cultures where sportswomen experienced abuse. These include Cycling New Zealand, Rugby New Zealand, Gymnastics New Zealand, Canoe Racing New Zealand, NZ Football and Hockey New Zealand.

This surely suggests there has been – and likely still is – systemic gendered abuse across New Zealand’s sport system. Urgent action is clearly needed.

High rates of abuse

Maltreatment and interpersonal violence – including neglect and physical, psychological and sexual violence – are common at all levels of sport for women, men and children.

One study of 1,665 elite athletes in Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium found extremely high rates of reported physical violence (25%), sexual violence (31%) and psychological or emotional violence (72%).

Sportswomen were found to experience abuse more than men, particularly sexual violence. An Australian study found 82% of 886 people surveyed had experienced some form of interpersonal violence in sport as a child. Rates were higher among girls and gender-diverse individuals.

Read more:
The price of gold — what high-performance sport in NZ must learn from the Olivia Podmore tragedy

Over the past three decades, researchers have examined various forms of gender-based and sexual violence in sport, usually perpetrated by male coaches, but also by others in the wider “support” teams.

The coach-athlete relationship inevitably involves an uneven balance of power. Abuse of that imbalance leads to significant harm and negative health impacts, with women athletes often reluctant to report the abuse. Some simply withdraw from sport altogether.

A global problem

These abusive relationships tend to exist within hierarchical, patriarchal and “win at all costs” sporting cultures. Organisational structures and systems often work to enable harmful practices.

But research shows gender-based violence is also increasingly happening online. And it is not only women athletes who experience it, but also women in other roles, such as officials, administrators and volunteers.

Read more:
Toxic sport cultures are damaging female athletes’ health, but we can do better

None of this is specific to New Zealand. Investigations have revealed gender-based violence across a range of sports internationally, where systems consistently fail to protect and support women.

Furthermore, it remains a significant blind spot for many sports organisations and professionals. Legal liability and protecting the sport rather than the athlete become priorities. Change can be sluggish, often lacking transparency and accountability.

Slow progress

The better news is that some governments and international sports organisations are developing safeguarding policies, procedures and toolkits.

An EU-led initiative has produced a good practice guide for sports bodies wanting to support athletes affected by sexual violence. And earlier this week, UNESCO published a handbook offering practical ways to address violence against women and girls in sport.

Read more:
Abuse in Canadian sports highlights gender and racial inequities

The International Olympic Committee also offers a “toolkit” to help national Olympic committees and international sports federations develop better policies and procedures. Various other organisations are working towards the same goals.

Despite such initiatives, many sports organisations still struggle to respond appropriately. In particular, it is vital that athletes themselves are involved in developing safeguarding policies.

Researchers and health professionals are increasingly calling for initiatives that centre the athlete and integrate holistic knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures and practices. We also cannot ignore the ways race, ethnicity, disability, gender identities and sexuality may amplify the risks and harms of abuse in sport.

Read more:
The Black Ferns review shows – again – why real change in women’s high performance sport is urgently overdue

Change has to be urgent

Meaningful change will require education for all those working in sport, athlete-centred policy and practice, and safe reporting pathways. Redress has to prioritise the needs of the abused.

Because women can be so reluctant to report abuse in the first place, it has been suggested a “carrot not stick” approach might work best. Teams and organisations that can show evidence of a positive, safe and healthy culture might be rewarded in future funding cycles, for example.

To that end, High Performance Sport New Zealand has launched a NZ$273 million strategy that includes prioritising athlete wellbeing. Yet it still doesn’t address the gender dynamics at play here.

Read more:
Long-range goals: can the FIFA World Cup help level the playing field for all women footballers?

Education programmes aimed at coaches and support staff working with women should be mandatory. Sportswomen must be able to report any concerns without fear for their careers or wellbeing. And anyone who observes questionable behaviour must have appropriate channels to report their concerns.

Minister of Sport Grant Robertson announced an independent Sport Integrity Working Group last year. So far, though, we’ve seen no actions or stated commitment to safeguarding women.

Everyone deserves access to a safe sporting environment, and safeguarding women in sport is an urgent issue. We can’t sit back and wait for the next headline about another national sports organisation or another male coach under investigation. The time for change is now.

Kirsty Forsdike receives funding from the Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions of the State Government of Victoria.

Holly Thorpe 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 another case of abuse in elite sport, why are we still waiting to protect NZ’s sportswomen from harm? – https://theconversation.com/with-another-case-of-abuse-in-elite-sport-why-are-we-still-waiting-to-protect-nzs-sportswomen-from-harm-209128

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

In a change of government tactics, Linda Burney this week deployed a sheet anchor to tie the Voice to practical outcomes. At the same time, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is weaponising the cost of living to flail it.

Their prime targets are “soft” voters – including those who are undecided, uncertain, sceptical, just tuning in.

Earlier, the government was putting much faith in “the vibe” to carry the Voice – a general appeal to righting the wrongs of the past and giving Indigenous people the opportunity to be heard. “Closing the gap” was part of the pitch but it was cast in general terms.

Now, with polling showing support for the Voice slipping, the government is desperate to arrest the slide. Probably its best chance of doing so is if it can convince people the Voice will bring tangible improvements on the ground for Indigenous people.

With this in mind Burney, the minister for Indigenous Australians, on Wednesday gave the proposed Voice a work program.

“From day one, the Voice will have a full in-tray,” she told the National Press Club. “I will ask the Voice to consider four main priority areas: health, education, jobs and housing.”

This was a new slant on how the Voice will operate. Previously, the emphasis has been on it taking the initiative. Now Burney is dealing herself actively into its work. “Bringing the priorities of local communities to Canberra will be incredibly important,” she said, “so will be the requests government makes of the Voice.”

The new emphasis is also designed to reinforce the message the Voice would concentrate on core issues – it would not be running out of control or distracted.

The issues in the areas Burney nominated are massive. If the Voice were to live up to the government’s hype about helping to close the gap, it would have to give well-based advice on broad policies as well as feedback from local communities. It would require sufficient resources to provide the former, while how well it did the latter would depend on the calibre of its individual members, whose precise methods of selection are yet to be determined.

In her just-released Australian Quarterly essay, Voice of Reason, Megan Davis, co-chair of the Uluru Dialogue, writes: “The quality of representatives, whether elected or selected by community, is essential to its success. At the end of the day, the success of the Voice will rise and fall on the men and women who represent the voices of the community.”

Davis also warns the Voice must be “sharply focused and driven by community interests”, and not spread itself too thin.

The government is wise to recalibrate its messaging, but it does risk adding to the confusion and widening the scope for more questions about the Voice’s operations.

Read more:
View from The Hill: Linda Burney says the Voice won’t be able to advise on Australia Day – but how could that be?

In the contest over the Voice, the government is relying on having time for the “yes” campaign to ramp up. But arguably, the long timeline may be working against the government and for the opposition leader. The government’s honeymoon is over, and the pressures many voters are under are worsening.

On Wednesday Dutton declared that, in the last year, “the prime minister’s obsession with the Voice means that he’s taken his eye off the ball when it comes to economic policy – and that’s why you’re paying more for your mortgage, it’s why you’re paying more for every element in your family and small business budget”.

Factually, this link is nonsense. But it may hit a few exposed nerves among voters.

Kos Samaras, from RedBridge consultancy group, says, on the basis of extensive focus-group research: “There’s growing resentment in some parts of Australia that this Voice issue seems to be on the minds of politicians in Canberra while these voters want action on their existential problems at a personal level – interest rates, rising rents, cost of living.”

Samaras (who formerly worked for the Labor Party) believes the cost-of-living crisis is a “punch in the guts” for the “yes” campaign.

Bearing in mind the referendum must win four states as well as a national majority, Samaras also warns that Western Australians are “starting to develop a view this is an east coast thing”.

A survey in June by the ACM newspaper group of more than 10,000 (self-selecting) readers found only 38% support for the Voice, and 55% opposition (7% undecided). More than seven in ten people felt the government hadn’t done enough to explain the voice to the community. The survey does not have the statistical rigour of a poll, but its base of 14 daily newspapers taps into major regional centres in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania (including Canberra, which is more progressive than elsewhere). So its finding is concerning for the “yes” case.

The Voice has backing from an impressive range of sporting, faith and community organisations, and strong support in the business sector, including from mining companies. Initially, this seemed a significant plus. But now there are doubts, with some fears ordinary people might react to what they see as “elites” telling them what to do.

Dutton has doubled down on his attacks on businesses that have endorsed and in some cases donated to the “yes” campaign. Homing in on Wesfarmers’ donation, he said: “I think the $2 million would be better off reducing prices in their supermarkets or reducing prices at Bunnings. When I go to Bunnings, I want to pay less for my goods, not more. […] Every time I hand over my credit card or cash at Bunnings, or at Coles, I don’t want part of that money going to an activist CEO.”

Whether Wesfarmers or similar firms donate to the Voice campaign is not going to make any difference to their prices. But that doesn’t mean the line won’t resonate with some voters.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has yet to announce the date for the referendum vote, continuing to repeat that it will be in the last quarter of the year. It’s a moot point whether the intensifying campaign will be to the advantage of the “yes” vote. Will the “soft voters” become increasingly irritated by anything that doesn’t relate to cost-of-living issues?

In retrospect, the referendum vote ideally should have been held earlier, even if the government had to face accusations of rushing it. Prospectively, the race is still there to be won by the “yes” case, but the government would also be wise to have a plan for handling the serious consequences of a loss.

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

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Linda Burney fills the Voice’s in-tray, as the government battles to stop slide in yes vote – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-linda-burney-fills-the-voices-in-tray-as-the-government-battles-to-stop-slide-in-yes-vote-209228

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Glen Thomas, Senior Lecturer in Professional Communication, Queensland University of Technology

Anyone with even the most casual interest in cricket will by now be well-versed in the debate over the “spirit of the game”. Alex Carey’s stumping of Johnny Bairstow on the final day of the second Ashes test sparked outrage, condemnation and ugly scenes in the Long Room at Lord’s Cricket Ground.

Plenty of commentators, former players and even prime ministers have had their say on whether Carey’s actions, while certainly within the laws of the game, were in accord with the more nebulous “spirit of cricket”. Precedents have been cited, some going as far back as WG Grace in 1882, who effected a similar dismissal in the very game that gave The Ashes their name.

English supporters have claimed Carey’s actions, while legal, went against the spirit of cricket because Bairstow thought the ball was dead and no longer in play.

Australian supporters counter by pointing out that Bairstow himself has dismissed people in the same way, so what’s the problem?

Cricket is unique in that it has laws that set out the rules of the game, but above this floats the spirit, to which aggrieved players and teams appeal when they feel hard done by.

No one, though, seems to have thought to ask for the thoughts of Australia’s favourite dad, Bandit Heeler. Bandit defines the spirit of cricket as playing hard, not complaining, and encouraging others to love the game.

Cricket lessons from Bluey

The program Bluey presents an iconic suburban Australia that shows children learning about life through games and play.

Season three features an episode called Cricket, in which Bandit explains to his daughter, Bluey, why cricket is much more than just hitting a ball around the grass.

The star of this episode is not Bluey, though. This time, Bluey’s school friend Rusty is the central character (dedicated Bluey viewers will know that Rusty’s dad serves in the Australian army and is often posted overseas on deployment).

In this episode, when it’s Rusty’s turn to bat, Bluey tells her dad they will never get Rusty out. Rusty loves cricket: Bluey creator Joe Brumm has said that Rusty is based on Steve Smith, former Australian captain. Smith has had his own problems with the laws of cricket, such as the “Sandpapergate” incident, in which Smith admitted to a ball-tampering plan and was suspended from the game for a year.

Rusty plays all the time, and when he isn’t playing, he’s practising or even sleeping with his bat next to him.

Read more:
Beyond Bluey: why adults love re-watching Australian kids’ TV from their childhoods

Bandit explains through flashbacks how Rusty learned to place his cut shot to avoid breaking a window, or how to deal with bad wickets that favour the bowler, or how to handle Tiny, a bigger kid who bowls at express pace.

The scenes with Tiny are the most telling ones. Rusty’s brother tells him that no one is going to go easy on him because he’s younger and smaller than the other kids. Rusty duly gets hit hard, and in the next scene can’t walk properly.

Advice on how to deal with Tiny comes from Rusty’s absent dad, who says Rusty will face harder things than a cricket ball as he grows up. The choices are that Rusty can back away and get out, or step up to the challenge. All he needs to do is keep his eye on the ball and look after his little sister.

That last element is the key to the episode. Rusty is initially shown as refusing to hit a catch to his little sister, but at the end of the episode is caught out by doing just that, even though Bandit tells us Rusty could have hit the ball into the middle of next week if he’d wanted to.

But when Rusty hits the catch, Bandit tells Bluey, “that’s what cricket’s about, kid”.

Rusty did not go easy on his sister earlier, but was generous when his job was done and the game was over. Hitting her a catch also helped inspire a love of the game in her and pride in her performance.

Read more:
Bluey was edited for American viewers – but global audiences deserve to see all of us

The spirit of the game

Bandit’s statement here is in some ways as nebulous as the back-and-forth arguments about the spirit of the game have been recently.

Australians have maintained that anything within the laws is fair game. English supporters were incensed because Bairstow was oblivious to what was happening and did not seek any advantage from his stroll down the wicket.

Bandit’s story gives us some clues and examples of what the spirit of cricket might mean. Rusty faces a bigger and scarier opponent and learns not to back away or expect special treatment. When the wicket is uneven or difficult, he learns to adapt to the conditions. Obsessive practice means his mother is not chasing after him with a slipper in hand to dole out a hiding. From this, Rusty learns the game, like life, is tough and played hard.

But there are moments to be generous when the game is not in the balance and there are times to show mercy to smaller or weaker opposition, such as Rusty’s sister.

Above all, cricket is about adapting, not backing away and being prepared to learn. But the real heart of the game is not in the player’s ability, but in their will – to be inclusive, encourage other players to love the game, and give someone else a turn when the job is done.

That might be the lesson for Bairstow. Yes, getting out in what a former England captain called a “dozy” way is not great. (As someone who was dismissed in the Under 14s’ in the same way 30 years ago, the memory still smarts.)

But as Bandit says, “that’s cricket”. When the job is done and you have nothing left to prove, then sure, hit a catch to your little sister.

Until then, though, keep your eye on the ball, mate.

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

– ref. ‘That’s cricket, kid’: what Bluey can teach us about the spirit of the game – https://theconversation.com/thats-cricket-kid-what-bluey-can-teach-us-about-the-spirit-of-the-game-209136

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vitomir Kovanovic, Senior Lecturer in Learning Analytics, University of South Australia

The South Australian government has announced a trial of AI technologies in eight public high schools.

This is the first trial of its kind in Australia.

“Edchat”, an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT but designed for educational use, has been developed by the state’s education department and Microsoft.

The eight-week trial will explore the use of AI to support student learning and understand the benefits and risks of these new technologies. After this, the government will decide whether to adopt the tool for other schools.

How have Australian schools responded so far to AI?

ChatGPT can be used by those 13 and over with parents’ consent.

But after ChatGPT arrived at the end of 2022, South Australia has been the only Australian state that has not banned generative AI tools in public schools.

In May, the Western Australia government lifted the AI ban for teachers in public schools.

But in private schools, the use of AI has been more widespread, raising the fear of the digital divide between public and private schools.

Attempts to limit or ban the use of AI technologies are also inherently problematic. A June 2023 survey by YouthInsight showed 70% of 14–17-year-old Australians have used ChatGPT – 59% used it for schoolwork or study, and 42% for completing school assignments.

Trying to restrict use translates to students using this in more informal and unsupervised spaces. A ban means students do not receive supervised support to learn how to best use these technologies for their education and future work lives.

What is the SA trial looking at?

The SA school trial will examine the benefits and challenges of using AI tools to support student learning.

Edchat is specifically designed for educational use, meaning its responses will take students’ learning in mind. While ChatGPT or Google Bard would simply answer a student’s question, Edchat does not necessarily respond in this way. Instead, it provides an appropriate hint or suggestion or will ask the student a counter question, in the same way a good tutor would support their students.

EdChat will available to students 24/7, providing them support both inside and outside classrooms.

Because Edchat is provided by the government, its usage data will be available for further examination. So it will be possible to understand how students interact with AI tools, what questions they ask, where and when they use the system, and so on. Much of the current AI discussion is based on speculation, but this trial will provide the first real world data to answer these questions.

This trial will attract much attention and will be closely monitored by other governments who are also grappling with similar questions around the use of AI in schools.

What questions do we have?

The key question at the moment is whether AI has net positive or negative effects on student learning.

There are highly opposing views on the use of AI in education. Some experts argue it will reduce students’ ability to write and think critically. Others see it as a valuable tool for improving student motivation and engagement, boosting their confidence, and unleashing their creative potential. The SA trial will start to provide concrete evidence of AI’s impact on student learning.

But to be really useful, the trial should also provide evidence of effective teaching practices using AI. Anecdotally, we are hearing teachers have had positive experiences with AI technologies, such as generating examples tailored to students interests, feedback on student’s writing, and supporting the development of critical thinking and idea generation. The SA trial can start to provide much stronger evidence of what is effective AI classroom practice.

Finally, the trial should provide evidence of constructive AI-enabled assessment. Current assessment practices focus on evaluating or measuring learning products (such as essays) rather than assessing the processes of learning (how and what students learn). It is important to address concerns the use AI tools can undermine assessment if students rely on automated assistance from tools such as ChatGPT to write their essay for them.

In this context, the trial should showcase a reimagined approach to current assessment practices. One that embraces the use of AI while ensuring the rigour of evidence that can be used to demonstrate student learning outcomes.

Read more:
The rise of ChatGPT shows why we need a clearer approach to technology in schools

Shane Dawson receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Vitomir Kovanovic 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. High school students are using a ChatGPT-style app in an Australia-first trial – https://theconversation.com/high-school-students-are-using-a-chatgpt-style-app-in-an-australia-first-trial-209215

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kimberley Reid, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Atmospheric Sciences, Monash University

In the past few weeks, climate records have shattered across the globe. July 4 was the hottest global average day on record, breaking the new record set the previous day. Average sea surface temperatures have been the highest ever recorded and Antarctic sea ice extent the lowest on record.

Also on July 4, the World Meteorological Organization declared El Niño had begun, “setting the stage for a likely surge in global temperatures and disruptive weather and climate patterns”.

So what’s going on with the climate, and why are we seeing all these records tumbling at once?

Against the backdrop of global warming, El Niño conditions have an additive effect, pushing temperatures to record highs. This has combined with a reduction in aerosols, which are small particles that can deflect incoming solar radiation. So these two factors are most likely to blame for the record-breaking heat, in the atmosphere and in the oceans.

Read more:
Ocean heat is off the charts – here’s what that means for humans and ecosystems around the world

It’s not just climate change

The extreme warming we are witnessing is in large part due to the El Niño now occurring, which comes on top of the warming trend caused by humans emitting greenhouse gases.

El Niño is declared when the sea surface temperature in large parts of the tropical Pacific Ocean warms significantly. These warmer-than-average temperatures at the surface of the ocean contribute to above-average temperatures over land.

The last strong El Niño was in 2016, but we have released 240 billion tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere since then.

El Niño doesn’t create extra heat but redistributes the existing heat from the ocean to the atmosphere.

The ocean is massive. Water covers 70% of the planet and is able to store vast amounts of heat due to its high specific heat capacity. This is why your hot water bottle stays warm longer than your wheat pack. And, why 90% of the excess heat from global warming has been absorbed by the ocean.

Ocean currents circulate heat between the Earth’s surface, where we live, and the deep ocean. During an El Niño, the trade winds over the Pacific Ocean weaken, and the upwelling of cold water along the Pacific coast of South America is reduced. This leads to warming of the upper layers of the ocean.

Higher than usual ocean temperatures along the equator were recorded in the first 400m of the Pacific Ocean throughout June 2023. Since cold water is more dense than warm water, this layer of warm water prevents colder ocean waters from penetrating to the surface. Warm ocean waters over the Pacific also lead to increased thunderstorms, which further release more heat into the atmosphere via a process called latent heating.

This means that the build up of heat from global warming that had been hiding in the ocean during the past La Niña years is now rising to the surface and demolishing records in its wake.

An absence of aerosols across the Atlantic

Another factor likely contributing to the unusual warmth is a reduction in aerosols.

Aerosols are small particles that can deflect incoming solar radiation. Pumping aerosols into the stratosphere is one of the potential geoengineering methods that humanity could invoke to lessen the impacts of global warming. Although stopping greenhouse gas emissions would be much better.

Read more:
Solar geoengineering might work, but local temperatures could keep rising for years

But the absence of aerosols can also increase temperatures. A 2008 study concluded that 35% of year-to-year sea surface temperature changes over the Atlantic Ocean in Northern Hemisphere summer could be explained by changes in Saharan dust.

Saharan dust levels over the Atlantic Ocean have been unusually low lately.

On a similar note, new international regulations of sulphur particles in shipping fuels were introduced in 2020, leading to a global reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions (and aerosols) over the ocean. But the long-term benefits of reducing shipping emissions far outweighs the relatively small warming effect.

This combination of factors is why global average surface temperature records are tumbling.

Are we at the point of no return?

In May this year, the World Meteorological Organization declared a 66% chance of global average temperatures temporarily exceeding 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels within the next five years.

This prediction reflected the developing El Niño. That probability is likely higher now, since El Niño has developed.

It is worth noting that temporarily exceeding 1.5℃ does not mean we have reached 1.5℃ by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change standards. The latter describes a sustained average global temperature anomaly of 1.5℃, rather than a single year, and is likely to occur in the 2030s.

This temporary exceedance of 1.5℃ will give us an unfortunate preview of what our planet will be like in the coming decades. Although, younger generations may find themselves dreaming of a balmy 1.5℃ given current greenhouse emissions policies put us on track for 2.7℃ warming by the end of the century.

So we are not at the point of no return. But the window of time to avert dangerous climate change is rapidly shrinking, and the only way to avert it is by severing our reliance on fossil fuels.

Read more:
Like rivers in the sky: the weather system bringing floods to Queensland will become more likely under climate change

Kimberley Reid receives funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.

– ref. Why are so many climate records breaking all at once? – https://theconversation.com/why-are-so-many-climate-records-breaking-all-at-once-209214

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Intifar Chowdhury, Youth Researcher, Centre for Social Research and Methods, Australian National University

Attempts to lower the voting age in Australia to 16 have been historically unsuccessful. More recently, the Make It 16 campaign has been advocating for the enfranchisement of 16 and 17-year-olds, but with no fines for under 18s who fail to cast their ballots.

Voluntary or not, lowering the voting age will have consequences for how political behaviour shapes political outcomes, especially for issues that particularly interest the young, such as climate change, cost of living, mental health and wellbeing.

Younger people tend to be more progressive in their views. This in turn would alter the make-up of the Australian electorate at each election or referendum. The addition of socially progressive voters might well be decisive on a highly contentious and divisive issue such as the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

Who should have the right to vote?

In 1973, following mass youth casualties in the Vietnam War, Australia’s voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. The reasoning behind this centred on equity: if 18-year-olds were old enough to fight and die, they should be old enough to vote.

Today’s equity arguments centre on taxation: many 16 and 17-year-olds pay tax and therefore should have equal rights to representation. However, this representation logic is not unique to 16 and 17-year-olds. It applies equally well to those under 16, as well as to tourists and temporary residents, who pay tax but do not have the right to vote.

Beyond the taxation argument, the franchise has been aligned with other adult responsibilities such as driving a car and consenting to sex. An important point of distinction, though, is the motivation: do they actually want to vote?

Although enthusiastic young leaders are driving campaigns such as Make It 16, we cannot be confident that a subset of politically engaged young people is representative of the Australian youth. There is no question about the cognitive abilities of 16 to 17-year-olds to engage with the electoral process. But there is little longitudinal data to firmly establish that younger people are enthused about voting.

That is not to say young people are not interested in politics. Evidence from Australia and elsewhere shows young people engage differently: their engagement with politics is based more on issues than party loyalties.

Being able to vote would mean younger people feel less excluded and alienated from politics. However, critics worry voluntary voting for 16 to 17-year-olds would weaken compulsory voting.

Australia’s compulsory voting means it has resisted youth electoral disengagement at the polls, which has markedly happened in other non-compulsory voting democracies. Given the highly transitory life stage they are in, young people are more likely to abstain if voting is voluntary. This would also run the risk of imprinting the habit of abstention.

What does the evidence suggest?

Data from the Australian Election Study suggest lowering the voting age would not invigorate electoral participation. It is likely early enfranchisement alone will not be a panacea for youth engagement. Rather, there are concerns that voluntary voting might further exacerbate the problem of lower youth enrolment.

My comparative study of youth electoral disengagement in advanced democracies studied a suite of institutional factors, including:

• electoral system (majoritarian versus proportional)
• type of executive (parliamentary/presidential)
• type of system (federal/unitary)
• party system (two/multi)
• voting age (16-21).

I found that, even when controlling for compulsory voting, it is the registration system that significantly influences generational engagement at the polls.

Transition to adulthood is characterised by increasing mobility in every aspect of life. On top of this, registration rules make it difficult for young people without a permanent, long-term residence to register to vote.

Within the voluntary registration system, young people are especially disadvantaged since new eligible voters are often unfamiliar with the registration system, including how and where to register to vote. Consequently, many confused, eligible voters inadvertently miss voter registration deadlines. Current evidence shows voter enrolment is lowest among those aged 18-24, at 89.5%, compared to a national figure of 97.2%.

However, what has been largely missing in the voting age debate is that lowering it to 16 may be a way to redress this enrolment discrepancy. It may be an institutional design feature that could cater to youth transition: 16-17-year-olds are more likely to be in parental homes when they enrol and then finally vote. This may help attract and keep them as active voters as they gain independence.

What does this mean for (major) parties?

The Coalition’s historic low support among young voters in the 2022 federal election may be a symptom of a long-lasting generational shift in the electorate. In the past two elections, only 26% of Gen Z voters, born after 1996, reported voting for the Coalition, while 67% of them voted either for the Greens or Labor. Although historically young people have tended to become more conservative as they age, recent evidence suggests voters born after 1980 are not doing that.

Extrapolating this trajectory of voting preferences, the addition of more socially progressive, issue-based younger voters will potentially benefit the left-of-centre parties, particularly the Greens. One political reason for Labor’s reluctance to lower the voting age seems to be the stark popularity of the Greens among Gen Z voters, which would increase the Greens threat to the incumbent.

Over the years, both major parties have been losing their (youth) votes to the Greens. Lowering the voting age may well pronounce this.

What would it mean for young voters?

Given the context of compulsory voting, Australia is best placed to implement the lowering of voting age to reap the benefits of engaging younger voters to the electorate. Much has been said about how this would improve youth representation, efficacy and outcomes.

However, lowering the voting age might not address the problem of youth distrust of politicians and the widening gap between younger generations and political parties. This would require a sincere effort to understand what causes the drift, before enfranchising younger voters and loosely tying them to a voluntary voting system. In fact, there is a real risk that voluntary voting might encourage the type of abstention driven by a strong dislike for politicians.

Enfranchising hundreds and thousands of additional voters would also inevitably raise the issues of ensuring proper enrolment and that young voters are well informed to vote. It would need to be accompanied by a major boost to civics education in Australian secondary schools.

All in all, while compulsory voting is the best system for lowering the voting age, we’d have to be careful not to undermine the system as it stands. Instead, it is important to tie it to efforts to inform younger voters and reduce the age-related barriers in a (compulsory) electoral process.

Intifar Chowdhury 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. Should the voting age in Australia be lowered to 16? – https://theconversation.com/should-the-voting-age-in-australia-be-lowered-to-16-208095

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

Next year’s American presidential election is shaping up to be extraordinary. Donald Trump is favoured to be the Republican candidate, despite facing multiple charges over removing classified documents. President Joe Biden has indicated he intends to run again, despite the fact he’ll be 82 at the time of the poll and 86 if he completed another four-year term.

In this podcast, author Bruce Wolpe – a senior fellow at the United States Centre at the University of Sydney, who previously worked with the Democratic Party in Congress, discusses his new book “Trump’s Australia”. Wolpe argues a second Trump term would have shocking consequences for Australia.

Wolpe says “as of now”, Biden is certain to run again. “The only thing that would upset that would be if there was a severe health issue that would prevent him from acting as president […] As far as Donald Trump is concerned, I see his chances of being the [Republican] nominee as over 50%. His chances of prevailing in the election is slightly under 50%.”

Wolpe paints a bleak outlook if Trump were to win a second term: “It would look like the first term, but only worse.”

“I talked to senior foreign policy officials, Americans and Australians, Liberal and Labor, Democrat and Republican, serving Republican and Democratic presidents and prime ministers from both parties. I asked them, what do you expect of Trump in a second term? And they said, he will never change.

“He is erratic, unhinged. He governs in chaos and that will continue, he is arrogant […] He is completely transactional. In other words, he’s not motivated by any moral considerations or ideological considerations.”

Wolpe believes that Australia is a “big echo chamber of US news”: “You get up early in the morning, turn on the news, and given the news cycle, what you hear on most days is from the United States, and that became really apparent with Trump […] There are some elements of the Australian political culture that really absorb it and really like it, and they’re animated about it.

“We have Trump attacking the media and saying fake news. And just guess what? Australian politicians, when they don’t want to answer a question, they say, Oh, that’s fake news. So these things leach into Australian society, the Australian dialogue.

“But then the question is, does Australia adopt Trump policies?

“We did not have stuff against transgender people, those candidates failed. We don’t have controls on books in libraries or attempts to do it, or teaching Indigenous history. Those culture war buttons that Trump and other Republicans push, they don’t have much prominence here, and that’s a really good thing.

“I think Australian democracy is extremely strong. Australia will continue to be an echo chamber, but I’m hopeful about how Australia can manage the incoming from the United States.”

Wolpe says if Trump were to win a second term, Australian democracy would survive, but questions whether the alliance between the two countries would. “America and Australia aligned because of the values they share. That means fidelity to democracy, human rights, rule of law. And if those things don’t exist in the United States, what are we to be aligned with?”

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

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Author Bruce Wolpe on the “shocking” consequences for Australia of a Trump 24 win – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-author-bruce-wolpe-on-the-shocking-consequences-for-australia-of-a-trump-24-win-209138

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Danielle Wood, Chief executive officer, Grattan Institute

The Australian consumer watchdog is halfway through an inquiry into childcare prices.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s interim report was released on Wednesday. It comes just days after the federal government’s increased childcare subsidies kicked in on July 1.

This is one of two major inquiries the federal government has commissioned on childcare. The Productivity Commission is also looking at how early education is set up in Australia.

After six months on the job, the ACCC report is full of facts and figures but short on conclusions.

However, reading between the lines of the 146 pages, the implication is competition alone is probably not enough to deliver high-quality and affordable childcare for Australian families.

Childcare markets are highly localised

The first reason for this is choice is much more limited than it may appear. Childcare markets are highly localised. Centres only really compete within a 2-3km radius, because most parents are not willing to travel more than 15 minutes for care.

The ACCC’s survey of parents suggests location and availability are the two most important factors in informing where parents chose where to send their child. That’s understandable – if you can’t find a convenient place on the days you need, most other considerations are moot. But that dynamic softens the degree of competition between centres.

The ACCC finds that affordability of care – the out-of-pocket costs parents face – is most important for determining how much care parents use. But crucially, once the decision has been made to use a certain amount of care, price appears less important than other factors. Indeed, price is only fifth on the list of the things parents consider when choosing between centres.

The implication here is price competition is weak. Indeed, fees are actually higher in local markets with more childcare services. This is likely due to a larger number of services in wealthier areas where parents can afford to pay more.

Read more:
Better, cheaper childcare is on the horizon in Australia, but 4 key challenges remain

Switching is costly

The second factor that softens competition is parents rarely switch providers.

The ACCC found 65% of parents they surveyed had not switched provider since 2020. One in five of this group said the reason they did not switch was that they didn’t want to disrupt their children. Moving into a new environment and building new relationships with educators is a barrier to moving to a better-quality or lower-priced centre.

Quality is hard to judge

The third reason is it is hard for parents to judge the “quality” of childcare services.

Of course parents want to put their children in high-quality care, but they find it difficult to measure key dimensions of quality, such as the standard of the educators.

The government has tried to fill some of the information gaps by introducing National Quality Standards, but the ACCC found parents do not place emphasis on these – probably because many are unaware of them.

Read more:
More than 1 million Australians have no access to childcare in their area

Fees have risen

One trigger for this ACCC inquiry was the increases in childcare centres’ fees – something that has been costly not only for parents and but also governments (who pick up an average of 60% of the fee for centre-based care via the childcare subsidy).

The ACCC shows between 2018 and 2022 childcare fees – the total amount charged – increased across childcare service types by between 20% and 32%. Government subsidises have reduced the impact of these rises on parents, with out-of-pocket expenses for childcare growing at a slower rate.

It is not surprising childcare costs tend to grow faster than inflation. That’s because childcare is highly labour intensive with limited scope for productivity gains. But the ACCC’s analysis show fees have also grown faster than wages over the past five years.

These high fees hurt everyone, but particularly low-income households. The ACCC’s analysis shows out-of-pocket expenses as a share of disposable income were higher on average for households in the bottom 10% of income earners, despite the higher subsidy for this group.

Follow the money

The interim report flags the most important part of the ACCC’s work is yet to come – understanding where the money is going.

The childcare market is highly diverse, with different models of care, and centres run by government, for-profit and not-for-profit providers. Many people struggle to understand how childcare can simultaneously cost so much for governments and parents, while its workers are paid so little.

Some in the industry are making good money. As articles in the financial media regularly remind us, it is a market where private equity and commercial property investors see attractive returns relative to the risks.

In the next phase of its inquiry, the ACCC will examine costs, profits, and quality across the sector. If there are excess profits being made, I’m confident the ACCC will find them.

This next stage of the inquiry will also inform whether the ACCC recommends stronger price regulation for the sector. This interim report is treading softly, but it looks like this is where the ACCC is heading.

The final report is due by December 31.

Danielle Wood’s employer, Grattan Institute, has been supported in its work by government, corporates, and philanthropic gifts. A full list of supporting organisations is found at www.grattan.edu.au

– ref. As fees keep climbing, this is why competition isn’t enough to deliver cheaper childcare – https://theconversation.com/as-fees-keep-climbing-this-is-why-competition-isnt-enough-to-deliver-cheaper-childcare-209209

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

Since Saturday, Australians have been required to wait until the age of 67 until they can get the age pension.

The original so-called “retirement age” of 65 for men dated back to 1909.

Women had their pension age lifted from 60 to 65 between 1995 and 2013. And all Australians have had it lifted in stages from July 2017, in a process that ended on July 1 2023.

It has happened with little protest – a stark contrast to the demonstrations and riots that rocked France earlier this year, when President Macron proposed and passed laws to lift the French pension age from 62 to 64.

What’s so special about French pensions?

French strikes and demonstrations over the retirement age aren’t new.

There were nationwide protests when France increased its retirement age from 60 to 62 in 2010, before that in 2003, and in 1995, when France tried to increase the pension age for public sector workers.

Just about anything you could want to know about public pension schemes in high-income countries can be found in the OECD report Pensions at a Glance, published every two years, most recently in 2021.

Public pension spending in France is 13.6% of GDP, compared to 4% in Australia.

In part, this is because France has an older population than Australia, but it is also because French pension payments are more generous than both Australia’s age pension and superannuation supports taken together.

The OECD finding that Australia provides a replacement rate of about 40% and France of about 74% is “forward looking”, in that it is based on what a worker on average earnings is estimated to be entitled to under the system applying in 2020, if she or he works from age 22 until that country’s normal retirement age.

For low-paid workers, Australia’s means-tested age pension makes the payments about as generous as those in France.

A separate 2018 OECD calculation showed that the average after-tax income of a French household headed by someone 65 years or older was 99.8% of the average income of all French households.

In contrast, the average after-tax income of an Australian household headed by someone of that age was 75% of that of all households.

Given that French households receive about the same disposable income while retired as working, it is easy to see why they are keen to retire.

And the heavy tax contributions required to fund their retirement incomes give them little opportunity to save privately while working.

The level of median private wealth in Australia (converted at prevailing exchange rates) is nearly twice that in France.

Read more:
Pension reform in France: Macron and demonstrators resume epic tussle begun over 30 years ago

Yet French public pension wealth is substantial. Calculating the value of the future pension income streams using life expectancies, the net pension wealth of French retirees amounts to 14 years of average earnings, compared to just over seven in Australia.

Because the value of these income streams is strongly influenced by how long the pensions are received, raising the French pension age by two years would cut the value of French pension wealth by around 8%.

Why was postponing pensions easier in Australia?

The phase-in of the Australian change after 2017 meant it didn’t affect the retirement incomes of Australian workers until many years after the change was first announced, and didn’t affect the incomes of those already retired at all.

And the Australian change legislated in 2009 was part of a broader program of reforms that included the biggest single increase in age and disability pensions and carer payments in Australian history.

Yet it will have losers. Those losing the most will be those with the shortest life expectancies. Indigenous men have life expectancies nearly nine years lower than non-Indigenous men and Indigenous women nearly eight years lower.

Which Australians will pay the highest price?

And the change has pushed a substantial number of Australians aged 65 and over who would have once received the pension on to the much-lower Jobseeker unemployment payment.

The number of people aged 65 years and over receiving JobSeeker climbed from zero in 2017 to 40,300 by May this year – and will climb further because of this month’s change.

These people are severely disadvantaged by this change, as the level of payment for an older unemployed person is more than $300 a fortnight less than the age pension, a gap that will only be slightly reduced by the increases announced in the most recent Commonwealth budget.

Relatively little attention has been paid to these people, who because of the low level of payment are among the poorest in the Australian population – with very limited prospects of being able to improve their circumstances.

In contrast, the idea of boosting tax on the earnings of superannuation balances over A$3 million attracted widespread criticism.

The very different institutional environments of Australia and France have created different lobby groups, with different interests to protect.

Peter Whiteford receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is a member of the Interim Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee.

– ref. Australia’s ‘retirement age’ just became 67. So why are the French so upset about working until 64? – https://theconversation.com/australias-retirement-age-just-became-67-so-why-are-the-french-so-upset-about-working-until-64-208648

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alix Woolard, Senior Researcher, Telethon Kids Institute

You have probably heard of “fight or flight” responses to distressing situations. You may also be familiar with the tendency to “freeze”. But there is another defence or survival strategy a person can have: “fawn”.

When our brain perceives a threat in our environment, our sympathetic nervous system takes over and a person can experience any one or combination of the four F responses.

What are the four Fs?

The fawn response usually occurs when a person is being attacked in some way, and they try to appease or placate their attacker to protect themselves.

A fight response is when someone reacts to a threat with aggression.

Flight is when a person responds by fleeing – either literally by leaving the situation, or symbolically, by distracting or avoiding a distressing situation.

A freeze response occurs when a person realises (consciously or not) that they cannot resist the threat, and they detach themselves or become immobile. They may “space out” and not pay attention, feel disconnected to their body, or have difficulty speaking after they feel threatened.

Read more:
More than half of Australians will experience trauma, most before they turn 17. We need to talk about it

What does fawning look like?

Previously known as appeasement or “people pleasing”, the term “fawning” was coined by psychotherapist Pete Walker in his 2013 book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving.

A fawn response can look like:

• people-pleasing (doing things for others to gain their approval or to make others like you)
• being overly reliant on others (difficulty making decisions without other people’s input)
• prioritising the needs of others and ignoring your own
• being overly agreeable
• having trouble saying no
• in more severe cases, dissociating (disconnecting from your mind and/or body).

While there isn’t yet much research on this response, the fawn response is seen more in people who have experienced complex trauma in their childhood, including among children who grew up with emotionally or physically abusive caregivers.

Fawning is also observed in people who are in situations of interpersonal violence (such as domestic violence, assault or kidnappings), when the person needs to appease or calm a perpetrator to survive.

Fawning is also different to the other F responses, in that it seems to be a uniquely human response.

Read more:
Emotional abuse is a pattern of hurtful messages – building parenting skills could help prevent it

Why do people fawn?

Research suggests people fawn for two reasons:

1. to protect themselves or others from physical or emotional harm (such as childhood trauma)
2. to create or improve the emotional connection to the perpetrator of harm (for example, a caregiver).

This type of response is adaptive at the time of the traumatic event(s): by appeasing an attacker or perpetrator, it helps the person avoid harm.

However, if a person continues to use this type of response in the long term, as an automatic response to everyday stressors (such difficult interactions with your boss or neighbour), it can have negative consequences.

If a person is continually trying to appease others, they may experience issues with boundaries, forming a cohesive identity, and may not feel safe in relationships with others.

Read more:
Trauma is trending – but we need to look beyond buzzwords and face its ugly side

What can I do if I ‘fawn’?

Because fawning is typically a response to interpersonal or complex trauma, using it in response to everyday stressors may indicate a need for healing.

If this is you, and you have a history of complex trauma, seek psychological support from a professional who is trained in trauma-informed practice. Trauma-informed means the psychological care is holistic, empowering, strengths-focused, collaborative and reflective.

Evidence-based therapies that are helpful following trauma include:

• eye movement desensitisation therapy, which focuses on processing traumatic memories

• exposure therapy to help expose people to things they fear and avoid

• trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy that aims to alleviate trauma symptoms by overcoming unhelpful thoughts and behaviours.

Depending on where you live, free counselling services may be available for people who have experienced childhood abuse.

Setting healthy boundaries is also a common focus when working with the fawn response, which you can do by yourself or alongside a therapist.

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

Read more:
What is EMDR therapy, and how does it help people who have experienced trauma?

Alix Woolard receives funding from Embrace at Telethon Kids Institute.

– ref. What is ‘fawning’? How is it related to trauma and the ‘fight or flight’ response? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-fawning-how-is-it-related-to-trauma-and-the-fight-or-flight-response-205024

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arianto Patunru, Fellow, The Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Australian National University

Australia and Indonesia are forging closer economic ties built on what each country can offer the other in the transition to clean energy. Indonesia is emerging as a maker of electric vehicles and the batteries that power them. Australia has the lithium reserves Indonesia needs to do this.

Visiting Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese have committed to working more closely together on the energy transition.

The leaders’ joint communique on Tuesday specifically noted Indonesia’s efforts to develop its electric vehicle production. Widodo is seeking to enlist Australia’s help to achieve Indonesia’s goal of becoming a global electric vehicle and battery manufacturing hub.

À lire aussi :
We could need 6 times more of the minerals used for renewables and batteries. How can we avoid a huge increase in mining impacts?

What are Indonesia’s goals?

In line with its commitment to the Paris Agreement, Indonesia has set an ambitious target for its vehicle industry. By 2025 it wants at least 20% of the cars it produces to be electric vehicles. That equates to about 400,000 cars.

Indonesian government programs such as the Low-Cost Green Car incentives and Low-Carbon-Emission Vehicle regulations are driving this transition.

Most vehicles made in Indonesia involve joint ventures with foreign manufacturers. To produce electric vehicles, Indonesia established joint ventures with Korea’s Hyundai and China’s SGMW.

The government’s goal is for the Indonesia Battery Corporation (IBC) to become a hub of electric vehicle battery manufacturing. This would take advantage of Indonesia’s rich nickel deposits. However, the country lacks other ingredients to make these batteries, most notably lithium.

À lire aussi :
Here’s how Indonesia could get to zero emission in its energy sector by 2050

Why does Indonesia want Australian lithium?

Indonesia aims to be in the world’s top five electric vehicle battery producers by 2040. To achieve this, it needs to secure access to other minerals, including lithium. Australian mines supply around half of the world’s lithium.

Other important suppliers include Chile (24%) and China (16%). But being close to Indonesia makes Australia the most attractive supplier.

So far most of Australia’s lithium exports have gone to China. Given changing geopolitics (for example, Chile plans to nationalise its lithium industry) and global supply-chain disruptions (the Russia-Ukraine war, the China-US tension), Australia would benefit from exporting lithium to Indonesia as well.

À lire aussi :
Batteries are the environmental Achilles heel of electric vehicles – unless we repair, reuse and recycle them

Australia lacks capacity to refine all its lithium

Australia is the world’s largest producer of spodumene. This mineral is rich in lithium.

However, Australia has limited capacity to refine all that spodumene into the lithium hydroxide used to make lithium-based batteries. It makes sense, then, to exploit this resource as part of the global supply chain, by linking with battery and car industries in Indonesia and other countries.

Australia is a small player in global manufacturing trade. However, its share of the global production network has been increasing.

Australia has a distinct competitive edge in specialised components. These include parts for aircraft and associated equipment, vehicles, earth-moving and mineral-processing machines, and finished products such as medical and surgical equipment.

However, Australia’s geographical location puts it at a disadvantage as an exporter. It costs more to export to distant major markets.

Specialising in high value-to-weight components helps to overcome this “tyranny of distance”. Exporting raw materials (including lithium) and importing the derivatives back to produce high-value goods is better for Australia.

À lire aussi :
Australia has rich deposits of critical minerals for green technology. But we are not making the most of them … yet

What would an agreement on lithium achieve?

In February 2023 the Western Australian government and Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KADIN) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to explore partnership opportunities. The focus is on supplying critical minerals for the battery industry. Widodo and WA Premier Roger Cook signed a follow-up plan of action this week.

Australia and Indonesia are expected to sign an MOU that will accelerate co-operation on the global battery and electric vehicle sector. Tuesday’s joint communique included a commitment to pursue this goal.

As both countries begin to decarbonise, they should exploit the complementary aspects of their economies. Both are embarking on the journey of energy transition to deal with the challenges of climate change.

It is important, however, not to limit this to a two-country endeavour. For a start, an EV battery needs much more than just nickel and lithium. Many of its components need to be sourced from other countries. And an EV battery industry should be integrated with an automotive industry supplying global markets.

The joint ventures may also extend to mineral processing. In Indonesia, electricity from coal powers most smelters. Collaboration on the energy transition should include a shift to clean wind, hydro and solar power.

Arianto Patunru is affiliated with ANU Indonesia Project and Center for Indonesian Policy Studies.

– ref. Why Indonesia wants Australia’s help to supply the world with electric vehicles and batteries – https://theconversation.com/why-indonesia-wants-australias-help-to-supply-the-world-with-electric-vehicles-and-batteries-209125

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Teresa Ubide, Associate Professor – Igneous Petrology/Volcanology, The University of Queensland

When you hear news reports about volcanoes spewing lava and ash, you may worry about the people nearby. In fact, almost one in ten people around the world live within 100 kilometres of an active volcano. For those living close to volcanoes, farming on their fertile soils, or visiting their spectacular landscapes, it is crucial to understand the drivers of eruption.

Why is the volcano erupting? How will the eruption evolve? When will it finish?

Our new research published today in Science Advances applies laser technology to read into the chemical composition of erupted magma over time.

Because the chemistry of magmas affects their fluidity, explosivity and hazard potential, our work could help future monitoring and forecasting of the evolution of volcanic eruptions.

Read more:
Why can’t we predict when a volcano will erupt?

Untangling the chemistry of erupted melt

Magma – molten rock – is composed of liquid (known as “melt”), gas and crystals that grow as the temperature of the magma drops during its journey up to Earth’s surface.

When the magma erupts to become a lava flow, it will release the gas (which contains water vapour, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and other compounds) and cool down into a volcanic rock. This rock contains crystals cooled slowly inside the volcano, embedded in a finer rock matrix cooled rapidly at the surface.

As a result, volcanic rocks can look a bit like “rocky road” chocolate. The crystals formed in the guts of the volcano are excellent archives of the run-up to eruption. However, the crystals can get in the way when we want to focus on the melt that carries them to the surface, and how the melt properties vary throughout the eruption.

To isolate the melt signal, we used an ultraviolet laser, similar to the ones used for eye surgery, to blast the rock matrix between larger crystals.

We then analysed the laser-generated particles by mass spectrometry to determine the chemical composition of the volcanic matrix. The method allows for a rapid chemical analysis.

This provides a faster and more detailed measure of melt chemistry and its evolution over time, compared to traditional analysis of the entire rock, or to painstaking separation of matrix and crystal fragments from crushed rock samples. Even if we call the crystals “large”, they are often as small as a grain of salt (or up to a chickpea in size if you are lucky!) and difficult to remove.

Read more:
The ‘pulse’ of a volcano can be used to help predict its next eruption

A destructive disaster in the Canary Islands

Our study focused on the 2021 eruption at La Palma, the most destructive volcanic eruption on historical record in the Canary Islands.

From September to December 2021, a total of 160 cubic metres of lava covered more than 12 square kilometres of land. It destroyed more than 1,600 homes, forced the evacuation of more than 7,000 people and generated losses of more than €860 million (AU$1.4 billion).

We analysed lava samples collected systematically by our collaborators in Spain throughout the three months of eruption. These are precious samples as we know their exact eruption day, and many of the sampling sites are now covered by later lavas from the eruption.

Using the laser-powered method, we could see variations in lava chemistry linked to changes in earthquakes and sulphur dioxide emissions, as well as eruption style and the resulting hazards. This included a change from thick lavas that acted as a bulldozer at the start of the eruption, to runny lavas that created rapid lava rivers and lava tunnels later in the eruption.

We also found a key change in lava chemistry about two weeks before the eruption ended, which suggests cooling of the magma due to a dropping magma supply.

Similar changes could be monitored as a signal of eruption wind-down in future eruptions around the world.

Forecasting volcanic activity

We cannot prevent volcanoes from erupting, and we cannot yet travel inside them like French sci-fi author Jules Verne once envisioned. But volcano monitoring has improved enormously in the last few decades to allow us to indirectly ‘peek into’ volcanoes and better forecast their activity.

Our work aims to provide a laboratory tool for testing volcanic samples collected during future eruptions. The goal is to read into the evolution of eruptions, to understand why they start and when they will end.

With about 50 volcanoes erupting at any given time around the world, you will soon see another volcano erupting in the news. This time, you can consider the importance of volcano science to improve our understanding of how volcanoes work and what drives them to erupt, to protect the people around them.

Teresa Ubide works for The University of Queensland. She receives funding from the Australian Research Council, AuScope-NCRIS, and The University of Queensland.

Alice MacDonald is a PhD Student at The University of Queensland and receives a RTP PhD Stipend from UQ.

jack.mulder@adelaide.edu.au receives funding from the Australian Research Council, AuScope-NCRIS, The University of Adelaide.

– ref. Volcano eruptions are notoriously hard to forecast. A new method using lasers could be the key – https://theconversation.com/volcano-eruptions-are-notoriously-hard-to-forecast-a-new-method-using-lasers-could-be-the-key-207031

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Janet Conti, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology, Western Sydney University

No single treatment will work for all people with eating disorders. Even the most highly researched evidence-based treatment may work for some people, but less so for others. When such treatments do not work, it can provoke anxiety.

As part of our research, we spoke with one mother who was supporting her teenage daughter through anorexia nervosa. When current treatments were not working, the mother told us:

We don’t really know what else we can do.

But there may be other treatment options for people like her daughter. The issue is they’re not always available on Medicare.

Read more:
Binge eating is more common than anorexia or bulimia – but it remains a hidden and hard-to-treat disorder

Medicare provides a menu of options

In Australia, changes to Medicare mean people diagnosed with an eating disorder may be eligible for up to 40 sessions with a psychologist and up to 20 sessions with a dietitian a year.

This is a remarkable recognition of how eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia or binge eating impact people’s lives, and for those who care for them.

This also recognises how difficult it can be to recover from an eating disorder. This is particularly when aspects of the eating disorder are acceptable to the person, and become their way of dealing with the slings and arrows of life.

Medicare provides several options for psychological interventions to treat eating disorders that are backed by research evidence.

These treatments include family-based treatment for adolescent eating disorders and cognitive behavioural therapy for adult eating disorders.

Such interventions work in the long term for around half of people.

So what about the other half?

Read more:
When I work with people with eating disorders, I see many rules around ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods – but eating is never that simple

It’s not just about evidence

Think about psychotherapy – also known as talking therapy – as a three-legged stool.

One leg of the stool is the research evidence. Another is the clinician’s expertise. The third leg is preferences of the person having treatment. We need all three if the stool is to stay upright and the psychotherapy has a chance of working.

The current Medicare system allows clinicians to draw from the first leg – the research evidence. This works for some.

Then there’s the second leg, the clinician’s expertise. One welcome development is through the Australian & New Zealand Academy for Eating Disorders credential for professionals treating eating disorders.

What is less recognised in the current Medicare system, however, is the importance of the therapeutic relationship, such as whether the clinician works in a person-centred way that takes into consideration the person’s preferences.

This could be tailoring treatment to the person’s unique needs, instilling hope for their recovery, and seeing the person as more than just the eating disorder. Think of these as the third leg of the stool.

These second and third legs help explain why even gold-standard, research evidence-based treatments do not work for everyone.

Read more:
How many people have eating disorders? We don’t really know, and that’s a worry

What else could work?

There are many psychological treatments for eating disorders that don’t have research evidence to back them. We cannot necessarily dismiss them as not working. They may have not yet been extensively researched. These emerging treatments need more research evidence, including which treatments work, for whom, and when.

Emerging treatments include those based on mindfulness. These may involve people learning not to judge their thoughts and feelings as right or wrong, or good or bad. Instead, this therapy allows them to observe these thoughts and feelings by focusing on the present moment.

Others include therapies that address both the eating disorder and adverse and traumatic life events, including the experience of the eating disorder itself.

We are also interested in, and are currently researching, narrative therapy. This explores aspects of the person that have been lost to the eating disorder, such as a valued sense of oneself. Reclaiming these aspects can give the person freedom to live a life no longer dominated by the eating disorder.

Until emerging treatments have more extensive research evidence, the Medicare system needs to mention them as valid treatment pathways when facilitated by experienced practitioners. This is particularly important if the most widely researched interventions do not work for someone.

Including emerging therapies, however, does not mean anything goes. To work out which of these emerging therapies might be eligible for Medicare funding in the future, we need greater consultation with people living with eating disorders, and the clinicians who treat them, to learn which emerging treatments work in practice.

Read more:
What makes a good psychologist or psychiatrist and how do you find one you like?

Join our study

We are conducting a small study on narrative therapy for anorexia nervosa. This involves 40 sessions over 12 months to be conducted at Western Sydney University.

If you want to know more about participating in the study, email us at narrative@westernsydney.edu.au

If you (or someone you know) needs care for an eating disorder, see your GP to be assessed for a Medicare Eating Disorder Plan. For support and more information about eating disorders, contact the Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 4673 or Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800. If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. In an emergency, call 000.

Janet Conti is affiliated with Western Sydney University as an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology. She also works part-time in private practice as a Clinical Psychologist. She is currently a co-researcher in two research projects funded by the Butterfly Foundation and the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Eating Disorders (ANZAED).

Tania Perich is affiliated with Western Sydney University as an Senior Lecturer in Psychology. She also works part-time in private practice as a registered psychologist.

– ref. Why eating disorder treatments only work half the time, according to a psychologist – https://theconversation.com/why-eating-disorder-treatments-only-work-half-the-time-according-to-a-psychologist-207322

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Averyl Gaylor, PhD Candidate in History, La Trobe University

On TikTok, “old money” and “clean girl” aesthetics are trending, with over three and four billion views respectively. Content tagged #cleangirlaesthetic and #oldmoneyaesthetic proliferates on the platform.

Clean girl and old money aesthetics are presented as aspirational trends achieved through living the associated lifestyle – cultivated from the inside out through diet, light exercise, skincare, hair care, nail care and practices of personal hygiene.

Even scent and the way one organises and manages their time contribute, in different ways, to clean girl and old money aesthetics.

These aesthetics are informed by a much larger history in which the performance of hygiene was entangled with ideas of class and race.

What are clean girl and old money aesthetics?

The clean girl aesthetic can be traced to this TikTok in which a user named xolizahbeauty instructs her audience on how to achieve the look of “those girls that always look clean”.

This highly gendered and racialised aesthetic implies slimness, flawless and dewy skin, plump and glossy lips, smooth and sleek hair, light (or “no makeup”) makeup, a fresh scent, gold jewellery and a highly organised and stress-free lifestyle.

It is considered best exemplified by celebrities like Hailey Bieber and Bella Hadid and, according to some subscribers of the aesthetic, evokes an “elite feeling”.

The old money aesthetic, on the other hand, is right now best embodied by Sofia Richie, whose recent wedding in the south of France went viral for exemplifying the style. In fiction, it has been popularised by the Roy siblings of HBO’s hit series, Succession.

Old money aesthetics draw on notions of “quiet luxury”, also called “stealth wealth”, in which sporting fashions that are garish or excessively branded is considered a social faux pas. There is a preference for fabrics made from natural fibres or clothing that is well constructed and functional. Such clothing might be worn on a yacht, in a country club or while attending the polo.

Without definitive rules, even Vogue admits the old money aesthetic is “hard to pin down”, describing it as “more of a mood than anything else”.

The entanglement of hygiene and wealth

“Clean girlies” (as they’re known on TikTok) and those embodying old money occupy what are imagined as distinct aesthetic trends. However, it is no coincidence these trends have emerged on social media at the same time. Perceived cleanliness (or otherwise) has long been understood as being reflective of class.

In 19th century England, infectious diseases plagued industrialising cities and towns, which could not adequately accommodate a rapidly expanding urban population. Diseases like cholera, caused by contaminated water, were attributed to the filth and squalor exemplified in the overcrowded city slums.

The urban poor living in such conditions were pathologised as unhealthy, unhygienic and immoral. Slum areas were imagined as vectors of disease that threatened the middle and upper classes.

In this context, poor hygiene denoted poverty and, conversely, just like on TikTok, perceptions of cleanliness were associated with wealth.

In Australia (and elsewhere), social reformers questioned whether poverty and poor hygiene were traits innate to certain populations, or whether hygiene could be taught. Reformers working in inner-city Melbourne were relieved to discover that, with the assistance of education and training, poor children could learn to distinguish between hygienic and unhygienic practices.

Today, hygiene education is delivered to young people not through classes in physical culture, but through short videos that contribute to clean girl and old money aesthetics.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, hygiene was also leveraged as a technique of colonisation. In her book Imperial Hygiene, historian Alison Bashford has shown that “imperial hygiene” (understood as “colonisation by the known laws of cleanliness”) was crucial to British expansion and the colonisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Hygiene discourse was weaponised to justify the so-called “protectionist” policy that segregated Indigenous populations in government-run missions and reserves. These pathologised Indigenous populations as “better off” removed from the settler world.

Contemporary clean girl and old money aesthetics draw on this history, redeploying racialised associations between hygiene and wealth to deem some people fashionable and aspirational. These aesthetics imply that not everyone has the capacity to be a clean girl privileged by the old money derived from aristocratic, imperial, colonialist roots.

Read more:
Far from the ‘ludicrously capacious’: what the fashion of Succession tells us about the show – and about society

The problems of clean girl and old money aesthetics

Clean girl and old money aesthetics leverage leisure time for self-improvement. “Hot girl walks” (the hashtag has over 200 million views on TikTok) and “Sunday resets” in which one rigorously deep-cleans and reorganises their home, are seen as practices of these aesthetics.

These aesthetics do not only require time, they are also intrinsically commercial. Celebrity and other influencers promote an infinite array of beauty, hygiene, food and fashion products as able to engender clean girl and old money aesthetics.

For example, the peptide lip treatment by Hailey Bieber’s skincare brand Rhode is a staple of the clean girl aesthetic. Old money, meanwhile, requires a good pair of blue jeans and a perfectly tailored blazer such as those sold by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s brand, The Row.

In requiring time and money, and being most prominently performed by a particular racialised group (young white women), clean girl and old money aesthetics function to exclude those unable to (literally and metaphorically) “buy-in”.

In this way, clean girl and old money aesthetics can be understood as a contemporary reflection of the historical relationship between modern hygiene, race and class.

Though clean girl and old money aesthetics are informed by the history of modern hygiene, they can also be positioned within a much more recent history of pandemic illness and disease.

The COVID-19 pandemic put matters of personal hygiene and cleanliness front and centre, and the world was starkly reminded that poverty and wealth have a direct impact on health outcomes, especially in times of crisis.

It is perhaps no wonder aesthetics that value practices of cleanliness and the attributes of wealth have emerged as aspirational trends in recent times.

Averyl Gaylor 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. New ‘clean girl’ and ‘old money’ aesthetics on TikTok make the same old link between hygiene and class – https://theconversation.com/new-clean-girl-and-old-money-aesthetics-on-tiktok-make-the-same-old-link-between-hygiene-and-class-208566

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kevin Tolhurst AM, Hon. Assoc. Prof., Fire Ecology and Management, The University of Melbourne

An El Niño event has arrived, according to the World Meteorological Organization, raising fears of record high global temperatures, extreme weather and, in Australia, a severe fire season.

The El Niño is a reminder that bushfires are part of Australian life – especially as human-caused global warming worsens. But there are a few important considerations to note.

First, not all El Niño years result in bad bushfires. The presence of an El Niño is only one factor that determines the prevalence of bushfires. Other factors, such as the presence of drought, also come into play.

And second, whether or not this fire season is a bad one, Australia must find a more sustainable and effective way to manage bushfires. The El Niño threat only makes the task more urgent.

Understanding fire in Australia

An El Niño is declared when the sea surface temperature in large parts of the tropical Pacific Ocean warms significantly.

The statement by the World Meteorological Organization, released on Tuesday, said El Niño conditions have developed in the tropical Pacific for the first time in seven years “setting the stage for a likely surge in global temperatures and disruptive weather and climate patterns”.

The organisation says there’s a 90% probability of the El Niño event continuing during the second half of 2023. It said El Niño can trigger extreme heat and also cause severe droughts over Australia and other parts of the world.

But before we start planning ahead for the next bushfire season, it’s important to understand what drives bushfire risks – and the influence of climate change, fire management and events such as El Niño.

The evidence for human-induced climate change is irrefutable. While the global climate has changed significantly in the past, the current changes are occurring at an unprecedented rate.

In geologic time scales, before the influence of humans, a significant shift in climate has been associated with an increase in fire activity in Australia. There is every reason to expect fire activity will increase with human-induced climate change as well.

Humans have also changed the Australian fire landscape – both First Nations people and, for the past 200 years, European colonisers.

Changes brought about by Indigenous Australians were widespread, but sustainable. Their methods included, for example, lighting “cool” fires in small, targeted patches early in the dry season. This reduced the chance that very large and intense fires would develop.

Read more:
Our land is burning, and Western science does not have all the answers

Changes brought about by European colonisers have also been widespread – such as land clearing using fire, and fire suppression to protect human life and property. But this approach has been far from sustainable, either financially, ecologically or socially.

Australia has just experienced a period of high rainfall across the continent due to a La Niña event combined with two other climate drivers: a negative Indian Ocean Dipole and a positive Southern Annular Mode. It means the soil is moist and plants are flourishing.

Now, we’re set to enter into a drying period driven by an El Niño. The abundant plant growth leading into a dry period is likely to result in widespread bushfires across Australia.

Initially, this is likely to occur in semi-arid inland areas where grasses have flourished in the wet period, but will dry out quickly. If the drying cycle persists for two or three years, then fires might become more prevalent in forests and woodlands in temperate Australia.

But an El Niño year doesn’t necessarily mean a bad bushfire season is certain.

In Australia, El Niño events are associated with hotter and drier conditions, leading to more days of high fire danger. But large and severe forest fires also need a prolonged drought to dry out fuels, especially in sheltered gullies and slopes. Soils and woody vegetation are currently moist following the La Niña period.

So El Niño and its opposite phase, La Niña, are on their own are a relatively poor predictor of the number and size of bushfires.

Read more:
The burn legacy: why the science on hazard reduction is contested

Fight smarter, and be prepared

Climate change will continue to test our fire management systems. And the return of an El Niño has fire crews on alert.

When it comes to fire management, Australia must be much smarter than it has been for the past 200 years. This means changing the focus to holistic fire management. Throwing huge amounts of money and resources at controlling bushfires – such as purchasing more and larger firefighting aircraft – is is not sustainable or sensible.

Fire is as fundamental to our environment as wind and rain. And the amount of energy released from a large bushfire will never be matched by any level of resources humans can muster.

The evidence bears this out. Take, for example, analysis of fire dynamics in two areas north and south of the US-Mexico border. Between 1920 and 1972, authorities on the US side had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on firefighting aircraft and other resources trying to suppress wildfires. This resulted in fewer wildfires than in the Mexico region. But the fires that occurred were larger and more severe.

Similar patterns have occurred in Australia. For example, a study of burn patterns in the Western Desert region showed that after the exodus of Traditional Owners, the number of fires reduced substantially, but the fires became far bigger.

Read more:
Watching our politicians fumble through the bushfire crisis, I’m overwhelmed by déjà vu

Change must happen

Damaging bushfires will return to Australia in the near future. The expected return of another El Niño should heighten efforts to create a more considered and sustainable fire management regime – particularly in southern Australia.

Experts, including me, have devised plans to guide the shift. They include:

• effectively managing the land with fire, including promoting Indigenous Australians’ use of fire
• engaging communities in bushfire mitigation and management
• better coordination across land, fire and emergency management agencies
• ensuring fire management is based on “best practice” approaches.

Australia, with its wealth of scientific knowledge and long history of Indigenous land management, should be well placed to manage fire sustainably – even with the pressures of climate change. Changing our approach will not be quick or simple, but it must be done.

Kevin Tolhurst is affiliated with the International Association of Wildland Fire. He is also on the forest fire management committee of Forestry Australia.

– ref. It’s official: Australia is set for a hot, dry El Niño. Here’s what that means for our flammable continent – https://theconversation.com/its-official-australia-is-set-for-a-hot-dry-el-nino-heres-what-that-means-for-our-flammable-continent-209126

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vaughan Cruickshank, Program Director – Health and Physical Education, Maths/Science, Faculty of Education, University of Tasmania

The second Ashes Test ended in tense scenes on Sunday following the controversial dismissal of English batsman Jonny Bairstow. His stumping infuriated a pro-England crowd at the famous Lord’s ground and divided the cricketing world.

While the Australians would no doubt have preferred to win with less controversy, did they actually do anything wrong?

In answer to that question, it’s widely accepted, even by the English team, that his dismissal was within the laws of cricket. But critics then invoked the “spirit of cricket” to suggest the Australians should not have asked for the dismissal to be upheld. So what is the difference?

The laws of cricket detail the rules of the game of cricket worldwide. They have been owned and maintained by the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) in London for over 200 years.

The rules are clear and the many English fans and past players, along with the current captain and coach, have acknowledged the umpires were correct according to those laws.

That’s when we get to the “spirit”. Since the late 1990s, the laws of cricket have also had an introductory statement or preamble. It states that cricket should be played not only according to the laws, but also in the “spirit of cricket”“.

This preamble is aimed at reminding players and officials of their responsibility for ensuring cricket is played in a truly sportsmanlike manner.

The two captains have the main responsibility for ensuring the spirit of fair play is upheld. This primarily involves making sure players show respect for other players, officials and the traditional values of cricket. It is against the spirit of the game to do things such as dispute an umpire’s decision, verbally or physically abuse a player or umpire, or cheat.

The problem is the “spirit of cricket” is a subjective and slightly hazy concept. Respected English cricket writers have even suggested it has not existed since 1882, using an example of conduct by the “father of cricket”, W.G. Grace himself.

While cricket is united under its laws, cricket is a global game and the idea of the “spirit” differs around the world. Consequently, opinions about Bairstow’s dismissal have been highly polarised. Many English players and fans are very angry at what has occurred, accusing Australia of going against the “spirit of cricket”. The fact they narrowly lost the match no doubt intensified this feeling.

Their anger is reflected in the front-page stories in numerous English newspapers and in social media posts. Twitter has had tens of thousands of tweets under trending hashtags such as #Ashes, #Bairstow and #SpiritofCricket.

Interestingly, a look at these hashtags also reveal numerous accusations of hypocrisy by the English, backed up with examples of England’s questionable, and sometimes very similar, conduct. These examples have included central figures such as English players Stuart Broad, Jonny Bairstow and coach Brendon McCullum.

Additionally, the only player who has been fined for displaying conduct contrary to the spirit of the game in this Ashes series is English player Moeen Ali.

Former Australian captain Ricky Ponting noted that a key part of the spirit of cricket was respecting the umpire’s decision, which in this instance he said the English players, fans and press had not. Indeed, several MCC members have been suspended over their abuse of Australian cricketers returning to their dressing room.

Perhaps the key lesson that both sides could learn can be encapsulated in the old saying that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, particularly in the modern age when evidence can be quickly found on the internet.

Neither country has a clean slate when it comes to the “spirit of cricket”. Both should be careful about trying to take the moral high ground. Trevor Chappell’s underarm bowl is one of the most infamous Australian examples, still remembered over 40 years later.

Bairstow’s dismissal is the most recent controversy and unlikely to be the last.

As the Australian team heads to Leeds for the third Test starting on Thursday, there are concerns tensions could boil over, on and off the field. Leeds is known for its raucous atmosphere. Cricket Australia has increased security for the Australian team and reportedly told players to remain extra vigilant when dining out in restaurants during the remaining weeks of the Ashes.

We may never get complete agreement on the “spirit of cricket” and whether the Australians breached it on this occasion. Perhaps the closest we can get is to agree with former Australian bowler and Yorkshire coach Jason Gillespie, who believes that

by playing within the laws of the game you are playing within the spirit of the game.

Let’s hope the remainder of the series sees a cooling of tensions and more focus on the last three Tests being played hard but fair, without reigniting “spirit of cricket” debates that no one wins.

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

– ref. What is the difference between the laws of cricket and the ‘spirit’ of cricket? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-difference-between-the-laws-of-cricket-and-the-spirit-of-cricket-209124

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Hay, Professor of Drama, Flinders University

The 2024 intake into the Bachelors-level degree at the National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA) has been “paused”, reportedly on the grounds of financial viability and “strategic alignment” with Swinburne University, which has auspiced NICA since 1995.

In the same week across the Tasman, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington announced savage cuts to its theatre and music programs.

These are just the latest blows to a sector in crisis. They arise from a decades-long suspicion of the place of arts training in the academy, which can be traced back as far as the 1950s.

Then, arts training was seen as insufficiently rigorous and incompatible with university structures. Now, those same concerns are framed in terms of strategic value and return on investment.

Whatever the rationale, they speak to a lack of imagination and creativity in the administration of the contemporary university.

An independent institution

At a meeting of its Professorial Board in December 1956, the University of Melbourne refused a proposal to establish a degree-level actor training program. The board declared the aims of the proposal could not “be fulfilled by a course which conformed to indispensable university standards”.

After this rejection, a similar proposal progressed at the University of New South Wales, with one critical difference.

While this actor training program would operate out of university facilities and be collocated with the School of English, it would remain separate.

The National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) was born in 1958. From its start, NIDA was physically integrated with but academically apart from its institutional sponsor.

Throughout its history and to today, to paraphrase long-time director John Clark, NIDA has revelled in its close association with the university – but closely guarded its independence.

Intellectual rigour

The suggestion in the late 1950s that the business of performer training was antithetical to the mission of the university was grounded in two related factors: matriculation standards, and the availability of suitably qualified staff.

Universities were sceptical of the intellectual rigour of artistic practice in the institution, both in prospective students and in staff.

Universities were also concerned about the lack of funding or teaching space for the higher intensity and longer hours demanded over more traditional tertiary subjects.

One exception stands out: the long-running actor training offered at Flinders University began in 1971, just five years after the university opened in 1966.

Otherwise, performers trained outside of university level institutions. Some joined the profession directly and trained on the job. Others were apprenticed through youth companies or student theatre, and graduated onto the professional stage.

Merging with the universities

In the intervening years, between 1967 to the early 1990s, much Australian arts training was housed within Colleges of Advanced Education (CAE). These colleges sat between TAFE institutions and universities, focusing on more vocational disciplines and awarding certificates, diplomas, and eventually degrees.

In the early 1990s, the Dawkins Reforms merged some technical and vocational providers with universities, and granted university status to others. This brought more arts training programs into universities.

The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), which had been housed within the Western Australian CAE since 1980, became part of Edith Cowan University.

The Kelvin Grove Campus of the Brisbane CAE, which had provided actor training since the late 1970s, was merged with the new Queensland University of Technology.

These new universities were beginning to articulate an academic identity. Their historical association with more vocational forms of training made them more open to maintaining the provision of arts training.

As part of this commitment, some institutions even founded new training programs. Swinburne established the National Institute of Circus Arts in 1995. The Griffith Film School followed in 2004.

By far the most contentious integration took place at the University of Melbourne in 2006, when the Victorian College of the Arts was first affiliated with and then fully integrated into the university.

Almost exactly 50 years after it was first rejected, actor training was now part of the business of that university – though not without a great deal of consternation and protest.

Various painful reorganisations followed, elegantly documented by Richard Murphet, as the university and the training institution worked through their differences – many the same as those identified by the Professorial Board in the 1950s.

Read more:
Friday essay: training a new generation of performers about intimacy, safety and creativity

The value of arts training

At its root, the uneasiness of the alliance between universities and performer training is a product of a perceived opposition between the intellectual and the manual.

This false binary discounts the ways in which knowledge is made by and held in the body, and the rigorous research-informed training cultures that have developed in university performing arts programs since the 1990s.

Too often, the universities themselves aren’t able to take on the very acts of imagination that characterise the training offered to students. Administrators instead see bloated programs that refuse to conform to increasingly rigid curriculum architectures.

Institutions that proclaim themselves to be innovative, agile and creative are increasingly unwilling to sustain the very programs that exemplify those qualities.

Budget bottom lines trump the values of the institution.

Far from being expensive follies incompatible with the institution, arts training programs act as the shopfront for the university. These programs intervene in civic life and showcase the university publicly. Their students activate campus spaces and bring community audiences to the university.

To maintain them does not require a commitment to the arts as an intrinsic good – though that would not go astray. It merely needs administrators to think differently, to make new models instead of insisting we fit the old, to imagine a better future.

Funnily enough, an arts training program could teach them precisely that.

Read more:
Friday essay: a world of pain – Australian theatre in crisis

Chris Hay receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC).

– ref. Intake to the National Institute of Circus Arts has been ‘paused’. Where to next for Australia’s performing arts training? – https://theconversation.com/intake-to-the-national-institute-of-circus-arts-has-been-paused-where-to-next-for-australias-performing-arts-training-209120

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elizabeth (Liz) Jackson, Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management & Logistics, Curtin University

Australia’s government wants to end live animal exports. A panel of four experts has been appointed and given a $5.6 million budget to come up with a plan to phase out the trade, worth $92 million a year.

Chaired by the former head of the Murray Darling Basin Authority, Phillip Glyde, the panel is expected to report by the end of September. What it proposes remains to be seen. The only thing that’s certain is that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised the ban won’t happen in his first term, and that a lot more funding will be needed if no one involved in the trade is to be left worse off.

The thornier question is whether the ban – something animal welfare activists have campaigned for decades – will be a net gain for global animal welfare. It’s likely to mean more animals being shipped from nations with lower standards.

Read more:
Veganism: why we should see it as a political movement rather than a dietary choice

Scandals, bans and reforms

Australia is the world’s seventh-biggest exporter of live animals by value. In 2022 it accounted for about 4.7% of the global trade, mostly shipping sheep to the Middle East and cattle to Asia. These markets either lack reliable refrigeration and cold-chain facilities for processed meat or have a cultural preference for freshly slaughtered meat adhering to specific practices, like halal.

Currently there is a ban on sheep being shipped to the northern hemisphere in summer, after 2,400 sheep died on a journey to the Middle East in 2017. There have also been temporary suspensions to individual countries over the past two decades.

Exports to Indonesia were suspended for six weeks in 2012, following an ABC Four Corners expose of cruelty to cattle in abattoirs.

Trade to Egypt was suspended in 2013 and 2006, again over cruelty to cattle in abattoirs. Shipments to Saudi Arabia were suspended between 2003 and 2005, after 58,000 sheep were stranded at sea for three months after Saudi authorities refused to let them disembark due to an outbreak of the viral disease scabby mouth.

These scandals, however, have led to significant reforms in the industry, with the federal government imposing stringent obligations on exporters for trade to resume.

As a result, Australia can boast that it leads the world in animal welfare practices.

It is only country that requires exporters to safeguard the welfare of animals from the paddock to the point of slaughter in abattoirs in other countries. This is a rare example of the principle of extended producer responsibility being practised. The World Organisation for Animal Health recommends this but does not require it.

Regulating treatment in importing nations

Two sets of Australian regulations oversee the treatment of animals being shipped for slaughter overseas. From the farmgate to the ship is covered by the Australian Standards for the Export of Livestock. These were introduced in 2021.

Treatment in importing countries is covered by the Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System (ESCAS). These rules were instituted in 2011, following the expose of mistreatment in Indonesian abattoirs.

They require exporters to ensure all handlers and facilities (ports, transport vehicle, feedlots and abbatoirs) in importing countries to comply with both local and Australian welfare guidelines.

To gain an export licence from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, exporters must demonstrate they have control over every link in the supply chain from when animals leave the ship to the point at which they are slaughtered.

Animals must be inspected before, during and after their journey by accredited animal health professionals. Facilities and animal-handling techniques are audited at least once a year. Auditors are appointed by the exporter but have to be independent, have no conflict of interest and be appropriately qualified.

Imperfect but ‘unique and innovative’

The system is not perfect. A 2021 review of ESCAS by the federal Inspector-General of Live Animal Exports identified a number of regulatory gaps and ways to make the system more efficient. In particular it noted that loss of control and traceability, sometimes with poor animal welfare outcomes, still occurs at low but chronic levels.

Nonetheless it still described the system as “a unique and innovative regulatory practice solution” that had largely achieved its broad objectives, and made eight recommendations to fix problems (the department agreed to four of these, and “agreed in principle” to the other four.)

Reporting non-compliance

One measure of how well the system is working is the number of reports of Australian livestock being mistreated or being in non-accredited facilities.
Anyone can make these reports, which are publicly available, along with the investigations arising.

For example, in 2021 the animal rights group Animals Australia reported non-compliant slaughter of sheep in Jordan. The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry agreed, and that the control arrangements of the exporter, Livestock Shipping Services, had failed.

Read more:
What the High Court decision on filming animals in farms and abattoirs really means

The federal minister for Agriculture, Murray Watt, described the live export industry in June 2020 (when he was shadow minister for Northern Australia) as “a world leader with regard to animal welfare”.

Nothing has changed since.

Elizabeth Jackson is a member-elected non-executive director of Sheep Producers Australia and is on the WAFarmers’ Livestock Council but does not derive any income from the agricultural industry. She currently receives research funding from the Food Agility CRC and the Fight Food Waste CRC.

– ref. Why Australia banning live animal exports may be a net loss for animal welfare – https://theconversation.com/why-australia-banning-live-animal-exports-may-be-a-net-loss-for-animal-welfare-205831

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bronwyn Carlson, Professor, Indigenous Studies and Director of The Centre for Global Indigenous Futures, Macquarie University

NAIDOC week is a big celebration for Indigenous people and a highlight on the Blak calendar – it is our Blak Christmas.

While reconciliation week focuses on relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, NAIDOC week is purely to celebrate our culture and achievements.

We get to celebrate who we are and what we have achieved, and we get to support all the deadly Blak businesses.

It’s a time for our community to celebrate being Blak, with local events that are accessible to all, such as Burramatta NAIDOC. Or you can relax at home and enjoy the many films and TV series written or produced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander filmmakers or staring fabulous Blak talent.

A brief history of NAIDOC

Held in the first week of July, NAIDOC has a long history of activism and celebration.

NAIDOC stands for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee and it dates back to the 1920s and the fight for better living conditions and rights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

It continued into the 1930s with the boycotting of Australia Day and the establishment of The Day of Mourning. In 1955 the event was expanded to a week-long celebration held in July.

Over the years the event shifted to become one of celebrating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, culture, and history, our survival and our resistance. With more than 65,000 years of history we need at least a week to celebrate our deadliness!

Read more:
Connecting to culture: here’s what happened when elders gifted totemic species to school kids

This year’s theme: ‘For our Elders’

This year’s NAIDOC theme is “For our Elders”. Our Elders are the trailblazers who fought tirelessly for all we currently have, and they continue to fight for the rights and freedoms of our people.

Sadly, we lose too many Elders at relatively young ages. Recently we have lost Uncle Jack Charles, Uncle Archie Roach and Yunupingu, among many others. In our communities, loss of our Elders too early is heartbreakingly commonplace.

NAIDOC awards

An event that is very popular is the National NAIDOC awards which acknowledge the contributions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to our communities. There are a range of categories including sports, creative arts, youth, Elders and lifetime achievement.

The “male” and “female” categories unfortunately miss a valuable opportunity to celebrate our leaders who are beyond the gender binary. Introducing gender-free categories would allow trans and gender diverse mob to be equally celebrated, as they also work tirelessly to make life better for the generations to come.

The NAIDOC ball

The annual NAIDOC balls held across most states and territories are also a highlight of the week. Much attention is paid to the fabulous outfits and jewellery, as this is one of the biggest events of the year and one of few opportunities to come together and celebrate a deep sense of pride in what we have achieved.

It’s also important to consider the accessibility of the key NAIDOC events, such as the awards and balls. Indigenous peoples will be out of pocket at least A$120 for a ticket to the awards and balls, and organisations including Blak businesses are ticketed at $220, with $300 tickets for corporate allies. During a cost-of-living crisis, $120 is a big ask.

Given NAIDOC is a national celebration, more funding is needed from government and local councils to fund mob to host celebrations. It would be fabulous to see government and mainstream organisations provide funding to Indigenous owned and controlled organisations to host NAIDOC events that are community-led and accessible to everyone.

What does NAIDOC week mean for non-Indigenous people?

Unfortunately NAIDOC week often leads to unpaid labour for many Indigenous people in workplaces, as they are expected to organise NAIDOC events and celebrations.

During NAIDOC week, non-Indigenous people can show their support by not putting extra pressure on Indigenous staff and being involved in the organising of NAIDOC events. Employers could also include a day off for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff so they can participate in cultural celebrations.

Non-Indigenous people can also support Blak-controlled businesses such as caterers and florists. But this should happen throughout the year as well.

They should also listen and learn throughout the year, not just during NAIDOC. Engage with free content such as First Australians, After the Apology, First Inventors and Mabo. Read some of the wonderful books written by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

During NAIDOC we also see deadly collaborations with big corporations which is a great way to showcase Indigenous excellence. This year Indigenous artist Rubii Red collaborated with Xbox to create a hand-painted console with profits going to Aboriginal kids in out of home care.

Happy Blak Christmas you mob!

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. What is NAIDOC week? How did it start and what does it celebrate? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-naidoc-week-how-did-it-start-and-what-does-it-celebrate-208936

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stacey Priestley, Research Scientist, Environment Business Unit, CSIRO

Groundwater is the world’s biggest source of easily accessible freshwater. Despite its importance, we know very little about how this resource is replenished over time. In a world-first study, we have used caves to show the decades-long decline in rainfall in south-west Australia has reduced the replenishment of groundwater in the region to an 800-year low.

Our findings highlight the immediate threat of climate change to water security for communities in the south-west – the region between Geraldton and Albany, including Perth. Groundwater is the major source of water used in Perth and many rural towns.

Rainfall across south-west Australia has been decreasing since the late 1960s. The region’s drying climate means rainfall may no longer be reliably replenishing its groundwater.

Read more:
Hidden depths: why groundwater is our most important water source

How can caves tell us about groundwater recharge?

Caves are natural windows into what’s happening underground. In caves, we can directly observe water on its way to becoming groundwater. This is an advantage when we want to understand how rainfall replenishes groundwater (technically known as groundwater recharge).

In this study, we measured seven stalagmite records and also water dripping from the cave ceiling from caves located in the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park. Stalagmites grow up from the cave floor in limestone caves. These structures build up when dripping water deposits minerals onto the cave floor.

In our study area, the mineral calcite (CaCO₃) is deposited in layers. The oldest layers are at the base of the stalagmite and the youngest layers at the top.

Read more:
Explorers just uncovered Australia’s deepest cave. A hydrogeologist explains how they form

These layers contain a record of past environmental change in the composition of their oxygen isotopes (different naturally occurring forms of oxygen atoms). We measured two of the stable isotopes of oxygen. Our study found both stalagmites and water showed the same change in their chemistry, an “uptick” or rise in the ratio between the two isotopes.

This oxygen isotope record of stalagmites is widely treated as a faithful recorder of changes in rainfall. However, it isn’t that simple in south-west Australia.

We found a change in the oxygen isotope composition of the stalagmites that was ten times greater than the drop in rainfall since the 1960s. This means another process was responsible for the oxygen isotope uptick.

We analysed the water dripping into the caves to help us understand the isotope changes in the stalagmites. We saw differences between water flow types: slower flow through the porous limestone and faster flow along fractures in the limestone, which is known as preferential flow. The faster flow of water had a different oxygen isotope composition, and the uptick in stalagmite oxygen isotopes indicates this flow type has declined in recent decades.

Read more:
The world’s biggest source of freshwater is beneath your feet

What does this mean for groundwater recharge?

Preferential flow is an important mechanism for rainfall recharge of groundwater. This flow supplies larger volumes of water to groundwater compared to porous flow.

The impact of reduced preferential flow can be seen in the stalagmite image below. A contraction of the growth to the centre of the stalagmite indicates a reduction in drip rate.

A decline in the local water table from another cave system in the region that began around 1980 matches the beginning of the oxygen isotope uptick. This confirms the decline in rainfall recharge to groundwater.

We now understood how the stalagmite record has captured changes in the groundwater recharge process. We then used the stalagmites to look further back in time to find evidence of previous upticks.

This is the second advantage of having approached this problem using caves. The stalagmite is essentially an archive of past dripwater oxygen isotope composition. Upticks further back in time would indicate if similar reductions in groundwater recharge had occurred.

Importantly, the longer record (shown below) indicates the current reduction in rainfall recharge is unprecedented in the past 800 years.

What does this mean for the region’s water supply?

South-west Australia’s drying climate and reduced groundwater recharge have important implications for sustainable use of this resource. Groundwater supplies three-quarters of the water used in the region and future groundwater use is expected to increase. These trends also pose a threat to the plants and animals that live in groundwater-dependent ecosystems.

Australia as a whole depends on finite groundwater resources, which are under mounting pressure. Drought resilience is a research focus of CSIRO, ANSTO and UNSW.

Read more:
How drought is affecting water supply in Australia’s capital cities

This research includes looking at ways to improve water security, such as water banking. This involves storing water underground using managed aquifer recharge (MAR) techniques. Excess water resources, such as recycled stormwater, are stored when available and used during dry years or a drought.

We are now working towards extending the record further back in time to 10,000 years ago. Our aim is to understand when groundwater was recharged and under what past climate scenarios. This knowledge will give us a better understanding of the limits and sustainability of this vital resource for communities that rely heavily on groundwater.

Stacey Priestley is also affiliated with the University of Adelaide. This research was undertaken while employed by ANSTO.

Other contributors to the research include Dr Allan Griffiths and Dr Karina Meredith of ANSTO and Professor Nerilie Abram of ANU. This research was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council and ANSTO, Australian Synchrotron beamtime, and with the assistance of resources and services from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), which is supported by the Australian Government.

Andy Baker receives funding from The Australian Research Council

Pauline Treble receives funding from the Australian Research Council and ANSTO. She is also an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney.

– ref. Decades of less rainfall have cut replenishing of groundwater to 800-year low in WA – https://theconversation.com/decades-of-less-rainfall-have-cut-replenishing-of-groundwater-to-800-year-low-in-wa-208751

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sam Moreton, Associate Lecturer, School of Psychology, University of Wollongong

As of July 1, authorised psychiatrists have been allowed to prescribe MDMA (the chemical found in “ecstasy”) to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and psilocybin (found in “magic mushrooms”) to treat depression that hasn’t responded to other treatment.

Psychedelic therapies have researchers excited because evidence suggests they might have lasting effects on factors that cause psychological distress beyond the treatment period. These include feeling disconnected from other people, fear of death, and rigid ways of thinking.

This stands in contrast to most medications for psychological issues, which only directly help while people keep taking them regularly.

But how strong is the evidence for psychedelic therapy?

Early promise

Early results from studies around the world have found psychedelic therapy might be effective for treating a range of psychological issues.

For instance, most studies (but not all) have found patients tend to report fewer depression symptoms for periods ranging from several weeks to several months after psilocybin therapy.

Similarly, studies have found reductions in PTSD symptoms three weeks after MDMA therapy.

Not so fast

However, as psychedelic research has grown, limitations of the research have been identified by researchers both within and outside the psychedelic field.

One issue is that we aren’t sure whether findings might be due to a placebo effect, which occurs when a treatment works because people expect it to work.

In clinical trials, participants are often given either a medication or a placebo (inactive) drug – and it’s important they don’t know which they have been given. However, due to the strong effects, it is difficult to prevent participants from knowing whether they have been given a psychedelic drug.

Researchers have tried to use a range of different drugs (such as Ritalin) as a placebo in order to “trick” those participants not given a psychedelic into thinking they have received one. But this can be difficult to achieve.

In 2021, researchers reviewed clinical trials involving psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin, and dimethyltryptamine (found in animals and plants) for mood and anxiety disorders. They found trials either had not assessed whether participants guessed correctly which drug they had been given, or that this had been tested and participants tended to guess correctly.

More recent trials either don’t measure this or find participants have a pretty good idea of whether they’ve had a placebo or a psychedelic drug.

Given the publicity and excitement around psychedelic research in recent years, it is likely most participants have strong beliefs such therapies work. This could lead to a significant placebo effect for participants given a psychedelic dose. Additionally, participants who realise they have received a placebo could experience disappointment and frustration, resulting in worse symptoms. The benefits of a psychedelic may seem even greater when they are compared to the experiences of disappointed participants.

Read more:
The TGA has approved certain psychedelic treatments: the response from experts is mixed

Translating trials to practice

Anecdotally, patients might be motivated to report they have gotten better, even when they haven’t.

On a 2021 podcast, one clinical trial participant described how, in hindsight, the information they provided to the trial did not accurately capture the worsening of their symptoms. Trial participants are likely aware their results might affect whether treatments are legalised. They may not want to “ruin” the research by admitting the treatment didn’t work for them.

There is also uncertainty about whether the findings from clinical trials mean treatments will work in private practice. There may be a lack of clarity around how trial participants are recruited and selected. Therefore participants may not represent the typical person with PTSD or treatment-resistant depression.

And while the safety of psychedelics within controlled contexts is often emphasised by advocates, less is known about safety of psychedelic therapy outside clinical trials.

Resolving issues

These issues do not mean the promising psychedelic research conducted over the past several decades is worthless. Nevertheless, a recent review of the effects of MDMA and psilocybin on mental, behavioural or developmental disorders by Australian researchers concluded the “overall certainty of evidence was low or very low”.

Dutch researchers recently drafted a roadmap for psychedelic science with a checklist for future research to help avoid these pitfalls. When more research is done, it might turn out psychedelic treatments help patients and don’t come with unacceptable harms – we simply don’t know that yet.

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

– ref. Do psychedelics really work to treat depression and PTSD? Here’s what the evidence says – https://theconversation.com/do-psychedelics-really-work-to-treat-depression-and-ptsd-heres-what-the-evidence-says-208857

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam J. Taylor, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne

On Wednesday the federal government released a consultation paper looking at how to make the school system “better and fairer”.

This is part of ongoing consultations over the next National School Reform Agreement between the Commonwealth and states, due to begin in 2025.

One of the questions the consultation paper asks is how to attract and retain teachers, and how to improve and support teachers’ career pathways.

As the paper noted, teachers accredited at the top level of the profession’s standards “make up less than 1% of the teaching workforce”.

Why is this so?

Read more:
What is the National School Reform Agreement and what does it have to do with school funding?

Accreditation levels

Australia’s professional standards for teachers are now ten years old.

The standards set out what a teacher must know and be able to do to be registered as a teacher in Australia.

They consist of four levels. The bottom two are mandatory for all teachers in classrooms. But the top two are voluntary.

Despite these being a way to high-performing members of the profession, as of 2023, only 1,211 of the 307,000 full-time-equivalent teachers in Australia, are accredited at these levels. That’s only about 0.4%.

A Commonwealth and state government plan to address the national teacher shortage, released in December 2022, said Australia should aim for 10,000 “highly accomplished” or “lead” teachers by 2025. It also noted the need to “streamline” the process.

This suggests the standards are not working or useful for the vast majority of teachers.

What are the standards?

The standards were developed by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. They include seven separate headings and 37 different focus areas.

The headings include “know students and how they learn”, “know the content and how to teach it”, “create safe and supportive learning environment” and “assess students’ learning”. Teachers must also ensure they keep engaging in professional development.

Each of the focus areas is divided into four stages. Teachers need to pass the first stage to enter a classroom after their education degree (“the graduate stage”) and then pass another stage in the first few years of their career (the “proficient stage”.)

The third and fourth stages of the standards (“highly accomplished” and “lead”) are voluntary.

What’s involved with the higher levels?

To become a “highly accomplished” teacher, there are two stages, no matter what state or territory teachers live in.

Firstly, the teacher needs to submit a complex portfolio with annotated documents, giving with evidence of their teaching practice. Then they have to pass a site visit where an external assessor examines them in the classroom.

Depending on the jurisdiction, the process takes a year or more. The cost ranges from about A$600 to more than A$1,000.

“Lead teacher” accreditation is another year and the same sort of cost again. On top of this, certification must be renewed every five years. This requires more written statements by the teacher, along with three to five referee reports.

Do they get paid more?

Despite this cost and effort, teachers do not necessarily get paid more if they get accredited at the higher levels.

Teachers in New South Wales do get a pay rise, as “highly accomplished or lead” categories are recognised in enterprise agreements across all school sectors. But this is not the case in Victoria. And in South Australia, if teachers have the accreditation and work in a government school, they are only paid more if they are in a recognised “highly accomplished or lead teacher” position in the school.

Read more:
Working with kids, being passionate about a subject, making a difference: what makes people switch careers to teaching?

Is it more prestigious?

The two voluntary stages are supposed to create a pathway for teachers to become specialists in their fields.

It was hoped that the voluntary stages would give teachers recognition for their expertise while remaining in the classroom, rather than building their careers by moving into school leadership roles. It was also seen as a way of raising the status of teaching.

But as my 2021 research showed, there is no compelling evidence the standards raise the status of the profession.

Meanwhile, many teachers don’t stay in the classroom once they are accredited.

A 2018 survey found one in three teachers who had done the higher levels of accreditation had moved into a school leadership role that took them more out of the classroom. Previous Australian research has shown teachers see moving into a school leadership or management role – such as a principal or a subject coordinator – as more prestigious than staying in the classroom.

Read more:
We won’t solve the teacher shortage until we answer these 4 questions

We don’t have a national approach

The uptake is not helped by different state attitudes. For example, Western Australia has an alternative leadership and pathways for teachers, which do not involve the national standards.

The figures suggest teachers would prefer to get a masters degree or other university qualification anyway. More than 16,000 Australians completed a postgraduate degree in education in 2021 alone. Even accounting for the 4,000 or so of those who were completing initial teacher education at master degree level, this is still a significant figure.

What now?

Teaching has long had an emphasis on ongoing professional development. But the low uptake in voluntary accreditation suggests we need to change the way we recognise high-performing teachers.

The two mandatory stages of the standards have had a high impact in part because all initial teacher education courses (and teachers’ ongoing registration) are pegged to them.

One way to give the voluntary stages of the standards some relevance, currency and status in the profession is to hitch “highly accomplished and lead teacher” accreditation to university qualifications as well. We know teachers want to do further study. This could be combined with higher levels of registration.

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

– ref. Why are less than 1% of Australian teachers accredited at the top levels of the profession? – https://theconversation.com/why-are-less-than-1-of-australian-teachers-accredited-at-the-top-levels-of-the-profession-208659

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Lesh, Lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, Deakin University

Heritage conservation has been blamed for making the housing crisis worse by standing in the way of new, higher-density housing. But protecting heritage and increasing housing should be complementary objectives. Heritage suffers when not enjoyed by our growing communities. Housing suffers when not shaped by our communal heritage.

YIMBYs and NIMBYs are usually on opposing sides of this debate. Yet what they agree on is the desirability of heritage areas. People in both the Not In My Back Yard and Yes In My Back Yard camps want to live in established suburbs, often in the inner city, with attractive historic urban landscapes.

Unfortunately, NIMBYs have exploited heritage loopholes to prevent development. There is a problem with how overly cautious practitioners and under-resourced authorities are applying heritage protections. So, YIMBYs wrongly blame heritage itself for housing issues.

Empirical evidence that heritage is a barrier to housing supply is practically non-existent. It’s not a talking point among housing experts. The real issues are urban policy, the tax system and housing supply.

Read more:
Why heritage protection is about how people use places, not just their architecture and history

In support of both heritage and housing

Heritage should be seen as part of the housing solution. Advocates for both heritage and housing can and have been allies.

In Victoria, for example, architect and politician Evan Walker introduced the first comprehensive local protections in the mid-1980s. He was ably supported by David Yencken, who had been the first chairman of the Australian Heritage Commission and a developer of innovative suburban housing. These city visionaries recognised that we could keep the best of the past and complement it with new, higher-density builds.

Heritage protections were created at a time when our historic neighbourhoods were at risk of widespread demolitions for inferior new buildings. High-rise towers threatened areas like The Rocks in Sydney and Carlton in Melbourne. A surge in ad-hoc redevelopment put valued homes at risk in suburbs such as Brisbane’s New Farm, North Adelaide and Perth’s Subiaco.

Our heritage suburbs were not desirable like today. We only have our fabulous cities of villages because people fought hard for heritage protections.

Read more:
Our cities owe much of their surviving heritage to Jack Mundey

Heritage is about what we find significant. Eroding protections risks the social, physical and historic fabric of heritage neighbourhoods, the very reasons so many of us – including both YIMBYs and NIMBYs – want to live in them. These areas have vibrant high streets, excellent services such as schools and hospitals, and many transport options.

It’s notable, too, that the smaller block sizes in older suburbs already produce high levels of density by Australian standards. Their walkability and infrastructure also make them more liveable. This heritage of urban vitality is worth conserving and replicating.

We can build more housing in heritage areas

A more palatable and sustainable solution is to build well-designed homes, hapartments and townhouses in and around heritage areas. There are architects and developers who do this. It may be a case of adapting obsolete historical buildings or constructing new buildings on appropriate sites.

When done well, new builds and incremental change improve our historic urban landscapes. Good examples include Perth’s Northbridge, Melbourne’s Collingwood and Sydney’s Chippendale.

Importantly, the best-designed new homes respect local history, prevailing design forms and neighbourhood character. That is a great strength of heritage: it allows us to embrace the most significant and beautiful aspects of our existing built forms and social lives.

Read more:
Preserving cities: how ‘trendies’ shaped Australia’s urban heritage

Heritage is not just about protecting grand monuments along Spring or Macquarie streets. It is also about everyday aspects of our suburbs: the sturdy stone street kerb, the intricate iron and lacework terrace, the worker’s timber cottage, the subdivided Federation home, the industrial warehouse turned apartment block and, of course, uplifting gardens, parks and trees.

The precincts, places and features that are heritage-protected reflect decades of community efforts. Today, residents still must have a right to have a say in planning and to see their heritage protected. Conservation is enshrined in planning and heritage legislation and widely supported by the community.

Overcoming barriers to densifying heritage areas

Authorities too often say “no” to appropriate housing in heritage areas. It happens for many reasons, though so-called NIMBYism is a factor.

Many local councils have also had funding for conservation cut, while federal and state leadership in urban heritage is minimal.

Some traditional approaches to conservation do tend to prevent rather than promote reasonable change to heritage places. This is also unsustainable: adapting existing buildings is good for the environment.

Read more:
Frozen in time, we’ve become blind to ways to build sustainability into our urban heritage

Many authorities lack the knowledge and resources to ensure new housing is consistent with heritage. We need to equip them with the innovative heritage approaches and creative design outlook they need to make better decisions. Planning and design panels with wide-ranging skills, including heritage, could work with communities to increase housing supply and choice where people want to live.

It’s essential to address the housing crisisc. More people should be able to enter the housing market and enjoy living in established suburbs. We have the heritage, planning and design tools to achieve both objectives.

Heritage strategies for increasing housing supply can include subdivision, adaptive reuse and infill development in and around heritage areas. It’s about designing the best housing for the specific context. Heritage policies should be reviewed and updated across Australia to support these kinds of outcomes.

The urban heritage of Australia’s cities is what makes them among the world’s most liveable. Heritage should not be about blocking housing, but rather about asking “how can we build housing better?”. Let’s embrace our urban past to shape our urban future.

Read more:
War on the demolishers? Probably not, and timing of NSW heritage review is curious

James Lesh has consulted in the area of heritage conservation.

– ref. YIMBYs and NIMBYs unite! You can have both heritage protection and more housing – https://theconversation.com/yimbys-and-nimbys-unite-you-can-have-both-heritage-protection-and-more-housing-206765

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Garlett, Legal Academic and Industry Fellow, Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining, The University of Queensland

There has been a flurry of scaremongering recently about Western Australia’s new Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act, which came into effect on July 1.

The act aims to better reflect the aspirations of Aboriginal people in government and business decisions that impact their cultural heritage. The views of Indigenous people have not been given equal weight in WA on these matters before, which has led to disastrous consequences.

The state’s outdated Aboriginal Heritage Act from 1972 failed to prevent Rio Tinto from legally destroying ancient and sacred rock shelters in Juukan Gorge in 2020 to expand an iron ore mine, demonstrating the need for legal reform.

The new act in WA is a step towards alignment with laws in other states, too. So, why is there so much concern about it?

Why was this new law instituted?

Past changes to WA’s cultural heritage law have disadvantaged Indigenous people. Those reforms narrowed the definition of Aboriginal heritage, weakening the protection of sacred sites to enable mining projects and other developments.

The new act aims to rectify this situation and better protect Australia’s 60,000 years of precious Aboriginal heritage. The law was developed over a period of five years and involved extensive consultation with many groups from all over WA.

What does the new act try to do?

While development and heritage protection can sometimes co-exist, it is not always possible – notably in mining regions. Once tangible pieces of cultural heritage are destroyed, they are gone forever. This is why the act aims to strike a better balance between the interests of different land users and stakeholder groups.

The new law includes stronger protections for significant sites and broader definitions of Aboriginal cultural heritage. It also requires developers to consult with Traditional Owners via new governance structures.

And it includes a positive duty to exercise due diligence – which means actively avoiding harm to Aboriginal heritage – and stronger penalties for breaking the law.

The law also considers cultural landscapes such as ancestral journeys through song lines – not just individual cultural sites. This approach means that both tangible and intangible cultural heritage can be protected.

There are now opportunities to establish protected cultural heritage areas in the state, too, which haven’t existed before.

Is all of the concern justified? Why is there so much confusion?

Despite the aim of striking a better balance between different stakeholder interests, many groups remain concerned about the act.

Farmers say the changes may delay their normal operations and impede their ability to work the land. Some fear they might be unduly prosecuted or fined.

Mining companies say the introduction of the law has been shambolic with exploration companies concerned it will slow the discovery of the minerals we need for the energy transition away from fossil fuels, such as lithium, copper and iron ore.

It has also been reported that sales of residential properties over 1,100 square metres have now started including disclosure statements that the buyer understands there may be new legal obligations to consider.

This may be adding to the fearmongering, similar to the introduction of the Native Title Act in the 1990s, when people feared they could lose ownership of their suburban backyards. That never came to pass.

Read more:
From crumbling rock art to exposed ancestral remains, climate change is ravaging our precious Indigenous heritage

The Shire of Carnarvon in WA says the new law may trigger community disputes about who is the appropriate Traditional Owner or knowledge holding group for a particular area of land. But this is not a new issue.

While there may be some uncertainty about the act, it does not mean the changes are unworkable. What will be required is adequate resourcing for the new local Aboriginal cultural heritage services and the new Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Council.

To allay fears, the WA government says for the first 12 months it will focus on implementation of the act, not punishing stakeholders for breaches of the more rigorous requirement to conduct Indigenous heritage surveys.

Public workshops and education sessions will be offered for anyone who is uncertain about the new requirements, as well.

Is the new law strong enough?

While it may be a step in the right direction, the law does not go far enough from an Indigenous perspective and for other professionals who work with Indigenous people.

A major point of contention is that the state minister for Aboriginal affairs can still have the final say in situations where traditional owners and developers do not agree on the destruction of cultural heritage. In the past, the minister has routinely prioritised mining and other developments over Aboriginal heritage protection.

The First Nations Heritage Protection Alliance has called for overarching federal legislation to ensure Indigenous self-determination and consent rights on cultural heritage are codified into Commonwealth law.

Read more:
Juukan Gorge inquiry: a critical turning point in First Nations authority over land management

In addition, the Dhawura Ngilan vision, which was developed by Australia’s peak Indigenous heritage bodies, outlines best practice standards for cultural heritage management and legislative protections.

It calls for Aboriginal heritage to be acknowledged and valued as central to Australia’s national heritage and recognised for its global significance. The vision sees Aboriginal people as the custodians of their own heritage, supported by strong and consistent heritage management policies across all states.

This issue of how we make decisions that balance competing interests is going to be more pressing in the future. Much of the mining required for the crucial minerals to fuel the renewable energy transition overlaps with Indigenous peoples’ lands.

Despite some improvement to the cultural heritage law in WA, more needs to be done. There needs to be protections for water resources and managing the cumulative impacts major developments (such as mining) can have on cultural heritage over time.

There is a lot more work to do to ensure our laws are not only fair, but also comprehensive. The next 12 months will hopefully allay fears the new state Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act will cause chaos and take us backwards.

Emma Garlett is an Indigenous consultant. She receives research funding at The University of Queensland. She is a columnist for The West Australian and the Host of Paint it Blak on YouTube. Emma is an Adjunct Professor and Advisory Board Member at the National Centre for Reconciliation, Truth and Justice at Federation University.

Deanna is chief investigator of an ARC Linkage grant on public-private inquiries in mining; member of the International Council of Mining and Metals independent expert review panel; and trustee and member of the international advisory council for the Institute of Human Rights and Business. She is Director of the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining at The University of Queensland.

Sarah Holcombe is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining (CSRM) at the University of Queensland. CSRM undertakes applied research for NGOs and civil society organisations, government and industry. Sarah is a member of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA) expert working group on FPIC.

– ref. Why is there so much confusion and fearmongering over WA’s new Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act? – https://theconversation.com/why-is-there-so-much-confusion-and-fearmongering-over-was-new-aboriginal-cultural-heritage-act-208752