Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adele Marum, PhD Candidate in English, University of Melbourne

Review: Little Birds, Sky Atlantic, released on Stan August 5 2020

Little Birds adapts a 1979 collection of French-born diarist Anaïs Nin’s unsettling erotic short stories published two years after her death.

Nin maintained that she wrote these stories in the late 1930s and early 1940s to earn money to support her artistic endeavours. During this time, she says, her life became “something like the life of the prostitute”. The stories are tales of taboo and violence, involving brothel workers, domination, exhibitionism and voyeurism as well as incest and sexual assault.

These remain major topics of interest in the 2020 adaptation. The series, written by artist, filmmaker and writer Sophia Al-Maria and directed by Stacie Passon, is a sensitive example of the current interest in and celebration of the sex industry and kink across multiple art forms. (Think Cardi B’s WAP feat. Megan Thee Stallion or FKA twigs’ Cellophane). It also invests in a sometimes (too) loud symbolism that visualises some of the key themes of Nin’s writing.

Futurist Tangiers

Al-Maria’s adaptation of Nin’s erotica sees the stories transposed onto the emergent Moroccan independence movement in Tangiers in 1955. The streets and bars of Tangiers are made dreamlike with neon hues. The characters’ costumes – dresses and suits in the style of Christian Dior’s New Look – incorporate luxe fake eyelashes, gimp masks and glitter. The visuals are an exploration of what Al-Maria terms “Gulf Futurism”, which emphasises the almost dystopian realities of many contemporary Gulf countries.

The six episodes follow Lucy Savage (Juno Temple), a wealthy New York heiress. In the first episode, Lucy travels to Tangiers to marry broke British aristocrat Hugo Cavendish-Smyth (Hugh Skinner). Perhaps in a nod to Nin’s suggestion that something like writing erotica can be thought of as sex work, we are frequently unable to separate characters’ private lives from their capacity to earn money.

An example of this is that Hugo, now he is married, must deal weapons to Morocco’s French colonial regime for Lucy’s sociopath father (David Costabile). In episode three, Mr Savage makes clear that if Hugo wants the pretty life and wife, he (and Lucy) must arouse a buyer’s interest in his new Man Portable Air Defence System (MANPADS). The insinuation is that the closer we look, the more we see how the characters’ livelihoods depend on sex appeal. Hugo’s situation is made more poignant because he is actually gay and in love with exiled Egyptian prince Adham (Raphael Acloque).

The series replicates Nin’s “stories within stories” style, where multiple characters have erotic encounters, some of which include telling each other dirty stories. Interestingly, many of the more faithful adaptations of Nin’s erotica occur only as verbatim stories told by characters in the television series.

From awakening to submission

Unlike the collection, the series has an overall plot. This condenses Nin’s life story, specifically as narrated in Henry and June, an “unexpurgated” volume of Nin’s diary that details her latent sexual “awakening” after moving with her husband – Hugh “Hugo” Guiler – to Paris in the early 1930s. In the series, the naive Lucy quickly becomes disillusioned with her marriage to Hugo. Subsequent episodes follow her seduction by Tangiers.

Having established this historical connection with Nin, Al-Maria proceeds to rewrite the story. In the second episode, Lucy seduces the secretary of the French colonial regime (Jean-Marc Barr), who bears an uncanny resemblance to Nin’s long-time lover, author and misogynist Henry Miller.

In possibly my favourite scene (for big metaphors and set design), Lucy does a “trick” for the secretary, ordering him to sit still with a lit cigarette between his lips. She then blasts it away, shooting a tiny gun engraved with “Lucy Loves Daddy”.

Lucy is captivated by Moroccan mistress Cherifa Lamour (Yuma Marwun). Lucy’s submission to Cherifa (who steals Lucy’s gun in the midst of an orgy) echoes Nin’s obsession with June Miller, Henry Miller’s frequently estranged wife. However, Cherifa is not married to the secretary. Rather, she is stalked and prosecuted by him for her work and anti-colonial politics.

Read more: Violence dressed up as erotica: Fifty Shades of Grey and abuse

Rewriting the story

Cherifa remains a key character in Little Birds. Her relative autonomy revises Nin’s frequent marginalisation of sex workers as animalistic, exotic and dead on the inside.

These differences to Nin’s stories enable Al-Maria to insert stories of resistance to colonial power. However, the series amplifies Nin’s emasculation of brash men who are at the whim and fancy of women’s desires.

Little Birds is strikingly similar to the feature-length 1974 French soft-core Emmanuelle. In that film, a young wife travels to Bangkok to have lots of exhibitionist sex with her diplomat husband, while nameless Thai people look on.

While the 2020 series maintains the pastel, soft-edged scenes and white protagonists of Emmanuelle, it criticises the repeated use of non-white actors in late 20th-century “avant-garde” porn to amplify the sex appeal of its white leads.

Read more: Strippers on film: battlers, showgirls and hustlers

At times, Al-Maria’s commitment to disrupting Nin’s stories is overblown and this can lead to contradictory meanings. The secretary’s use of a Japanese shibari rope bondage technique to hold Cherifa captive conflates sex work and human trafficking in a way that I doubt was intended, given the series’ overall celebration of kink and prioritisation of oppressed communities.

Nonetheless, Little Birds aptly shows us how erotica and porn can simultaneously be art, work and a means of arousal.

Little Birds is now streaming on Stan.

– ref. Playing and paying the whore in Little Birds – https://theconversation.com/playing-and-paying-the-whore-in-little-birds-144345

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lorraine Finlay, Lecturer in Law, Murdoch University

The events of the past few days in Western Australia have been extraordinary as the protracted conflict between the government and mining billionaire Clive Palmer reached a fever pitch.

Premier Mark McGowan declared the state is “in a war” with Palmer, and, in turn, Palmer has called for the premier to be jailed.

While this war of words has become a feature of their ongoing dispute over the WA border closures, these comments are related to an entirely different disagreement — a legal battle Palmer is waging against the state, reported to be worth A$30 billion. But Palmer told reporters this week:

There isn’t any $30 billion claim against the Western Australian government […] It’s [their] assessment of what the damages are for what they’ve done.

Nevertheless, the Western Australian government late last night took the unprecedented step of passing a bill preventing Palmer from collecting damages from the state.

In essence, the government is seeking to legislate its way out of a legal dispute. There is no doubt that having to pay a potential $30 billion damages claim would be devastating for WA. But trying to circumvent the courts by instead legislating a preferred outcome is also not without its consequences.

Read more: WA border challenge: why states, not courts, need to make the hard calls during health emergencies

What is the current dispute about?

Late Tuesday, Attorney-General John Quigley introduced the bill and informed parliament the state was facing the massive damages claim related to the dispute with Palmer.

The dispute stretches back to 2012 and has a complicated history, including both arbitral awards and a Supreme Court decision in Palmer’s favour. It was recently listed for a 15-day arbitration hearing due to commence in November.

While WA has vigorously defended its legal position, Quigley acknowledged “a successful defence of the claim is not guaranteed”.

McGowan also warned losing the case would bankrupt the state and

would mean mass closures of hospitals, of schools, of police stations, mass sackings of public servants and child protection workers.

The bill was designed to prevent this outcome. And just two days later, it passed into law with the support of both government and opposition members.

What does the new law do?

Quigley has acknowledged this new law is unprecedented. It is directly and expressly targeting Palmer, his mining company Mineralogy Pty Ltd, and the ongoing dispute over the Balmoral South iron ore project.

It terminates the ongoing arbitration, invalidates existing arbtiration agreements, voids existing arbitral awards, prevents further legal proceedings or appeals, protects the state from any liability of any sort in relation to the dispute (including any criminal liability), and obliges Palmer and his companies to indemnify the state.

The rules of natural justice and freedom of information laws are expressly stated not to apply.

Read more: Mineral wealth, Clive Palmer, and the corruption of Australian politics

There are a number of concerns with the government’s actions. First, this approach undermines both the rule of law and separation of powers, which are foundational pillars of our Westminster system of government.

It also creates sovereign risk. The premier has sought to downplay this by reassuring the resources sector this is a one-time-only exceptional case.

But how could it realistically not change the risk calculation made by potential investors? If the government shows it is prepared to intervene in this way once, how could anybody be 100% sure that they wouldn’t be prepared to do it again?

Another concern is the singling out of Palmer by the law. While he is clearly a wildly unpopular figure in WA and an enthusiastic litigant, drafting specific laws to target named individuals is never a good idea and undermines the principle of equality before the law.

Laws should not be drafted to target specific individuals, no matter who they are.

A rushed debate

The fact that such extraordinary legislation has been rushed into the parliament with no prior consultation or warning, and passed with only two days of debate is also concerning.

The government rejected a proposal to have the legislation considered in more detail by a parliamentary committee, even if done within an expedited timeframe. Quigley claimed

there is too much at risk for all Western Australians for namby-pamby inquiries.

While the premier has claimed the urgency was necessary given the unique circumstances, it means an extraordinary law that negates foundational Westminster principles has been passed with minimal scrutiny or debate.

The significance of this is perhaps best captured by comments made by McGowan himself in 2013. The view from opposition gave him a somewhat different perspective:

It has been part of the standing orders and the time-honoured process of parliament in the Westminster system for a long period that we do not rush legislation through without time to consider it because doing so does not allow proper debate in its consideration and mistakes are made in the legislation.

The unprecedented nature of this particular law must surely amplify these concerns.

What happens next?

Palmer has already indicated he will challenge the validity of the new law in the High Court. He has also taken steps in the past two days to try to prevent the law from taking effect by registering the existing arbitral awards in the Queensland Supreme Court and applying for an injunction in the Federal Court.

While the WA government has tried to remove the dispute from the courts, it now looks as though the matter will end up in court one way or another — and the legal fight will likely be protracted.

By trying to legislate itself a win in this legal dispute, the government has tried to place itself above the law. This may or may not end up saving WA from a catastrophic damages claim.

But there is still a significant cost in the collateral damage that has been done to the rule of law.

Read more: These young Queenslanders are taking on Clive Palmer’s coal company and making history for human rights

– ref. The WA government legislated itself a win in its dispute with Clive Palmer — and put itself above the law – https://theconversation.com/the-wa-government-legislated-itself-a-win-in-its-dispute-with-clive-palmer-and-put-itself-above-the-law-144360

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, Office of the Chief Scientist

Following the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20, many people throughout Australia, and across the world, wanted to know how they could help in response to the environmental disaster.

Hundreds contacted the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA), Australia’s peak citizen science body, for guidance on how to participate in relevant scientific projects.

It was a golden opportunity to show that science can be, and is, done by all kinds of people – not just those working in labs with years of training and access to high-powered instruments. A scientist can be you, your children or your parents.

And this recognition led to the establishment of the Citizen Science Bushfire Project Finder, a key outcome from the bushfire science roundtable, which was convened in January by Federal Science Minister Karen Andrews.

To establish the project finder database, ACSA partnered with the CSIRO and the Atlas of Living Australia to assist the search for vetted projects that could contribute to our understanding of post-bushfire recovery.

Five months on, the value is evident.

Science as a way of thinking

In response to the bushfires, one citizen science project set up was the Kangaroo Island Dunnart Survey. A record number of citizen scientists answered the call to assist in recovery efforts for this small marsupial.

The Kangaroo Island dunnart was already listed as endangered before the fires, with population estimates between 300-500 individuals. And initial post-fire assessments indicated a significant further decline in its population, highlighting the importance of tracking the species’ recovery.

Meanwhile, nearly 1,500 kilometres away from Kangaroo Island, a local resident set up “Mallacoota After Fires” in the small community of Mallacoota, Victoria – a region hit hard by the bushfires.

This has enabled the community to record and validate (via an app and website) how the fires impacted the region’s plants and animals.

So far, the project has documented the existence of a range of flora and fauna, from common wombats to the vulnerable green and golden bell frog. It has also captured some amazing images of bush regeneration after fire.

Science does not just belong to professionals. As eminent US astronomer Carl Sagan noted, “science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge”.

This suggests that, when properly enabled, anyone can actively participate. And the output goes beyond the rewards of personal involvement. It contributes to better science.

Read more: Citizen science: how you can contribute to coronavirus research without leaving the house

The need for ongoing engagement

Citizen science is significantly contributing observations and expertise to bushfire research. Across southeast New South Wales and the ACT, several hundred citizen scientists have:

• conducted targeted landscape-wide surveys of threatened species, or new weed or pest incursions
• collected specified data from plot locations stratified against fire history
• assessed whether wildlife actually use water and feed stations established by communities after a fire has been through. (Data suggests the use of the stations is limited).

And it’s not just in local communities. Platforms such as DigiVol have enabled citizen scientists from around the world to review thousands of camera trap images deployed post-fire to monitor species survival and recovery.

Still, there is much more to do. Australia is a vast continent and as we saw last summer, the fire footprint is immense.

But there is also a huge community out there that can help support the implementation of science and technology, as we adapt to our changing climate.

Reaching out at the right time

In January, Prime Minister Scott Morrison asked the CSIRO, supported by an expert advisory panel chaired by one of us (Alan Finkel), to develop recommendations for practical measures that would increase Australia’s disaster and climate resilience.

The report on Climate and Disaster Resilience gives due emphasis to the importance of citizen science in complementing traditional research-led monitoring campaigns and sharing locally specific advice. One component of the response also brought together national stakeholders, to develop a series of more detailed recommendations regarding the critical role of citizen science.

Citizen scientists can be involved in important data collection and knowledge building. They can collaborate with disaster response agencies and research agencies, to develop additional science-based community education and training programs.

Also, citizen science is a way to collect distributed data beyond the affordability and resources of conventional science.

With that in mind, the task now is to better marry the “professional” scientific effort with the citizen science effort, to truly harness the potential of citizen science. In doing so, we can ensure environmental and societal approaches to disaster recovery represent a diversity of voices.

The role of the community, particularly in developing resilience against environmental disaster, can be a most useful mechanism for empowering people who may otherwise feel at a loss from the impact of disaster. Furthermore, by working with communities directly affected by bushfires, we can help measure the extent of the impact.

We call on our professional scientist colleagues to actively collaborate with citizen science groups. In doing so, we can identify priority areas with critical data needs, while also informing, enriching and engaging with diverse communities in science.

Equally, we encourage citizen scientists to share and tell their stories across social and political settings to demonstrate the impact they continue to have.

The beneficiary will be science.

Read more: Chief Scientist: we need to transform our world into a sustainable ‘electric planet’

– ref. From Kangaroo Island to Mallacoota, citizen scientists proved vital to Australia’s bushfire recovery – https://theconversation.com/from-kangaroo-island-to-mallacoota-citizen-scientists-proved-vital-to-australias-bushfire-recovery-48230

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Greg Barton, Chair in Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University

Have we flattened the curve of global terrorism? In our COVID-19-obsessed news cycle stories about terrorism and terrorist attacks have largely disappeared. We now, though, understand a little more about how pandemics work.

And ironically, long before the current pandemic, the language of epidemiology proved helpful in understanding by analogy the way in which terrorism works as a phenomenon that depends on social contact and exchange, and expands rapidly in an opportunistic fashion when defences are lowered.

Terrorism goes quiet – but we’ve seen this before

In this pandemic year, it appears one piece of good news is that the curve of international terrorist attacks has indeed been flattened. Having lost its physical caliphate, Islamic State also appears to have lost its capacity, if not its willingness, to launch attacks around the world well beyond conflict zones.

We have seen this happen before. The September 11 attacks in 2001 were followed by a wave of attacks around the world. Bali in October 2002, Riyadh, Casablanca, Jakarta and Istanbul in 2003, Madrid in March 2004, followed by Khobar in May, then London in July 2005 and Bali in October, not to mention numerous other attacks in the Middle East and West Asia.

Since 2005, with the exception of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris in January 2015, al-Qaeda has been prevented from launching any major attacks in western capitals.

The September 11 attacks precipitated enormous investment in police counterterrorism capacity around the world, particularly in intelligence. The result has been that al-Qaeda has struggled to put together large-scale coordinated attacks in Western capitals without being detected and stopped.

Then in 2013, Islamic State emerged. This brought a new wave of attacks from 2014 in cities around the world, outside of conflict zones in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Nigeria.

This wave of IS international terror attacks now appears to have reached an end. The hopeful rhetoric of the collapse of the IS caliphate leading to an end of the global campaign of terror attacks appears to have been borne out. Although, as the sophisticated and coordinated suicide bombings in Colombo in Easter 2019 reminded us, further attacks by previously unknown cells cannot ever be ruled out.

While it’s tempting to conclude that the ending of the current wave of international terrorist attacks by IS is due largely to the ending of the physical caliphate in Syria and Iraq, and a concomitant collapse of capacity, the reality is more complex. Just as the wave of al-Qaeda attacks in the first half of the 2000s was curtailed primarily by massive investments in counterterrorism, so too it appears to be the case with IS international terror plots in the second half of this decade.

Read more: Why we need to stay alert to the terror threat as the UK reopens

The 2019 attacks in Sri Lanka illustrate dramatically what happens when there is a failure of intelligence, whether due to capacity or, as appears to be the case in Sri Lanka, a lack of political will. The rise of IS in 2013-14 should not have caught us by surprise, but it did, and in 2014 and 2015 we were scrambling to get up to speed with the intelligence challenge.

Epidemiology of terror

The parallels with the epidemiology of viruses are striking. Reasoning by analogy is imperfect, but it can be a powerful way of prompting reflection. The importance of this cannot be underestimated as intelligence failures in counterterrorism, like poor political responses to pandemics, are in large part failures of imagination.

We don’t see what we don’t want to see, and we set ourselves up to become victims of our own wishful thinking. So, with two waves of international terrorist attacks over the past two decades largely brought under control, what can we say about the underlying threat of global terrorism?

There are four key lessons we need to learn.

First, we are ultimately seeking to counter the viral spread of ideas and narratives embodied in social networks and spread person-to-person through relationships, whether in person or online. Effective policing and intelligence built on strong community relations can dramatically limit the likelihood of terrorist networks successfully executing large-scale attacks. Effective intelligence can also go a long way to diminishing the frequency and intensity of lone-actor attacks. But this sort of intelligence is even more dependent on strong community relations, built on trust that emboldens people to speak out.

Second, terrorist movements, being opportunistic and parasitic, achieve potency in inverse relation to the level of good governance. In other words, as good governance breaks down, terrorist movements find opportunity to embed themselves. In failing states, the capacity of the state to protect its citizens, and the trust between citizen and authorities, provides ample opportunities for terrorist groups to exploit grievances and needs. This is the reason around 75% of all deaths due to terrorist activity in recent years have occurred in just five nations: Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria (followed by Somalia, Libya, and Yemen).

The third lesson is directly linked to state failure, and is that military methods dramatically overpromise and under-deliver when it comes to countering terrorism. In fact, more than that, the use of military force tends to generate more problems than it solves. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than what has been so wrongly framed as the Global War on Terror.

Beginning in October 2001 in the immediate wake of the September 11 attacks, the war on terror began with a barrage of attacks on al-Qaeda positions in Afghanistan. It was spurred by understandable anger, but it led to two decades of tremendously expensive military campaigns they have completely failed to deliver the hoped-for end in terrorism to justify the massive toll of violence and loss of life.

The military campaign in Afghanistan began, and has continued for almost 19 years, without any strategic endpoints being defined and indeed with no real strategy vision at all. After almost two decades of continuous conflict, any American administration would understandably want to end the military campaign and withdraw.

Obama talked of doing this but was unable to do so. Trump campaigned on it as one of the few consistent features of his foreign policy thinking. Hence the current negotiations to dramatically reduce American troop numbers, and in the process trigger a reduction in allied coalition troops while releasing thousands of detained militants in response to poorly defined and completely un-guaranteed promises of a reduction in violence by the Taliban.

This is America’s way of ending decades of stalemate in which it is has proven impossible to defeat the Taliban, which even now controls almost one half of Afghanistan. But even as the peace negotiations have been going on the violence has continued unabated. The only reason for withdrawing and allowing the Taliban to formally take a part in governing Afghanistan is fatigue.

Not just Afghanistan

If the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan were the main story, the situation would already be far more dire then we would care to accept. But the problem is not limited to Afghanistan and West Asia. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the “coalition of the willing” was justified largely on the grounds it was necessary to stop al-Qaeda from establishing a presence in Iraq. It achieved, of course, the exact opposite.

Al-Qaeda had little, if any, presence in Iraq prior to the invasion. But the ensuring collapse of not just the regime of Saddam Hussein but the dismantling of the Baath party and the Iraqi military, led largely by a Sunni minority in a Shia majority country, created perfect storm conditions for multiple Sunni insurgencies.

These in turn came to be dominated by the group that styled itself first as Al Qaeda in Iraq, then as the Islamic State in Iraq, and then as the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria. This powerful insurgency was almost completely destroyed in the late 2000s when Sunni tribes were paid and equipped to fight the al-Qaeda insurgency.

The toxic sectarian politics of Iraq, followed by the withdrawal of US troops at the end of 2011, coinciding with the outbreak of civil war in Syria, saw the almost extinguished insurgency quickly rebuild. We only really began to pay attention when IS led a blitzkrieg across northern Iraq, seized Mosul, and declared a caliphate in June 2014.

Defeating this quasi-state took years of extraordinarily costly military engagement. But even as IS was deprived of the last of its safe havens on the ground, analysts were warning it continued to have tens of thousands of insurgent militants in Syria and northern Iraq and was successfully returning to its earlier mode of insurgency.

Read more: US retreat from Syria could see Islamic State roar back to life

As the Iraqi security forces have been forced to pull back in the face of a steadily building COVID-19 pandemic, there are signs the IS insurgent forces have continued to seize the spaces left open to them. Even without the pandemic, the insurgency was always going to steadily build strength, but the events of 2020 have provided it with fresh opportunities.

The fourth and final lesson we need to come to terms with is that we are dealing with a viral movement of ideas embodied in social networks. We are not dealing with a singular unchanging enemy but rather an amorphous, agile, threat able to constantly evolve and adapt itself to circumstances.

Al-Qaeda and IS share a common set of ideas built around Salafi-jihadi violent extremism. But this is not the only violent extremism we have to worry about.

In America today, as has been the case for more than a decade, the prime terrorist threat comes from far-right violent extremism rather than from Salafi-jihadi extremism. The same is not true in Australia, although ASIO and our police forces have been warning us far-right extremism represents an emerging secondary threat.

But the potent violence of an Australian far-right terrorist in the attack in Christchurch in March 2019 serves to remind us this form of violent extremism, feeding on toxic identity politics and hate, represents a growing threat in our southern hemisphere.

Read more: ASIO chief’s assessment shows the need to do more, and better, to prevent terrorism

Fighting the terrorist pandemic

In this year in which we have been, understandably, so preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic, another pandemic has been continuing unabated. It is true we have successfully dealt with two waves of global terrorist attacks over the past two decades, but we have not dealt successfully the underlying source of infections.

In fact, we have contributed, through military campaigns, to weakening the body politic of host countries in which groups like al-Qaeda, IS and other violent extremist groups have a parasitic presence.

We now need to face the inconvenient truth that toxic identity politics and the tribal dynamics of hate have infected western democracies. Limiting the scope for terrorist attacks is difficult. Eliminating the viral spread of hateful extremism is much harder, but ultimately even more important.

– ref. In COVID’s shadow, global terrorism goes quiet. But we have seen this before, and should be wary – https://theconversation.com/in-covids-shadow-global-terrorism-goes-quiet-but-we-have-seen-this-before-and-should-be-wary-144286

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Hall, Senior Researcher in Politics, Auckland University of Technology

It isn’t easy being a political opposition in the midst of a crisis. The volatility within New Zealand’s National Party – which has had three leaders in as many months – is a case in point.

Some argue this is circumstantial. The COVID-19 crisis has benefited the incumbent government – or, more precisely, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party. Of course, that public support could easily vanish in the event of a mismanaged outbreak, because voters don’t respond to a crisis itself, but to the competency of its handling.

Yet the government appears to have won public confidence – and so, for now, the electoral advantage.

But there is more going on. Under pressure, the opposition risks sabotaging itself by failing in its role as opposition – that is, failing in the duties and responsibilities that accompany this office.

Formally, this role is titled “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition”. Her Majesty, of course, refers to Queen Elizabeth II, still officially the sovereign of New Zealand.

The meaning of “opposition” is also intuitive to grasp. As the largest party that isn’t in government, its job is to oppose – to challenge, to test, to needle, to inquire. The opposition ought to hold the government to account.

Opposition is a recent invention

This role hasn’t always existed in parliamentary systems – it was a 19th century innovation. But it enriched democracy by guaranteeing a space for dissent, for formal disagreement with the government of the day.

It meant the losers of the political competition would not be turfed into the wilderness, bitter and disenfranchised. Rather, they would remain in the fold, able to contribute to the political process through confrontation, critique and even collaboration.

This gets us closer to the odd word “loyal”. It implies that the opposition should be loyal to the democratic institutions that protect its right to criticise. It need not take the government line on any issue, but it should be loyal to the rules of the game, precisely so that it can continue playing.

Read more: By delaying the dissolution of parliament Jacinda Ardern buys time on the election date – but only a little

Consider, by contrast, the one-party state, where the losers in the political competition are shut out of public decision-making. In such circumstances, loyalty is pointless. The ruling party only wants to expel or silence detractors, to cancel their voice.

Consequently, the opposition has no duty of loyalty, and instead a strong incentive to influence public decisions by seizing power – by coup, revolt or revolution.

Constructive opposition is the point

In this we see the distinction that political theorist Chantal Mouffe makes between “antagonistic” and “agonistic” politics.

Antagonistic politics are where opposing parties treat each other as enemies, to be vanquished or exiled. With agonistic politics, on the other hand, parties treat each other as noble adversaries, worthy of challenge but also respect.

The institution of the loyal opposition facilitates a constructive agonism. As the New Zealand-born political philosopher Jeremy Waldron argues, it instructs the government to assume the loyalty of the opposition, to not treat it as treasonous merely because it voices disagreement.

Meanwhile, the opposition must oppose – but it must do so without burning down the house. Yet the COVID-19 crisis is seriously straining this loyalty.

Read more: Voting is an essential service too. New Zealand can’t be afraid to go to the polls, even in lockdown

A dangerous game

It started out well with New Zealand’s Epidemic Response Committee, a cross-party vehicle of agonistic democracy, where the opposition could openly hold the government to account, even under a state of emergency.

But the subsequent leaking of sensitive information for political gain by National Party members betrayed a lack of loyalty to government institutions, and to New Zealanders who entrust them with private information.

Now, the opposition is insinuating that the government publicly withheld information about the present outbreak.

Given how swiftly this coronavirus spreads, and how much the government has to lose from its spreading, it isn’t politically rational for the government to cover it up. It is a cynical suggestion – and the opposition risks that many voters will see it as such.

This is a dangerous game. The opposition is undermining trust at a time when trust is incredibly important. New Zealand’s strong levels of social and institutional trust are a key factor in our relatively successful pandemic response.

Its degradation – a loss of trust in official medical advice, for example, or the authority of lockdowns – diminishes the country’s capacity to fend off COVID-19. It further diverts attention away from more credible shortcomings in New Zealand’s pandemic response, such as contact tracing and quarantine protocol.

A noble calling

And it feeds into the paranoia that crises conjure up. Social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are revealing themselves as effective engines of conspiracy and indoctrination – with implications we’re still coming to understand.

Read more: Rogue poll or not, all the signs point to a tectonic shift in New Zealand politics

The opposition’s appeals to paranoia only add more fuel to the online inferno. Yet the electoral gains, if there are any, are liable to spill toward minor parties, such as the New Zealand Public Party, which make conspiracies their forte.

Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has a noble function, all the more important in this volatile political moment. Upholding rather than denigrating that office is what will reinvigorate the loyalties of voters.

– ref. The COVID-19 crisis tests oppositions as well as governments. Ahead of New Zealand’s election, National risks failing that test – https://theconversation.com/the-covid-19-crisis-tests-oppositions-as-well-as-governments-ahead-of-new-zealands-election-national-risks-failing-that-test-144415

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Elshaug, Visiting Fellow, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, Professor of Health Policy and Co-Director, Menzies Centre for Health Policy, University of Sydney

This is one of our occasional Essays on Health, this time from an Australian visiting fellow in Washington, DC. Adam Elshaug, professor of health policy, asks how one of the world’s most inequitable health-care systems has coped with COVID-19. The short answer, he says, is that it provides a wake-up call for us all. It’s a long read.

We all hoped for a rapid and effective COVID-19 response. For the United States, that has not occurred. It is now host to more documented COVID-19 cases and deaths than any other country.

With about 4% of the world’s population, the US accounts for about 25% of all cases and about 20% of all deaths — more than 169,000 deaths so far.

Yes, it’s a large country, but that is about 500 deaths per million population, compared with Australia’s about 12 per million.

Australia’s state of Victoria is amid its second wave, recording 723 new cases and 13 deaths on July 30. The same day, the US recorded 68,585 new cases and 1,465 deaths.

I write this from my temporary base in Washington, DC.

I have experienced first hand, and since the outset of the pandemic, how deficiencies in the organisation of the US social, political and health-care systems have become more vivid and their consequences intensified.

Given its status as a world superpower, and its stratospheric per capita health care spend, the situation in the US is truly alarming.

Entire books will be written on this woeful epoch in US history. But I want to focus on some key observations of the country’s failed COVID-19 response, and the lessons.

Transitioning to failure

It would be unfair to blame President Donald Trump and his administration for the systemic failures in the US social and health-care systems. Those have been decades in the making.

But his pre-COVID-19 dismantling of the pandemic preparedness system, disregard for scientists, and hyper-partisanship have clearly worsened the US response.

I agree with the political commentator David Frum, who wrote:

That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault.

President Barack Obama left the Trump administration with pandemic-ready infrastructure. This was motivated by outbreaks of Ebola and previous novel coronaviruses (responsible for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, and SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome), and an appreciation of their ever-present threat.

Then, Trump took critical steps before COVID-19 that weakened its preparedness to the point of catastrophe. Here are just a few.

Read more: Explainer: what Donald Trump’s funding cuts to WHO mean for the world

The Trump administration dismantled the (Obama-instituted) White House team in charge of pandemic response, dismissing its leadership and staff in early 2018. This team had also laid out a detailed dossier for a pandemic response plan. Trump ignored it.

Since coming to office, the Trump administration has also cut funding to key agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These cuts directly impacted domestic projects and international collaborations (including with China) on pandemic preparedness.

Too little, too late

Even into February as the severity of the pandemic was realised worldwide, Trump was downplaying the threat, openly stating it was like the common flu.

He called growing concerns about COVID-19 a “hoax” and had a “hunch” expert assessments of the potential toll were wrong.

As cases and deaths, particularly in New York began to rise steeply, the real evidence of unpreparedness became apparent.

Critically, at no point through the pandemic has the US had in place a sincere strategy of public health 101: test, trace, isolate.

Trump has repeatedly claimed anyone who wants a test can get a test, but this has been a farce. Shortages of testing supplies and poor coordination have hamstrung containment strategies.

Even though testing has increased, it has not kept up with demand. The time to receive results as of July ranged from 1 to 14 days, averaging 7 days.

This is inadequate to manage spread via active but undiagnosed cases. That is just the beginning of the current troubles.

The Disunited States of America

The limited availability of masks, personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators revealed significant cracks in US preparedness. It also put on full display the caustic political divisions that are a modern feature of US politics and society.

Despite the first cases being recorded in Washington state, its deadly potential was initially felt most in the Democratic state of New York. Trump used this to avenge old scores and fuel competition between red (Republican) versus blue (Democratic) states.

When the New York health-care system buckled as a result of its fragmented structure (another failing) and enormous caseload, the state’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, called for urgent assistance, such as supplies from the national stockpile.

Trump tweeted Governor Cuomo “should spend more time ‘doing’ and less time ‘complaining’.”

The fierce competition between states for limited mask and PPE supplies led to suppliers price-gouging.

Frustration led governors to place clandestine international orders. Illinois and Maryland, for example, received plane-loads of supplies under the cloak of darkness and protected by state police. They did this “out of fear the Trump administration would seize the cargo for the federal stockpile”, as occurred in Massachusetts.

There has also been tension across the country about stay-at-home orders, school closures, schools and retail reopenings, data transparency and sharing – the list goes on.

Wearing a mask has become a political act. Now, concerningly, Trump has ordered COVID-related hospital data bypass the CDC and be fed directly to the White House, raising concerns about transparency.

Read more: US coronavirus data will now go straight to the White House. Here’s what this means for the world

Despite Trump threatening his absolute authority over the states, much responsibility rests with state governors (equivalent to Australian premiers). And yet counties (equivalent to local councils) have enacted policies independent of, and often contradicting, state policies.

This could be sensible in reflecting local conditions as the rolling wave moves on. However, it has confused any singular messaging and exemplified the red/blue political divide.

The southern (primarily red) states that were late to institute control measures and early to re-open are now the epicentre of this rolling wave.

Read more: Coronavirus is spreading through rural South’s high-risk population – reopening economies will make it worse

Systemic inequality

Among OECD countries, the level of structural inequality in the US is extreme. The collision of three problems — uncontrolled pandemic, recession, uninsured people — is disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable.

Pre-pandemic, about 32 million Americans (around 10% of population) lacked health insurance. A further 150 million (around 50% of the population) held employer-sponsored health insurance.

Up to July 18, about 32 million Americans had filed for unemployment as a direct result of the pandemic, pushing the unemployment rate well into teen figures.

This number is rising weekly and millions of those have, or will, lose their employer-sponsored health insurance at a time they may need it most.

The US has the unenviable first place position for the highest health-care costs in the OECD yet some the worst health outcomes among similar countries.

COVID-19 has placed millions more Americans further away from accessing needed health care.

The country was already experiencing a decline in life expectancy and the fear now is this will be exacerbated further.

A stark warning

There is a political rallying cry in the US that the country represents a shining light on the hill, a “beacon of hope” for the world.

We must admit the US population size and current political climate make its pandemic response more complex than countries like Australia’s. But that doesn’t mean we can be apathetic.

The US, through COVID-19, offers the starkest of warnings. Underlying gross structural inequality, under-investment and unpreparedness in public health, and socio-political tensions have met in a dizzying, tragic outcome for the richest country in the world.

All Americans have suffered but their most vulnerable have, and will continue to, suffer disproportionately.

It is a shining light for what we must avoid, what we must stand up for and protect against.

This is a co-publication with Pursuit.

– ref. Pandemic letter from America: how the US handling of COVID-19 provides the starkest warning for us all – https://theconversation.com/pandemic-letter-from-america-how-the-us-handling-of-covid-19-provides-the-starkest-warning-for-us-all-144357

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick D. Nunn, Professor of Geography, School of Social Sciences, University of the Sunshine Coast

Sea level rise is a serious threat to the low-lying islands of the Republic of Kiribati in the central Pacific Ocean. To fight it, their president recently announced he plans to raise the islands to make them habitable as long as possible.

President Taneti Maamau will seek support from China for this ambitious strategy, and recently switched his nation’s allegiance from Taiwan to China to make this happen. It’s a bold move, considering China’s sights are set on military and economic expansion across the Pacific region, yet Maamau insists on maintaining Kiribati’s independence.

Read more: As Australia’s soft power in the Pacific fades, China’s voice gets louder

Maamau’s response to the looming climate crisis in Kiribati shows he is a president determined not to capitulate to western narratives of vulnerability.

Unlike President Anote Tong before him, who held the widely commended policy of migration, the Maamau viewpoint is not simply a difference of opinion – it’s a culturally grounded expression of human dignity.

Demeaning narratives

Kiribati is made up of atolls – the sinking summits of volcanic islands from the flanks of which coral reefs grow upwards. Unconsolidated sands and gravels tossed up onto these reefs by storm waves form the atoll islands, which are typically narrow, sinuous and low.

Most of us cannot imagine the everyday challenges of life there. The ocean is omnipresent, impossible to ignore, and a threat that could extinguish life on the island with just a short-lived flourish.

But for too long, the people of Kiribati have been pummelled and demeaned by global narratives that treat them as vulnerable.

This view ignores the fact that proud peoples have lived on atolls in the equatorial Pacific for millennia, surviving countless disasters.

For example, the people of Pukapuka Atoll in the northern Cook Islands speak of a night about 400 years ago as “te mate wolo” (the great death). Then, a giant wave washed over the island, destroying all the houses and food gardens, and killing everyone save two women and 17 men who were left to rebuild Pukapukan society.

Fight or flight

By the end of this century, the average global sea level may be over a metre higher than today. The highest point of most atolls in Kiribati (and elsewhere) is less than three metres.

Such stark figures might ring alarm bells for those pondering atoll life, but many atoll islands show few signs of shrinking. That said, no scientists studying this unexpected resilience believe the situation will last indefinitely.

Read more: Dynamic atolls give hope that Pacific Islands can defy sea rise

Like sprawling low-lying river deltas and low-lying coasts in every part of the world, the effect of rising sea level for the remainder of the 21st century and beyond will force profound changes to coastal geographies – atoll islands included.

There are two ways to respond. One is to agree with the Western narrative and accept that the rapidly rising sea level will progressively eat away at the fabric of your islands until they become uninhabitable, and eventually submerged. This idea of moving elsewhere – to a less fragile place – is a natural response, and the view former Kiribati president Anote Tong held.

But Tong is no longer in charge. Taneti Maamau has been elected president of Kiribati in the last two elections. His response, which clearly has popular appeal given his latest resounding win, 26,053 to 17,866, is quite different.

He is confronting the overwhelmingly negative international rhetoric about atoll futures, designing and driving a way forward that will ensure livelihoods can be sustained in Kiribati for the foreseeable future.

He needs help, a role China appears willing to assume, but on his own terms – no large loans and no military bases.

Whether this position proves realistic is uncertain. Like many smaller Pacific Island countries, Kiribati has exhibited a growing dependence on foreign aid for the provision of basic services over the past few decades.

However, such dependence is unsustainable given the likely soaring costs of domestic adaptation to climate change in donor countries.

Read more: Pacific Islands must stop relying on foreign aid to adapt to climate change, because the money won’t last

Yet Kiribati is a special case. Its Exclusive Economic Zone (where it claims exclusive rights for economic activities such as fishing or drilling) covers a huge area of almost 3.5 million square kilometres, giving it a bargaining chip with more affluent yet less well-endowed nations.

Raising the islands

Today, raised causeways connect many atoll islands rising from the same reef for people and vehicles to cross.

Causeways are relatively cheap to construct but also inhibit water movements between atoll lagoons and the surrounding ocean, focusing wave attack on particular parts of islands.

Maamau’s plan is to replace these causeways with bridges, to improve lagoon-ocean water exchange and perhaps help restore island coasts to their natural state. It’s an expensive and engineeringly-challenging solution the Chinese are likely to relish given their construction of lengthy bridges at home.

In addition, Maamau’s government will deploy dredgers to suck up vast quantities of sand from lagoon floors and dump it along exposed island coasts, not just for protection but also to build up more land for planting crops.

Read more: Unwelcome sea change: new research finds coastal flooding may cost up to 20% of global economy by 2100

This is a short-term low-cost solution, but one likely to prove sustainable for only a few decades at most, given the expected increases in prolonged island inundation in this region.

It would be a tragedy if Pacific Island countries, their people and their cultures, became lost a century or more from now.

But as the pandemic has reminded us, we in developed countries are much like the people of the atolls: we’re living on the edge and want to believe life is indefinitely sustainable where we are. The truth is, we have to adjust to survive.

– ref. Pacific people have been ‘pummelled and demeaned’ for too long – now they’re fighting back – https://theconversation.com/pacific-people-have-been-pummelled-and-demeaned-for-too-long-now-theyre-fighting-back-144278

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Lintermans, Associate professor, University of Canberra

The tragic fish kills in the lower Darling River drew attention to the plight of Australia’s freshwater fish, but they’ve been in trouble for a long time.

Many species have declined sharply in recent decades, and as many as 90 of Australia’s 315 freshwater fish species may now meet international criteria as threatened.

Read more: We wrote the report for the minister on fish deaths in the lower Darling – here’s why it could happen again

No Australian fish species is yet listed officially as extinct, but some have almost certainly been lost before scientists even knew they existed. With so many species at risk, understanding which are in greatest peril is a vital first step in preventing extinctions.

This is what our new research has done. We’ve identified 20 freshwater fish species with a 50% or greater probability of extinction within the next two decades, and a further two with a 40-50% chance – unless there’s new targeted conservation action.

Slipping through the conservation cracks

Many small-bodied species, including Australia’s smallest fish the red-finned blue-eye, look likely to be lost within a single human generation. These fish have evolved over millions of years.

Twelve of the species identified have only been formally described in the past decade, and seven are still awaiting description.

This highlights the urgent need to act before species are listed under the national legislation that gives fishes their conservation status, and even before they’re formally described.

These processes can take many years, at which point it may be too late for some species.

More than half the species on our list are galaxiids – small, scaleless fish, that live in cooler, upland streams and lakes. Trout, an introduced, predatory species, also favour these habitats, and the trout have taken a heavy toll on galaxiids and many other small species in southern Australia.

For example, the Victorian Shaw galaxias has been eaten out of much of its former range. Now just 80 individuals survive, protected by a waterfall from the trout below. We estimate the Shaw galaxias has an 80% chance or more of extinction within the next 20 years.

Read more: Double trouble: this plucky little fish survived Black Summer, but there’s worse to come

Many galaxiids do not thrive or readily breed in captivity, so suitable trout-free streams are essential for their survival.

Improving trout management requires an urgent, sustained conservation effort, including collaborations with recreational fishers, increased awareness and changing values among government and key sectors of society.

Without this, trout will almost certainly cause many native galaxiids to go extinct.

Native fish out of their natural place can also be a problem. For example, sooty and khaki grunters – native fishing species people in northern Australia have widely moved – threatening the ancient Bloomfield River cod.

One disaster can lead to extinction

All of the most imperilled species are now highly localised, which means they’re restricted to very small areas. Their distributions range from only four to 44 square kilometres.

A single catastrophic event could completely wipe out these species, such as a large bushfire that fills their streams with ash and robs them of oxygen.

For example, until 2019 the Yalmy galaxias had survived in the cool creeks of the Snowy River National Park. But after the devastating Black Summer fires, just two individuals survived, one male and one female, in separate areas.

Millions of years of evolution could be lost if a planned reunion is too late.

One of the key steps to reduce this risk is moving fish to new safe locations so there are more populations. Researchers choose these new locations carefully to make sure they’re suitable for different species.

Climate change is another threat to all identified species, as it’s likely to reduce flows and water quality, or increase fires, storms and flooding. Many species have been forced to the edge of their range and a prolonged drought could dry their remaining habitat.

The short-tail galaxias existed in two small separated populations in creeks of the upper Tuross River Catchment, in the south coast of NSW. One stream dried in the recent drought, and the other was burnt in the subsequent fires.

Luckily the species is still hanging on in the burnt catchment, but only a single individual has been found in the drought-affected creek.

Unlisted, unprotected

Our study is part of a larger project to identify plants and animals at high risk of extinction.

We found the extinction risks of the 22 freshwater fish species are much higher than those of the top 20 birds or mammals, yet receive far less conservation effort.

Only three of the highly imperilled fish species are currently listed as threatened under national environmental legislation: the red-finned blue-eye, Swan galaxias and little pygmy perch.

Listing species is vital to provide protection to survivors and can prompt recovery action. Given our research, 19 fish species should urgently be added to the national threatened species list, but conservation action should start now.

Small native freshwater fishes are worth saving. They play a vital role in our aquatic ecosystems, such as predating on pest insect larvae, and are part of our natural heritage.

By identifying and drawing attention to their plight, we are aiming to change their fates. We cannot continue with business as usual if we want to prevent their extinctions.

– ref. Australia’s smallest fish among 22 at risk of extinction within two decades – https://theconversation.com/australias-smallest-fish-among-22-at-risk-of-extinction-within-two-decades-144115

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Somayeh Parvazian, Survey Methodologist, National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER)

The Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) unpack the lives of young Australians as they leave school, enter further study or the workforce and make the transition into adulthood.

The latest findings are now available for the group of young people who completed their first questionnaire back in 2009 at age 15. This group’s 11th and final survey shows young people are completing university at higher rates than ever before, while participation in apprenticeships and traineeships is taking a dive.

Read more: Most young people who do VET after school are in full-time work by the age of 25

The information collected from these groups of students, or “cohorts”, is used to better understand what helps or hinders this transition. This includes things like the effect of schools on year 12 completion, whether government benefits like Youth Allowance help students complete their studies, and the factors that help a young person find full-time work sooner.

Each cohort starts with about 14,000 students in the first survey, or “wave”. From the age of 15 to 25, they complete a 20-minute survey once a year to share what’s been happening in their lives. LSAY asks about their experiences at school, their post-school study and work, as well as their health and home life.

Six cohorts have taken part so far. The recent release of findings from the fifth cohort’s final survey is a milestone, with LSAY data now available across three decades. This means we can study generational changes in transition patterns.

To capture the many changing events or factors that affect young peoples’ transition, the survey has added questions about caring responsibilities, volunteering activities, participation in the gig economy, their personality traits and whether they have access to social support.

Read more: Students’ own low expectations can reinforce their disadvantage

Data dating back to the ’70s

LSAY is one of Australia’s biggest and longest-running panel surveys. More than 60,000 young people have been surveyed since 1995. It’s recognised as one of eight core longitudinal data assets in Australia.

The surveys grew out of the Youth in Transition (YIT) studies in the 1970s. The decade’s oil price shocks caused unemployment to soar, with young people hit the hardest. This created a need to better understand their school-to-work transition in the face of global technological and economic change.

Then came the Australian Longitudinal Surveys (ALS) and Australian Youth Surveys (AYS) in the 1980s. One of the more prominent pieces of research using these data found the aptitude of new teachers fell substantially as teacher pay declined compared to other salaries.

These three longitudinal studies were combined to create the LSAY program.

Read more: If you have a low ATAR, you could earn more doing a VET course than a uni degree – if you’re a man

Researchers mine LSAY for insights

More than 300 published research papers have used LSAY data. The report 25 years of LSAY: Research from the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth showcases some of the highlights.

LSAY research has shown working just a few hours a week while at school improves prospects of getting a full-time job. But working long hours has a slightly negative effect on school completion. The research also found females are better at balancing school and work than their male peers.

Research has also shown that students participating in school-based vocational education and training (VET) had higher rates of school completion, full-time employment and incomes in their first year after school than non-VET students with similar characteristics. Ex-VET students were also more likely to be in a job they liked as a career. These benefits were associated with school-based VET programs with a workplace learning component.

The Productivity Commission used LSAY data to investigate the demand-driven university system. Many disadvantaged students successfully attended university as a result of the expansion of the system. However, those with lower literacy and numeracy were more likely to drop out. The study recognised schools and universities need to do more to prepare and support students, and that university might not always be the best option.

Read more: More students are going to university than before, but those at risk of dropping out need more help

LSAY has been an important source of evidence for policy. National reviews and inquiries informed by LSAY data include the COAG Reform Council’s reporting on youth transitions (2009), the Bradley Review of Higher Education (2008) and the House of Representatives inquiry into combining school and work (2008-2009).

The recent Education Council Review of Senior Secondary Pathways, released in July, draws heavily on LSAY to establish how students can choose the best pathway for their transition from school.

LSAY has a high degree of comparability with international youth surveys. These include the Transition from Education to Employment (TREE) study in Switzerland, the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) in Canada, the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) and National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) in the United States, and Next Steps in the UK.

Most of these have a starting sample of about 9,000 individuals. Next Steps has 16,000. LSAY’s starting sample of 14,000 young Australians makes it one of the largest surveys of its kind in the world.

Tracking lives through the GFC and COVID-19

These datasets enable us to transform a snapshot of a person’s life into a moving picture. Compared with cross-sectional studies, these longitudinal datasets provide a much clearer picture by accounting for personalities, life events and pathways.

Combining a longitudinal study with cohort studies sheds more light on this picture by controlling for inter-generational differences, or crises such as wars, financial downturns or natural disasters.

For example, using data from four LSAY cohorts, one study found the well-being of those whose transitions occurred during the global financial crisis (GFC) was much worse on several measures, including standard of living, home life, career prospects, social life and independence.

The extraordinary challenges Australian youth face as a result of the coronavirus pandemic will be documented when the sixth LSAY cohort, now aged 20, complete their sixth survey in 2020 and further surveys in the years thereafter.

By providing a valuable resource to explore the longer-term effects of this crisis, LSAY continues to stand the test of time.

– ref. A 3-decade ‘moving picture’ of young Australians’ study, work and life, thanks to LSAY – https://theconversation.com/a-3-decade-moving-picture-of-young-australians-study-work-and-life-thanks-to-lsay-141134

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

In the early 1930s a 21-year-old undergraduate at the London School of Economics asked a great question during his summer research project: “if my economics professors are right that markets are an efficient way to allocate resources, then why do firms exist?”

To put it another way, why would an entrepreneur go to the effort of building a company and buying things “in house” rather than just buying them in the market?

That student, Ronald Coase, would go on to win a Nobel prize for his contribution to answering this question.

He suggested markets have the great virtue of the price mechanism, which communicate information about economic fundamentals (like what consumers value) and balances supply and demand. But there are “transaction costs”, and sometimes haggling in the market can be less efficient than, say, a manager simply telling her employees what she wants done.

These insights point to the fundamental problems with Austalia’s university sector in 2020.

We have about 40 “firms” that, as far as domestic undergraduates are concerned, don’t set their own prices, don’t set their own quantities (i.e. the number of students they accept) and are regulated not by the invisible hand of the market but the federal government’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency.

At the same time universities compete in an international marketplace for both students and staff.

This leads to the worst of all worlds. The sector has many of the downsides but none of the benefits of market competition. They are not in control of their own destiny.

The recent round of federal government reform attempts – encouraging students to pursue “job-ready” qualifications by slashing the price of courses such as mathematics, agriculture and nursing while doubling those such as humanities and communications – is incrementalism likely doomed to failure.

There is pressing need for more significant reform.

A crisis that was always coming

Perhaps the place to begin is to acknowledge that both the university sector and the government have legitimate gripes with the current funding model.

Universities can point to a host of perverse incentives – creating unintended negative consequences contrary to what was intended – embedded in the system. In particular, it has encouraged universities to chase full fee-paying international students to cross-subsidise Australian students.

The funding universities receive for domestic undergraduates is insufficient to provide them a world-class education. Research is also underfunded. This has left universities with no choice but to enrol large numbers of foreign students, paying market prices for their education.

The government argues universities might not be preparing students as well as they could for the job market – with too few graduating with the skills the economy demands and too many pursuing degrees in fields they are unlikely to find employment.

To all these points there are responses. I could tell you, for instance, that in nine years at UNSW Sydney I have seen the quality of undergraduates I teach get even better, not worse. But this back and forth rather misses the point.

Read more: Australian universities could lose $19 billion in the next 3 years. Our economy will suffer with them

Warning bells

COVID-19 has simply accelerated a crisis in university funding that was always coming.

There has always been the risk of the Chinese government simply turning off the tap. China has done so to other countries, such as Taiwan in 2017, when it halved the number of students permitted to study there to just 1,000.

In February 2018, Clive Hamilton and others warned about dependence on Chinese students after China issued a “Study Abroad Alert” about Australia being unsafe for Chinese students.

Read more: Without international students, Australia’s universities will downsize – and some might collapse altogether

Two major reforms needed

We need two things.

First, removing the perverse incentives of cross-subsidies in the system.

This will require domestic students paying more for their education through the HECS-HELP loan system. Our “Group of Eight” universities can’t keep charging a quarter of what institutions like Boston University or the University of California San Diego charge and deliver a world-class undergraduate experience. It will also require funding research properly, in part by linking universities and industry more closely.

Read more: Australia can do a better job of commercialising research – here’s how

Second, we need to allow and encourage universities to specialise more. Not every institution needs to be doing research in particle physics, for example. Indeed, not every university needs to being doing research at all.

Universities focusing more on their comparative advantage, in research or teaching, would enable research dollars to be better targeted.

Nor should we continue to insist that all universities charge the same price to students for the same subject matter. Students should be allowed to be the arbiters of what good education looks like, rather than an Excel spreadsheet in Canberra making that determination.

When we come out of COVID-19, economic growth will be at more of a premium than ever before, and harder to come by. Economists have long emphasised the crucial role of human capital and “ideas” developed through research in driving economic growth. We need a high-quality, well-functioning university sector.

Rather than bicker about incremental changes to the system, we need a grand bargain between universities and government that fundamentally reforms the sector. The future of young Australians, and our economy, depends on it.

– ref. Vital Signs: this university funding crisis was always coming – COVID-19 just accelerated it – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-this-university-funding-crisis-was-always-coming-covid-19-just-accelerated-it-144365

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Linden, Sessional Lecturer, PhD (Management) Candidate, School of Management, RMIT University

In this recession, unlike in previous ones, governments have chosen to help pay salaries to keep workers in work rather than pay unemployment benefits when they laid off.

It means that the July unemployment rate revealed on Thursday was 7.5% instead of the 8.3% it would have been had those working zero hours but being paid by JobKeeper been counted as out of work.

This approach has kept employees and firms ready for work at a time when it is far from clear when things will improve.

Implicit in the deal was that firms in need of JobKeeper would behave as if they were in times of immense uncertainty and not pay big dividends to shareholders on the assumption that things were rosy.

It is early in the company reporting season but already there are signs that millions of dollars in increased dividends are being paid out by companies that received millions of dollars of JobKeeper.

As The Guardian’s Ben Butler puts it

what we are seeing is a transfer of millions of dollars from taxpayers – the community at large – to shareholders, some of whom are already quite rich

By supporting the wages of employees in companies at risk, the government freed up money the companies could use to pay shareholders increased dividends rather than fortify themselves against that risk.

It enabled them to shovel out of the door the money the government was shovelling in, leaving themselves no better prepared than before.

And they need to be prepared.

The last thing we need is big dividends

In April the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority wrote to banks and insurers asking them to “seriously consider deferring decisions on the appropriate level of dividends until the outlook is clearer”.

Even where they were confident they had the resources they needed, their dividends should be at a “materially reduced level”.

Perhaps precipitously, it relaxed the guidance on July 29, noting that uncertainty had “reduced somewhat”. A few days later Victoria went into Stage 4 lockdown.

Its new guideline was for banks to retain at least half of their earnings when making decisions on dividends, an instruction the Commonwealth Bank followed to the letter on Wednesday paying out 49.95% of its earnings as dividends.

That night on ABC’s The Business the bank’s chief executive Matt Comyn conceded the outlook was “highly uncertain”.

Earlier that day we learnt that the private sector wage index had stopped for the first time in its 27 year history.

A graph presented to Commonwealth Bank shareholders on Wednesday shows that almost all of the increase in deposits in its accounts comes from government benefits rather than wages and salaries.

Some 10% of all bank loan books are now made up of loans on which borrowers have been granted deferred payments.

Among small businesses, 17% of repayments have been deferred, a proportion set to climb from September as Job keeper subsidies are reduced and withdrawn.

In March the government gave companies temporary relief from rules that prevent them from trading while insolvent.

Read more: The last thing companies should be doing right now is paying dividends

For the moment the change has pushed insolvencies down to an all time low, creating an unknown amount of zombie companies not fully alive but not yet dead.

When the temporary relief expires (September, unless it is extended) there’s talk of an tidal wave of insolvencies.

It raises concerns that for now many companies are announcing dividends that shouldn’t and ordinarily wouldn’t be paid.

Some (not the Commonwealth Bank) are using JobKeeper to pay them.

Why dividends, now of all times?

There is a relationship between dividends, share prices and executive pay. Australian companies that pay out big dividends keep their share prices high.

Many Australians receiving dividend imputation cheques, including many retirees, hold shares because of them.

Without them, share prices would fall and executives would be denied their bonuses.

One way to ensure that there is money available for dividends is to rule out new investments that can’t achieve a high rate of return, meaning money can be paid out to shareholders instead.

Read more: High hurdle rates are holding back businesses, but perhaps they should be

Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe has complained that hurdle rates of 13% to 14% seem to be “hard-wired into the corporate culture in some companies” notwithstanding the record low rates at which they can obtain funds.

In January the head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Rod Sims warned that unless companies lowered their hurdle rates they would “risk missing investment opportunities to foreign raiders”.

It’s something akin to an undeclared investment strike by corporate Australia, something akin to “heads, shareholders win; tails, employee, creditors and the rest of us lose”.

– ref. For some companies, JobKeeper has become DividendKeeper. They are paying out, even though the future looks awful – https://theconversation.com/for-some-companies-jobkeeper-has-become-dividendkeeper-they-are-paying-out-even-though-the-future-looks-awful-144289

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative writing, University of Melbourne

A friend is sending me documents needed to make me the executor of his will. He does not expect to die from this pandemic but he has enough weaknesses in his body to be fairly sure he would not survive the virus if it gets to him. He is not as old as I am but he is not young either. He is clear-sighted enough to know what he must do now: stay at home. He is also clear-sighted enough to admit into his thinking the common fact of death.

And common fact it is — about 160,000 Australians die in the course of each year —though every death is a particular death and no single death can be quite like another. From a certain distance, it looks as if we must all enter this darkness or this blinding light by the same gate when we die, and from that point of view our common destination is undeniable.

But from another point of view, the one taken in Kafka’s famous parable, Before the Law, each of us stands at a particular gate made for us, a gate no other person can go through. Making a similar point, “Death is a black camel that kneels at every person’s gate”, goes a Turkish proverb.

I am a little shocked by my friend’s matter-of-fact approach to the idea of his death; and I am comforted by his attitude as well. At least he is not leaving matters to bureaucrats or stolid workers who might think his death is much the same as all other deaths.

As a friend, I have always valued him for the no-nonsense realism he brings to bear on our lives, and for the creativity with which he has approached every experience of his life. I tell him I will be happy to sign the documents and, if needed, to act as his executor. He says it will be simple. He has everything in labelled boxes and files.

When I talk to another friend who is a doctor at a Melbourne hospital, she speaks of the bruise on her nose from wearing a tight mask all day every day, of the sweating inside her protective plastic garments, of washing and disinfecting her hands after taking off each item of protective clothing at the end of a shift.

She says she thinks it is only a matter of time before she will be infected with the virus. She is young and her chances of survival are high, she says. I am shocked all over again by the way she thinks — or must think if she is to continue to do this work.

Read more: When life is coming to a close: three common myths about dying

This fearful companion

Another day and there are nearly 2,000 people from aged care homes sick with the virus, and a record number of deaths reported for two days running. Grieving families are interviewed on television and on the radio.

I am living at home now with my death a definite shadow in my mind. I am 70, which makes me vulnerable. Many of us, I know, are in our homes with this fearful companion so full of its own patience and fierce focus.

One mercy is that I don’t have to be worrying about my parents, who both died three years ago after reaching their nineties. Their deaths followed the familiar pattern: a series of falls, an illness that brings pneumonia with it, a descent into morphine assisted sleep, then days of dragging in those last breaths as though they are being counted down.

But their deaths were particular too. My father was exhausted, I believe, and my mother was not ready to go. She fought through to those last breaths with all the fight she had in her.

In 1944 Carl Jung suffered a heart attack after breaking his foot, and was in a coma for three weeks. In a brief memoir of this experience, he describes floating out into near space where he could look down on the planet, then entering a light-filled rock that seemed to be a temple with a room inside where he was sure he would meet all the people who had been important to him, and where he would finally understand what kind of life he had lived.

At the entrance to this room, his doctor called him back to earth where there seemed to be a continuing need for his presence. He had to forego the experience of death, he wrote. He was 69 and he would live for another 17 years. For those who were caring for him, he might have looked like any patient in a coma and near death, but for him this was a particular moment of reckoning and even joyous anticipation.

Watching my parents die was its own shock after witnessing the deterioration in their bodies and minds as they aged, the reduction of their lives to a hospital bed, closed eyes, machines attached, the days-long struggle to breathe. It was almost unbearable to be near this and almost impossible to keep away as the time left became shorter.

Now in the time of this virus a painful new imposition bears down upon the families of the dying for they cannot even stand by the bed of a dying parent or grandparent or partner. The sadness of this immeasurable.

In an essay about death, called On Practice, Michel Montaigne mentioned that “practice is no help in the greatest task we have to perform: dying.”

In this matter we are all apprentices. But is there some way of breaking ourselves in for death, or must we always work and work to keep both death and the thought of death at bay?

Read more: Guide to the classics: Michel de Montaigne’s Essays

When my sister died of cancer at 49, I remember her patting our young daughter’s hand the day before she died, saying to her, “Don’t cry, I’ll be all right. I promise you I will be all right.”

At the time I thought she was in denial, or that perhaps she thought that she needed to protect us from the heavy presence of death.

But now I think she might have been looking past us and even past herself: we do die and it is all right — and every living thing that moves only moves under the condition of its coming death. She might have been seeing this well enough to embrace its truth. I don’t know.

‘A second, a minute, longer’

Today the sun was out, a low winter sun sparkling through the twisted branches of our back yard ornamental pear trees, and I could not resist going out into the sunshine to weed around the carrots and beetroot, and take up the last of the autumn leaves from under the parsley bushes. I felt lucky to have these few minutes with the warmth of the sun on the back of my neck.

I have been reading Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer, and somewhere near the end she records the words of a physicist dying of cancer from the Chernobyl fallout. He said,

I thought I only had days, a very few days, left to live, and I desperately wanted not to die. I was suddenly seeing every leaf, bright colours, a bright sky, the vivid grey of tarmac, the cracks in it with ants clambering about in them. ‘No,’ I thought to myself, ‘I need to walk round them.’ I pitied them. I did not want them to die. The aroma of the forest made me feel dizzy. I perceived smell more vividly than colour. Light birch trees, ponderous firs. Was I never to see this anymore? I wanted to live a second, a minute longer!

This reaction is deeply understandable, and each of us shares this feeling, even if only faintly, every morning that we find we have the world in our world again — for perhaps a whole day. Each time I read that paragraph I misread “I desperately wanted not to die” as “I desperately wanted to die”.

This urge to stay at home is almost matched by the urge to be out in the world rubbing shoulders with crowds. The desire to save my own life is mixed somehow with a desire to have it over with. My misreading troubles me, but it keeps happening.

A woman I know who is 30 years old answers, when I ask her how she feels about the growing numbers of aged victims to this pandemic, that there need to be more public “death-positive” campaigns in order to make death a more natural part of life in our culture — to make of it something we need not fear so much or become so angry over.

Though she speaks as if death belongs to other kinds of being than her, she makes some good sense because this is the other side of our attitude to death. Sometimes I lie in bed and count the likely number of days I might have left to me, and it always seems both a lot and not enough. And then I forget what the number was because after all, how can there even be a world without me in it?

Some years ago our dear neighbour Anna said she had decided it was time for her to die. There was nothing else she wanted. We had watched her nurse her husband through dementia for a decade, we had many afternoon teas with her as she fussed over our children and showed us the latest thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle she was completing. She talked about the books she was reading. And then one day she was ready to go.

Not long after that I visited her, more or less unconscious in a hospital bed. My amazement at her decision to go. But now, as I inch closer to old age, I imagine I might be able to understand how her decision was as much a matter of the mind as the body.

An American news service has reported that across 24 hours one person every minute died in the United States from Covid-19. I am not sure how to understand this kind of counting. It conjures images of queues of bodies, of frantic funeral directors and grieving families. It speeds up the mind and produces in me a feeling of panic.

Every minute across each day of the year about seven babies are born in the USA. A lot happens in a minute across a whole nation. Numbers tell a certain kind of story, the heart tells another, but sometimes the numbers are aimed at the heart.

If not death-positive, then perhaps we could be death-realistic. Svetlana Alexievich talked to children in cancer wards. A dying child named Oxana spoke of what she desired: “When I die, don’t bury me in a graveyard. I’m afraid of cemeteries. There are only dead people there, and crows. Bury me in open countryside.”

It is possible to know we are afraid, and know at the same time that this fear is a fear up to the brink of death, and beyond that we can go with our imaginations into an open countryside.

I am afraid, as we all are. When my daughter asks what she should do with my ashes after I am gone, the fiction we play at is that I will care what happens to “my” ashes, that it will make a difference to me, and that “I” will still be somewhere when she makes that decision.

I can never compose a clear set of instructions for her, though I know that putting those ashes somewhere in nature, perhaps out on water or under a tree, would fit with an idea I have of how the journey is best completed.

Intense light

With a state of disaster formally declared and a curfew at night for all the citizens of our city, the word, “disaster”, might seem to mark an endpoint. But it has become the sign for a new beginning and a new campaign.

With these new plans in place, drastic though they are, the possibility opens for believing, perhaps naively, that there will be a time when death does not dominate our thinking, that the virus will be a memory of a time we negotiated, a dark passage of intense narrowness before coming out of it into an open countryside. Perhaps as faltering human beings we must live this way: repeatedly imagining in hope of further scenes of rebirth.

When we know as fully as it can be known that we are each on a sure way to our own particular death, perhaps then we are already in that open countryside. My partner Andrea and I walked in the sunshine today to a park where we met, briefly, with our son, who stood well away from us, all of us in masks.

We talked about everything that is small, inconsequential, funny and ordinary in our lives. Two of us will have birthdays under this extended lockdown. We did not mention death, but everything we said was bathed in its intense light.

Our duties

I receive emails offering support and good wishes from friends interstate and around the world for the six weeks of lockdown. There is a shift in attitude and mood away from blame and towards support. We have a difficult time ahead of us. The street falls still and silent at night. I have a list of books to read, old papers to go through and throw out, but before that I find I wake up ill.

When I ring a doctor friend for advice he tells me he is COVID-19 positive himself, contracted in one of Melbourne’s aged care homes, and is in quarantine at home for two weeks. So far, into day six, he is feeling not too bad. In anticipation of this he says he has been keeping fit, eating well, and taking zinc tablets. My friend advises me to go to an emergency ward at a nearby hospital, and I do, though with much nervousness.

I am the only person in the emergency waiting area when I arrive, and am soon inside with a nurse in a cubicle, having urine and blood tests. Everyone is in plastic, masked, and across the aisle from me there are three police officers guarding a prisoner with shackles at his ankles and one arm pinned by a padlock to a wide leather belt. All three police are masked and one wears bright orange ocean swimming goggles as well.

In the emergency centre, I feel that I am both in the midst of an unfolding crisis and present at a theatre-in-the-round performance. A woman in a wheelchair asks loudly what everyone’s name is and what their job is. When one man says he is the director of the emergency centre she laughs loud and long, as though she has somehow caught the biggest fish in the river and doesn’t believe it.

Someone asks her if she wants some lunch, and she announces that she is starving and could they make up a bacon and fried egg sandwich for her followed by a crunchy peanut butter sandwich.

I am released from the emergency ward with blood and urine samples left for analysis, but without being tested for COVID-19 because I showed no specific symptoms.

Read more: ‘I want to stare death in the eye’: why dying inspires so many writers and artists

My time in the hospital is a reminder to me of how far I am from the world now. A workplace, I realise afresh, can be dizzyingly busy, chaotic, packed with humanity and with unpredictable moments of basic care for fellow humans, of suffering, and those bizarre sights worthy of a circus or an opera. I have become so used to moving between two or three rooms at home and going outside only to go into the garden, that I am in a panic here in the hospital over doorknobs, sheets, chairs or curtains that I’m touching — and at the same time I feel that this closeness to others is what being alive is really about.

Returning home I have to keep reminding myself that it is in this quiet, almost passive way of living that I am doing something needed. It might be that this social isolation, one from another, is a plague response from the middle ages, but without it, we are told, modern hospitals, ventilators and ICUs will be overwhelmed. There is an intimate, human response needed to this virus. It forces an honesty upon us.

If this social isolation is now one of life’s duties, it goes along beside all the other duties, and among them is the fact that dying is one of our duties. This is an old thought, and perhaps a pagan thought.

Seneca the Younger wrote of this duty in the first century of the Christian era. Would it be too heartless to say that in the presence of so much death and illness we might now be capable of being driven into a new and eerie awareness of what it is like to be alive?

I can envy the vivid, raw consciousness of the man Alexievich quoted, the man who “desperately wanted not to die”, while feeling something desperately hopeless for him too. Perhaps a part of this being alive to dying is being able to hold and carry more than one feeling at once, and especially the contradictory feelings.

This morning Andrea called me to come and look at our second yellow poppy bursting out from her planter box in the back yard. It stands slender on its hairy stalk, its papery petals a shocking splash of colour against its perfect background, a winter sky.

– ref. Friday essay: on reckoning with the fact of one’s death – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-on-reckoning-with-the-fact-of-ones-death-143822

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

The state of aged care preparation in the era of COVID is, it seems, in the eye of the beholder.

Vastly different claims emerged this week, when the royal commission examining the sector turned its attention to the handling of the pandemic.

According to senior counsel assisting the commission, Peter Rozen, QC, federal authorities had no COVID plan specifically for aged care, always potentially a major risk area. And, Rozen noted, compared with many countries, a very high proportion of Australia’s deaths have been residents of facilities.

The government disputes the lack-of-plan allegation and has a different take on the statistics.

Brendan Murphy, secretary of the health department and until recently Australia’s chief medical officer, appearing before the commission, insisted there had been proper planning, and said the death proportion reflected not a failure in aged care but the low number of fatalities in the general community.

If you were taking a bet on who most people would believe, Rozen would be short odds.

Morrison knows the government is highly vulnerable on the issue. Aged care is a federal responsibility. It affects millions of Australians, counting those with relatives in homes. People’s anger buttons are easily triggered when things go wrong.

Some around the government might like to discount Rozen’s attack as being what counsels-assisting do at royal commissions. But his claims were backed by witnesses, from highly-regarded geriatrician Joseph Ibrahim, of Monash University, to union officials with members on the front line.

They also resonated after the numerous first hand accounts in the media from families as the virus has ripped through well over a hundred facilities in Victoria. Currently, there are more than 1000 cases among residents and over 1000 among staff, linked to these homes.

Politicians have been congratulated during COVID for listening to experts, but according to Ibrahim there was not enough aged care expertise applied in the preparations to firewall the sector.

It’s hard if not impossible, anyway, to build adequate safeguards when the structure itself is so compromised, due to bad decisions and neglect over many years.

Read more: Royal Commission into Aged Care reminds Health Department Secretary Brendan Murphy it sets the rules

A sector operating with low paid, often short term, casuals who pick up work across facilities and often have inadequate English (complicating even basic training) was always inviting disaster.

Health minister Greg Hunt declared recently, after Dan Andrews said he wouldn’t want his mother to be in some of these places: “The idea that our carers, that our nurses are not providing that care, I think, is a dangerous statement to make. They are wonderful human beings and I won’t hear a word against them.”

This misses the point. No one doubts the commitment the majority of the carers have to their work. But the nature of the workforce brings dangers for residents.

Many facilities run on narrow financial margins. The rules allow them to keep their staffing to a minimum, in terms of numbers and skill.

Nor has regulatory oversight been adequate. Often it is families and the media that have exposed neglect and abuses. Morrison announced the royal commission in September 2018 a day before an ABC Four Corners investigation was to air.

The for-profit system emphasises the idea of facilities being “home-like”, which sounds great but can mean inadequate specialised care and challenges for inflection control.

The word “tragic” is thrown around too much by politicians and media. But what’s happened in aged care during COVID has indeed been a tragedy.

It’s just possible if the pandemic had come two years later, after next year’s final report of the royal commission had forced some reform, that fewer lives would have been lost. But even with the system as it is, the evidence indicates better planning could have saved lives.

That’s certainly Ibrahim’s view. In his precis of evidence, he argued “hundreds of residents will die prematurely because people failed to act”.

“We had enough knowledge to do better. We failed because when residents are treated as second class citizens there is an absence of accountability and consequences for those responsible for aged care in Australia,” he said.

There was “failure to provide the same health response to residential aged care that was delivered to the rest of Australia.”

The government has been playing catchup on aged care all through the pandemic. It had to put substantial money in to help with staffing; it was slow to acknowledge the importance of masks; it set up a co-ordinated response in Victoria belatedly; national cabinet only a week ago stepped up preparations in other parts of the country.

Morrison is now confronted at two levels: there must be root and branch reform after the royal commission, and his government is under immediate pressure over this week’s indictment.

The government’s tactic of inserting Murphy into the commission’s witness list was a miscalculation.

It seemed to assume the commission would defer to Murphy when he sought to make a statement to reject Rozen’s claims. But he was refused permission to commence with the statement (which he delivered at the end of the session) and all his appearance did was highlight the government’s sensitivity.

When he summed up the COVID hearings on Thursday, Rozen did not resile from his initial criticisms. He concluded the problems in aged care had been foreseeable; “not all that could be done was done”; and the challenge remained.

Picking up a recommendation from Ibrahim, Rozen urged an “age-care specific national co-ordinating body to advise government”. It would bring together expertise in aged care, infection control and emergency preparedness.

With such a body, “a national aged care plan for COVID could still be put in place,” Rozen said.

Read more: Government rejects Royal Commission’s claim of no aged care plan, as commission set to grill regulator

Although the advisory body is not a formal recommendation, commissioner Tony Pagone endorsed it among “practical things that perhaps should not wait.”

“The virus doesn’t wait and nor should the measures that need to be implemented to deal with the virus wait either”, Pagone said.

The government, which has previously signalled more assistance for aged care in the budget, should stop insisting it has done everything well and act immediately on this and some of the other suggestions made in the COVID hearings.

Morrison said this week in a Facebook message, “I want to assure that where there are shortcomings in these areas they’ll be acknowledged. And the lessons will be learned.”

The government likes to talk about wanting a reform agenda, but this should not be just an economic one. Aged care must be near the top of any serious “reform” to-do list, and vested interests should not be allowed to limit necessary changes.

In his end-of-year ministerial reshuffle, prompted by Mathias Cormann deciding to quit parliament, Morrison should elevate the aged care portfolio from the outer ministry to cabinet.

Having the post in cabinet would send a positive signal but, more importantly, it would encourage a wider range of ministerial eyes on an issue that’s been mishandled for as long as anyone can remember.

Veterans’ affairs is in cabinet, and most families would think aged care is just as worthy of a place.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Morrison government needs to improve, rather than defend, its poor COVID aged care performance – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-morrison-government-needs-to-improve-rather-than-defend-its-poor-covid-aged-care-performance-144447

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Welch, Senior lecturer, University of Auckland

Genetic surveillance — a technology that uses the genetic fingerprint of a virus to track its spread — is part of the public health response to New Zealand’s new COVID-19 community outbreak and could help pinpoint its source.

There are now 17 cases of community transmission, all in Auckland, and health officials are treating the group as a single cluster, with an expectation that case numbers will grow.

Ideally, we should be sequencing all positive test swabs, regardless of whether they are found at the border or in the community. The community cases could then be compared to all other cases to find a close match. This would suggest a likely chain of transmission, help with contact tracing and reveal the sequence of the outbreak.

But not all samples are currently sequenced. In total, New Zealand had 1225 confirmed cases of COVID-19, and about 700 of the positive samples have been sequenced.

I argue the Ministry of Health should now make genetic sequencing mandatory. Here’s why.

Tracking epidemics using genomes

Genetic surveillance of infectious diseases is a maturing technology that has played a major role in the effort to control the Ebola and Zika epidemics, and now the COVID-19 pandemic.

We can now obtain a complete viral genome quickly and cheaply to identify mutations that provide clues about transmission chains.

Cases that are part of the same transmission chain will have genomes that look very similar: they share the same mutations compared to a reference genome. Cases from different transmission chains have genomes with differing patterns of mutations.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, does not have a particularly high mutation rate. It acquires mutations at about half the rate of seasonal influenza, but it mutates fast enough to leave a signal of where it has come from.

Read more: ‘Genomic fingerprinting’ helps us trace coronavirus outbreaks. What is it and how does it work?

This brings us to how this is helping in our efforts to control the current community outbreak.

There are four main theories about where the new cases could have come from:

Read more: Masking the outbreak: despite New Zealand’s growing COVID-19 cases, there are more ways to get back to elimination faster

The genomes of the new cases could identify the first scenario of a quarantine leak if we found a match between viral genomes from people in quarantine and in the new cluster. This relies on comprehensive sequencing of all cases in quarantine, but currently, there are still gaps.

Similarly, in the unlikely scenario of a transmission chain that has persisted since New Zealand’s first wave, we’d expect a match with one of the cases sequenced during the first outbreak, although the genomes would have diverged somewhat over that period of time.

The scenarios of transmission through goods or an undetected border case are more difficult to decipher using genomic methods. We would be looking to match the viral genome from the new local cases to one of more than 80,000 publicly available genomes that have been sampled worldwide. This would point to a country of origin but not necessarily distinguish between the scenarios.

Early results from sequencing of the first four cases from the new Auckland cluster suggest no link to a known (sequenced) New Zealand case, and the UK as the closest match. For now, this leaves all possibilities still open.

Ongoing surveillance

With widespread testing now underway, new cases will be identified in the community over the coming weeks. It is important that they are rapidly sequenced to determine whether they belong to the same transmission chain.

Genomic analysis will tell us whether we are dealing with a single or multiple clusters. Even the best contact tracing cannot be sure of the origin of an infection, and supplementing it with genomic data is crucial.

But genomic analysis is not limited to establishing transmission chains. It can also tell us about the overall size of an outbreak, which is directly related to the genomic diversity of the virus. We can also date events to establish when transmission started within a cluster, provided there is sufficient diversity in the cluster.

The genomes we have so far in New Zealand show a huge diversity of cases, with many introductions from around the globe. Indeed, the diversity of early samples largely reflects the diversity of the virus globally, with most cases that led to further transmission coming from North America and Australia in line with travel patterns to New Zealand.

Most introductions did not result in further community transmission. This shows how effective New Zealand’s first lockdown was, when transmission rates declined dramatically soon after level 3 and 4 measures were put in place.

Genomes were also used in real time during the first outbreak to help attribute cases to clusters. Retrospectively, this has shown that contact tracing was effective, with relatively few cases being wrongly attributed.

But genome analysis is neither foolproof nor a panacea. Sometimes positive samples are found that cannot be sequenced because they contain only a small amount of viral material. The rather slow rate of mutation of Sars-COV-2 means many cases are essentially carrying identical copies of the virus, even across different countries.

This greatly reduces our ability to attribute an infection to a particular outbreak. There are also real computational bottlenecks – data is generated faster than we can sensibly analyse it.

Despite these limitations, genomic surveillance gives us near real-time insights into the spread of COVID-19 that were not possible in any previous pandemic. That’s why I argue it’s time for the Ministry of Health to now make immediate genetic sequencing mandatory for all positive test swabs in New Zealand, not just some.

– ref. Why New Zealand needs to focus on genome sequencing to trace the source of its new COVID-19 outbreak – https://theconversation.com/why-new-zealand-needs-to-focus-on-genome-sequencing-to-trace-the-source-of-its-new-covid-19-outbreak-144402

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Welch, Senior lecturer, University of Auckland

Genetic surveillance — a technology that uses the genetic fingerprint of a virus to track its spread — is part of the public health response to New Zealand’s new COVID-19 community outbreak and could help pinpoint its source.

There are now 17 cases of community transmission, all in Auckland, and health officials are treating the group as a single cluster, with an expectation that case numbers will grow.

Ideally, we should be sequencing all positive test swabs, regardless of whether they are found at the border or in the community. The community cases could then be compared to all other cases to find a close match. This would suggest a likely chain of transmission, help with contact tracing and reveal the sequence of the outbreak.

But not all samples are currently sequenced. In total, New Zealand had 1225 confirmed cases of COVID-19, and about 700 of the positive samples have been sequenced.

I argue the Ministry of Health should now make genetic sequencing mandatory. Here’s why.

Tracking epidemics using genomes

Genetic surveillance of infectious diseases is a maturing technology that has played a major role in the effort to control the Ebola and Zika epidemics, and now the COVID-19 pandemic.

We can now obtain a complete viral genome quickly and cheaply to identify mutations that provide clues about transmission chains.

Cases that are part of the same transmission chain will have genomes that look very similar: they share the same mutations compared to a reference genome. Cases from different transmission chains have genomes with differing patterns of mutations.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, does not have a particularly high mutation rate. It acquires mutations at about half the rate of seasonal influenza, but it mutates fast enough to leave a signal of where it has come from.

Read more: ‘Genomic fingerprinting’ helps us trace coronavirus outbreaks. What is it and how does it work?

This brings us to how this is helping in our efforts to control the current community outbreak.

There are four main theories about where the new cases could have come from:

Read more: Masking the outbreak: despite New Zealand’s growing COVID-19 cases, there are more ways to get back to elimination faster

The genomes of the new cases could identify the first scenario of a quarantine leak if we found a match between viral genomes from people in quarantine and in the new cluster. This relies on comprehensive sequencing of all cases in quarantine, but currently, there are still gaps.

Similarly, in the unlikely scenario of a transmission chain that has persisted since New Zealand’s first wave, we’d expect a match with one of the cases sequenced during the first outbreak, although the genomes would have diverged somewhat over that period of time.

The scenarios of transmission through goods or an undetected border case are more difficult to decipher using genomic methods. We would be looking to match the viral genome from the new local cases to one of more than 80,000 publicly available genomes that have been sampled worldwide. This would point to a country of origin but not necessarily distinguish between the scenarios.

Early results from sequencing of the first four cases from the new Auckland cluster suggest no link to a known (sequenced) New Zealand case, and the UK as the closest match. For now, this leaves all possibilities still open.

Ongoing surveillance

With widespread testing now underway, new cases will be identified in the community over the coming weeks. It is important that they are rapidly sequenced to determine whether they belong to the same transmission chain.

Genomic analysis will tell us whether we are dealing with a single or multiple clusters. Even the best contact tracing cannot be sure of the origin of an infection, and supplementing it with genomic data is crucial.

But genomic analysis is not limited to establishing transmission chains. It can also tell us about the overall size of an outbreak, which is directly related to the genomic diversity of the virus. We can also date events to establish when transmission started within a cluster, provided there is sufficient diversity in the cluster.

The genomes we have so far in New Zealand show a huge diversity of cases, with many introductions from around the globe. Indeed, the diversity of early samples largely reflects the diversity of the virus globally, with most cases that led to further transmission coming from North America and Australia in line with travel patterns to New Zealand.

Most introductions did not result in further community transmission. This shows how effective New Zealand’s first lockdown was, when transmission rates declined dramatically soon after level 3 and 4 measures were put in place.

Genomes were also used in real time during the first outbreak to help attribute cases to clusters. Retrospectively, this has shown that contact tracing was effective, with relatively few cases being wrongly attributed.

But genome analysis is neither foolproof nor a panacea. Sometimes positive samples are found that cannot be sequenced because they contain only a small amount of viral material. The rather slow rate of mutation of Sars-COV-2 means many cases are essentially carrying identical copies of the virus, even across different countries.

This greatly reduces our ability to attribute an infection to a particular outbreak. There are also real computational bottlenecks – data is generated faster than we can sensibly analyse it.

Despite these limitations, genomic surveillance gives us near real-time insights into the spread of COVID-19 that were not possible in any previous pandemic. That’s why I argue it’s time for the Ministry of Health to now make immediate genetic sequencing mandatory for all positive test swabs in New Zealand, not just some.

– ref. Why New Zealand needs to ramp up genome sequencing to trace the source of its new COVID-19 outbreak – https://theconversation.com/why-new-zealand-needs-to-ramp-up-genome-sequencing-to-trace-the-source-of-its-new-covid-19-outbreak-144402

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

The Australian poet Gwen Harwood used to submit poems to literary journals under both her own name and a male pseudonym, Walter Lehmann. Furious that the latter poems were more favourably received, in 1961, she sent two new sonnets to The Bulletin, penned by Lehmann, containing coded messages of abuse.

Her elaborate literary hoax became front-page news. But Donald Horne, the magazine’s editor, poured scorn on the female poet. “A genuine literary hoax would have some point to it,” he said.

In 2020, just in case this “point” is still not sufficiently clear, the Women’s Prize for Fiction has just marked its 25th anniversary by publishing 25 literary works by female authors with their real names on the cover for the first time.

Some of the books, like Middlemarch, written by Mary Ann Evans under the pen name George Eliot, are well-known, ranking among the greatest novels in English. Others have been dragged off dusty book shelves and placed in the spotlight once again.

Read more: Friday essay: George Eliot 200 years on – a scandalous life, a brilliant mind and a huge literary legacy

Mary Bright, writing as George Egerton, openly talks about women’s sexuality in Keynotes, published in 1893. Ann Petry, best known as the author of The Street, the first book by an African American woman to sell more than one million copies, appears as the author of Marie of the Cabin Club, her first published short story penned under the pseudonym Arnold Petri in 1939.

Also included is Violet Paget, whose ghost story A Phantom Lover, was published under her pen name Vernon Lee. And Amantine Aurore Dupin, whose Indiana is better known for being written under the pseudonym George Sand.

For these authors, using a pseudonym was not just about slipping their work past male publishers who did not think publishing was a place for a woman. It was also about more diffuse forms of gender prejudice.

Women writers – witheringly dubbed “lady novelists” in the 19th century – also worried that their work would be marginalised as “women’s writing”; as domestic, interior, “feminine” and personal, as opposed to “masculine” themes such as history, society and politics that are, according to social norms, deemed to be more serious and culturally significant.

As George Lewes, Mary Ann Evans’ friend and life partner, put it, “the object of anonymity was to get the book judged on its own merits, and not prejudged as the work of a woman”.

Read more: Friday essay: George Eliot 200 years on – a scandalous life, a brilliant mind and a huge literary legacy

“A bald-headed seer of the sterner sex”

In Australia, the Harwood hoax has often been relegated to the status of a literary curiosity, or mildly amusing cultural footnote. But Harwood was far from alone in feeling a sense of frustration with the male-dominated literary world.

In choosing a male pseudonym, Harwood joined the ranks of other bold and adventurous Australian women, such as Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (1879–1954). Franklin’s male pseudonym has been given to Australia’s most illustrious literary award, but her work – including My Brilliant Career (1901) – has not been published under her real name. The Stella Prize, established in 2013, marked this omission.

Indeed, Stella explicitly asked her publisher to delete the word “Miss” and use the name “Miles” in the hope that her work would be better received as the work of a man. “I do not wish it to be known that I’m a young girl but desire to pose as a bald-headed seer of the sterner sex,” she said.

So too, Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson (1870–1946), also known as Mrs Robertson, is only recognisable to Australian readers under the pen name Henry Handel Richardson.

Ethel used the male pseudonym to publish her literary works – including the classic women’s coming of age story, The Getting of Wisdom (1910) – because she wanted to be taken seriously as a writer.

Ethel’s gender identity was kept a secret for many years. As late as 1940 she wrote that she had chosen a man’s name because,

There had been much talk in the press of that day about the ease with which a woman’s work could be distinguished from a man’s; and I wanted to try out the truth of the assertion.

The sexually ambiguous pen name M. Barnard Eldershaw was also used by 20th century Australian writers Marjorie Barnard and Florence Eldershaw who, working in the 1920s to 1950s, penned five novels together, including Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as well as short stories, critical essays and a radio play.

There were, of course, Australian women in the late 19th century who published under their own names, and paid the penalty.

They included Rosa Praed, Ada Cambridge, and Tasma, the pen name of Jessie Couvreur. Many were denigrated as “lady novelists” whose “romances” were witheringly labelled derivative, commercial or frivolous. And it’s likely their names are no longer recognised, except by experts.

Rosa and Ada, Stella and Ethel, for some reason, do not sound as weighty or serious as Henry and Miles, or George and Vernon. But this will not change until Australian publishers take note. It’s time to republish these Australian women under their own names.

– ref. Reclaim Her Name: why we should free Australia’s female novelists from their male pseudonyms – https://theconversation.com/reclaim-her-name-why-we-should-free-australias-female-novelists-from-their-male-pseudonyms-144404

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justine Shaw, Conservation Biologist, The University of Queensland

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a heavy toll on research in Australia. We surveyed 333 early and mid-career researchers in science, technical, engineering and medical (STEM) fields and found the impact on their productivity and mental health has been dire, with many considering leaving research altogether.

Survey says: it’s bad

In May, the Early and Mid Career Researcher (EMCR) Forum of the Australian Academy of Science conducted a national survey to understand the effects of COVID-19 restrictions such as lockdown and the transition to remote learning. We found the effects of COVID-19 have made existing problems worse, and are likely to have a long-lasting impact on careers and well-being.

Researchers across the country reported increased anxiety not only due to the pandemic, but also to the uncertainty in their employment situation resulting from loss of university revenue and calls for cuts to jobs and pay.

They also revealed their research has often had to take a back seat to heavier loads of teaching and administrative work, and other priorities such as caring for children.

Even short-term disruptions can have long-term impact

In scientific research, career success often depends on steadily accumulating performance indicators such as publications, citations, keynote addresses and awards.

COVID-19 restrictions make it harder for less established researchers to hit these targets. Missing them means lower chances of future funding, and ultimately less job stability.

Researchers with a longer track record of success will be less affected, because these impacts will be less visible.

Read more: Science prizes are still a boys’ club. Here’s how we can change that

Not all junior researchers are affected equally, either. The blows fall most heavily on casual and part-time workers who are paid via fixed-term research or teaching contracts; those who are primary carers (typically women); those who are in Australia on temporary work visas; and those who depend on their institution or employer to secure an income to support their families (as opposed to those who are paid via externally funded fellowships).

Broadly speaking, these impacts are consistent with how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting women in scientific fields. Impacts of COVID-19 on university budgets and federal research funding could lead to some of these most vulnerable researchers losing their employment.

There have been considerable efforts from the Australian Academy of Science, Science and Technology Australia, the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council to increase the representation of minorities, and these are now at risk.

Early stability builds future security

Early and mid-career researchers are the engine of the research helping us navigate this unprecedented health crisis. In addition, each researcher is the product of 10-15 years of intensive post-secondary education and training, representing an investment (primarily by government) of at least A$500,000.

Read more: Raising the cost of a PhD

Just as importantly, each researcher is an individual with unique and irreplaceable experience and training.

In our survey many researchers commented that they no longer see a future in pursuing a research career in the short or long term. This is not only happening in Australia – countries around the world face the loss of a generation of scientists.

Supporting these researchers is essential to securing the present and future of Australia’s knowledge economy. A significant loss of research capacity and knowledge could take generations to recover from.

A generation at risk

Solutions to this crisis will require cooperation between employers, funding bodies, government and researchers themselves.

A sensible first step would be for funding bodies and employers to let researchers renegotiate what they can deliver, to account for COVID-19 disruptions. This will give researchers more certainty about how they will be assessed in this time.

In addition, there needs to be clear instruction on how to capture the career disruptions due to COVID-19 in applications and assessments.

Another change that could prevent the loss of thousands of jobs would be for JobKeeper payments to be extended to cover public universities.

The effect of losing an entire generation of Australian scientists, particularly one that has benefited from efforts to support women in STEM, will be astronomical.

Not only does Australia’s economy depend on a strong scientific workforce, but the pandemic has also shown these people are an essential asset in tackling global health disasters.

Although the federal government is encouraging tertiary enrolments in STEM degrees through its higher education package, the initiative is doomed to fail without early and mid-career researchers to drive teaching and research training. When the next pandemic strikes, we may not have the world-class scientists we need ready to swing into action.

– ref. Early and mid-career scientists face a bleak future in the wake of the pandemic – https://theconversation.com/early-and-mid-career-scientists-face-a-bleak-future-in-the-wake-of-the-pandemic-144350

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

The second wave of the pandemic in Victoria has pushed the post-COVID economic recovery further beyond the horizon. Among the challenges for the federal opposition are dealing itself into the debate and formulating alternative economic policies before the next election.

With speculation the budget may bring forward the next tranche of the legislated tax cuts, Labor is leaving the way open to give its support.

“We’ve said for some time that that’s something that the Government should consider. We’d have an open mind to that if they came to us with a proposal. They don’t yet have a specific proposal. We’ve had some smoke signals about it for some time now…” Jim Chalmers, Shadow Treasurer, tells The Conversation.

“If they came to us and said that they wanted to bring forward stage two of the legislated tax cuts, then we’d engage with them in a pretty constructive way. We’ve said that for some time.”

A high danger is Australia may come out the COVID recession as a more unequal society. Charmers says: “My big fear is that it will accelerate some of those trends that we were already worried about; inequality, but also social immobility.

“We are worried about a lost generation of workers, a discarded generation of people, who become disconnected from work and from society during this recession, who find it very hard to make their way back.

“When people ask what keeps us awake at night, really it’s the idea that this spike in unemployment turns into long-term unemployment, which becomes long-term disadvantage, which cascades through the generations and concentrates in areas like the one that I represent. That’s our big fear.”

At the moment, Chalmers is working in Brisbane, assisting with the campaigning for the October Queensland election, which he believes will be “extraordinarily tight”

“There’ll be different sub-elections around the place. Townsville will be a challenge for us. There’s some opportunities for us on the Gold Coast. It’ll be a real mixed bag. The big thing that we need to avoid is one of those minority governments. In this recession and into the recovery, we want to have a stable government like the one that Annastacia Palaszczuk is providing.”

TRANSCRIPT (edited for clarity)

MICHELLE GRATTAN: Jim Chalmers, we’re in an incredibly difficult and volatile time. How do you see the economy looking a year on?

JIM CHALMERS: I think you’re right, Michelle, that this is a really difficult time. Even just this week we heard that wages growth is the slowest it’s been for the 20-something years that we’ve kept these kind of statistics. We took another massive hit to consumer confidence, now back down to the levels it was at in April when people were extremely anxious. It is a very difficult time. Where we get to in a year’s time is pretty heavily reliant on a couple of uncertainties; when and whether we find a vaccine, and when and whether there are other outbreaks like we’ve seen in Victoria. But one thing I think is almost-certain, if not certain, is that the labour market will still be really weak in a year’s time. The Reserve Bank, the Government, and the private economists all think that we will have unacceptably high unemployment for longer, that we’ll have weakness in the labour market, and I think that that should be our biggest concern and our key focus.

MG: Now we’ve seen the Opposition being increasingly critical in various aspects of Government policy. Taking an overview however, do you think enough is being spent by the Federal Government or should there be more? And if you think it should be more, how much more?

JC: First of all on our criticism, as you describe it, of what the Government’s done, our overwhelming preference is for the Government to succeed. That’s the difference between our approach this time around and what the Liberals and Nationals did during the Global Financial Crisis. We want the Government to succeed. Our preference is that they get everything exactly right. But I think our responsibility is to point out where there’s been issues with the speed at which they’ve moved, or the coverage of JobKeeper, or what’s happening with the super early access, or what’s happening in aged care, or not having a comprehensive national scheme for paid pandemic leave. I think it’s our responsibility to point out where the Government could be doing better. I think it’s a matter of recognising that all of this money is borrowed money. We judge its effectiveness by what it means for jobs. We need to get maximum bang for buck. Our responsibility is to point out where that isn’t happening, and to try and get the Government to be as successful as possible in managing this recession.

MG: And what about the quantum? Is it enough?

JC: It remains to be seen Michelle. Certainly most people, including the Reserve Bank and others, have wound back their expectations for what’s happening in the economy. Only three weeks ago the Government said something like an additional 240,000 Australians will lose their jobs between now and Christmas. By last week that’d become almost 400,000. The expectation is that the economy is deteriorating. We’ve said all along that we need to be responsive to that. The Government’s policies need to be tailored to developments in the economy. If the economy is going to get much worse, then I think it’s highly likely the Government will need to do more. It doesn’t necessarily only have to be cash payments. There are other ways the Government should be supporting the economy and we think, for example, that a comprehensive jobs plan would be really important at this stage.

MG: Well, what would be the shape of that?

JC: We’ve put some ideas on the table. Think about this crisis in three stages. The first stage is responding to the immediate crisis, the triage part of things. That means JobKeeper, JobSeeker, and getting those right. The next phase is bolstering the recovery. We’ve said that the Government should be contemplating things like building more social and public housing because it’s labour intensive, and has a lasting benefit for the most vulnerable people in our society. Beyond that, in terms of creating new jobs and getting investment and employment going again, we’ve offered to work with the Government to settle energy policy so that businesses can invest with confidence again.

MG: In terms of the direct creation of jobs though, some of these alternatives you’re putting forward, or additions, are not going to be appropriate for people who’ve been thrown out of work in the service sector, are they?

JC: That’s a really important consideration, Michelle, because we need to be doing what we can to create jobs for people who’ve been displaced, as well as doing what we can to keep people in work. The caring economy needs to be a really important part of that consideration. We’re very concerned that in childcare, for example, that many workers were taken off JobKeeper too early given what we saw unfold in Victoria. That needs to be a key part of our considerations and a key part of the Government’s considerations. Those caring economy workers in aged care, disability care and child care are really important.

MG: Just in labour market terms, we’re hearing a lot in aged care at the moment about the fact that workers are not well trained, they’re not well paid, they have to take a number of casual jobs. How do you think a better workforce could be put together for that industry in the near-term, in say the next couple of years?

JC: I think we’ve known for some time now that there are issues in aged care. That’s why there’s a royal commission. That royal commission which hands down its final report early next year has made some interim recommendations about some of those issues that you identified, but others as well including physical and chemical restraints, getting younger people out of aged care, and also making sure that we do something about those homecare waiting lists. But the workforce issues in particular have been around for some time. My colleague Julie Collins and my other colleague Ged Kearney have been talking about this for some time. The issues have been obvious, but this crisis has really shone a light on them. We’ve not announced or proposed a specific policy yet here, but we are working our way through those issues like the Government is and we’ll do the right and responsible thing when the Government comes to the table with a plan.

MG: It’s a sort of microcosm, it’s a problem that can arise in various industries, isn’t it? Casualisation, people taking part-time jobs, training; all of those things can come together?

JC: Yeah. One of the key things we’ve learned from this crisis is really just how precarious people’s work lives are, just how insecure work is, how much underemployment there is, and how much we rely on basic things like sick leave. It’s really shone a light on those things. Some of us didn’t need reminding, but others did, that all of these things that have developed in the workforce over some time are costly, not just in crisis terms, but for so many people who were already living on the edge even before the virus turned up.

MG: Now obviously debt has become a second, third or fourth order issue in the current circumstances, but some economists would argue that it doesn’t really matter at all. Do you think there’s a limit to how much debt a country can comfortably live with in this situation?

JC: I think debt does matter, but in times like this it’s not the most important priority. The most important priority is supporting people and their jobs in particular. We’ve been consistent on that all the way from the Global Financial Crisis and again now. We recognise that when times are as grim as they are now, we’re in the first recession in three decades and the worst downturn since the Great Depression, that government needs to step in and do what it can. It needs to be responsible about that. It needs to be looking for maximum bang for buck. Spending needs to be effective. We measure that effectiveness by what it means for jobs. At some point the debt will have to be repaid so it does matter to that extent. There are costs in servicing debt. We’re heading towards one trillion dollars in gross debt, which is really quite stupendous in historical terms so it does matter, but the highest priority is jobs.

MG: At what point, what amount, or percentage of GDP would you become really concerned that we shouldn’t be exceeding?

JC: It’s already concerning. It’s $850 billion in the most recent update and heading towards a trillion. When it was at $100 billion and $200 billion the Government described it as a debt and deficit disaster. It’s now at some multiples of that. It’s concerning. It costs taxpayer money to service the debt. It will need to be repaid over time. We don’t want the most vulnerable people to repay that. In terms of nominating a percentage of GDP, I think the most important thing is that the Government steps in when things are dire like they are now, and does what’s right and responsible in terms of people’s jobs in particular. I agree with the point made really well by Deloitte Access Economics, which is that if you want to fix the budget, you have to fix the economy. That’s our priority.

MG: You mentioned vulnerable people. Labor, particularly before the last election, made inequality a big issue. Do you think that this crisis will leave us as a more unequal society?

JC: That’s certainly the fear that I have, Michelle. You hear a lot of people saying that the virus doesn’t discriminate, and in health terms anybody’s capable of catching it so it’s true to that extent. But in terms of the effects of this recession, I think it does discriminate. My big fear is that it will accelerate some of those trends that we were already worried about; inequality, but also social immobility. We are worried about a lost generation of workers, a discarded generation of people, who become disconnected from work and from society during this recession, who find it very hard to make their way back. When people ask what keeps us awake at night, really it’s the idea that this spike in unemployment turns into long-term unemployment, which becomes long-term disadvantage, which cascades through the generations and concentrates in areas like the one that I represent. That’s our big fear. That’s why we have to do whatever we responsibly can to step in and to do the right thing by people and their jobs now.

MG: Of course, one thing is the encouragement of business investment. The lack of business investment’s become a huge problem. The Government’s looking at an investment allowance. Labor took a version of this to the election. How effective is such an incentive when many businesses will just have no confidence about where things will be in a few months or a few years, and they don’t want to take any risks, even if they are given incentives?

JC: A couple of things about that, Michelle. You’re spot on to say that business investment is a problem. It’s been a problem for some years. Even last year, 2019, we had some very worrying trends in business investment. Some businesses are recovering. Some will recover faster than others. There will be an appetite in some parts of the economy for investment if we can get the incentives right. I think it’s important that we recognise that. The other really important point is this tax incentive. If the Government comes forward with something like what we proposed at the election, or some other version like what the BCA is proposing then we’ll have a look at that. We haven’t seen the details of that yet. But it shouldn’t be the only thing that the Government’s doing when it comes to incentivising business investment.

I spend a lot of time in the boardrooms of this country, Michelle. In almost every meeting I have, in one way or another, energy policy uncertainty comes up. A key reason why businesses haven’t been investing is because there’s been 19 different energy policies in the last seven years from the Government. People don’t know what the rules of the road are going to be, and they need that certainty. That’s why Anthony Albanese wrote to Scott Morrison to suggest that both of the big parties in the parliament work together to give business that certainty so they can get that cleaner and cheaper energy, lower their business costs, and get investing again. Investment equals jobs and it’s jobs that we need.

MG: There’s been a lot of talk recently about a push in favour of gas. What’s your view on that?

JC: Gas has a role to play, absolutely. It’s an important part of the energy mix. There’s a lot of investment that’s gone into gas around the country in recent years. For the foreseeable future we’ll have a mix of different energy sources. One of the things that we need to be able to do and that I’m convinced we can do is have cleaner and cheaper energy, including new sources of energy, without abandoning some of those traditional strengths that we’ve had and which have done so much during this recession to help underpin what economic activity there is.

MG: The superannuation debate is going to heat up soon. The Government has a report that’s been done into that. All the signs are that the Government would like to reverse or change the current law that will increase compulsory super from next year. Labor is very against any change. Firstly, would you guarantee that it would vote against such a change? And secondly, don’t those who say that compulsory super shouldn’t increase, have a case? Especially view of figures like those – we were talking about wages?

JC: We don’t support the freezing of the Superannuation Guarantee. We don’t support the unwinding of those gradual, legislated increases. There’s not a piece of legislation before us and typically we’d confirm our view on how we’d respond to that through the usual processes and in the usual ways that you’d be familiar with, but we certainly don’t support another freeze. One of the arguments as you rightly identify that the Government has been putting about even before this crisis is about wages. I mean, give me a break! Wages growth has been stagnant in this country for some time. Wages growth was especially stagnant after the last couple of times that the Government froze the Superannuation Guarantee. I don’t think that that argument holds much water. I’m really worried that there’s been an agenda here from our political opponents to undermine and diminished super, and that they’re using this Coronavirus crisis as an excuse to do that. They got that Retirement Income Review report some days ago now, a couple of weeks ago now. They still haven’t released it and I think that’s very troubling. We don’t want it to be a stalking horse for more attacks on super or more attacks on the pension. They should release the report and then we can engage with it.

MG: It’s not just the Government though, is it? The Grattan Institute, for example, is critical of the way that the super scheme is going?

JC: First of all, I have a lot of respect and regard for the Grattan Institute. But those particular conclusions come from some, in my view, unusual assumptions which led to them arriving at what they concluded in those reports. I’m not critical of them as an organisation, but we’re entitled to disagree with their conclusions. My view is that you don’t boost retirement incomes by winding back super. We don’t want “compulsory” taken out of compulsory superannuation. There are people in the Liberal Party, the National Party and elsewhere who want superannuation to be voluntary. They want the SG frozen. They want some of the other arrangements relaxed. We’re not in the cart for that. We’ve made that very clear and I can’t see that position changing.

MG: The Government has floated the idea of bringing forward the next stage of the legislated tax cuts. What would be Labor’s attitude if that happened in the budget?

JC: We’ve said for some time that that’s something that the Government should consider. We’d have an open mind to that if they came to us with a proposal. They don’t yet have a specific proposal. We’ve had some smoke signals about it for some time now. We do think that middle Australia needs cost of living support during this recession. It shouldn’t be the only thing that they contemplate. We need a more comprehensive plan, particularly for jobs. But if they came to us and said that they wanted to bring forward stage two of the legislated tax cuts, then we’d engage with them in a pretty constructive way. We’ve said that for some time.

MG: Now can I turn to the question of border closures? Obviously, it’s clear that borders need to be closed to Victorians at this point, but do you support closures when there are less reasons for them? For example, particularly, do you support WA maintaining its hard border? And how long do you think that we can live as a balkanized country?

JC: Obviously, it’s difficult to gauge that last part of your question, Michelle, but I think on the main, people have been pretty supportive of these border closures. What we’ve seen in Victoria really reminds us that whether it’s Mark McGowan, Annastacia Palaszczuk or others, they’ve been right to be cautious, careful, and conservative about returning to normal. In my home state of Queensland, if Annastacia Palaszczuk had listened to Josh Frydenberg and Scott Morrison and reopened the borders early, then that may have had catastrophic consequences for lives and jobs here in Queensland. I’m sure Mark McGowan feels the same way about those border closures that Clive Palmer has been trying to knock over in the west. Nobody pretends that having state borders closed is a good long-term thing but I think it’s proven necessary. For Premiers and Chief Ministers of either political persuasion, we’ve tried in the Opposition to be supportive of them when they take those decisions which are difficult and have consequences. When they take those decisions based on a careful consideration of the best available medical advice, then we try and back them in.

MG: A big part of your job is not just responding to day-to-day things but formulating policy that Labor will take to the election in the economic area. I wonder, how difficult is it in these circumstances to do that ahead of time? For example, before the 2016 and 2019 elections, Labor had policy out there way ahead of time. Do we now have to see policy formulated in a just-in-time approach?

JC: We’ll roll out policies in advance of the election. But one of the things that we have to recognise is that it’s harder than ever to assess what kind of situation we would inherit if we were to win government at the next opportunity. We don’t really know what condition the budget would be in or the economy, though we can work on the basis that unemployment will be a key focus of Labor’s policies. I think it is more difficult. We made a deliberate decision after the last election to take the time to get our policies right. That is harder in the current climate. We are focused in the near-term on dealing with this recession, recovering from it strongly, making sure that we can find new opportunities and new jobs for people. We don’t know when the election will be, or what the budget or the economy will look like then. To be frank with you, Michelle, that does make things more difficult.

MG: Labor has usually got big spending programs for health and education in particular. Will they have to take a backseat at this next election in terms of the money that you pledge for them?

JC: Health and education will always be key priorities for us. In terms of the size and nature of commitments that we might make there then that obviously remains to be seen. There’s more work to be done in those really important areas. There’s never been a time where public health has been more important than it is now. Making sure people are skilled up to take advantage of opportunities as they emerge in the recovery, that’s obviously key as well. They’re important policy areas. We need to recognise we can’t undo all of the damage overnight that’s been done over seven years of cuts in lots of these areas. They’ll be a priority. We’ll be responsible about it. We’ll have a discussion about it. We’ll announce our policies in due course.

MG: Scott Morrison has said that the National Cabinet, which has been working pretty effectively during the pandemic, has replaced the Council of Australian Governments, which of course operated under both Labor and Coalition governments. Would you expect a Labor Government to keep that structure of the National Cabinet and its attendant bodies?

JC: We’ll work our way through that, Michelle. I’m a long-term believer in the capacity of what used to be COAG as a forum for reform, especially economic reform. I think it has been diminished in recent years and during this crisis it has redeemed itself in the form of the National Cabinet. I think there have been good developments at the National Cabinet from leaders of both sides of politics and from right around Australia. That’s a good thing. We’ll learn from that. We’ll take the best of what we inherit and see if any other improvements could be made. Whether it’s called the National Cabinet, whether people meet via video, on the phone, or in person, those are some considerations. What really matters is what state, federal and local governments can do to work together to try and recover from this recession. I would be certain that under an Albanese Labor Government, that COAG or National Cabinet, whatever it’s called, will play a really important role. The parallel I’ll draw here is with the G20 meetings, which were so good at dealing with the Global Financial Crisis 10 years ago, and then lost their way a little bit in more normal times. We need to make sure that National Cabinet or COAG is as effective in normal times as it is in crisis times.

MG: Which of course is, by definition, difficult, isn’t it? Because crisis brings governments together.

JC: Yeah. As I said, it has performed relatively well. There have been some things that we would quibble with, and there have been outbreaks of disagreement from time-to-time, but overall it has worked relatively well. The real test will be how it works in 18 months’ time or three years’ time, and as the recovery gathers pace whether there’s still an appetite for cooperation, collaboration and reform.

MG: Do you think in general, the pandemic has shown that the Federation needs a major shake-up or has it shown that it can work effectively together when it has to?

JC: There have there been a lot of instances where two levels of government have worked together effectively, and we should acknowledge that. But at the same time, we’ve seen some of the finger-pointing which is not ideal. For example, aged care is a federal responsibility. From the Prime Minister down, the Government shouldn’t be trying to evade their responsibility for aged care. It’s been one of the most problematic areas. From time-to-time we have had federal ministers try and pretend that this is a Victorian State Government problem. It’s not. There are issues of accountability. Ideally, if you started to draw up the Federation from a blank sheet of paper, you wouldn’t have as many of the blurred lines of accountability, but aged care is very clear. We need to make sure that people are accountable and responsible for the areas that are in their remit.

MG: Now, you’re a Queenslander. There’s an election coming up in October. What have you been doing on the ground there to help your state colleagues? How’s it going? Is it an election all about the pandemic, or are there a whole lot of issues that we’re not hearing about down south?

JC: I think it’s primarily about the pandemic. One of the reasons why that has dominated the discussion is because there are very different views from the Premier and the Opposition Leader about things like border closures. Annastacia Palaszczuk has been resolute and she’s been right. That’s saved jobs and save lives here, frankly. That will be a key issue in the campaign, but there are other issues too. How we get the Queensland economy diverse enough and broad enough to be creating jobs and opportunities in the recovery will be a really important part of it as well. I’ve been spending a heap of time in regional Queensland with some of our state candidates. I just got back from a long road trip through out west, Central Queensland and the Fraser coast. Next week I’m off to Western Queensland and the Southern Downs, spending time with our candidates. One of the consequences of it being a bit more difficult to move around the country is it has given us the opportunity to spend more time out bush in Queensland, which I enjoy because you get a lot out of those conversations and we’ll continue to have them.

MG: How do think it’ll go?

JC: It’s going to be extraordinarily tight, I think. That’s because the State Government here only has a buffer of a couple of seats as it is. They won a seat last time in northern Brisbane which was an extraordinary outcome and we’ll be fighting hard to retain it, but it’s typically a very Liberal seat. There’ll be different sub-elections around the place. Townsville will be a challenge for us. There’s some opportunities for us on the Gold Coast. It’ll be a real mixed bag. The big thing that we need to avoid is one of those minority governments. In this recession and into the recovery, we want to have a stable government like the one that Annastacia Palaszczuk is providing.

MG: Finally, are you coming down to Canberra for the sitting that starts on the 24th? That means that if you do come, when you go back you’ve got to isolate for two weeks, which is a bit of a break in your political campaigning for the state.

JC: Yeah, we’re having that advice clarified, Michelle, to make sure that we properly understand what our responsibilities would be coming back into Queensland. My intention is –

MG: That’s what the State Government told me late last week.

JC: Yeah, I think that’s our intention. I think they’re providing some written advice to us. It may be that we have that now, but I haven’t seen it if we do. My intention is to be in Canberra. I think a lot of the issues are central to my portfolio work. But I’ll have to get that advice from the Queensland Government, and sit down and talk with the family about it to work out what’s best.

MG: So if you do have to isolate going back because of the Queensland border, you might not come?

JC: My preference is to come. My intention is to come. But I just want to see what the detail of that advice is and talk with Laura and the kids about what we can manage.

MG: Jim Chalmers, thanks very much for talking with us today. We may or may not see you in Canberra later in the month. That’s all for The Conversation’s politics podcast. Thank you to my producer Tom Glassey. We’ll be back with another interview soon. Goodbye for now.

Additional audio

A List of Ways to Die, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Jim Chalmers on tax cuts, inequality, and the Queensland election – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-jim-chalmers-on-tax-cuts-inequality-and-the-queensland-election-144410

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle H Lim, Senior Lecturer and Clinical Psychologist, Swinburne University of Technology

The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to loneliness in Australia.

This is especially so as Melburnians entered the strictest lockdown to date. Meanwhile, the rest of Australia braces for the possibility of a second wave and people are adapting to new habits and restrictions.

This has disrupted our social routines, and in many cases has reduced the number of people we interact with. This makes it harder to maintain meaningful social connections, resulting in loneliness.

But sometimes it can be difficult to tell if you’re feeling lonely or feeling something else. And many people are reluctant to admit they’re lonely for fear it makes them seem deficient in some way.

So what are the signs of loneliness? And how can we recognise these signs and therefore manage them?

Read more: Lonely in lockdown? You’re not alone. 1 in 2 Australians feel more lonely since coronavirus

I’m not lonely…

Loneliness is complex. Some people can feel lonely despite having extensive networks, while some others might not, even if they live alone. There are many factors behind this, and the COVID-19 pandemic is another significant one.

Social restrictions during the pandemic mean we are more reliant on existing relationships. People who enjoy brief but multiple social interactions in their daily routine, or simply like being around others, may now find it harder to keep loneliness at bay.

When researchers ask people whether they’re lonely, some deny or reject the idea. But when asked in a different way, like whether they want some company, some of those same people would say yes, they would like company.

This is because there’s a social stigma to loneliness. We often think it is somehow our own fault or that it reveals some personal shortcoming. Loneliness evokes a particularly vulnerable image, of someone living alone with no one around them.

One survey also found men are less likely to say they’re feeling lonely, although this research was published before COVID-19.

“Max”, aged 21, was interviewed as part of an upcoming project being done by Ending Loneliness Together, an organisation that addresses loneliness in Australia. He has experienced periods of loneliness, and said:

I think specifically for men, [they] lock themselves away because they don’t know how to verbalise that feeling. It demonstrates the real disparity in the way in which we expect our men to engage in their emotions.

Because of these misconceptions, many who are lonely will overlook their own emerging signs of loneliness in the hope these feelings will go away once they are around people. But seemingly logical solutions like making more friends or knowing more people may not help, if you perceive these relationships to be unhelpful, neutral, ambivalent, or even sources of conflict.

Nevertheless, ignoring growing levels of loneliness will increase our risk of developing poorer physical and mental health.

Signs you might be lonely

Loneliness is a normal signal to connect with others, so it’s unlikely you’ll be able to rid yourself completely of lonely feelings during this time. Instead, we should aim to manage our loneliness so it doesn’t become severely distressing.

More often than not, we might not be willing to admit even to ourselves that we’re feeling lonely. The COVID-19 pandemic may be a trigger, but there is a range of factors that can lead you to feel lonely, sometimes without even realising.

This can make it hard to be consciously aware of any loneliness you might be experiencing, particularly if the pandemic has left you feeling busier and more stressed than usual.

Here are some signs you might be feeling lonely. To a certain extent, you feel that:

• you are not “in tune” with others

• your relationships are not meaningful

• you do not belong

• you do not have a group of friends

• no one understands you

• you do not have shared interests with others

• there is no one you can turn to.

It’s important to remember, though, not all of these may relate to you and you may experience these in varying degrees.

How to manage your loneliness

Because of the complexity of loneliness, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. To find the best solution for you, reflect on your personal preferences, previous experience, and your capacity to reach out to your social networks.

During the pandemic, the solutions you select will differ depending on the social restrictions in your state. Even under the strictest social restrictions (in Melbourne), some of us have been fortunate to have a friend or a neighbour in our area with whom we can walk and chat while still adhering to public health directives. For others, getting in touch via Zoom or a phone call may be the only option.

For those who can, establishing shared goals or activities with friends, family, or colleagues can be helpful. These provide positive social support and facilitate a sense of achievement when meeting those goals. This might include setting self-care goals such as exercise, meditation, cooking, hobbies, or learning new skills. But equally, it’s not a sign of “failure” if you don’t do these things.

Friendships are good for our health, but making a new friend can be taxing for some people.

Instead, perhaps think about how you can work on existing relationships. Pick what feels right and is feasible for you. If improving the ties you already hold is all you can do, focus on this. And if you are reaching out to people outside your familiar network, it doesn’t have to be confronting. A simple hello is a small step towards more meaningful interactions in the future.

Social restrictions including isolation, quarantining, and social distancing are public health measures we’ve become acquainted with since the onset of COVID-19. Although these restrictions modify our social interactions physically, they don’t mean we can’t stay meaningfully connected to each other. This is why many prefer the alternative term “physical distancing”.

We can, and should, stay socially connected while being physically apart.

Read more: Loneliness is a social cancer, every bit as alarming as cancer itself

– ref. It’s hard to admit we’re lonely, even to ourselves. Here are the signs and how to manage them – https://theconversation.com/its-hard-to-admit-were-lonely-even-to-ourselves-here-are-the-signs-and-how-to-manage-them-143987

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zoe Loh, Senior Research Scientist, CSIRO

COVID-19 has curtailed the activities of millions of people across the world and with it, greenhouse gas emissions. As climate scientists at the Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station, we are routinely asked: does this mean carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have fallen?

The answer, disappointingly, is no. Throughout the pandemic, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels continued to rise.

In fact, our measurements show more CO₂ accumulated in the atmosphere between January and July 2020 than during the same period in 2017 or 2018.

Emissions from last summer’s bushfires may have contributed to this. But there are several other reasons why COVID-19 has not brought CO₂ concentrations down at Cape Grim – let’s take a look at them.

Measuring the cleanest air in the world

Cape Grim is on the northwest tip of Tasmania. Scientists at the station, run by the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, have monitored and studied the global atmosphere for the past 44 years.

The air we monitor is the cleanest in the world when it blows from the southwest, off the Southern Ocean. Measurements taken during these conditions are known as “baseline concentrations”, and represent the underlying level of carbon dioxide in the Southern Hemisphere’s atmosphere.

Read more: Forty years of measuring the world’s cleanest air reveals human fingerprints on the atmosphere

A drop in the CO₂ ocean

Emissions reductions due to COVID-19 started in China in January, and peaked globally in April. Our measurements show atmospheric CO₂ levels rose during that period. In January 2020, baseline CO₂ was 408.3 parts per million (ppm) at Cape Grim. By July that had risen to 410 ppm.

Since the station first began measurements in 1976, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased by 25%, as shown in the graph below. The slowdown in the rate of carbon emissions during the pandemic is a mere tug against this overall upward trend.

The CO₂ increase is due to the burning of fossil fuels for energy, and land use change such as deforestation which leaves fewer trees to absorb CO₂ from the air, and changes the uptake and release of carbon in the soils.

Atmospheric transport

Large air circulation patterns in the atmosphere spread gases such as CO₂ around the world, but this process takes time.

Most emissions reduction due to COVID-19 occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, because that’s where most of the world’s population lives. Direct measurements of CO₂ in cities where strict lockdown measures were imposed show emissions reductions of up to 75%. This would have reduced atmospheric CO₂ concentrations locally.

But it will take many months for this change to manifest in the Southern Hemisphere atmosphere – and by the time it does, the effect will be significantly diluted.

Natural ups and downs

Emissions reductions during COVID-19 are a tiny component of a very large carbon cycle. This cycle is so dynamic that even when the emissions slowdown is reflected in atmospheric CO₂ levels, the reduction will be well within the cycle’s natural ebb and flow.

Here’s why. Global carbon emissions have grown by about 1% a year over the past decade. This has triggered growth in atmospheric CO₂ levels of between 2 and 3 ppm per year in that time, as shown in the graph below. In fact, since our measurements began, CO₂ has accumulated more rapidly in the atmosphere with every passing decade, as emissions have grown.

But although CO₂ emissions have grown consistently, the resulting rate of accumulation in the atmosphere varies considerably each year. This is because roughly half of human emissions are mopped up by ecosystems and the oceans, and these processes change from year to year.

For example, in southeast Australia, last summer’s extensive and prolonged bushfires emitted unusually large amounts of CO₂, as well as changing the capacity of ecosystems to absorb it. And during strong El Niño events, reduced rainfall in some regions limits the productivity of grasslands and forests, so they take up less CO₂.

The graph below visualises this variability. It shows the baseline CO₂ concentrations for each year, relative to January 1. Note how the baseline level changes through a natural seasonal cycle, how that change varies from year to year and how much CO₂ has been added to the atmosphere by the end of the year.

The growth rate has been as much as 3 ppm per year. The black line represents 2020 and lines for the preceding five years are coloured. All show recent annual growth rates of about 2-3 ppm/year – a variability in the range of about 1 ppm/year.

Read more: Coronavirus is a ‘sliding doors’ moment. What we do now could change Earth’s trajectory

Research in May estimated that due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, global annual average emissions for 2020 would be between 4.2% and 7.5% lower than for 2019.

Let’s simplistically assume CO₂ concentration growth reduces by the same amount. There would be 0.08-0.23 ppm less CO₂ in the atmosphere by the end of 2020 than if no pandemic occurred. This variation is well within the natural 1 ppm/year annual variability in CO₂ growth.

The road ahead

It’s clear COVID-19 has not solved the climate change problem. But this fact helps us understand the magnitude of change required if we’re to stabilise the global climate system.

The central aim of the Paris climate agreement is to limit global warming to well below 2℃, and pursue efforts to keep it below 1.5℃. To achieve this, global CO₂ emissions must decline by 3% and 7% each year, respectively, until 2030, according to the United Nations Emissions Gap Report.

Thanks to COVID-19, we may achieve this reduction in 2020. But to lock in year-on-year emissions reductions that will be reflected in the atmosphere, we must act now to make deep, significant and permanent changes to global energy and economic systems.

The lead author, Zoe Loh, discusses the CO₂ record from Cape Grim in Fight for Planet A, showing now on the ABC.

Read more: Why there’s more greenhouse gas in the atmosphere than you may have realised

– ref. Carbon dioxide levels over Australia rose even after COVID-19 forced global emissions down. Here’s why – https://theconversation.com/carbon-dioxide-levels-over-australia-rose-even-after-covid-19-forced-global-emissions-down-heres-why-144119

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Wilson, Professor of Public Health, University of Otago

As New Zealand enters its second day at heightened alert levels to contain a community outbreak of COVID-19, we expect that it should only be a temporary setback.

Four cases with no direct links to border or quarantine facilities were confirmed late on Tuesday. On Thursday it was announced there were 13 new cases linked to those four people – meaning there are now 17 active community cases in New Zealand.

Given the control measures already in place and the willingness most people have shown to comply with restrictions, we believe New Zealand can get back to its elimination status.

But we suggest a number of additional measures to speed up progress, including an update of the current alert system to make the use of masks mandatory in indoor public spaces and to place tighter controls on venues with a high transmission risk, including bars, gyms, choirs and churches.

Read more: Churchgoers aren’t able to lift every voice and sing during the pandemic – here’s why that matters

Getting the outbreak back under control

The use of masks should be mandatory for all indoor public places at level 2 (which is currently in place across New Zealand) and this requirement should be added to a revised alert level system. The effectiveness of simple reuseable fabric masks can approach that of standard surgical masks.

Read more: How do I know if my mask actually works? What about the ‘candle test’?

We should also update advice on venues with a particularly high risk of transmission, including bars, nightclubs, gyms and choirs and church gatherings (anywhere people sing). Some of these places have been implicated in large outbreaks.

One Japanese study noted many COVID-19 clusters were associated with:

… heavy breathing in close proximity, such as singing at karaoke parties, cheering at clubs, having conversations in bars, and exercising in gymnasiums.

Similarly, there are studies on outbreaks associated with dance classes and a choir practice. The closure of such places could be built into alert level 2 – or perhaps a distinct alert level 1B where all other places remain open.

Even at higher alert levels, we should reassess school closures to reflect more nuanced evidence about risks and benefits at different ages. The aim should be to keep younger children in school wherever possible.

The information about physical distancing at schools on the Ministry of Education website is now outdated and needs revision. In particular, mask use should be universally adopted by secondary school-aged children, bringing them into line with recommendations for adults to prevent viral spread.

The new outbreak affects several work places in Auckland and better sick leave provisions are in discussion to ensure workers with mild illnesses and those waiting for test results don’t come to work. This support is particularly important for workers at the highest risk of infection: border workers, air crew and staff at managed isolation and quarantine facilities.

Further economic support packages will be necessary for people unable to work under level 3 restrictions.

Effective measures are already in place

The government’s rapid implementation of strong control measures is appropriate. This decisive approach allowed New Zealand to eliminate COVID-19 back in May. The country is now better prepared than earlier in the year in a number of ways because:

• we know that it is possible to eliminate the virus and there are inspiring examples from other jurisdictions (including Taiwan, most Australian states and territories, and Fiji)

• we have the logistics in place to carry out mass testing in the community

• the manual contact tracing system has improved, including better integration of regional public health units into a single national system

• we have genomic sequencing methods available to help identify the source of the outbreak

• and the Ministry of Health has adopted World Health Organization advice on the use of face masks.

All these measures, together with alert level 3 restrictions in the greater Auckland region, will help bring the outbreak under control. There is only a small risk these measures could fail and force New Zealand (or some regions of the country) to repeat a level 4 lockdown.

Necessary measures for the longer term

It is almost certain the current outbreak is due to a border-related event. This was the source of the large outbreak currently affecting the Australian state of Victoria and spilling over into New South Wales.

Read more: Yes, it looks like Victoria has passed the peak of its second wave. It probably did earlier than we think

Previous modelling work shows it can take several weeks for a case to be detected following a biosecurity breach. It has been suggested the virus may have entered New Zealand on refrigerated freight, but this source is much less likely than a failure with the quarantine system.

Given this outbreak, a thorough review of border and quarantine systems, including ports, is now necessary. After some concerning quarantine breaches, we now have a more robust system of border controls, including stricter testing regimes in managed isolation and quarantine facilities.

But further improvements will be needed, and this could include more regular testing of border and quarantine staff and the use of digital technologies to ensure staff keep appropriate distance from people in quarantine and to track their movements when off-duty (within privacy safeguards).

Improvements in contact tracing are ongoing. A CovidCard device is currently going through a trial in Rotorua, but the government should explore alternatives such as smartphone apps using the Apple/Google platform, as used in Ireland and Spain.

Phone data were used successfully in South Korea and New Zealand should evaluate this option, within appropriate privacy safeguards.

Finally, we need an update on the scope for COVID-19 surveillance through testing of wastewater. Several cities, including Paris, are exploring this. In New Zealand, researchers have detected the virus in wastewater, and this form of early detection of outbreaks would reduce the need for routine community testing.

– ref. Masking the outbreak: despite New Zealand’s growing COVID-19 cases, there are more ways to get back to elimination faster – https://theconversation.com/masking-the-outbreak-despite-new-zealands-growing-covid-19-cases-there-are-more-ways-to-get-back-to-elimination-faster-144356

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bain Munro Attwood, Professor of History, Monash University

The Conversation is running a series of explainers on key figures in Australian political history, looking at the way they changed the nature of debate, its impact then, and it relevance to politics today. You can read the rest of our pieces here. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people.

William Cooper is not a household name, but he should be. This Yorta Yorta elder is one of Australia’s most formative political leaders.

In the 1930s, he began a remarkable political campaign, pushing for Indigenous rights and recognition, nearly all of which have significant implications for Australian politics today.

Early life

Cooper was born on the junction of the Murray and Goulburn rivers in December 1860. He was profoundly influenced by his people, who had demanded and won a reservation of land in the 1880s, which they called Cumeroogunga.

Yorta Yorta people farmed Cumeroogunga into the 1900s, only to lose it and have their families and community broken up by repressive policies of the New South Wales Board for the Protection of Aborigines in the 1910s and 1920s.

Cooper escaped the most severe of state protection boards’ special laws at the time, which denied Aboriginal people basic rights such as freedom of movement, custody of their children and control over personal property.

But he knew the suffering the laws caused and still had a very hard life, denied the opportunities enjoyed by most non-Indigenous Australians. Apart from anything else, this meant he suffered enormous poverty.

Christian influence

Importantly, in his early life, Cooper also acquired the means to understand and fight against his people’s oppression. In his teens, he was taken under the wing of evangelical Christian missionaries, Daniel and Janet Matthews, at the Maloga mission on the banks of the Murray River.

Their teachings were fundamental to the political work Cooper would eventually undertake. They had a view of humanity that encompassed all people as God’s children, and so held the lives of Aboriginal people mattered, too. This provided a powerful antidote to the prevailing racial prejudice Cooper experienced and witnessed.

The Matthews saw God and religious principles as a higher order than government. And they provided a prophetic or predictive view of history that promised salvation for the Yorta Yorta, just as the Bible, especially the Book of Exodus, had promised to the persecuted and suffering Israelites.

Read more: Charles Perkins forced Australia to confront its racist past. His fight for justice continues today

It is understood Cooper spent much of 20s on and off missions and then earned a living working as a shearer, drover, horse-breaker and general rural labourer.

He was a member of the Shearers’ Union and Australian Workers’ Union. He also acted as a spokesman for Aboriginal workers in western New South Wales and central Victoria, having a “longing to help his people”. After returning to Cumeroogunga in his 60s, he moved to Melbourne, so he could get the age pension.

Petitioning the King

Now in his 70s, Cooper began a remarkable political campaign. This had several strands, many of which continue to have significance in Australian politics today.

First and foremost, in 1933 Cooper drew up a petition to King George V. With more than 1,800 signatures by the time it was presented to the federal government in 1937, the petition’s central demand was representation for Aboriginal people in the Commonwealth Parliament. This call for a federal MP who would be chosen by Aboriginal people was, if you like, a demand for a Voice to Parliament.

Read more: Constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians must involve structural change, not mere symbolism

Cooper believed this was crucial, as government laws about Aboriginal people were made without any consideration of their opinions. He argued Indigenous perspectives differed markedly from those of white Australians – which Cooper called “thinking black”.

Cooper was heir to a tradition among Aboriginal people in New South Wales and Victoria that held they had a special relationship to the British king or queen. Certainly, Cooper believed Aboriginal people had a right to appeal to the British Crown on the grounds that it still had a responsibility for them because of duties it had undertaken to perform in the past.

Regrettably, prime minister Joseph Lyons did not pass the petition on to Buckingham Palace, and it has never been found in any archive. But in 2014, a copy finally reached Queen Elizabeth, after his grandson Boydie Turner travelled to London.

Equal rights and ‘uplift’

In 1936, Cooper founded the Australian Aborigines’ League, which he envisaged as an organisation to represent all Aboriginal people.

Under his leadership, the league developed a program to call for the rights and privileges that other Australian citizens enjoyed, while also seeking the “uplift” of Indigenous people, so they could overcome the disadvantages they suffered.

“Uplift” entailed a claim for special rights for Aboriginal people — to land, capital and other resources — that rested on their disadvantage, rather than their status as the country’s Indigenous or First peoples.

But in the course of demanding the rights of citizenship and “uplift”, Cooper repeatedly sought to draw attention to his ancestors’ prior ownership of the land and their subsequent dispossession, displacement and decimation.

He did so in order to remind white Australians of their obligations to Aboriginal people, incurred as a result of this history. As Cooper noted in 1938,

Surely the Commonwealth, which controls all that originally belonged to us, could make what would be a comparatively meagre allowance for us, by way of recompense.

To remind people of Australia’s black history, Cooper called for a “Day of Mourning” to mark Australia’s sesquicentenary in January 1938 and an “Aborigines’ Day” to be held in the nation’s churches every year on the Sunday closest to Australia Day.

Protest against Nazi persecution

Cooper and the League also rejected government policies advocating for the absorption of Aboriginal people into Australian society. Instead, he asserted a vision of Aboriginal people as a permanent and ongoing community in Australia. As he said in 1936,

all thought of breeding the half-caste white, and the desire that that be accomplished, is a creature of the white mind. The coloured person has no feeling of repugnance toward the full blood, and in fact, he feels more in common with the full blood than with the white.

Cooper and other members of the league identified very strongly as a persecuted racial minority and made common cause with others beyond Australia’s shores, including the Jewish people.

In the incident for which Cooper now seems to be best known by non-Indigenous Australians, in December 1938 he led a protest against Nazi persecution to the German Consulate in Melbourne.

Inspiring a new generation

Cooper’s life and work seem astoundingly relevant for today. But during his life his campaign for rights for Aborigines fell on deaf eyes as far as government was concerned.

As he lamented in 1937,

We asked [for] bread. We scarcely seem likely to get a stone.

Yet, by the time he passed away in March 1941, he had inspired a new generation of Aboriginal leaders, most notably his grand-nephew Doug Nicholls but also the Onus brothers, who became prominent in the struggle for Aboriginal rights in the immediate post-war period.

His notion of “thinking black” would in time also catch the imagination of yet another generation of Aboriginal leaders, such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Most importantly, perhaps, Cooper is remembered above all else for his prescient call for an Aboriginal voice to Parliament.

Through this, and his fight to overcome Aboriginal disadvantage, he continues to speak to us today.

– ref. William Cooper: the Indigenous leader who petitioned the king, demanding a Voice to Parliament in the 1930s – https://theconversation.com/william-cooper-the-indigenous-leader-who-petitioned-the-king-demanding-a-voice-to-parliament-in-the-1930s-140056

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thomas McGee, PhD researcher, Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, University of Melbourne

No child should be denied her rights because her parents are LGBTIQ+, and no family should have to endure the indignity we did.

These are the words of Roee and Adiel Kiviti, a same-sex married couple who recently won a legal challenge against the US Department of State for refusing to consider their daughter an American citizen.

Both men are US citizens, but their daughter was born in Canada through surrogacy. The State Department considers such children of same-sex couples to be “born out of wedlock”, irrespective of the marital status of the parents. For the Kivitis, this meant their daughter was denied the automatic citizenship normally granted to the children of US citizens.

This isn’t just a singular case. For many children born to same-sex couples through international surrogacy, there is a risk they could become stateless — unable to gain citizenship in the country where they were born, or their parents’ home countries.

Immigration Equality, an LGBTIQ+ immigrant rights organisation in the US, says there is a

new double standard for citizenship: one for the children of gay couples and one for the children of straight couples.

What does statelessness mean?

Statelessness is defined under international law as not being recognised as a citizen by any of the world’s 195 recognised states. According to the UN’s conservative estimate, there are some 12 million stateless people globally.

In practical terms, stateless people face many challenges due to their lack of citizenship. While these differ significantly from one context to the next, common experiences include the inability to access vital services (such as education and health care), move freely, own property and simply prove one’s identity.

Cases like the Kivitis’ daughter have brought high-profile attention to the risk of statelessness associated with LGBTIQ+ parenting situations.

Similar cases have been compiled by campaigners in Europe, where litigation is also underway.

An Irish-Polish lesbian couple, for instance, gave birth to a daughter through IVF in Spain in 2018. The girl, Sofia, is currently stateless because neither woman’s country will recognise her right to citizenship. Her Spanish citizenship is still pending.

And before international commercial surrogacy arrangements were banned in India and Thailand, the children of many same-sex couples born in these countries were at risk of statelessness.

However, statelessness is also a problem that LGBTIQ+ people themselves may face. My recently published research has identified scores of stateless LGBTIQ+ people around the world.

Read more: A year since the marriage equality vote, much has been gained – and there is still much to be done

Stateless LGBTIQ+ people face double marginalisation

Why do we hear so little about their experiences? Indeed, this was the question that motivated me to study the links between statelessness and sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (relating to a person’s physical sexual anatomy).

Having worked on statelessness for the last decade, I have attended many conferences with little consideration given to LGBTIQ+ people. In contrast, much research has been conducted on the experiences of LGBTIQ+ refugees and asylum seekers.

As Eliana Rubashkyn, an intersex person from Colombia who experienced years of statelessness before receiving asylum and citizenship in New Zealand, explained to me:

Nobody talks about our case because we are taboo everywhere. Yet it is a chronic violation of human rights.

My research highlights that stateless LGBTIQ+ people often face a significant double marginalisation. They are discriminated because of their sexuality or gender expression, as well as their lack of documentation.

Read more: What does an asylum seeker have to do to prove their sexuality?

For example, one stateless queer man in Lebanon described fears of being arrested on grounds of public immorality (a common charge against the LGBTIQ+ community) and lacking the necessary paperwork to establish his identity. While he is not the only stateless person in his family (due to gender discrimination in Lebanese citizenship law), the risks are compounded in his case.

It goes without saying that being stateless can also make any problem I encounter due to my sexual orientation and gender identity much worse. And vice versa.

While no statistics are available, for some LGBTIQ+ people, discrimination is what caused them to become stateless in the first place.

They can lose their citizenship due to complex laws that do not recognise LGBTIQ+ marriages and relationships across countries. There is also a patchwork of different laws recognising sex and gender transitions, which can be especially problematic for trans and intersex individuals.

This was the case for Rubashkyn, who no longer resembled her passport photo following hormone treatment and became stranded in Hong Kong’s airport six years ago.

Desperate to prevent officials from deporting her back to Colombia, where she had suffered persecution, she ultimately renounced her Colombian citizenship, making herself stateless. She was later resettled in New Zealand and gained citizenship in 2018.

Asylum requests are often denied

Within asylum contexts, research shows both statelessness and LGBTIQ+ situations are often missed or misunderstood during the process of assessing claims for protection.

For instance, one transsexual interviewee from my research explained

the various intersecting elements of my narrative seemed to confuse the asylum officials who wanted to understand my experience through a singular lens. I tried to explain but they did not appear convinced.

The lack of attention paid to “rainbow statelessness” in the media and policy debates may further lead governments to question the credibility of statements made by stateless LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers.

This is why it’s critical to bring more attention to the links between statelessness and sexual orientation or gender identity.

Better understanding this intersection is necessary to improve laws and policies that discriminate against LGBTIQ+ people, and sometimes render them, or their children, stateless.

Read more: So much for Dutch tolerance: life as an LGBT asylum seeker in the Netherlands

– ref. ‘We are taboo everywhere’: how LGBTIQ+ people, and their children, become stateless – https://theconversation.com/we-are-taboo-everywhere-how-lgbtiq-people-and-their-children-become-stateless-141987

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Varela, Research Fellow, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Many economists think that earnings in super funds should be taxed at a relatively low rate, compared to labour earnings and other types of earnings such as interest and dividends.

This is reflected in tax policy around the world. Among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, private pension plans (what we call super) have among the lowest tax rates of any savings instrument.

The Australian tax treatment of super aligns with this trend. But the Australian system is much more generous than other countries and very expensive.

In the past financial year the tax concessions on super fund earnings cost the government an estimated A$17.8 billion. The tax concession on employer super contributions cost $19.6 billion.

Do the benefits of these generous tax concessions justify their costs?

Our recent report on savings taxes suggests that they don’t, in large measure because they are poorly aimed at their intended objectives.

In order to understand just how poorly they are aimed, it is necessary to identify the arguments typically used to justify their existence.

Justification 1. The impact of tax compounds over time

The first (and by far most convincing) justification is that superannuation is typically held for a long period of time. Since income from superannuation is taxed annually, the impact of the tax compounds over time, similar to compound interest.

Lower tax rates can offset the increase in effective tax rates over time.

But in practice they are applied poorly because they apply equally, irrespective of whether the asset is held for a short or a long time.

Read more: Progressive in theory, regressive in practice: that’s how we tax income from savings

Ideally the concession would be the greatest for workers at the start of their careers.

They are the ones who hold super for the longest time, but the system actually awards the highest concessions to the high earners, who tend to be the oldest and closest to retirement.

Justification 2. Super tax concessions encourage saving

A second rationale for superannuation tax concessions is that they help ensure people save enough money for retirement.

This argument is less convincing, because there is relatively strong evidence suggesting that it is the compulsory nature of superannuation, rather than how it is taxed, that drives retirement savings.

In other words, if people are not saving enough for retirement, superannuation concessions are the wrong tool – increasing the compulsory percentage would be better.

Read more: Early access to super doesn’t justify higher compulsory contributions

Moreover, if increasing retirement savings is a goal of tax policy, it would be best achieved by charging the least to the people most likely to respond to tax rates.

Existing research suggests that low income people are among those most likely to respond to tax concessions. Yet at the moment the concessions are directed to high earners.

Justification 3. Super concessions take weight off the pension

A third argument is that super tax concessions reduce dependence on the age pension.

But super tax concessions only improve the government’s financial position if savings on the age pension are greater than the cost of the concessions.

It is a far from decided question.

There is a good deal of evidence suggesting that the amount placed in super has only a modest impact on the likelihood that the superannuant will claim a pension, and a relatively modest impact on the amount claimed.

Increased savings of almost any form will reduce dependence on the age pension to some extent because most savings, other than owner-occupied housing, are counted in the means test.

If the government wanted a stronger effect it could tighten the means test.

Alternatively, it could direct concessions toward those Australians most likely to receive an age pension.

At the moment the biggest concessions are directed to the Australians wealthy enough to be unlikely to receive the pension.

So how should we tax super?

In the long-run there’s a case for taxing the earnings from all types of savings at the same rate.

Short-run, super tax could be reformed by

• making all superannuation contributions out of post-tax income (potentially with an upfront subsidy, but a smaller one than currently exists)

• taxing earnings in the retirement phase in addition to the pre-retirement phase and using the resulting revenue to reduce the tax rate on all super earnings

• taxing super earnings at a lower annual rate for younger Australians to account for the fact that they hold super assets for a longer

• Removing “catch-up provisions” that allow older Australians to put in more at lower tax rates and lowering the annual concessional contributions cap

The savings made could help fund a reduction in personal income tax rates, greater government support payments, or a combination of both.

The government’s retirement income review has examined some of these questions. It was delivered to the treasurer late last month.

– ref. We need super, but we’re taxing it the wrong way round – https://theconversation.com/we-need-super-but-were-taxing-it-the-wrong-way-round-143421

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Wilson, Professor of Public Health, University of Otago

As New Zealand enters its second day at heightened alert levels to contain a community outbreak of COVID-19, we expect that it should only be a temporary setback.

Four cases with no direct links to border or quarantine facilities were confirmed late on Tuesday, and there are now four more probable community cases, including one student at an Auckland school.

Given the control measures already in place and the willingness most people have shown to comply with restrictions, we believe New Zealand can get back to its elimination status.

But we suggest a number of additional measures to speed up progress, including an update of the current alert system to make the use of masks mandatory in indoor public spaces and to place tighter controls on venues with a high transmission risk, including bars, gyms, choirs and churches.

Read more: Churchgoers aren’t able to lift every voice and sing during the pandemic – here’s why that matters

Getting the outbreak back under control

The use of masks should be mandatory for all indoor public places at level 2 (which is currently in place across New Zealand) and this requirement should be added to a revised alert level system. The effectiveness of simple reuseable fabric masks can approach that of standard surgical masks.

Read more: How do I know if my mask actually works? What about the ‘candle test’?

We should also update advice on venues with a particularly high risk of transmission, including bars, nightclubs, gyms and choirs and church gatherings (anywhere people sing). Some of these places have been implicated in large outbreaks.

One Japanese study noted many COVID-19 clusters were associated with:

… heavy breathing in close proximity, such as singing at karaoke parties, cheering at clubs, having conversations in bars, and exercising in gymnasiums.

Similarly, there are studies on outbreaks associated with dance classes and a choir practice. The closure of such places could be built into alert level 2 – or perhaps a distinct alert level 1B where all other places remain open.

Even at higher alert levels, we should reassess school closures to reflect more nuanced evidence about risks and benefits at different ages. The aim should be to keep younger children in school wherever possible.

The information about physical distancing at schools on the Ministry of Education website is now outdated and needs revision. In particular, mask use should be universally adopted by secondary school-aged children, bringing them into line with recommendations for adults to prevent viral spread.

The new outbreak affects several work places in Auckland and better sick leave provisions are in discussion to ensure workers with mild illnesses and those waiting for test results don’t come to work. This support is particularly important for workers at the highest risk of infection: border workers, air crew and staff at managed isolation and quarantine facilities.

Further economic support packages will be necessary for people unable to work under level 3 restrictions.

Effective measures are already in place

The government’s rapid implementation of strong control measures is appropriate. This decisive approach allowed New Zealand to eliminate COVID-19 back in May. The country is now better prepared than earlier in the year in a number of ways because:

• we know that it is possible to eliminate the virus and there are inspiring examples from other jurisdictions (including Taiwan, most Australian states and territories, and Fiji)

• we have the logistics in place to carry out mass testing in the community

• the manual contact tracing system has improved, including better integration of regional public health units into a single national system

• we have genomic sequencing methods available to help identify the source of the outbreak

• and the Ministry of Health has adopted World Health Organization advice on the use of face masks.

All these measures, together with alert level 3 restrictions in the greater Auckland region, will help bring the outbreak under control. There is only a small risk these measures could fail and force New Zealand (or some regions of the country) to repeat a level 4 lockdown.

Necessary measures for the longer term

It is almost certain the current outbreak is due to a border-related event. This was the source of the large outbreak currently affecting the Australian state of Victoria and spilling over into New South Wales.

Read more: Yes, it looks like Victoria has passed the peak of its second wave. It probably did earlier than we think

Previous modelling work shows it can take several weeks for a case to be detected following a biosecurity breach. It has been suggested the virus may have entered New Zealand on refrigerated freight, but this source is much less likely than a failure with the quarantine system.

Given this outbreak, a thorough review of border and quarantine systems, including ports, is now necessary. After some concerning quarantine breaches, we now have a more robust system of border controls, including stricter testing regimes in managed isolation and quarantine facilities.

But further improvements will be needed, and this could include more regular testing of border and quarantine staff and the use of digital technologies to ensure staff keep appropriate distance from people in quarantine and to track their movements when off-duty (within privacy safeguards).

Improvements in contact tracing are ongoing. A CovidCard device is currently going through a trial in Rotorua, but the government should explore alternatives such as smartphone apps using the Apple/Google platform, as used in Ireland and Spain.

Phone data were used successfully in South Korea and New Zealand should evaluate this option, within appropriate privacy safeguards.

Finally, we need an update on the scope for COVID-19 surveillance through testing of wastewater. Several cities, including Paris, are exploring this. In New Zealand, researchers have detected the virus in wastewater, and this form of early detection of outbreaks would reduce the need for routine community testing.

– ref. Masking the outbreak: how New Zealand could return to its COVID-19 elimination status even faster – https://theconversation.com/masking-the-outbreak-how-new-zealand-could-return-to-its-covid-19-elimination-status-even-faster-144356