Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Griffin, Associate Professor, Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, The University of Queensland

After having low rates of influenza (flu) transmission in recent years thanks to our COVID control strategies, case numbers are now rising.

So far this year, Australia has had more than 32,000 lab-confirmed cases of the flu and 32 deaths.

Getting a flu vaccine is the best way to protect against getting the flu. These are reformulated each year to protect against the most widely circulating strains – if our predictions are right.

Below you’ll find everything you need to know about the 2023 flu vaccine. But first, some flu basics.

Read more:
Are flu cases already 100 times higher than last year? Here’s what we really know about the 2023 flu season

What are the different types of flu?

There are two main types of influenza: influenza A and influenza B. On the surface of the influenza virus there are two main proteins, the hemagglutinin (HA or H) and neuraminidase (NA or N).

Different strains are named after their versions of the H and N proteins, as in H1N1 or “swine flu”.

Minor changes in the proteins (HA and NA) on the surface are common because the enzyme the virus uses to make copies of itself is prone to errors.

Sometimes the influenza virus can change more abruptly when it mixes up components from different influenza viruses – including influenza viruses that typically infect birds, pigs or bats – to create a virus that’s basically new.

The regular change in the virus is the reason the vaccine is updated every year. The Australian Influenza Vaccine Committee meets late in the year to plan what should be included in the vaccine for the following season, after considering what happened in our last flu season and in the Northern hemisphere winter.

Read more:
Flu or COVID? You can now test for both at home with a single swab. Here’s what you need to know

What strains does this year’s flu shot protect against?

Modern flu vaccines typically protect against four strains. For this year’s vaccine, the committee has recommended it includes:

• an A/Sydney/5/2021 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus

• an A/Darwin/9/2021 (H3N2)-like virus

• a B/Austria/1359417/2021 (B/Victoria lineage)-like virus

• a B/Phuket/3073/2013 (B/Yamagata lineage)-like virus.

The naming of the viral components can sometimes be confusing. The name is derived from the virus type (A or B)/the place it was first isolated/strain number/year isolated (virus subtype).

This year’s vaccine therefore includes an influenza A virus similar to the 2009 pandemic-causing H1N1 isolated from Sydney in 2021 and a second influenza A virus (H3N2) isolated in Darwin in 2021.

Influenza B viruses are classified into 2 lineages: Victoria and Yamagata. This year’s vaccine includes an influenza B isolated from Austria in 2021 (Victoria lineage) and an influenza B isolated in Phuket in 2013 (Yamagata lineage).

Who should get a flu shot?

Health authorities recommend everyone aged six months of age or over should get the flu vaccine every year.

Some groups are at greater risk of significant disease from the flu and can access the flu vaccine for free. This includes:

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged six months and over

• children aged six months to five years

• pregnant women at any stage of pregnancy

• people aged 65 years or over

• people aged five years to 65 years who have certain underlying health conditions affecting the heart, lungs, kidneys or immune system, and those with diabetes.

Read more:
Should I get the flu shot if I’m pregnant?

How can I get it?

You can get a flu shot from your local general practice or pharmacy. Or you may have an opportunity to get vaccinated at your workplace if your employer supplies it.

While the vaccine is free for those in the above groups, there can be a consultation or administration fee, depending on where you get your vaccine.

If you aren’t eligible for a free vaccine, it usually costs around A$20-$30.

Are there different options?

For over 65s, whose immune systems may not work as well as when they were younger, a specific vaccine is available that includes an adjuvant which boosts the immune response. This is free for over-65s under the national immunisation program.

A high-dose vaccine is also available for people aged 60 and over. However this isn’t currently funded and costs around $70 on a private prescription.

People with egg allergies can safely get the egg-based flu vaccine. However there is also a cell-based immunisation for people who don’t want a vaccine made in eggs. When vaccines are grown in eggs, sometimes the virus can change and this might affect the level of protection. Cell-based vaccines aim to address this issue.

The cell-based vaccine isn’t funded so patients will pay around $40 for a private prescription.

How well do they work?

The vaccine’s effectiveness depends on how well the strains in the vaccine match those circulating. It generally reduces the chance of being admitted to hospital with influenza by 30-60%.

Read more:
Why can you still get influenza if you’ve had a flu shot?

What are the side effects?

You can’t get the flu from the vaccine as there’s no live virus in it.

When people get a flu-like illness after the vaccine, it can be due to mild effects we sometimes see after vaccination, such as headaches, tiredness or some aches and pains. These usually go away within a day or two.

Alternatively, symptoms after getting a flu shot may be due to another respiratory virus such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) that circulates in winter.

When’s the best time to get your flu shot?

The vaccine provides peak protection around three to four months after you get it.

The peak of the flu season is usually between June and September, however this changes every year and can vary in different parts of the country.

Given this, the best time to get the vaccine is usually around late April or early May. So if you haven’t already, now would be a good time to get it.

Paul Griffin has been a Medical Advisory Board Member including for AstraZeneca, GSK, MSD, Moderna, Biocelect/Novavax, Seqirus and Pfizer and has received speaker honoraria including from Seqirus, Novartis, Gilead, Sanofi, MSD and Janssen.
Paul Griffin is also a Director and Scientific Advisory Board Member of the Immunisation Coalition.

– ref. Should I get a flu vaccine this year? Here’s what you need to know – https://theconversation.com/should-i-get-a-flu-vaccine-this-year-heres-what-you-need-to-know-203406

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cynthia Faye Barlow, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Australian Centre for Housing Research, University of Adelaide

Every winter we hear about soaring energy bills and people’s inability to stay warm. But, until now, we haven’t really known just how cold Australian homes are. Our newly published research suggests around four out of five of Australian homes fail to meet World Health Organization minimum standards for warmth.

Australia has a reputation for being a hot place. It might lead us to think we just need to tough it out through winter, because soon it will be hot again.

Our winters may not be as cold as in Europe and North America, but our health statistics are a wake-up call. Our winter death rates are over 20% higher than in summer.

Newly updated building codes, and our health and welfare systems, assume most people are OK over winter. This is simply not the case. We need to take winter more seriously.

Read more:
Breaking the mould: why rental properties are more likely to be mouldy and what’s needed to stop people getting sick

What did the study find?

About six years ago, we wondered just how cold Australian homes were. Over the past few winters, we have been measuring people’s in-home temperature. Our latest research suggests more than three-quarters of Australian homes were cold last winter – having an average winter temperature less than 18 degrees (the World Health Organization’s recommended minimum) during occupied, waking hours.

This is startling. Previously, it has been thought that only about 5% of people were cold.

For our study, temperature sensors were placed in 100 homes across temperate New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia. Two-thirds of Australia’s population live in these temperate climate zones.

Across the sampled homes, 81% were below 18°C on average across the whole of winter. The homes averaged 16.5°C across occupied, waking hours. The coldest homes had a minimum hourly average of just 5°C.

Tasmanians were hardest hit. Some homes in this state had average indoor temperatures of less than 11°C.

But, regardless of state, the majority of homes in our study were unhealthily cold.

Read more:
Forget heatwaves, our cold houses are much more likely to kill us

Who’s at risk?

Cold isn’t just a problem that affects low-income households. The research included homes that were owned outright, mortgaged and rented, across all income levels.

Some people might feel comfortable at 16℃, but many are not cold by choice. A combination of poor housing conditions, inadequate heating and not being able to afford the cost of heating leaves many struggling to stay warm. And energy prices are set to rise.

The aged, people with a disability and those facing housing insecurity are most at risk. This includes those struggling to pay rent, moving frequently, living in overcrowded homes or spending most of their income on housing. There are also greater challenges for renters.

Cold indoor temperatures can make other problems such as mould worse, and can even affect our mental health.

Read more:
If you’re renting, chances are your home is cold. With power prices soaring, here’s what you can do to keep warm

We must recognise the connection between health and cold housing. The objectives of housing and health policies must be linked to improve the situation.

Australia is shifting towards providing more home-based care, rather than hospital care. This trend means we must be even more careful to ensure home environments are healthy.

There is also a need to increase community awareness of the risks of cold housing. At-risk groups include First Nations communities, the aged, the young, disabled and those in insecure housing.

Delivering healthier housing is one of the best ways of raising the living standards and quality of life of these communities.

Read more:
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We can learn from successes overseas

New Zealand and the United Kingdom have been tackling cold housing with remarkable success. Both have started by acknowledging a collective social responsibility to address this problem.

We, too, must realise the problem is bigger than individual households. National ownership of this problem and a systemic response are required.

The NZ and UK interventions have started with rentals, both government and private. Their experience shows mandatory requirements to protect tenants, in particular, need to be made transparent and objective.

With almost one-third of Australians renting their homes, such actions could improve the lives of millions of people.

Read more:
‘I’ve never actually met them’: what will motivate landlords to fix cold and costly homes for renters?

Both NZ and the UK used housing surveys to track progress in housing quality over time. This method clearly shows what works best and identifies areas that still need improvement.

Similarly, Australia should closely monitor progress towards housing that keeps temperatures at a healthy level. Results should be made public. This would promote continued improvement of housing conditions and help direct investment to policies that deliver the best results.

Importantly, we need to keep providing robust research on who is most vulnerable. Our study represents early data from a bigger study of 500 homes, which will enable us to more conclusively identify the true risk of cold housing in Australia.

Cynthia Faye Barlow receives funding from National Health and Medical Research Council grant number 2004466.

Emma Baker currently receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), The Australian Research Council (ARC), the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), and the Environment Protection Authority Victoria.

Lyrian Daniel receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), The Australian Research Council (ARC), and the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI).

– ref. Feeling frozen? 4 out of 5 homes in southern Australia are colder than is healthy – https://theconversation.com/feeling-frozen-4-out-of-5-homes-in-southern-australia-are-colder-than-is-healthy-205293

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bjorn Sturmberg, Senior Research Fellow, Battery Storage & Grid Integration Program, Australian National University

To power Australia without fossil fuels will mean using batteries to store power from solar and wind. We often think this means home batteries – or large grid-scale installations.

There’s another size too: community-scale or neighbourhood batteries, which are growing rapidly in Australia due to support from state governments like Victoria and Western Australia and, more recently, from the federal government. They seem to solve a lot of problems we know people are concerned about – such as enabling more rooftop solar and helping to speed up a transition to renewables.

But the popularity of these batteries shouldn’t be the only factor in decisions about where they are rolled out. Sometimes – and in some parts of the grid – they make sense. At other times, they may not be the best solution.

Our research explores when community batteries are – and are not – useful. In short, we find the main use of these batteries is to make the grid able to handle more solar and electric vehicles. But they’re not the only option. This is why we have produced a decision-making tool for policymakers to figure out where and when these batteries are worthwhile.

What exactly is a community battery – and why is the idea popular?

Think of a community battery as like a neighbourhood asset – battery packs similar in size to a 4WD that can store locally produced solar or help serve local electric vehicle charging.

The idea is for these batteries to reduce carbon emissions and energy bills while benefiting all energy users nearby, rather than only those with access to rooftop solar. These are great ambitions – small wonder they’ve proven a hit.

But the success of these batteries is far from certain.

Over the last four years, our research has found two areas we have to fix to maximise the chances these batteries actually do what we want them to do.

First, we need greater clarity on how we decide whether community batteries are a good investment.

Second, we need better measurement and evaluation of what these batteries actually contribute to the grid and to energy users.

Why does it matter? Making sure neighbourhood batteries deliver what they promise is particularly important because they have generated so much public interest and excitement.

If they don’t work, they could undermine public support for collective solutions – the type of solutions we know are more efficient and equitable than households going it alone.

Why put batteries into communities at all?

Batteries will play a crucial role in getting us towards our goal of 82% renewables by 2030. One way they can do this is by storing energy from solar and wind for later use.

Surprisingly, this doesn’t necessarily mean emissions will go down. Recent research has shown that if batteries are run to maximise profits, they could actually increase emissions by charging from coal power. By contrast, if they are run to maximise the use of solar and wind, they could contribute to lowering emissions.

What batteries do better than any other technology, however, is to provide (or soak up) power at extremely short notice to tide the grid through sudden shocks, such as the storm knocking over a transmission line or a coal-fired power station exploding.

But batteries can do this from anywhere on the grid. So the real question is: why put batteries into our suburbs and small towns at all?

In a new discussion paper, this article’s lead author argues the primary purpose of community batteries ought to be addressing constraint in the local electricity grid. This reiterates a consistent finding from our research.

While this sounds reasonable, community batteries aren’t the only option to fix local grid issues. That means we should only turn to them where they are clearly better than the alternatives, such as upgrading transformers.

What about storing solar and shoring up the grid? These tasks may be done more efficiently and with less environmental impact with grid-scale batteries, pumped hydro or electric vehicle batteries.

Read more:
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And what about sharing the benefits of solar with people who can’t afford an array or who have nowhere to put one? While this vision is in line with public sentiment, the complexity of the privatised energy system makes it very difficult to redistribute financial benefits.

Community batteries are also no panacea for the desire of people to see and be included in national planning for the decarbonisation transition. An inclusive planning process can address uncertainties in how the transition will affect us and our communities and ensure it upholds public values.

Time will tell if the newly announced Net Zero Authority will deliver this.

Build these batteries only when warranted

So does this mean we should avoid community batteries altogether? No – but it does mean we should carefully track and evaluate these projects to see where they work best.

To help with this, several of this article’s authors developed a framework to figure out what impact these batteries have on the clean energy transition, how to do it with social acceptance and good oversight, and to do so in a way which is economically beneficial.

Community batteries are not a silver bullet, but they do have promise. Used wisely, they could help accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels while reducing network costs.

To make the most of them, we need to understand how and where these batteries will best serve the work of building a just, reliable and sustainable energy system.

Read more:
Solar curtailment is emerging as a new challenge to overcome as Australia dashes for rooftop solar

Bjorn Sturmberg has received funding from the State and Federal governments, including from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, for work related to solar, batteries (including medium-scale batteries), microgrids, and electric vehicles.

Alice Wendy Russell has received funding from State (Vic) and Commonwealth governments for work on neighbourhood batteries and microgrids. She is affiliated with the Canberra Alliance for Participatory Democracy.

Hedda Ransan-Cooper has received funding from State and Federal governments, including from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, for work related to community batteries.

Louise Bardwell has received funding from State (Vic) and Federal governments for work on neighbourhood batteries.

Marnie Shaw has received funding from State and Federal governments, including from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, for work related to community batteries.

– ref. Community batteries are popular – but we have to make sure they actually help share power – https://theconversation.com/community-batteries-are-popular-but-we-have-to-make-sure-they-actually-help-share-power-202626

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy W. Jones, Associate Professor in History, La Trobe University

Drag queens around the world are currently being accused of “grooming children” through drag storytime events. These accusations curiously associate public book reading with child sex offending.

We know from decades of research and inquiries the places that young people are most at risk of sexual victimisation are their home or an institution of care (such as a school, orphanage or church). The people that most often offend against children are family members and care providers.

However, this recent panic about drag queens reading in public libraries is actually typical in the history of child sexual abuse. This history has involved repeated moral panics that distract from the alarming data regarding child sexual abuse in the home. Instead, these narratives locate the threat to children outside of the home – to gay men, “stranger danger” and even satanic ritual abuse – rather than confronting the situations and protecting children where they are most at risk.

Moral panic

In the 1970s, feminist attention to domestic violence, sexual assault and the patriarchy created the conditions that enabled the sexual assault of children in the home to be put in the spotlight.

It wasn’t long, however, before attention was shifted elsewhere. In the 1980s, fears about a new form of abuse spread. Satanic ritual abuse was thought to involve large numbers of victims and perpetrators, but was “so cloaked in secrecy and involve such precise concealment of evidence that almost no one knew about it”.

Satanic ritual abuse captured headlines and people’s imaginations with tales of particularly painful, depraved and degrading practices. Research has shown that reports of abuse initially came from adults who “regained memories” of experiences of satanic abuse in their childhoods. Additional reports clustered in the periods after media attention on initial cases.

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The consensus in medical literature that emerged in the 1990s was there was a tendency of some individuals, especially clients of particular psychotherapists, to manufacture memories of abuse which never occurred. Corroborating evidence of abuse was not found, leading sceptics to account for these “pseudomemories” through “misdiagnosis, and the misapplication of hypnosis, dreamwork, or regressive therapies”.

Subsequently, the satanic ritual abuse controversy and “false memory syndrome” have been used to discredit hard-fought feminist recognition of the gravity of child sex offending.

A deviant lifestyle

There is also a long history of using paedophilia and ideas about child grooming in homophobic and transphobic ways to oppose the recognition of the civil rights of LGBTIQA people.

Campaigns to decriminalise homosexuality often struggled against attempts to impose unequal ages of consent in reform legislation. In 1967, for example, homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales, but men had to wait until they were 21 to legally consummate their love, five years longer than straight lovers.

In Tasmania, the last Australian state to decriminalise sex between men (in 1997), a heated public debate frequently raised issues of child protection. Letters to newspapers claimed that decriminalisation “would only open the floodgates and allow the very young to become prey to those who have chosen to lead this deviant lifestyle”.

The idea was that young people are vulnerable to becoming homosexual and shouldn’t be allowed to consent to sexual activity until they were much older than their heterosexual peers.

Sitting behind this notion of the vulnerability of young queer people is the false idea that LGBTIQA status is a sign of moral failing, illness or perversion.

Further, it perpetuates the myth that queerness or transness is somehow transmissible. This is the somewhat fantastical idea that everybody has the latent potential to become queer or trans, and all that is needed to convert is exposure to a queer or trans person.

These fears have fuelled repressive legislation, such as the notorious Section 28 in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, Ugandan and Russian laws banning the promotion of homosexuality, and the “don’t say gay” laws in the United States.

Ironically, these strange and harmful ideas are also behind the ineffective, discredited and dangerous attempts to change or suppress LGBTIQA people’s sexuality or gender identity.

In these instances of so-called “conversion therapy”, it is often religious conservatives who “groom” young LGBTIQA people in attempts to make them straight and cisgendered.

Such change and suppression practices are now thankfully against the law in many jurisdictions around the world.

A kinder and gentler future

Despite periodic moral panics, the history of gender and sexuality since 1970 tends towards a kinder, gentler future. People have generally become more accepting of LGBTIQA people’s human rights, and are more welcoming and celebrating of sexual and gender diversity.

The pace of change has been fast, however, and some groups of people haven’t gotten used to contemporary community standards of acceptance, such as the move towards marriage equality around the world.

Because of this history of growing acceptance, young people are feeling more comfortable and safer to explore their identities at younger ages. They are thus more visible than they used to be in the past.

However, they’re also more vulnerable as they explore sensitive aspects of their inner selves at younger and potentially less resilient ages. Research shows the impacts that homophobic and transphobic messaging can have on young people, proving they need to be protected from this harmful rhetoric – not from drag queens.

Drag storytime events are an age-appropriate way to celebrate diversity. They benefit all children – gay, straight, transgender and cisgender – with education about consent, human dignity, self determination and human rights.

This knowledge is one of the best protective factors against child victimisation.

Timothy W. Jones receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Victorian Government, and has provided consultancy services to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales, and the United Nations Human Rights Council. He serves as President of the Australian Queer Archives.

– ref. Calling drag queens ‘groomers’ and ‘pedophiles’ is the latest in a long history of weaponising those terms against the LGBTIQA community – https://theconversation.com/calling-drag-queens-groomers-and-pedophiles-is-the-latest-in-a-long-history-of-weaponising-those-terms-against-the-lgbtiqa-community-205648

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate C. Prickett, Director of the Roy McKenzie Centre for the Study of Families and Children, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

Budget 2023 marks “half-time” for the Labour government’s long-term child poverty targets. It’s an ideal point in the ten-year project to take stock and see what’s worked and what hasn’t.

In 2018, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour coalition government was handed a mandate to address Aotearoa New Zealand’s high child poverty rates. This culminated in legislation requiring the government of the day to set both short-term (three year) and long-term (ten year) targets for four key poverty measures.

Various factors have influenced the outcomes so far: on the upside, high employment, a COVID-19 response that saved lives and livelihoods, and expansions to the social safety net; on the downside, the lingering impact of the pandemic, high inflation and unaffordable housing.

We might add to that a seeming lack of political appetite for bold change – the signalling of a “no frills” budget included. Ultimately, however, the hope is that what we’ve learned so far can guide future policy to hit those targets.

A nuanced story

The short-term targets came due in 2021, with mixed results. One important measurement captures the percentage of children living in households with income less than the 50% of the median household income, after housing costs are accounted for. This declined from 22.8% in 2018-19 to 15.0% in 2020-21, beating the target of 18.8%.

However, targets for the other two measures – household income before housing costs, and material hardship — were not met, or sat on the edge of the margin of error.

But focusing on only these measures masks a more nuanced story about who was helped – and who was left behind. In addition to these three key poverty measures, six other indicators are routinely reported each year.

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Poverty declined across all indicators. Moreover, some of the largest drops, in terms of the percent change from their base levels in 2018, were in measures of more severe poverty, and those that accounted for differences in housing affordability.

For example, those living in severe material hardship (not being able to afford at least half of a list of 17 everyday items, such as fresh fruit and vegetables or home heating) went from 5.8% in 2018 to 3.9% in 2022. That’s a 33% decline from the base level.

A similar decline occurred among children who were in both material hardship and income poverty, as well as for the key after-housing-cost measure.

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Uneven trends

This is good news. Those in the most severe hardship and in deeper forms of income poverty were more likely to have been helped in the past five years. And poverty seemed to drop even after considering differences in family housing costs.

Across many of these indicators, too, the percent change from 2019 base poverty levels (when ethnicity data were first reported) was larger among tamariki Māori and Asian children when compared with European children.

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To be absolutely clear, there are still large and unconscionable inequities in poverty rates between European children and tamariki Māori. But the poverty declines have been larger in absolute terms for tamariki Māori and have helped modestly narrow inequities across many measures.

The declines were uneven across certain subgroups, however. While declines in some measures have been larger for tamariki Māori compared with European children, declines were statistically insignificant for two of the key poverty indicators.

In particular, Pacific children experienced the smallest declines, and in three of the nine measures reported increases in poverty rates (albeit within sampling error range). A similar trend was found among disabled children and children living with household members with disabilities, although data reporting only began in 2020.

Taking the targets seriously

We’re not going to make further dents in child poverty without implementing bold support for those families being left behind:

• working families teetering on the poverty line

• Pacific families who may be less likely to qualify for support because they don’t have residency status, despite contributing to the economy and their communities

• and families who may not be able to work, or whose work may be limited due to care needs, such as those with whānau with disabilities.

Alas, a “no frills” budget this week feels woefully out of line with what is needed to keep the pedal down and meet those long-term poverty targets.

While the prime minister has said there would be “targeted support for those that need it most with the rising cost of living”, this hardly points to broader systemic change. If a cost-of-living crisis is seen as a short-term economic condition, deeper problems aren’t addressed.

More fundamentally, it goes against a key purpose of these targets: to have the government set goals and make budget decisions that show it takes these targets seriously.

If this or any future budget fails to project any impact on child poverty, those targets risk becoming nothing more than a Treasury spreadsheet exercise.

Kate C. Prickett is the Director of the Roy McKenzie Centre for the Study of Families and Children, which has previously received research funding from the Ministry of Social Development and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

– ref. NZ is finally making progress on child poverty – but a ‘no frills’ budget puts that at risk – https://theconversation.com/nz-is-finally-making-progress-on-child-poverty-but-a-no-frills-budget-puts-that-at-risk-205559

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kylie Hillman, Senior Research Fellow, Australian Council for Educational Research

Australia’s Year 4 students have not lost ground on their reading skills, despite all the disruptions to schooling during the pandemic.

A major international test has found about 80% of students have “more than elementary” skills in reading comprehension. This is the same result Australian students recorded in the last round of PIRLS testing in 2016.

But reading performance among students from disadvantaged backgrounds and rural areas still tends to be lower than among other students.

What do the PIRLS results tell us? And how can we improve reading skills?

Why is PIRLS important?

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study – PIRLS for short – is an international assessment of Year 4 students’ reading comprehension skills. It is one of three international assessments Australia participates in, along with the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which covers maths and science in Year 4 and Year 8, and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which assesses reading, mathematics and science in 15-year-olds.

These assessments involve a nationally representative, random selection of schools and students. The results provide an overview of how different groups of students are performing in these key areas of learning, both within and between countries.

Unlike NAPLAN, these assessments are not designed to report on individual students’ performance.

What does PIRLS measure?

PIRLS has been conducted about every five years since 2001, and Australia has taken part since 2011. It focuses on Year 4 students because many students at this level are moving on from learning to read and are now reading to learn.

In other words, they are now fairly comfortable with the mechanics of reading, and more of their learning will require them to interact with text – whether searching the internet for information about a certain country or discussing the experiences of a lead character in a novel.

The Year 4 students who participate in PIRLS each read two texts – either two narrative texts, like a short story; two non-fiction texts, like a short article; or one of each.

They then answer a set of questions about the content, style and purpose of those texts.

Read more:
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How did Australia go?

The 2021 PIRLS assessment was conducted in the midst of the COVID pandemic, which saw interruptions to normal schooling in many participating countries, including Australia.

In Australia, 281 schools and 5,487 students were involved.

Australia’s average score was 540 points. This was statistically similar to Australia’s average score in 2016 (544 points) and higher than the average score in 2011 (527 points).

The 2021 result is also significantly higher than the average scores of 28 other countries, including Germany, New Zealand and France.

Australia scored lower than average scores for six other countries: Singapore, Hong Kong and England (who tested in English) as well as Russia, Finland and Poland.

Twenty-one countries, including usually strong performers like Russia and Finland, recorded significant drops in their average score since 2016.

Meeting the ‘proficient standard’

Australian students also held their ground when it came to the proportion who met the Australian “proficient standard” for reading. This involves students demonstrating “more than elementary skills expected at that year level”.

About 80% of Australian students met or exceeded the proficient standard in 2021, as they did in 2016. Students at this level can make straightforward inferences, interpret reasons for characters’ feelings or actions, and provide information about central ideas within texts.

We still have 20% of students behind

At the same time, this means we still have about 20% of students who do not meet the proficient standard, compared to just one in ten in the highest performing countries, such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Russia.

These figures increase if students are from an equity group.

For example, 42% of students in remote schools, 40% of First Nations students and 31% of students in disadvantaged schools did not meet the proficient standard.

How can we improve?

The PIRLS study highlights behaviours, attitudes and strategies that seem to be associated with higher scores on the reading assessment.

Students who tell us they enjoy reading, are confident readers or are engaged during their reading lessons tend to perform at higher levels than young people who do not enjoy reading, aren’t confident or aren’t engaged during their reading lessons.

Students in classrooms where teachers report students are tired, disruptive, uninterested or don’t have the prerequisite skills or knowledge they need tend to score lower than students in classes that aren’t impacted by these factors.

And students in schools where principals tell us most students have early literacy skills (like knowing letters or reading short words) before starting school tend to score higher, on average, than students in schools where fewer students have early literacy skills when they start school.

Read more:
What is that voice in your head when you read?

Australia’s achievement in PIRLS 2021 is a good result in the context of the pandemic and a testament to our teachers’ dedication and professionalism.

Ultimately, though, every child deserves the chance to become a competent reader. Early support for students who find reading challenging is essential to prevent them falling behind in other learning areas, and if we hope to see improvement on future national and international assessments.

Kylie Hillman is affiliated with the Australian Council for Educational Research, who are the National Project Managers for PIRLS. The report is released on behalf of the Australia, state and territory governments, however the views expressed in this article are those of the author.

– ref. Australia’s Year 4 students have not lost ground on reading, despite pandemic disruptions – https://theconversation.com/australias-year-4-students-have-not-lost-ground-on-reading-despite-pandemic-disruptions-205644

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Miller, Senior Lecturer in Education, University of Newcastle

Students from schools in low-income communities did not suffer significant “learning loss” during the pandemic years of 2020-2021, but instead improved in certain areas of study.

That’s one key finding from our research, published recently in the journal The Australian Educational Researcher.

In fact, we found students considered most at risk of “learning loss” during the pandemic actually achieved greater growth in mathematics and equivalent growth in reading in 2021 when compared with a similar group of students from 2019.

Our results reveal one silver lining from the past three challenging years, and underscore what’s possible when programs aimed at helping the most disadvantaged students are well funded.

Overall, however, we still have a long way to go to remove pervasive and structural inequities baked into Australia’s school systems, and to narrow achievement gaps.

Read more:
Early NAPLAN results show promise, but we don’t know the full impact of COVID school closures yet

What we did and what we found

Our study involved data on Year 3 and 4 academic results, collected as part of a randomised controlled trial with 125 New South Wales public schools.

From this data we carried out two studies – one comparing student results in 2020 to 2019, the second comparing 2021 to 2019.

In other words, one analysis compared student results from the first year of the pandemic with pre-pandemic kids. The other compared academic results of pre-pandemic kids with those who’d lived through consecutive years (which included remote learning).

The groups of students for each year of the study – 2019, 2020 and 2021 – were carefully “matched” so we could be confident we were comparing like with like.

When comparing 2020 and 2019 cohorts, we found no significant differences overall in maths or reading achievement.

However, analysing these same data by school Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (a measure of school-level advantage that accounts for school location, parent education and percentage of Indigenous students) revealed worrying inequities.

In this 2019 and 2020 comparison (which compared pre-pandemic students to those living through the first year) we found students in disadvantaged schools achieved less growth in maths. Those in mid-range schools had achieved slightly more.

Then when the pandemic continued, we were able to also compare pre-pandemic kids (the 2019 group) with those who’d lived through both years (the 2021 group).

This allowed us to measure the impact of consecutive years of disrupted learning.

Surprisingly, we found students from disadvantaged schools achieved three months additional growth in maths and equivalent growth in reading compared to their 2019 pre-pandemic peers.

Meanwhile, students in mid-range and advantaged schools achieved about the same as their pre-pandemic peers.

Concerns about ‘learning loss’

Early in the pandemic, teachers, parents, researchers, government, and the media worried and speculated that student results would decline.

As our research shows, major concerns about widespread diminishing academic achievement did not materialise.

Even where students did not achieve at the same rates as they did in pre-pandemic years, they still learned.

In hindsight, the idea of “learning loss” or of students’ learning going backwards was likely a source of unnecessary worry for families.

However, overseas results show Australia was an outlier.

World Bank analysis of 35 empirical studies on the impact of COVID-19 on student learning concluded students around the world fell behind by “roughly a one-half year’s worth of learning.”

It also found students from disadvantaged contexts were more likely to be negatively affected.

Researchers at Harvard University found remote and hybrid learning during the pandemic contributed to significantly widening achievement gaps for disadvantaged students.

In this global context, the recent academic achievement of students in our NSW studies are cause for real celebration.

What’s behind these results?

When the pandemic brought lockdowns and uncertainty, governments and education departments around Australia found hundreds of millions of dollars to put toward preventing students from falling behind.

The NSW Department of Education’s tutoring scheme, launched in 2021, may have contributed to the positive academic results we found.

The COVID intensive learning support program funded schools to employ more educators to deliver small group literacy and numeracy tuition to students identified as needing it most.

The program has been extended to June 2023, but has been criticised for not being particularly well targeted.

The widespread teacher shortage has also been a factor. Hard-to-staff schools in disadvantaged and rural and remote areas, where arguably tutoring was needed most, reported struggling to hire classroom teachers let alone additional educators for the tutoring program.

It’s also possible our key finding could be explained by the strict focus on literacy and numeracy in primary schools when students returned after periods of remote learning.

However, this “back to basics” focus – at the exclusion of sport, assemblies, excursions and the other extracurricular activities that punctuate school life – may also have negatively affected student and teacher wellbeing.

Read more:
As students return to school, small-group tutoring can help those who are falling behind

Where to from here?

The achievement gap between students from marginalised groups and their more advantaged peers looms large in the Australian education system.

The students in our study from disadvantaged schools, while showing academic improvement in maths in 2021, still started and ended the year well behind their more advantaged peers.

In fact, their achievement level at the end of 2021 was still below where students in advantaged schools began their school year.

There are clear lessons to be learned from the pandemic and our research on its effects.

For decades, funding models left marginalised students at real disadvantage. But when the pandemic hit, governments were able to find significant funding for programs and initiatives actually targeted at those with the greatest need.

Can such special funding be sustained to stem ongoing inequities in Australian schooling? David Gonski, appointed by the Gillard government in 2011 to review Australian school funding models, certainly thought so.

Our results could not be more timely. Federal education minister Jason Clare recently announced an expert panel and ministerial reference group to advise on a new National School Reform Agreement.

This agreement sets out five-year initiatives and targets, which are tied to funding and agreed between the federal government and states. It represents our best opportunity to finally get school funding right.

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

Andrew Miller receives funding from the NSW Department of Education and the Paul Ramsay Foundation.

Jenny Gore receives funding from the Australian Research Council, NSW Department of Education and Paul Ramsay Foundation.

Leanne Fray receives funding from the NSW Department of Education and the Paul Ramsay Foundation.

– ref. A pandemic silver lining: how kids in some disadvantaged schools improved their results during COVID – https://theconversation.com/a-pandemic-silver-lining-how-kids-in-some-disadvantaged-schools-improved-their-results-during-covid-203047

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Professor Emerita, Australian National University

During an official visit to Australia in 2016, US President Joe Biden assured America’s Pacific allies that “We’re not trying to contain China”. That assurance is looking very shaky now.

The Biden administration’s energetic promotion of the Quad grouping and the AUKUS alliance convey a message that few observers have difficulty interpreting. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has been particularly clear, speaking of mobilising “all tools of national power” to create “guardrails” to block China from displacing America from its global leadership role.

As Financial Times editor Edward Luce observes, containing China is now Biden’s explicit goal.

The Cold War mantra

What exactly is meant by “containing”? We seldom talk about “containing” France, Britain or the United States, for instance. In the imagery of containment, “they” are always unruly and liable to overstep their boundaries. Meanwhile, “we” are always the sedentary targets of that expansionism.

If the US is to contain China, it must lead a global alliance committed to the same goal. This is evidently what the US hopes to do. This aspiration is making many of its allies increasingly uncomfortable.

“Containment” was the great Cold War mantra. Its origins can be traced to American diplomat George F. Kennan, whose 1946 “long telegram” to the State Department called on the US government to develop a strategy for preventing the spread of the “malignant parasite” of Soviet communism.

In an anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, he labelled this strategy as “containment”, and stressed that Soviet expansionism had deep roots in the “Russian-Asiatic” psyche.

This did not deter US policymakers from applying his containment strategy – with even greater enthusiasm – to China following the 1949 establishment of the People’s Republic in Beijing.

As geographer Charles Fisher pointed out in the early 1970s, the idea of “containing China” echoed much older European and US images of the world. Fisher highlighted the influence of 19th and early 20th century civilisation theorist Halford Mackinder, whose thesis on “the geographical pivot of history” played “a seminal part in the development of the containment doctrine”.

European civilisation was seen as “the outcome of the secular struggle against Asiatic invasion” embodied in the invasions of the “Mongol hordes which fell upon Europe in the 14th century”. The rise of steam power and the railways had created the prospect of the emergence of a new landlocked Eurasian power that would challenge western civilisation.

Widespread public acceptance of Cold War containment policy towards China, Fisher argued, stemmed partly from its resonance with older, western images of the world.

[…] in the 1950s, it seemed that a single vast Eurasian Communist bloc now stretched like the old Mongol empire from the plains of eastern Europe to the shores of the China Sea, there to confront the United States across a rapidly shrinking Pacific Ocean.

With the rise of powerful revolutionary movements in Southeast Asia, American foreign policy became haunted by the vision of the “virus of communism” spreading from China across Asia. China became the chief object of US containment. In the words of journalist Don Oberdorfer, Vietnam became “‘the place to draw the line’ against the communist tide and especially against the Chinese hordes seen as the most virulent and threatening manifestation of international Marxism”.

The Trump era rhetoric

The widespread revival of Cold War containment rhetoric began under US President Donald Trump. His trade advisor, Peter Navarro, wrote a series of books partly based on fabricated sources with lurid titles such as “Death By China: Confronting the Dragon”, resurrecting early 20th century stereotypes of the Chinese “hordes”.

The Biden administration has tried to refashion Trump’s crude China-bashing into a more refined containment policy. But the polite language of the strategy carries familiar undertones. China’s growing power is condensed into a simple image of a global bully “exporting the tools of autocracy abroad.”

The new buzzword of Biden’s China policy defines China as the United States’ “pacing challenge”. This term is rarely defined. It paints world politics as a two-horse power race in which China must never be allowed to get its nose in front of the US.

All of this is accompanied by repeated assurances from senior US officials that they are “not looking for conflict”. But these assurances are not the same thing as a concerted diplomatic effort to find creative approaches to the current crisis in relations. A key problem with the Biden administration’s containment strategy is that it conflates urgently needed international cooperation to protect security and freedom with the “pacing challenge” of keeping the US one step ahead of China.

This strategy therefore risks becoming, like the Cold War version of containment, a perpetual struggle for the preservation of the status quo. As Henry Kissinger once observed, that allows “no role for diplomacy”.

Within the Biden administration, there are clearly divided views about the way this new version of containment is taking shape. Among close allies of the US, there seems no desire for it.

As Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said:

Rather than being a pawn in this new Cold War, we must promote principles and values enshrined in ASEAN’s outlook on the Indo-Pacific region to guide other countries in their engagement with our region.

There could be nothing more urgent than searching for alternatives to a retreat into the mindset of Cold War containment policy, with all its haunting traces of past fears and violence, and all its potential to spiral into disastrous future conflicts.

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

– ref. Joe Biden has said the US wasn’t trying to ‘contain’ China, but the evidence suggests otherwise – https://theconversation.com/joe-biden-has-said-the-us-wasnt-trying-to-contain-china-but-the-evidence-suggests-otherwise-204809

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

Treasurer Jim Chalmers is the first in decades to declare war on what he calls the “pain of rising rents”.

His first budget, in October, and his second, this month, contained a suite of measures designed to stop rents going “through the roof”. By far the biggest of those – the blockbuster – was a A$10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund to finance social and affordable housing.

If you think the idea of building a fund rather than building houses sounds odd, you probably think the same way about the Medical Research Future Fund, the Future Drought Fund, the Disaster Ready Fund or the $250 billion Future Fund itself, which was set up to pay public service and defence pensions.

Those were all previous Coalition government ideas – the likes of which were satirised in ABC TV’s The Hollowmen. Back in 2008, it came up with a $150 billion “Perpetual Endowment Fund”, created for no particular purpose other than “to meet the future challenges of this nation”.

I can think of at least four things that would do more to restrain rents than Labor’s $10 billion fund – and one of them would do it a lot quicker.

$10 billion, but off-budget and largely unspent

The (political) genius of these sorts of funds is they make it look as if you are spending a lot, without the need to spend much at all.

The $10 billion (or whatever that goes into the fund) isn’t actually “spent” as far as the budget is concerned. It doesn’t come off the budget surplus, or add to the budget deficit, because it remains in the government’s hands.

The fund can be thought of as a fiction. The money stays in the government’s hands until some of it is spent, except that while in the government’s hands, it is invested in the stock market and other places to try and earn a return.

But it doesn’t always work. During 2022, the usually successful Future Fund went backwards.

When Labor came up with the idea of the Housing Australia Future Fund in 2021, it looked a surer bet. Governments could borrow at “ultra-low interest rates” and the returns on investments were good.

To “protect the balance of the fund”, the government has limited withdrawals to $500,000 per year, meaning a less-grand-sounding commitment to spend up to $500,000 a year would have achieved just as much.

Housing Minister Julie Collins’ counter to that criticism is to say that creating a fund – an “enduring promise” – will protect housing spending from the “whims of future governments”

And yet the legalisation says every piece of spending from the fund will require formal government approval.

Another reason for limiting the amount that can be spent each year (apart from protecting the balance of the fund) is that there are practical limits on how quickly homes can be built.

Limits on how quickly new homes can be built

A truly bizarre and long-established fact of Australian home building is that it never gets done more quickly. If you went back to the 1990s, the 1980s or even the 1970s, you would find that the number of houses completed per quarter was roughly what it is today, between 22,000 and 29,000.

The number of houses under construction varies wildly; at times it has been low, late last year it reached an all-time high. But the number of houses completed seems to chug along at the same rate regardless. All that commencing more builds does is push out construction times.

It’s the same for units, which the Bureau of Statistics classifies as “other residential”. The number being completed per quarter is no higher than it was a decade ago, but the number under construction has climbed much higher.

All that funding more than a small number of extra builds per year would do is push construction costs higher and push out completion times.

The Australian Greens might well be right to oppose the artifice of a “fund,” but they are probably wrong to propose much more spending per year than the $500,000 the government is promising and the 30,000 extra homes over five years it says it will deliver.

I can think of at least four things that would restrain rents more than the fund, one of which Chalmers has delivered in the budget, albeit in a small dose.

1. Boost rent assistance

The “largest increase in more than 30 years” in Commonwealth Rent Assistance amounts to $16 per week.

It’ll help the 1.3 million concession card holders who receive it. But it is not much, and not much more in the future, because Chalmers has not acted on the recommendation of his economic inclusion advisory committee to increase it in line with rents actually paid, rather than the consumer price index.

Chalmers might well have been concerned that a bigger increase in rent assistance would have pushed up rents, but there’s a way of dealing with that.

2. Limit rent increases

Price control is anything but uncommon. In most states, increases in the prices we can be charged for electricity, gas and water are limited by regulation. In the Australian Capital Territory, increases in rents are limited by regulation.

The maximum permitted increase is 110% of the most recent annual increase in Canberra rents reported to the Bureau of Statistics. In the year to March, Canberra rents climbed 5.54%, making the maximum permissible increase 6.1%.

It works well, and Canberra landlords don’t seem to have withdrawn from the market. Among Australia’s capitals, Canberra’s rental vacancy rate is the highest.

3. Bribe states and councils to rezone land

Another option is to provide incentive payments to state and local governments that free up their planning systems and build more housing.

Conditional payments are not novel. The Commonwealth provided special payments to states that fell in line with its deregulation agenda for about a decade from the mid-1990s.

4. Restrict negative gearing to new builds

Negative gearing and the concessional rate of capital gains tax that accompanies it drive Australians into becoming landlords. But if they buy existing homes to do it, they do no more than turn owner-occupied homes into rented homes.

Limiting negative gearing to newly-built homes – as Labor promised in 2019 – would get them to fund new builds.

While it’s true that getting more Australians into affordable homes is anything but easy, some of what we need to do is straightforward. We can do better than a grand-sounding big-bucks fund.

À lire aussi :
The compelling case for a future fund for social housing

Peter Martin ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

– ref. 4 ways to bring down rent and build homes faster than Labor’s $10 billion housing fund – https://theconversation.com/4-ways-to-bring-down-rent-and-build-homes-faster-than-labors-10billion-housing-fund-205643

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Benjamin Smith, Professor of Archaeology (World Rock Art), School of Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia

Three rock art panels were this month removed from Murujuga/Burrup in Western Australia to make way for a new A$6.4 billion fertiliser factory.

Moving Indigenous rock art anywhere in the world is controversial. In this case, a journalist photographing the removal was stopped by police. Later, her home was raided and her camera’s memory card temporarily seized.

The removal of rock art goes against international best practice in heritage conservation. Specifically, it breaches the globally accepted Burra Charter, which states that an object should “remain in its historical location” because this forms an important part of its cultural significance.

Despite the travesty unfolding at Murujuga/Burrup, non-Indigenous archaeologists have largely been silent about the destruction. As three rock art specialists with a combined professional experience of 100 years, we consider it our professional and moral obligation to speak out.

Rock art removal in Murujuga

Murujuga/Burrup is 1,500 kilometres north of Perth. It contains more than a million rock art petroglyphs, making it the one of the world’s largest concentration of petroglyphs. The region’s art-making tradition may extend back more than 40,000 years.

The art of Murujuga includes extinct animals and some of the earliest known images of the human face. The site has also been nominated as the next Australian UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The three rock art panels were removed this month. The panels will be relocated to another Burrup location, under the guidance of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation.

Murujuga/Burrup is also home to several large gas and ammonia plants. Posing with a spade at the fertiliser factory site last month, WA Premier Mark McGowan said the project confirmed the Pilbara region’s role as the “engine room of Australia’s economy”.

The destruction has profoundly affected Traditional Owners. Raelene Cooper, Mardudhunera woman and the former chair of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, this month said McGowan:

stands there quite proudly with a shovel to dig into the ngurra, the ground, giving the green light to go ahead and destroy the very rock art that holds the World Heritage values of our Country.

And following the rock art’s removal, Kuruma Marduthunera traditional custodian Josie Alec said:

I don’t know what to say. I am so angry and hurt right now. It is a sad, sad state of affairs. The free, prior and informed consent has still not been given to Perdaman to remove these rocks – not all traditional custodians have been consulted on this.

Read more:
In NSW there have been significant wins for First Nations land rights. But unprocessed claims still outnumber the successes

What destroying sacred sites does

Clearly, the choice to build over sacred sites causes long-term cultural pain and trauma to Aboriginal communities. So why not find an alternative location?

Murujuga/Burrup is not the only place in WA suitable for a fertiliser factory.
What’s more, acidic industrial emissions from facilities around the Burrup Peninsula are damaging the area’s rock art more generally. Emissions from the gas-powered fertiliser factory will exacerbate this – as well as leading to greater greenhouse gas emissions.

The damage to Indigenous heritage at Murujuga/Burrup has gained attention in recent years, and the problem was the subject of a 2016 Senate inquiry.

The destruction has also led to rising tensions, including street protests and road blocks, as Aboriginal community members struggle to make their voices heard.

These are not the first such protests. In the 1980s, the community and archaeologists protested against the Karratha Gas plant, a development that involved removing ancient Murujuga rock art panels. Many were damaged in the process.

In the 2000s, the proposed expansion of this plant, and plans to build a massive new liquefied natural gas facility, were met with even stronger protests. Archaeologists from across the world vocally opposed the plans.

It’s time for archaeologists to speak out

Today, Aboriginal voices against cultural heritage damage at Murujuga/Burrup are louder than ever.

But archaeologists have largely remained silent about the destruction.

Expert voices are crucial when it comes to standing up to government and corporate power. Take, for example, the almost 100 scientists who this month demanded the Northern Territory government abandon fracking in the Beetaloo Basin.

We urge archaeologists around the world to follow this example. They should demand a stop to all industrial development at Murujuga, and the immediate return of the three rock art panels.

In Australia, the cultural violence of rock art removal is being recognised in some quarters. For example, three Tasmanian museums and galleries recently returned rock art panels to locations from which they were removed in the 1960s.

Damage to rock art is not just an affront to Aboriginal people. It diminishes us all. As the global advocacy group the Rock Art Network says:

This fragile and irreplaceable visual heritage has worldwide significance, contemporary relevance and for many indigenous peoples is still part of their living culture. If we neglect, destroy or disrespect rock art we devalue our future.

Benjamin Smith receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Joakim Goldhahn receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Rock Art Australia.

Paul S.C.Taçon receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Murujuga’s rock art is being destroyed – where is the outrage? – https://theconversation.com/murujugas-rock-art-is-being-destroyed-where-is-the-outrage-205476

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martin Williams, Research fellow, Swinburne University of Technology

Kambô is an oozy substance harvested from the defensive skin secretions of the Amazonian giant monkey tree frog. In the traditional medicine of some indigenous peoples of the Amazon, Kambô is applied to superficial burns on the skin of participants to produce an intense purging effect.

In the past decade, Kambô use has also been on the rise in neo-shamanic or complementary medicine in Western countries. Many users say they experience positive after-effects, but bad outcomes ranging from prolonged vomiting to seizures and even death have also been reported.

In Brazil, it’s illegal to sell or market Kambô. In Australia, where two deaths after Kambô rituals have led to coronial inquests, it was listed by the Therapeutic Goods Administration in 2021 as a Schedule 10 poison: “a substance of such danger to health as to warrant prohibition of sale, supply and use”.

Despite government bans and several fatalities, Kambô use in Western countries still seems to be going strong. So what does Kambô do, and what do users get out of it?

The Kambô ritual

Kambô comes from the giant monkey tree frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor) which lives in the Upper Amazon rainforest. The frogs are captured and their limbs are tied with thread to four vertical twigs, to enable harvesting of their secretions by gentle scraping. The frogs are then released, physically unharmed.

The clear mucus-like secretion is typically spread onto bamboo sticks and air-dried for storage and transport. The Kambô is then prepared by reconstituting with water before application.

Kambô contains a range of biologically active molecules that most likely provide the frogs with defences against predators.

In the ritual, superficial burns are first made on the recipient’s skin, then Kambô is applied to the burns using a short length of rainforest vine. Next, the thick red sap of the “dragon’s blood” tree (Croton lechleri) is applied to the burns as an antiseptic.

Traditionally, among the indigenous Amazonian tribes that use Kambô, there is virtually no ceremony involved. It plays more of a role in their traditional medicine and hunting practices than in informing their cosmology.

In Kambô rituals catering to Westerners, the practice is often carried out in a ceremony involving songs, musical instruments, burning of incense, and prayers.

Traditionally, three to five small burns are made with a smouldering stick on the upper arm or lower leg of the recipient.

In Western neo-shamanic practice, however, Kambô is often applied to a larger number of burns. The burns may be located elsewhere on the body, including the neck, upper back, chest, and the Yogic chakra locations.

What Kambô does to the body

Following introduction via the small burns, the active ingredients of the Kambô pass rapidly into the body. They move through the lymphatic system – essentially the body’s drainage system, running parallel to the blood circulatory system – and thence into the bloodstream.

As a result, participants experience a short, intense purgative experience. The physiological effects are complex, rapid and sometimes paradoxical.

Typically, the first symptoms reported are an initial rush of heat and redness of the face. Nausea and vomiting are often experienced within several minutes, accompanied by general malaise, racing heart, dizziness and swelling of the face, and sometimes an urge to defecate.

Further effects include the feeling of a lump in the throat or difficulty swallowing, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, runny nose and tears, swollen lips, eyelids or face, and occasionally a swollen tongue or throat.

These physiological effects are generally expected, and indeed sought, by those performing and undergoing the Kambô ritual.

Aside from the range of physiological effects discussed above, Kambô is not regarded as exerting any direct psychedelic or hallucinogenic effects. Nor is it known to be used by anyone for this purpose.

What can go wrong?

The duration of the physical effects is usually 15–30 minutes. However, individual responses vary considerably and, on occasion, the symptoms may last several hours.

Kambô has caused harm in only a very limited number of documented cases, although the documented harms have included death. A handful of case reports describe incidents of hepatitis, psychosis, prolonged vomiting, hyponatremia (low blood sodium), seizure, rupture of the oesophagus and cardiac arrest.

Those extreme consequences are particularly few relative to the presumably large number of administrations globally, in both the traditional indigenous and the recent Western contexts.

Accurate figures about usage are impossible to obtain, but one academic source notes over 6,000 members of various closed Facebook groups devoted to Kambô, and the International Association of Kambô Practitioners’ Facebook page has over 2,500 followers.

What are the perceived benefits of Kambô?

Despite the documented harms, the great majority of users of Kambô anecdotally report positive physical, emotional and spiritual after-effects.

In Western societies, including Australia, the use of Kambô for healing or wellness has risen rapidly in recent years. The rise has coincided with the emergence of a subculture that questions the merits of the Western medical model and embraces alternative modes of health and medicine.

However, there is limited evidence of the directly measurable health benefits of Kambô in the peer-reviewed academic literature. The putative benefits claimed by the Kambô community largely remain to be substantiated by clinical research.

The actual or potential health benefits conferred by Kambô treatment can be difficult to distinguish from the anticipated or perceived benefits related to psychological effects. These psychological effects in turn may relate to the belief or faith systems that may be involved.

One important aspect of the Kambô experience is purging, particularly by way of vomiting but also defecation.

Many advocates see purging as representing a means of personal transformation through cleansing or detoxification. Purging may also be thought to expel various harmful, negative or generally undesirable aspects of both an emotional and a spiritual nature.

Read more:
Ayahuasca: the shamanic brew that produces out-of-body experiences

Participants may also feel a benefit from the overall “ordeal” or “challenge”. In this regard, significant parallels may be drawn between the purging elicited by Kambô and that associated with the psychoactive brew ayahuasca.

To understand what people gain from Kambô, we may need to move into the domain of philosophical speculation. However, the concepts of personal transformation and spiritual growth are very real to many adherents, and their role in Kambô’s perceived benefits should not be discounted.

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

– ref. Illegal, occasionally deadly, and not much fun. What is the frog toxin Kambô and why do people use it? – https://theconversation.com/illegal-occasionally-deadly-and-not-much-fun-what-is-the-frog-toxin-kambo-and-why-do-people-use-it-205401

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elise Stephenson, Deputy Director, Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, Australian National University

This week, the Australian Space Summit is celebrating some of our nation’s strengths and achievements in the space sector. But it’s taking place under the shadow of significant cuts to space technology investment announced in last week’s federal budget.

Space technologies play a critical role in responding to many national priorities, such as climate and disaster resilience, connecting regional Australians, contributing to regional security and driving economic growth. Yet, the sector suffers from a branding issue – most people think of rockets and astronauts, rather than the satellites we depend on globally.

This leads to a misunderstanding in government of the importance of space technologies to the issues we are seeking to solve. It also makes it harder to recruit talented people to the field.

So, how do we find enough people with the skills necessary to grow this critical technology sector?

Why diversity and inclusivity matter

The answer is placing a new priority on talent recruitment and expanding diversity and inclusivity in the space sector.

The space sector needs workers from all different backgrounds and disciplines, but is struggling to attract a diverse talent pool. This is due to a misconception that space only offers STEM-related jobs, as well as the overwhelmingly white and male make-up of the space industry, government and academia.

This not only impacts the workforce pipeline, but also potentially the sector’s funding, due to a limited view of what kinds of solutions the space sector can provide to society’s biggest challenges.

This is an urgent public relations issue for the space sector. It needs to rethink how it markets itself to the public to better recruit for a myriad of positions in fields like space law, policy, technology governance, social anthropology and archaeology, business, arts, communications and more.

Read more:
Why outer space matters in a post-pandemic world

The sector also needs to make diversity a priority. Currently, just one in five employees in the space industry are women. First Nations Australians also continue to be sidelined, despite the fact the majority of our ground-based infrastructure for space systems is on Indigenous lands.

We need greater inclusivity of perspectives from people of diverse genders, sexual orientations and ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, as well as people with disability. Research shows diverse and inclusive groups lead to greater trust, democracy and innovation, less “group think”, more positive work environments and greater employee retention.

Additionally, greater diversity can make it easier to tell the story of why space technologies matter to society. This would help in terms of government funding and the industry’s ability to punch above its weight globally.

A national conference on diversity in space

Last month, we brought together over 200 experts from the space industry, government, academia and the community to discuss these issues at the first-ever national conference on gender equality and diversity in space.

The participants agreed that diversity is an overlooked opportunity for the space sector. Many of the challenges facing the sector could be addressed by recruiting from a more diverse talent pool and ensuring diverse perspectives are being incorporated into technology design and solutions.

These are some of our key recommendations:

1) Enhance workplace conditions and enact informal networks

Policy changes can help with diversity recruitment, such as tackling poor organisational cultures, offering equitable leave policies and improving current promotion and hiring policies.

But informal networks are important, too. There are networks for women in space in various countries, such as the US and New Zealand, which have proven to be vital in developing a more diverse workforce. A new Women in Space Network is soon to be launched in Australia.

2) Don’t just pay lip service to diversity

Diversity must be placed at the centre of programs and policies in both the space sector and in governments at the federal and state/territory level. The space sector must also do a better job of explaining the importance of its work to government agencies.

3) Establish diversity procurement policies

This includes minimum targets to support women-owned and First Nations-owned enterprises in the space sector and giving preference to space businesses that demonstrate improvements to diversity in their workforce.

Read more:
Lost in space: Australia dwindled from space leader to also-ran in 50 years

Australia risks falling behind

In 2025, Australia will host the International Astronautical Conference, the largest annual conference for the space industry in the world. This is a great opportunity to showcase our leadership in promoting a values-based, diverse, equitable and sustainable space sector.

Yet, without tangible action now, Australia’s space sector risks falling further behind our international counterparts.

The Australian Space Agency is currently working with a number of organisations, including the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, the ANU Institute for Space and the Australian Centre for Space Governance, to develop our own policy for diversity in the space sector.

This is a step in the right direction, particularly in the wake of the latest budget. But the industry also needs to step up with data transparency on diversity, as well as tangible commitments and actions.

To this end, we are conducting research on improving diversity in the space sector. We are inviting anyone in government, industry and academic roles to take part in a survey to describe their experiences of inclusion, diversity, equality and access in their jobs. This input will contribute to Australia’s statement on diversity and inclusivity in the space sector.

Elise Stephenson receives funding from the Australian Space Agency and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. She is affiliated with the Australian Centre for Space Governance.

Cassandra Steer receives funding from the Australian Space Agency, the Department of Defence, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Geoscience Australia. She is Chair of the Australian Centre for Space Governance and affiliated with the International Institute of Space Law.

– ref. Just 1 in 5 employees in the space industry are women. This lack of diversity is holding us back – https://theconversation.com/just-1-in-5-employees-in-the-space-industry-are-women-this-lack-of-diversity-is-holding-us-back-205393

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Bean, Senior Lecturer in Microbiology and Fermentation Technology, Federation University Australia

It’s estimated coeliac disease affects 1.4% of the world’s population – a staggering 112,000,000 people or so in total.

People with this condition develop an abnormal immune reaction when they consume gluten – a protein found in grains including barley, wheat and rye. It can damage the lining of their small intestine and lead to a range of (often debilitating) symptoms.

Coeliacs are forced to forgo glutenous food and drinks, including bread, pasta, cakes, biscuits, pastries and, of course, beer – which has malted barley as its main ingredient. Other alcoholic beverages are considered gluten-free (although diligence is still required since drinks can have flavours added after distillation).

Brewers around the world work on producing beers that can be enjoyed by people with coeliac disease, or general gluten sensitivity. They achieve this through two common approaches:

1. making beer with grains that don’t contain gluten
2. breaking down the gluten into smaller compounds during the manufacturing process.

The former approach is widely used in Australia and New Zealand.

Read more:
Everything you need to know about coeliac disease (and whether you really have it)

How they make gluten-free beer

Consider your breakfast. Did you eat rice bubbles, corn flakes or puffed wheat? Each one of these cereals will give you energy to start your day, but only the last one contains gluten.

Similarly, brewers can use gluten-free grain such as sorghum, buckwheat or rice to try to replicate the flavour of beer, but without the gluten. Beers produced in this way are truly “gluten-free”. They contain none at all.

But brewing with these alternative grains isn’t as common or straightforward as brewing with barley.

Think back to your breakfast: all three cereals are suitable enough, but they don’t taste the same. While there is plenty of diversity in beer flavours, all commonly consumed beer has the underlying flavour of malted barley. This is the taste beer drinkers have come to know and love.

Brewing processes for gluten-free beer must be modified to accommodate the unusual characteristics of alternative grains. For example, barley has a husk, which is used for filtration while making beer. Gluten-free grains tend to not have husks, so rice husks might be added in.

Also, if a particular brewery produces both gluten-free and gluten-containing beer, then gluten contamination is possible. That’s why most Australian breweries that produce gluten-free beer do so in a dedicated facility.

How they make gluten-reduced beer

The natural role of gluten in the barley plant is to provide nutrients to the seedling for germination. Given gluten’s importance to the life cycle of the plant, it’s inevitable some gluten will end up in beer that’s made using barley. In which case, the gluten must then be removed.

To do this, brewers treat the beer with an enzyme called a prolyl endopeptidase (PEP), which is traditionally used to clarify beer by removing hazes formed by proteins.

The PEP enzyme can “recognise” specific parts of the gluten protein and break them down into smaller compounds that don’t cause an immune response in coeliacs.

These beers can be considered “gluten-reduced”. They aren’t completely gluten-free. Whether they are safe to be consumed by coeliacs is a matter of debate among health professionals. Some coelics can tolerate one or two gluten-reduced beers, while others can’t tolerate any.

Research has found gluten-reduced beers would induce an immune response that could be detected through a blood test in two out of 31 coeliac patients.

People who are very sensitive to gluten should exercise caution when considering gluten-reduced beers.

Different countries, different standards

The US Food and Drug Administration states that foods, including beer, with less than 20 parts per million (ppm) gluten can be labelled gluten-free.

The rule in Europe is the same; products containing no more than 20 ppm are considered “gluten-free”. An additional category of “very low gluten” can be used to describe products containing up to 100 ppm.

Australia and New Zealand, by contrast, have some of the strictest legislation concerning gluten-free labelling. By Food Standards Australia New Zealand’s (FSANZ) criteria, products containing 20 ppm or less can be labelled “low gluten”, but not gluten-free. To be labelled gluten-free, the beer must not contain any detectable gluten whatsoever.

In other words take note of where your beer was brewed, because it makes a difference. Products sold in Australia and New Zealand adhere to stricter labelling regulations than other countries. Low levels of gluten have been detected in foods produced overseas and sold as “gluten-free” in Australia. The same could be true for imported beers.

Fortunately, most gluten-free beers available in Australia and New Zealand are produced here, so country-specific labelling might be a bigger issue for the jet-setting beer drinker.

Not just for coeliacs

People who aren’t coeliacs can still have allergies and aversions to gluten – and this may be more common than you think. A 2020 study in Australia found almost one-quarter of people interviewed chose to avoid gluten in their diet, even though only 1% of respondents were coeliacs.

Just like the boom in alcohol-free beers, the range of gluten-free beers is expanding. Brewers are producing exciting new beers not just for coeliacs but also for other people who may be conscious about their gluten intake.

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

– ref. An expert’s guide to drinking beer for people who don’t do well with gluten – https://theconversation.com/an-experts-guide-to-drinking-beer-for-people-who-dont-do-well-with-gluten-201460

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kristin Graham, Lecturer in Podiatry, University of South Australia

Ankle sprain is one of the most common musculoskeletal injuries, particularly in sports like netball, basketball and football where jumping, landing on one foot and sudden direction changes are part of the game.

Ankle sprains can be painful, debilitating and may result in ongoing ankle problems. In fact, people with a history of a previous ankle sprain are more likely to sprain an ankle again in future.

Prevention is key. In an effort to reduce sprain risk, many people look for “high-top” shoes, where the section around the side of the shoe (also known as the “collar”) extends up closer to the ankle.

But what does the research say? Do high-top shoes actually reduce your sprain risk?

Read more:
Why do I sprain my ankle so often? And how can I cut the risk of it happening again?

High-tops don’t always help – and can sometimes harm

Plenty of research exists on this topic but unravelling the truth is complicated by inconsistency between studies. Researchers may have different ways of investigating the issue, of measuring the shoes success, or even different ways of defining a “high-top” shoe.

For example, the reported difference in collar height between “high-top” to “low-top” shoes was considerable, ranging from 4.3 to 8.5cm across different studies.

That said, the trend in the current research literature suggests the ankle protection provided by high-top shoes may not be enough to significantly reduce sprain risk while playing sport.

In fact, this design may also reduce athletic performance, and increase the risk of ankle sprain in some people.

Research does support the idea high-top shoes provide good stability when outside forces may cause an ankle sprain when the person is stationary (for example, when a person standing still is knocked from the side and starts to topple over, putting stress on the ankle).

However, once you start moving it’s a different story. In fact, some research suggests high-top shoes may even increase the risk of ankle sprain in some activities.

This may be because these shoes can change the way we use the muscles in our ankles and legs.

Specifically the muscles on the outside of the lower leg may start firing later and not work as strongly to stiffen the ankle when your’re wearing high top shoes (compared to low top shoes).

To reduce ankle sprain risk, it is important the muscles on both sides of the legs work together at the same time.

Tellingly, delayed and weaker activation of the muscles on the outside of the lower leg is greater in people with chronic ankle instability. This finding suggests high-top shoes may not be the best choice for anyone with a history of ankle sprain.

There is also some evidence wearing high-top shoes may impede athletic performance by reducing jump height and increasing shock transmission to other parts of the body.

Getting the right fit

External supports such as tape and braces are effective in both uninjured and previously injured ankles. But they’re most effective when used in combination with preventive exercise programs.

What is crucial when selecting footwear is good fit and good function. Footwear should fit the foot in length, width and depth, with a thumb’s width between the end of the longest toe and the tip of the shoe. You should have enough space across the ball of the foot for it to not be pulled tight when standing.

However, around 70% of people are wearing shoes that are not fitted appropriately. Women and girls more often have shoes that are too narrow, and older males often wear shoes that are too long.

Ill-fitting footwear can increase falls, induce greater levels of osteoarthritis and impedes natural foot function in adults and children.

Make sure you’ve got the right shoe for the job. Form must suit function.

As an example, there’s merit in wearing a well-fitted high-top sneaker during static, standing based activities.

However, a low-top sneaker may be more beneficial during sporting activities that require frequent stopping, jumping, sudden changes in direction or for people with a history of ankle sprains.

Read more:
Running shoes may cause injuries – but is going barefoot the fix?

Kristin Graham is affiliated with Australian Podiatry Association. Non executive member.

Helen Banwell has received in-kind support from ASICS Oceania and Skobi in the last two years. Neither funded the relevant studies – just gave us the shoes. I am currently involved as an external ‘content expert’ on a study with Monash with Bobux shoes but the study has been on hold since Covid started and I’m not receiving any monies for my involvement.

Ryan Causby receives funding from Australasian Podiatry Education Research Fund. He is a Director on the Australasian Council of Podiatry Deans and a member of the Australian Podiatry Association.

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

– ref. Do high top shoes actually reduce ankle sprain risk? Here’s what the research says – https://theconversation.com/do-high-top-shoes-actually-reduce-ankle-sprain-risk-heres-what-the-research-says-202852

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Grant Duncan, Associate Professor, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University

If the recent flood of sleep-inducing pre-budget speeches and commentary is any indication, New Zealand voters can expect largely unimaginative leadership that fails to prepare the country for an uncertain future, regardless of who wins October’s election.

Even so, when finance minister Grant Robertson reads his “no frills” budget speech on Thursday, he’ll implicitly be making the case for why he and his colleagues should be returned to office. Going by the most recent opinion poll, that’s far from a sure thing.

So while this week’s budget has plenty riding on it, Labour appears to be betting voters don’t want anything bold. As Prime Minister Chris Hipkins puts it, the government is merely “doing the basics” to fix flood-damaged infrastructure – not rebuilding to a standard fit for the future.

The sense of persistent social and environmental problems being managed by press release, rather than resolved, is undiminished. In thrall to credit rating agencies, bank economists and Treasury officials, political leaders have decided “basics” and “no frills” must represent our highest ambitions.

From Ecostore to Kmart

Last year saw the Labour government’s fourth “Wellbeing Budget”, a concept begun in 2019 with mental health as its headline. In 2020, COVID-19 became the big issue. This year, however, Robertson is downplaying wellbeing, instead taking a “balanced” approach involving careful cost-cutting, saving and reprioritisation.

Not everyone is happy about the turning away from wellbeing. But it was always questionable whether the word represented anything more than a trendy sticker on “government as usual”.

It’s doubtful any government would say it wasn’t concerned with people’s wellbeing. At the same time, every budget must do the boring job of planning public revenue, expenditure and borrowing with a view to the economic consequences.

By setting out the state’s aims and priorities, it’s an inherently political document. But there’s nothing in it that will necessarily make a voter feel better or more satisfied with their lot – unless perhaps they’re the direct beneficiary of a public lolly scramble.

This being election year, of course, budget largesse is something one might anticipate. But Thursday’s “orthodox no-frills budget” sounds like Labour is switching from Ecostore to Kmart: never mind your wellbeing, this is about Labour’s political survival.

Not all about the economy

Late last year, the Reserve Bank governor apologised for “trying to engineer a recession to bring down high inflation”. He might also have apologised to the government for making it that much harder to retain office.

It hasn’t quite gone that way, though. The December 2022 quarter registered negative 0.6% economic growth, but Massey University’s GDP tracker is showing this hasn’t turned into a recession and the economy is actually growing again.

Robertson can boast that unemployment is low, jobs are being created and wages are rising. Yes, inflation and interest rates are high, which causes real stress, but inflation may have passed its peak. As a whole, New Zealand is full steam ahead.

Read more:
Strikes, protests and collective action: how fighting a cost-of-living crisis wasn’t always about tightening your own belt

To labour the metaphor, then, what’s the iceberg?

Surveys show confidence in the government has been declining since the highs of mid-2020. Last month, 55% said New Zealand was “heading in the wrong direction”, compared to 35% who said the opposite. Negative sentiment also outweighed positive in consumer confidence surveys.

A “no frills” budget may allay some fears about excessive spending and new taxes. But on its own that doesn’t win back disaffected voters. There has been more than discontent about the high price of avocados – non-material issues such as co-governance and even recognition of gender diversity have become culture wars.

As a simple political strategy, National and ACT now need only to scare those who are most likely to vote (middle class people over 45) with images of a Labour-Green coalition supported by the Māori Party taking the country further down a path that’s too radical for their liking.

An absence of vision

The government’s priorities are skills, science and technology, and infrastructure. The last involves massive projects and capital investment, estimated to cost NZ$210 billion over the next 30 years – just to address the existing infrastructure deficit.

Given the tax burden of all this, we might expect taxation to be an issue. Especially so, considering the recent Inland Revenue report showing “the effective tax rate paid by middle income New Zealanders is at least double that paid by our wealthiest citizens”.

But this budget will propose neither a wealth tax nor a capital gains tax (notwithstanding a group of wealthy New Zealanders openly agreeing they should pay more tax). And there’ll be no cyclone recovery levy, either.

Read more:
Proving the wealthiest New Zealanders pay low tax rates is a good start – now comes the hard part

So Robertson will also have one eye on the National and Act parties’ pledges to cut taxes, paid for by eliminating “wasteful” spending. Robertson calls this the “fiscal Bermuda Triangle” and rejects the idea of “unfunded inflationary tax cuts”.

We can see the outlines of a fairly conventional pre-election policy debate. National will call Labour profligate and ineffectual, Labour will be able to point to “doing the basics” with a “no frills” approach.

But neither major party appears willing to deal with the full extent of social and infrastructural investment necessary to bring the country up to speed with other developed nations. And neither now talks honestly about the tax revenues needed to do that.

They seem to have given up on building a better nation. Is this lack of vision and courage the kind of leadership voters are looking for? The fact that neither of the major parties is getting ahead in the polls may be all the answer we need.

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

– ref. Wellbeing is so last year – Labour’s ‘no frills’ budget points to an uninspiring NZ election – https://theconversation.com/wellbeing-is-so-last-year-labours-no-frills-budget-points-to-an-uninspiring-nz-election-205118

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael F. Braby, Associate Professor, Australian National University

How old are butterflies, and where did they evolve? And perhaps more importantly, how and when did they reach the isolated continent of Australia?

Answers to these simple questions have baffled scientists for decades. Until recently we had very little idea when butterflies evolved, and hypotheses concerning their place of origin were largely educated guesses.

In recent years, however, several studies have indicated butterflies most likely arose sometime during the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs dominated the Earth. Now, an international collaboration (of which I am a member) has placed the time of origin much more precisely: 101.4 million years ago, give or take 1.2 million years.

These early butterflies were different from nocturnal moths, their ancestors. They flew during the day, rather than at night, and were attracted to brightly coloured flowers for their rich nectar.

A 100-million-year history

To reach this conclusion, researchers from dozens of countries needed to construct the world’s largest “family tree” of butterfly species. This tree of life was assembled with DNA from 2,244 species representing all butterfly families and 92% of genera.

There are roughly 19,000 butterfly species in the world, and piecing together the 100-million-year history of the group required assembling the world’s largest dataset of butterfly DNA sequences, geographical distributions and larval host plants.

Underlying the analysis were 11 rare butterfly fossils, without which the analysis would have been impossible. Butterflies are rarely preserved in the fossil record, and those that are preserved are frequently difficult to identify.

These fossils served as calibration points on the evolutionary tree. Once the tree was calibrated researchers could then estimate the timing of key events in butterfly evolution, starting with their origin.

North American origins

Not only did this latest study determine the age of butterflies, it also discovered where the butterflies first originated. By assembling a database of the distributions of all modern species and the plants on which they lay their eggs, the scientists were able to trace the movements of butterflies through time and space.

The study tells a dynamic story – one rife with rapid diversifications, faltering advances, and improbable dispersals. Some groups travelled over what seem impossibly vast distances, and others seem to have stayed in one place while continents, mountains and rivers moved around them.

According to this latest research, butterflies first appeared somewhere in Central and western North America.

At that time in the mid-Cretaceous, the continent of North America was part of eastern Laurasia, and it was bisected by an expansive seaway that split the continent in two. Present-day Mexico was joined in a long arc with what is now the United States, Canada and Russia.

North and South America had not yet joined via the isthmus of Panama, but butterflies seem to have had little difficulty crossing the water gap into the Southern Hemisphere. Once they reached South America, the early butterflies diversified to an astonishing degree.

From there, many groups not only moved back into North America, but they also dispersed to Australia via Antarctica. At the time, the three continents were still connected to form Southern Gondwana, a remnant of the supercontinent Gondwana.

The path to Australia – and the rest of the world

Two of the earliest butterfly lineages to reach Australia via Antarctica were the subfamilies Coeliadinae (awl skipper butterflies) (around 72 million years ago) and Euschemoniinae (around 65 million years ago). The Euschemoniinae are a group of butterflies found only in Australia, containing just a single remaining species – the spectacular regent skipper (Euschemon rafflesia) – restricted to the rainforests along the east coast.

To reach Australia, butterflies must have once lived in Antarctica in the Late Cretaceous and Early Paleogene periods when global temperatures were considerably warmer than today. They would have made their way across the continent to Australia before the two landmasses separated some 34 million years ago.

Other groups of butterflies entered Australia much later via the islands of South-East Asia. They had earlier reached Asia from North America across the Bering land bridge.

From there, they quickly covered ground, spreading and diversifying across Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. They even made their way to India, which was then an isolated island, separated by kilometres of open sea on all sides.

Once butterflies had become established in Central and North America approximately 101 million years ago, they quickly diversified alongside their plant hosts over the next 25 million years, with the last two families (Riodinidae and Lycaenidae) evolving around 76 million years ago. By the time dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago, all six modern butterfly families had arrived on the scene.

Michael F. Braby has received past funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), Australian Fulbright Commission, and the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS)

– ref. How butterflies conquered the world: a new ‘family tree’ traces their 100-million-year journey across the globe – https://theconversation.com/how-butterflies-conquered-the-world-a-new-family-tree-traces-their-100-million-year-journey-across-the-globe-205487

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Libby Callaway, Associate Professor, Rehabilitation, Ageing and Independent Living Research Centre and Occupational Therapy Department, School of Primary and Allied Healthcare, Monash University

Last week’s federal budget included a A$732.9 million investment to get the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) “back on track”. In the next four years, there are also plans for a $15.3 billion reduction in NDIS costs.

One area of focus is assistive technology, an
umbrella term that covers products – from glasses to communication devices to wheelchairs – and the systems and services necessary for their delivery. Getting assistive technology right is vitally important for an effective NDIS because the return on investment is around nine times what is spent. Assistive technology enables people to do what’s important to them, including work and study.

Pre-budget announcements flagged this focus and the 2023–24 budget provides further detail. Reportedly, some $2.5 billion in projected savings will come via proposed initiatives including “preferred provider arrangements to leverage [NDIS] buying power” and an “assistive technology expert advisory panel”.

These targets are ambitious and there are important considerations for them to be successful.

Putting the person first

There are internationally recognised steps for assistive technology provision. The first is that the supply of assistive technology is person-centred, not product or service-centred. This is because to get good outcomes, individual goals and needs should drive product selection, rather than a person’s needs being “fitted” to an existing product. The latter goes against good assistive technology practice and could worsen NDIS participant outcomes.

The value of assistive technology support funding committed in NDIS participant plans – $1.38 billion at the end of last year – points to an opportunity to exert buying power and save money. However, bulk buying assistive technology at discount prices could lead to unintended consequences.

Risks include restricting product selection or inadvertent market price fixing.
It also means the government may wind up with a warehouse full of equipment waiting to be matched to a user, rather than the products scheme participants really require.

The current approach – using an evidence-based list of product categories that guides NDIS participants and providers clarity on the options available – is more suitable.

For example, personal alarms can useful to alert others to the need for assistance but the reasons for assistance depend on the person. Disability-related needs, such as seizure and falls management, fire detection, alerts for phone calls or visitors, and orientation or memory prompts, should guide product selection.

Read more:
NDIS cost scrutiny is intensifying again – the past shows this can harm health and wellbeing for people with disability

The right advice can be complex and cost more

When assistive technology is more complex or high risk, it is recommended participants seek advice from allied health professionals.

Some assistive technology advisory services – such as state-based Independent Living Centres – were lost when they fell through funding gaps that emerged when the NDIS was implemented.

This means people will most often get advice from product suppliers or when they contract advice from allied health providers. But hourly rates for allied health services funded by the NDIS have been labelled as “price gouging” by leaders including NDIS Minister Bill Shorten. The suggestion here is that the same service is being charged at a much higher rate for NDIS participants. But this is incorrect. It fails to take into account the complexity and cost of NDIS work, or gap amounts paid for other allied health services, like those provided through private health insurance or chronic disease programs.

When it comes to assistive technology and home modifications, the trained technical expertise, necessary insurances, professional supervision and administrative processes required make delivery highly complex and costly.

For example, for an occupational therapist to codesign vehicle modifications with a wheelchair user, there are seven practice steps and three sets of stakeholders that need to be engaged to deliver a good outcome.

NDIS participant and provider expertise should be central

There are reports that a proposal to bulk buy assistive technology would rely on an advisory panel, something like the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme that negotiates medicine prices.

But expert advisory panels, such as those in other disability and injury management schemes, are typically staffed by health professionals.

NDIS participants must be partners in panel design. Any advisory panel should include people who use assistive technology, as well as health professionals who advise on it.

Read more:
From glasses to mobility scooters, ‘assistive technology’ isn’t always high-tech. A WHO roadmap could help 2 million Australians get theirs

Nothing about us without (any) of us

The NDIS relies on informed and empowered participants and an effective and efficient provider market.

The most effective way to curb spending will be for the National Disability Insurance Authority (which administers the NDIS) to codesign processes with people with disability and their support network – sometimes called “need knowers” – and any advisers they choose to engage. They can help identify reasonable and necessary assistive technology and get the best value for money.

Read more:
The government says NDIS supports should be ‘evidence-based’ – but can they be?

Libby Callaway receives funding from the Australian government Department of Health and Ageing, and the Transport Accident Commission in Victoria. She is the voluntary President of the Australian Rehabilitation and Assistive Technology Association, and a voluntary Board Director of The Homer Hack.

Natasha Layton receives funding from the World Health Organization and iLA (Independent Living Assessment, WA). She is a voluntary Board member with the Australian Rehabilitation and Assistive Technology Association, and the Global Alliance of AT Organizations, as well as representing Australian Standards to the ISO as an expert on assistive product classification and terminology.

– ref. Government plans to use NDIS bulk-buying power to help save billions – but they shouldn’t put products before people – https://theconversation.com/government-plans-to-use-ndis-bulk-buying-power-to-help-save-billions-but-they-shouldnt-put-products-before-people-205577

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Bentley, Professor of Social Epidemiology and Director of the Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Housing at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne

Rental properties are more likely be mouldy than other homes. This is a concern as excessive mould growth is known to harm human health.

Once buildings are infested with mould, the difficult and costly issue of remediation arises. Landlords and tenants are caught in the middle of a tussle over who is responsible for fixing the problem. As one Melbourne renter and research participant told our colleague Maria Gatto, during a study validating mould reporting:

The landlord came around [and] walked [into] every room where there’s black mould on the ceiling – like it’s freaking [something out of the TV series] Stranger Things – and she’s like, ‘Oh, a little bit of mould in winter, it’s very normal, it’s fine […] this happens every winter, it’s not a big deal’.

Heading into winter, after three consecutive La Niñas, conditions are ripe for a mega mould season. Combining our expertise in health, law, building and construction, we examine the problem of mould in homes and offer guidance for both renters and landlords.

Read more:
Sudden mould outbreak after all this rain? You’re not alone – but you are at risk

Ideal conditions for growth

Mould is a fungal growth that reproduces via tiny airborne particles called spores. When these spores settle on moist, plant-based construction materials such as wood, wallpaper or plasterboard, they can form a new colony.

Growth is more likely when homes are cold, humid, lack air flow, or suffer from water damage. Outbreaks have been reported in flooded parts of southeastern Australia.

So why is the problem of household mould worse in rentals? Weak regulation of tenancy legislation is just one of many factors. Rental properties tend to be poorly maintained, with structural problems such as leaks. Given this, they can be expensive to heat.

How mould makes people sick

The World Health Organization recognises mould can be harmful.

A 2022 Asthma Australia report revealed people living in mouldy homes were more likely to have asthma and allergies. A systematic review of peer-reviewed research found children living in mouldy homes were more likely to experience asthma, wheeze and allergic irritation of the eyes, nose, throat and mouth (allergic rhinitis).

Living with mould is a source of stress. People worry about the consequences for their health and there is a growing body of evidence describing the negative mental health effects of mouldy, damp homes.

Read more:
Thinking of buying a dehumidifier? Advice from an expert on mould and damp

Problems with managing mould in the rental sector

There is a gap between building and residential tenancies legislation. A building deemed to meet the minimum standards of the construction code with respect to mould may not meet the minimum standards for rental. That’s because there’s ambiguity in the National Construction Code around “minimum standards of health”.

For example the Victorian Building Act 1993 contains some provisions for the relevant surveyor to serve a notice on the basis of a health circumstance affecting a user. However, there is no guidance on how to assess the health of the indoor environment, or to deliver a building direction that will address the root cause for mould. This varies by state and territory.

Mould remediation can be costly. A study by Victoria University found half the defects causing mould were water-related. These were more expensive to fix than other problems, by an average of A$7,000.

Each winter, Tenants Victoria deals with a spike in renters seeking legal help to resolve their mould problems. This led to the service launching an annual winter Mould Clinic in 2021.

Despite increased legal protections, renters are still struggling to get mould fixed. For these reasons, many renters find the legal process doesn’t offer a solution to their problem, and instead move to a new property, with all its attendant costs and stresses. Others can’t afford to leave, or live in social housing with limited transfer options.

Charting mould in homes across Australia

Where does the responsibility lie?

Tenancy legislation varies by state and territory. Renters should familiarise themselves with the regulations in their jurisdiction.

In Victoria, residential tenancies legislation has set the criteria that “each room in the rented premises must be free from mould and damp caused by or related to the building structure”. Landlords now must disclose if they have treated mould in the past three years.

Similarly, new legislation in Queensland (coming into effect in September) states rental properties should be free from vermin, damp and mould where this is caused by issues with the structural soundness of the property.

In New South Wales, the landlord needs to disclose signs of mould and dampness in the condition report (but not necessarily have fixed it). Mould is not mentioned in the ACT residential tenancies legislation.

For the most part, the responsibility for mould in rental properties lies with landlords if the cause is structural –- for example, if a broken or faulty window frame has let rainwater inside.

Requests for urgent repairs can be accompanied by an assessment report by an occupational hygienist, environmental health professional or expert from the local council. People with an existing health condition such as asthma can include a doctor’s report.

What next?

To achieve change across all relevant domains of regulation, construction, natural disaster response and government policy, we need a sustainable, broad healthy housing agenda in Australia. We also need to consider options for immediate action.

As one Victorian renter noted:

When we buy a car for the purpose of driving on the roads, we’re required to get a roadworthy certificate to make sure it’s safe, because of the risk to other people […] Ideally it would be great if there was [some] kind of ‘rentworthy’ certificate […] to demonstrate that the property has been inspected, to identify any structural issues that might affect the tenant’s health and wellbeing. And that that be available to tenants […] before they enter into a lease or before (the property is) even able to be advertised.

Read more:
Mould and damp health costs are about 3 times those of sugary drinks. We need a healthy housing agenda

For those in Melbourne, a free Tenants Victoria event on this topic will be held at RMIT University Storey Hall on Wednesday, May 17 at 1pm. It will be followed by a free pop-up legal clinic.

Quotes in this article were collected by Maria Gatto as part of her Masters of Public Health, conducted at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health in 2022.

Rebecca Bentley receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council.

Nicola Willand receives or has received funding for research from various organisations, including the Australian Research Council, the Victorian State Government, the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation, the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, the Future Fuels Collaborative Research Centre and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Centre. She is affiliated with the Australian Institute of Architects.

Tim Law receives or has received funding from the Victorian Building Authority, the National Health Medical and Research Council, the Australian Building Codes Board, Tasmania Consumer Building and Occupational Services, and Commercialisation Australia.

– ref. Breaking the mould: why rental properties are more likely to be mouldy and what’s needed to stop people getting sick – https://theconversation.com/breaking-the-mould-why-rental-properties-are-more-likely-to-be-mouldy-and-whats-needed-to-stop-people-getting-sick-205472

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Danny Liu, Associate Professor, University of Sydney

In just a few months, higher education has moved from being afraid of how generative AI like ChatGPT could help students cheat, to cautiously embracing it by allowing students to use it under certain circumstances.

In getting to grips with how AI will change education and society, we’ve heard mainly from educators, university management and other experts. But what about students, whose studies, careers, relationships and futures will be most impacted by AI?

We are academics from universities in Sydney and Hong Kong, specialising in higher education practice and research.

Over the last two months, we have asked students their thoughts about how AI should be used in their education through questionnaires and focus groups. This includes a survey of more than 450 students in Hong Kong and pilot focus group panels with 13 Australian students.

Here are some the key themes to emerge so far from this ongoing research.

AI makes knowledge easier to access

Students recognised that ChatGPT was helpful for summarising, brainstorming, explaining and suggesting. They mentioned how it made it easier to learn difficult topics in a conversational way.

As one told us:

I’ve had a mostly positive experience […] Explanations of new concepts are always really well done and you [can] ask it to explain something a little more clearly.

Others mentioned it helps them learn during classes:

to grab quick definitions, explain concepts to me, and assist in discussions when the conversation goes quiet or people are confused.

Students are aware of the risks

The more experience students had with ChatGPT, the more nuanced their views were. One student noted ChatGPT “will miss out on important points or misunderstand”.

That’s why I am not relying on it for assignments, instead it is very helpful for my daily learning.

Another went further to say that using AI improved their critical thinking:

I simply put the whole assignment in to see what it would generate. The answer was quite abysmal […] This was really valuable information because I developed critical thinking while critiquing its work.

Another student added, “I think students really need to understand that AI is not always correct”.

In the survey of more than 450 students across Hong Kong universities, 80% said they understood its limitations and potential inaccuracies.

AI is key to their future careers

Students talked about how AI could remove less desirable parts of work, to focus on more important thinking.

busywork can be done for us, and will be done for us in our future careers.

As one student put it:

for learning, it’s [like] an upgraded version of Google. Let’s say if you are new to a topic, you can ask ChatGPT questions and treat it as interactive Wikipedia.

Students said they wanted their teachers to teach them “how to best use AI tools and make AI tools a common part of education, just like PowerPoint and Excel”.

This includes educating them about risks, biases and limitations so they can understand the technology they will inevitably be using.

Students agreed guidelines about “what happens if AI is used” are needed going forward. As one noted:

Please do not assume the worst of us. Rather, teach us how to use this technology in the right way and learn alongside it.

Concerns about equity and ethics

Students were concerned about the disadvantages that lack of access to ChatGPT would mean for some people.

all students should have the same resources as one another, being of a lower income should not be a reason why other students can do their assessments more efficiently.

Others noted AI was not necessarily free, as there were costs of accessing premium tools. Schools are also taking different approaches globally and locally, with some banning and some embracing AI. This could widen existing inequities.

Read more:
We need to change the way universities assess students, starting with these 3 things

Where to from here?

The Australian Universities Accord discussion paper highlights AI as a significant opportunity, and challenge.

This is something we cannot ignore. And students want universities to actively engage with AI for their benefit.

They do so knowing this is a “difficult time” for their teachers.

The traditional ways of learning […] are changing. But this technology is now our present and the future, we need our teachers to prepare us for it.

But they are worried about their futures and they want their education to prepare them for life after study, in a world that is changing rapidly.

if university wants to prepare people for later in life, why not encourage usage of a tool that would be available to us outside a strict academic setting?

We need to work with students, industries, communities, and governments to figure out how we can help our students engage productively and responsibly with AI. This is urgent work as the pace of AI development accelerates and has wide-ranging impacts across society perhaps beyond its developers’ understanding.

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

– ref. ‘Please do not assume the worst of us’: students know AI is here to stay and want unis to teach them how to use it – https://theconversation.com/please-do-not-assume-the-worst-of-us-students-know-ai-is-here-to-stay-and-want-unis-to-teach-them-how-to-use-it-203426

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marian Makkar, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, RMIT University

On May 10, Netflix dropped its four-part docuseries, Queen Cleopatra. Executive produced by actress Jada Pinkett-Smith as part of her African Queens series, Queen Cleopatra focuses on Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Egypt, through testimonies and dramatic reenactments.

The docuseries has been met with backlash over Cleopatra being depicted as Black. It is viewed as a form of cultural misrepresentation and historical revisionism. These point to Netflix’s appropriation of Egyptian culture and heritage.

The fact that Queen Cleopatra is classified a documentary over drama has further angered audiences because it lends misplaced legitimacy to the series and its depiction of Egyptian history.

This raises important questions. What is cultural appropriation? Why is this docuseries problematic? How should brands take more responsibility when representing other cultures?

What is cultural appropriation exactly?

In my work, cultural appropriation takes many forms, such as

• non-Indigenous people wanting to learn a culture’s traditions, then turning it into a business (for example, sweat lodge ceremonies)

• movies and books adopting real or imagined Indigenous traditions (such as in the film Dances with Wolves)

• jewellery using Indigenous symbols

• and the natural health market adopting Chinese traditional medicine.

Some can be clearer forms of appropriation than others. Mimicking symbols or names are intentional forms of appropriation (such as the case of Lego using Maōri names), compared to the easy entanglement of culture and intellectual knowledge (for example, fashion designs inspired by varied cultures).

Read more:
Why the discovery of Cleopatra’s tomb would rewrite history

Why is Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra a case of cultural appropriation?

The type of appropriation observed in the Queen Cleopatra docuseries is best described as “subject appropriation”. This is where outsiders make the culture or Indigenous people’s lives the subject of their story.

Cleopatra’s story told by Western experts on Egypt’s behalf is an act of separating the culture from its people. Not only does it exploit Indigenous cultural knowledge, but it nullifies cultural meanings specific to Egyptian natives.

A wave of public outrage in Egypt arose over the narrative of the series. Since the trailer’s release, prominent Egyptian personalities, including comedian and political activist Bassem Youssef, called out its distortion and appropriation of Egyptian culture.

The outrage is not about Cleopatra’s skin as depicted in the docuseries’ click-bait trailer. Skin colour did not matter to ancient Egyptians, nor does it matter in modern Egypt. It is Cleopatra’s remarkable achievements and lasting reputation that makes her a target for different groups claiming her as their own, such as Cleopatra being labelled as an “African Queen” instead of an Egyptian Queen.

The docuseries’ questionable experts

Besides what many people, including renowned Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass, have called to be a form of cultural identity theft, the docuseries’ lack of consultation with Egyptian experts is perceived as a sign of disrespect.

Instead, Netflix invited Western “experts” with distorted views on facts. The documentary opens with a story from Classics Professor Shelley Haley saying that her confidence in Cleopatra’s ethnicity was influenced by her grandmother (not history) telling her, “I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was Black.”

Others’ comments compared Cleopatra to a “chameleon”, saying she “looks different depending on who is depicting her”, and “the appeal of Cleopatra is that we imagine her” however we choose.

Statements that mix imagination and historical fact in a so-called documentary are the core argument of Egyptian lawyer Mahmoud Al-Semary’s legal case against Netflix. He calls for the immediate shutdown of Netflix in Egypt for its distortion of Egyptian history.

What is possibly the clearest example of cultural disrespect is the inclusion of Colleen Darnell as an expert. Known as a “vintage Egyptologist”, Darnell presents herself in cosplay from the 1920s. It is problematic because that era is synonymous with a time of violence by British colonial rulers in Egypt and Western nations robbing Egyptian artefacts.

The persistent problem of cultural appropriation

Appropriation and distortion of a culture’s beliefs can leave Indigenous people feeling violated and manipulated.

Netflix, a giant streaming platform, is guaranteed to have more viewers and make more money with their docuseries than Egypt’s recently released 90-minute documentary on Cleopatra. This way, Netflix deprives Egyptians of possible financial gains, while failing to recognise Egypt’s rights over others’ use and adaptation of their own history and culture.

Many argue Netflix exploited and offended Egyptian culture with this docuseries. A positive response to claims of appropriation would be for Netflix to prioritise its moral obligation of integrity and respect for other cultures over profit. However, the director’s reaction in the media was to call the claims “laughable”.

To avoid cultural divides, it is imperative that brands consider their responsibilities if and when representing another culture. It begins with positive intent, and ends with respect, cultural consultation and consent.

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

– ref. Is Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra cultural appreciation or cultural appropriation? – https://theconversation.com/is-netflixs-queen-cleopatra-cultural-appreciation-or-cultural-appropriation-205198

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ross Lawrenson, Professor of Population Health, University of Waikato

The New Zealand health system is currently in the throes of its biggest reorganisation in more than 20 years. The aim is to provide more efficiency and equity.

But while it is acknowledged New Zealand has under-invested in health infrastructure, more damaging has been the under-investment in people.

This lack of planning for the future health workforce is directly responsible for the staffing shortages now being experienced. These shortages are being patched up with short-term solutions such as attracting overseas-trained health workers with promises of quick pathways to citizenship.

So as well as structural reform of the health services, the vision for those services and subsequent workforce demands needs to be articulated. Ideally this would include a budget that invests in training more – and more diverse – New Zealand doctors.

Relentless demand

We know the demand for more doctors is relentless – fuelled by a growing and ageing population. At the same time, we have an ageing medical workforce, with many doctors planning to retire in the next decade.

There has been a 40% increase in the number of doctors registered with the Medical Council over the past decade, from 13,880 in 2012 to 19,623 in 2023 – a year-on-year increase of 3%.

To sustain this modest growth each year, we will need to increase the total medical workforce by 590 annually. We will also need an additional 300 doctors a year to replace those who are retiring or leaving to work in Australia and elsewhere.

Read more:
Critically understaffed and with Omicron looming, why isn’t NZ employing more of its foreign-trained doctors?

Yet we currently only have two medical schools training 550 doctors a year between them. So we continue to rely on importing doctors from other countries.

Out of the OECD, New Zealand has the highest dependency on overseas-trained doctors, with 42% of the workforce being international medical graduates (IMGs).

The regions with the lowest percentages of IMGs are Auckland (31%), Capital & Coast (34%), and Canterbury (36%). But this can climb to 60% in many rural regions. Last year, 1,232 IMGs were registered to practice here, reflecting the high demand for doctors not being met through local training and retention.

Paradoxically, one of Health New Zealand’s goals is to increase the number of Māori and Pacific doctors, which is hard to do when we rely on importing twice as many doctors as we train.

Our missing GPs

Doctor shortages are not evenly spread. There are particular problems in the less wealthy regions, and in particular specialities such as general practice. GPs are the backbone of the health system, with 90% of health consultations occurring in primary care.

Yet while we have increased the number of doctors by 5,000 over the past ten years, the number of GPs has only increased by 260. This means we have GP shortages, resulting in increasing demand on hospitals, increasing waiting times in the emergency departments, and a growing problem of late diagnosis and poorer health outcomes.

The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners has called for these shortages to be urgently addressed by increasing the number of junior doctors training in general practice to 300 per year. This is hardly possible with only two existing medical schools – it would mean more than half their total output of graduates going into the GP training programme.

Read more:
New Zealand’s health restructure is doomed to fall short unless its funding model is tackled first

Currently, just 25% of the 550 medical school graduates (130-140 doctors a year) choose to go into general practice. To achieve a goal of 300 we would need to double the number of doctors training or take a substantial number of junior doctors out of the other speciality training schemes.

There are geographical differences in where doctors are working, too. New Zealand graduates tend to choose to practice in the major centres where they have trained, while high needs communities and regional centres have to rely even more heavily on attracting IMGs.

Thus the Te Manawa Taki region – serving a predominantly rural population of over a million people across the central North Island, including 25% Maori – has 7% fewer doctors than the other regions (or 265 fewer doctors than would be expected).

Investing in training

The United Kingdom recently opened five new medical schools, while Canada is set to open three. In both countries, research showed doctors tended to stay and work in the area where they trained. The new medical schools are located in regions with high needs and recruitment difficulties.

There is no doubt New Zealand should be following suit.

Read more:
No one is mourning the end of district health boards, but rebuilding trust in the system won’t be easy

The New Zealand Resident Doctors’ Association is calling for another 200 medical students a year to be trained. This should be just the start, with ongoing commitments to increase student numbers in line with the growing medical workforce.

But simply increasing the number of students going to Auckland and Otago medical schools will not work. We cannot expect different health workforce outcomes by doing the same thing again and again.

We need more doctors in training, we need to attract students from a wider range of backgrounds, we need to place these students in the regions they are needed, and we need a new curriculum that will prepare for a workforce consistent with the future demands of the New Zealand health system.

That can only be achieved with a new and more socially accountable medical school, and significant investment. It is said the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is now.

Ross Lawrenson works for the University of Waikato which has a strategic goal of having a medical school. He has received grants in the past from Health Workforce New Zealand for training doctors and researching workforce needs.
He is a member of the National party.

– ref. New Zealand’s reliance on foreign doctors to plug gaps highlights the need for another medical school – https://theconversation.com/new-zealands-reliance-on-foreign-doctors-to-plug-gaps-highlights-the-need-for-another-medical-school-204668

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mehmet Ozalp, Associate Professor in Islamic Studies, Director of The Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation and Executive Member of Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University

Last weekend, Turkey held a historic election that will be crucial in deciding in the way the country is heading. Although almost all pre-election polls were predicting a narrow win for the main opposition candidate, the results are inconclusive, and the country will go to a runoff election in two weeks’ time.

The new constitution voted in 2017 stipulates the parliament and presidential elections must be held at the same time. To win the presidential component of the election, a candidate must garner more than 50% of the votes. If none of the candidates receives greater than 50% of the votes, the election goes to a runoff election between the two candidates with the highest votes.

This is precisely the situation Turkey faces now. Incumbent President Recep Tayyib Erdogan and his closest rival, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, will face each other in a runoff election on May 28.

Who is Erdogan’s opposition and what were their arguments?

There are two main blocks that fought to win in a bitter and ruthless campaign.

The broad opposition National Alliance is made up of six political parties, spearheaded by the Kilicdaroglu-led Republican People’s Party (CHP) party. CHP is known for its pro-secularist policies, and for this reason have been fiercely opposed by the religious segment of Turkish voters.

To turn this image around, Kilicdaroglu promised a broad reconciliation policy to unite the country and heal the wounds of the past. He also followed an appeasement strategy by drawing under the National Alliance the national and conservative leaning Good Party (IP) and three minor religious parties, the conservative Happiness Party (SP), Future Party (GP) and Solution Party (DEVA).

The last two parties’ inclusion in the alliance are significant, as they are respectively led by Ahmet Davudoglu, a former prime minister and Erdogan’s former foreign minister, and Ali Babacan, who served as the minister of economy until 2019 under successive Erdogan governments.

Holding the alliance together was important, as a key criticism against the opposition was its fragmented nature, which some argued would make it impossible to form a concerted front against Erdogan. The National Alliance successfully overcame this hurdle.

The next problem was who would be the collective candidate of the National Alliance. The polls consistently showed mayors of Ankara and Istanbul ahead of Kilicdaroglu as candidates. Turkish voters tend to prefer politicians with proven public office track record – two of the mayors had this but Kilicdaroglu did not.

In a decision some argue was politically motivated, Imamoglu was charged and sentenced to three years for insulting the Electoral Council (YSK). This took him out of contention.

Another spanner in the works for the National Alliance was the self-nomination of Muharrem Ince for the presidential election. Ince was CHP’s nominee in the 2018 election where he lost to Erdogan.

The National Alliance was fearful Ince’s candidacy would split opposition votes, which would in turn take the election to a second round that would advantage Erdogan. Ince announced his withdrawal from the race two days before the election, after several images were circulated on internet alleging him having an affair.

Battered and bruised, Kilicdaroglu remained as the main opposition candidate in the last stretch. He had three main arguments in his campaign.

The first was the failure of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s 2023 goals and objectives. Turkey was supposed to enter the top 10 economies in the world. Turkey barely stays within the top 20, at 19th.

What is worse, the economy has been on a downturn for the past three years. The Turkish lira has plummeted in value and inflation has reached as high as 85.5%.

Read more:
Will the Turkish earthquakes affect how the country is governed?

Kilicdaroglu has pointed to the high price of onion and potatoes as a symbol of economic crisis and worsening cost of living for many Turks.

The second is the increasing reputation of nepotism, corruption and wasteful government spending, which has been long criticised by many segments of Turkish society. Mismanagement of the government were widely criticised immediately after the February 2023 earthquake, delivering further a blow to Erdogan and his government.

Finally, Kilictaroglu tried to present a new vision for the electorate. He announced a four-step reform program that would make Turkey

• more democratic
• more productive, with investment in agriculture and industry
• a social state with services
• able to sustain these reforms.

What was Erdogan’s election strategy?

Unfortunately for Kilicdaroglu, his message could not be heard by all voters, especially those in small towns and rural areas who primarily rely on conventional media of TV and newspapers.

As a result, he won the majority vote in major cities such as Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, but Erdogan was in front in inland areas and smaller cities.

A key strategy for Erdogan is controlling the Turkish media. Turkey has one of the highest rates of detained and jailed journalists in the world – in fact, it is second only to China. During April, Erdogan received more than 33 hours of airtime on the state-run TRT channel. Kilicdaroglu had just 32 minutes.

The incumbent government’s job was relatively easier. Erdogan was the natural candidate for the Justice and Development Party (AKP)-led People’s Alliance. Ultra nationalist MHP (Nationalist Movement Party) has been supporting the AKP government since 2015. The alliance also included several minor religious and nationalist parties.

Read more:
Secondary crises after the Turkey-Syria earthquakes are now the greatest threat to life

The ruling block had three main arguments against the opposition.
First was the secular history of CHP, established by Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and now led by Kilicdaroglu. In the 1990’s, CHP was the leading defender of the headscarf (hijab) ban for women.

Erdogan argued if Kilicdaroglu became president, religious Muslims in Turkey would lose their freedoms gained in the past two decades under his rule.

Second was Kilicdaroglu’s Alevi religious identity. Alevism is a branch of Shi’a Islam followed by about 5-10% of Turks within a largely Sunni nation. The Erdogan camp was hoping the Sunni majority would not relate to Kilicdaroglu’s Alevi orientation.

Third was the accusation that Kilicdaroglu would collude with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, the Kurdish separatist organisation that was responsible for many terrorist activities in Turkey. The extreme implication was that Kilicdaroglu would divide the country along Turkish and Kurdish lines, a charge vehemently denied by Kilicdaroglu.

It seems the fear mongering strategy against Kilicdaroglu worked, and Erdogan will go to the runoff election ahead of his rival.

What is likely to happen next?

Erdogan, nevertheless, has been wounded. If 50+% gives political legitimacy, and Erdogan is the incumbent president, he lost some legitimacy by receiving less than 50% of the votes last weekend.

The Turkish media will play a key role in the next two weeks. They are in a conundrum. They cannot be too critical of Erdogan and support Kilicdaroglu for fear of a post-election crackdown if Erdogan wins. But they would also not want to be seen as too supportive of the Erdogan government in case Kilicdaroglu wins the election.

Erdogan will have no qualms about putting excessive pressure on the media, and that may be sufficient to tip the election in his favour.

Kilicdaroglu will have a chance to face Erdogan, with no other opposition candidate, in an electoral duel. If he is able to appeal to people who did not vote for Erdogan, he may pull off a narrow win. His strategy will be to call for all voters to turn up and vote if they do not want another five year’s of Erdogan rule and economic hardship.

Mehmet Ozalp is affiliated with Islamic Sciences and research Academy.

– ref. After a brutal presidential election campaign, Turkey is headed to a run-off contest. Here’s why – https://theconversation.com/after-a-brutal-presidential-election-campaign-turkey-is-headed-to-a-run-off-contest-heres-why-205406

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

The outcry was loud and swift last week after Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek approved a new coal mine in central Queensland. It’s the first coal mine Labor has approved since coming to power a year ago.

The project, the Isaac River mine, will extract metallurgical coal to be burned for steel-making. Environmental groups decried the potential damage the mine would cause to wildlife, water quality and the climate.

Any new coal mine is inconsistent with the global goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. But the Isaac River mine is probably the least bad of those recently under consideration.

The mine would produce only metallurgical coal, which is still needed by the steel industry, and would operate for just five years. Importantly, we shouldn’t let controversy over the approval of a small, short-lived mine distract from more consequential recent decisions on coal – and those still looming.

A lesson in spin-doctoring

Plibersek’s handling of recent coal mine announcements is a masterclass in egregious political spin-doctoring.

On May 5, Plibersek triumphantly announced she had rejected two Queensland coalmine proposals – the MacMines China Stone mine and the Stanmore Resources Range project – because the proponents failed to provide information about potential damage to the environment.

The decision was widely welcomed. But in reality, scuppering the mines was an easy and relatively uncontroversial decision for Plibersek. Both proposals had been moribund for a long time. Indeed, MacMines abandoned its proposal in 2019 and the phone number for its Darwin office is no longer even connected.

Plibersek rejected the mines not because of the damage they would cause to nature, but because the proponents had for years failed to provide basic information to the department.

Some observers suspected the announcement was meant to soften us up for bad news.

That news came six days later, when details of the Isaac River mine approval were quietly uploaded to the federal environment department’s website. The coal mine, east of Moranbah, will reportedly produce about 500,000 tonnes of metallurgical coal each year for five years.

The approval was made public right before Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s budget reply speech. This follows a well-worn strategy of governments burying bad news by releasing it concurrently with bigger news events.

A spokesperson for Plibersek defended the approval, saying the federal government “has to make decisions in accordance with the facts and the national environment law – that’s what happens on every project, and that’s what’s happened here”.

Thermal vs coking coal

In weighing up the merits of Plibersek’s decision on the Isaac River mine, we must make a distinction between thermal coal, used in electricity generation, and metallurgical or “coking” coal, used in steel-making.

Metallurgical coal accounts for about half of Australia’s coal exports by tonnage, but the great majority by value.

The world is rapidly moving away from burning coal to generate electricity. Much of Europe will be coal-free by 2030. The United States and other developed countries are following suit.

The much-publicised “return of coal” resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine never amounted to much and is already over.

By continuing to export thermal coal, Australia is delaying the inevitable transition for the sake of short-term profits.

So what’s the picture for metallurgical coal? Low-emissions alternatives for steel-making are available, but it will be some time before they’re deployed at scale. So demand for metallurgical coal is expected to continue for years, or even decades.

Even bodies such as the International Energy Agency, which have called for an end to all new fossil fuel investment, could scarcely raise strong objections to a small-scale metallurgical coal mine set to close in five years.

Let’s not get distracted

In these circumstances, Plibersek played the media well by making the Isaac River mine the featured dish in a menu of bad news.

That approval was not the only decision made by Plibersek last week, or the most important one. She also allowed three other mine projects – two in New South Wales and one in Queensland – to proceed to the next stage of environmental assessment.

These projects had been sent back to Plibersek for further consideration after an environment group requested the effects of climate change be considered. The projects are still subject to further steps in the approvals process. But Plibersek’s decision to let them proceed provides a major boost.

The projects include an expansion of the Mount Pleasant mine in NSW. It would produce about 12 million tonnes of thermal coal a year – more than the Adani Carmichael mine. It’s expected to operate until 2050, by which time many countries have pledged to quit coal-fired power completely.

Plibersek now faces a huge political test when it comes time to decide on those, and many more coal projects in the planning pipeline. On current indications, climate impacts will be disregarded completely.

In February, Plibersek rejected mining magnate Clive Palmer’s proposed Central Queensland coal project, on the grounds it would damage rivers and the Great Barrier Reef.

So under this government, mines may be rejected because they would damage the local environment or for failing to get their paperwork right – but not because they enable emissions that will help destroy the global environment.

This is a clear weakness in national environment law. The Albanese government could have fixed it, by introducing a so-called “climate trigger”. This would have enabled it to knock back a development proposal on the grounds of its climate impact. But it has refused to do so.

Leer más:
Labor has introduced its controversial climate bill to parliament. Here’s how to give it real teeth

Big coal tests remain

Optimists can console themselves with the idea that things would have been worse if the Morrison government was still in power. But none of the approval decisions announced by Labor so far differ from those we might have expected under the Coalition.

And there is one intriguing case where things look like going the other way. In the lead-up to last year’s federal election, then prime minister Scott Morrison blocked a gas-drilling proposal off the New South Wales coast, using ministerial powers he secretly conferred upon himself.

The Albanese government has taken legal action to nullify that decision.

Many more federal decisions on coal mining projects are yet to come. If all or most are approved, Labor’s efforts to reduce domestic emissions will count for little or nothing – a fact no amount of spin-doctoring can conceal.

Leer más:
Tanya Plibersek killed off Clive Palmer’s coal mine. It’s an Australian first – but it may never happen again

John Quiggin is a former Member of the Climate Change Authority. Some of his work has been published by The Australia Institute, mentioned in this article.

– ref. Yes, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek approved a coal mine. But save the angst for decisions that matter more – https://theconversation.com/yes-environment-minister-tanya-plibersek-approved-a-coal-mine-but-save-the-angst-for-decisions-that-matter-more-205561

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

The outcry was loud and swift last week after Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek approved a new coal mine in central Queensland. It’s the first coal mine Labor has approved since coming to power a year ago.

The project, the Isaac River mine, will extract metallurgical coal to be burned for steel-making. Environmental groups decried the potential damage the mine would cause to wildlife, water quality and the climate.

Any new coal mine is inconsistent with the global goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. But the Isaac River mine is probably the least bad of those recently under consideration.

The mine would produce only metallurgical coal, which is still needed by the steel industry, and would operate for just five years. Importantly, we shouldn’t let controversy over the approval of a small, short-lived mine distract from more consequential decisions on coal.

A lesson in spin-doctoring

Plibersek’s handling of recent coal mine announcements is a masterclass in egregious political spin-doctoring.

On May 5, Plibersek triumphantly announced she had rejected two Queensland coalmine proposals – the MacMines China Stone mine and the Stanmore Resources Range project – because the proponents failed to provide information about potential damage to the environment.

The decision was widely welcomed. But in reality, scuppering the mines was an easy and relatively uncontroversial decision for Plibersek. Both proposals had been moribund for a long time. Indeed, MacMines abandoned its proposal in 2019 and the phone number for its Darwin office is no longer even connected.

Plibersek rejected the mines not because of the damage they would cause to nature, but because the proponents had for years failed to provide basic information to the department.

Some observers suspected the announcement was meant to soften us up for bad news.

That news came six days later, when details of the Isaac River mine approval were quietly uploaded to the federal environment department’s website. The coal mine, east of Moranbah, will reportedly produce about 500,000 tonnes of metallurgical coal each year for five years.

The approval was made public right before Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s budget reply speech. This follows a well-worn strategy of governments burying bad news by releasing it concurrently with bigger news events.

A spokesperson for Plibersek defended the approval, saying the federal government “has to make decisions in accordance with the facts and the national environment law – that’s what happens on every project, and that’s what’s happened here”.

Thermal vs coking coal

In weighing up the merits of Plibersek’s decision on the Isaac River mine, we must make a distinction between thermal coal, used in electricity generation, and metallurgical or “coking” coal, used in steel-making.

Metallurgical coal accounts for about half of Australia’s coal exports by tonnage, but the great majority by value.

The world is rapidly moving away from burning coal to generate electricity. Much of Europe will be coal-free by 2030. The United States and other developed countries are following suit.

The much-publicised “return of coal” resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine never amounted to much and is already over.

By continuing to export thermal coal, Australia is delaying the inevitable transition for the sake of short-term profits.

So what’s the picture for metallurgical coal? Low-emissions alternatives for steel-making are available, but it will be some time before they’re deployed at scale. So demand for metallurgical coal is expected to continue for years, or even decades.

Even bodies such as the International Energy Agency, which have called for an end to all new fossil fuel investment, could scarcely raise strong objections to a small-scale metallurgical coal mine set to close in five years.

Let’s not get distracted

In these circumstances, Plibersek played the media well by making the Isaac River mine the featured dish in a menu of bad news.

That approval was not the only decision made by Plibersek last week, or the most important one. She also allowed three other mine projects – two in New South Wales and one in Queensland – to proceed to the next stage of environmental assessment.

These projects had been sent back to Plibersek for further consideration after an environment group requested the effects of climate change be considered. The projects are still subject to further steps in the approvals process. But Plibersek’s decision to let them proceed provides a major boost.

The projects include an expansion of the Mount Pleasant mine in NSW. It would produce about 12 million tonnes of thermal coal a year – more than the Adani Carmichael mine. It’s expected to operate until 2050, by which time many countries have pledged to quit coal-fired power completely.

Plibersek now faces a huge political test when it comes time to decide on those, and many more coal projects in the planning pipeline. On current indications, climate impacts will be disregarded completely.

In February, Plibersek rejected mining magnate Clive Palmer’s proposed Central Queensland coal project, on the grounds it would damage rivers and the Great Barrier Reef.

So under this government, mines may be rejected because they would damage the local environment or for failing to get their paperwork right – but not because they enable emissions that will help destroy the global environment.

This is a clear weakness in national environment law. The Albanese government could have fixed it, by introducing a so-called “climate trigger”. This would have enabled it to knock back a development proposal on the grounds of its climate impact. But it has refused to do so.

Read more:
Labor has introduced its controversial climate bill to parliament. Here’s how to give it real teeth

Big coal tests are still remaining

Optimists can console themselves with the idea that things would have been worse if the Morrison government was still in power. But none of the approval decisions announced by Labor so far differ from those we might have expected under the Coalition.

And there is one intriguing case where things look like going the other way. In the lead-up to last year’s federal election, then prime minister Scott Morrison blocked a gas-drilling proposal off the New South Wales coast, using ministerial powers he secretly conferred upon himself.

The Albanese government has taken legal action to nullify that decision.

Many more federal decisions on coal mining projects are yet to come. If all or most are approved, Labor’s efforts to reduce domestic emissions will count for little or nothing – a fact no amount of spin-doctoring can conceal.

Read more:
Tanya Plibersek killed off Clive Palmer’s coal mine. It’s an Australian first – but it may never happen again

John Quiggin is a former Member of the Climate Change Authority. Some of his work has been published by The Australia Institute, mentioned in this article.

– ref. Yes, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek approved a coal mine. But let’s save the angst for decisions that matter more – https://theconversation.com/yes-environment-minister-tanya-plibersek-approved-a-coal-mine-but-lets-save-the-angst-for-decisions-that-matter-more-205561

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Greg Raymond, Lecturer, Australian National University

The last time voters headed to the polls in Thailand was in 2019, following five years of a repressive military dictatorship. Thai voters spoke nervously of their democratic aspirations and allowed a military-led government into power.

Now, after four years of a functioning parliamentary democracy, Thai voters have roared. With nearly all votes counted in Sunday’s parliamentary election, they have resoundingly rejected the junta and its successor military-proxy parties.

Thailand’s most progressive party, Move Forward, looks set to gain the most seats in the new parliament. Close behind is the more established and similarly liberal Pheu Thai party of the polarising Shinawatra dynasty.

Following them in third place is Bhumjaithai. This rural-based, more traditional party of patronage politics had recently been the previous government’s coalition partner.

Trailing far behind, in fourth and fifth place, are the two military-proxy parties: Palang Pracharat, headed by former deputy prime minister and army chief Prawit Wongsuwan, and United Thai Nation, headed by current Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, leader of the 2014 coup.

Will this usher in a democratic spring?

The result reflects a huge boost in support for Move Forward, which won half as many seats outright in the 2019 election. Now, Move Forward looks likely to take all of but one of the 33 Bangkok seats in parliament, which in the past was seen as the stronghold of Pheu Thai.

It is hard not to wonder whether the strong performance of recently elected Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt, an independent who has set new standards in transparency, accountability and pure hard work, might have affected the choices of Bangkok voters.

Move Forward has a similar leader in the Harvard-educated former businessman Pita Limjaroenrat – someone who is both well-educated and business-minded.

The formation of a new government trenchantly opposed to the involvement of the military in politics seems logical, potentially ushering in a new progressive, democratic era in Thai politics, with Pita as the new prime minister.

This could be transformational for all of Southeast Asia – especially the countries on the mainland. Democratic institutions have taken a battering in the region in recent years, with Myanmar’s 2021 coup and Cambodia’s turn to increasingly autocratic rule under Hun Sen.

The dramatic decline in support for Thailand’s military-aligned, incumbent government likely reflects a general sentiment among the Thai people that it was simply time for the military to go.

Prayuth has been prime minister since May 2014, when as a military officer he undertook a coup against Yingluck Shinawatra’s democratically elected government. Since then, the Thai people have grown tired of his autocratic style of rule, short temper and mediocre management of the economy.

To speculate further, Thais may feel that the military’s job in overseeing a monarchical transition from Rama IX to Rama X is well and truly now complete.

Read more:
‘This country belongs to the people’: why young Thais are no longer afraid to take on the monarchy

But obstacles remain

But the election result also doesn’t guarantee Thailand’s opposition forces will be able to form a government.

The primary challenge facing the leading parties is the illiberal design of the 2017 constitution. Because it contains a clause allowing 250 unelected, junta-appointed senators to participate in a joint sitting to choose the next prime minister, the military-proxy parties can still, in theory, cobble together a coalition to retain power.

If they received the support of the parties that made up the previous government (Bhumjaithai and the Democrats), they could form a ruling coalition with the
roughly 170 seats they all won in total in Sunday’s vote, along with the support of the 250 junta-appointed senators.

If this were to occur, they would be a minority government, unable to pass laws without opposition support, and subject to no-confidence motions. But they might hope they could lure away opposition parliamentarians, using various inducements like ministerial positions, to achieve a majority in the lower house.

The second challenge for the opposition parties is forming a democratic coalition. Will Pheu Thai accept Pita as prime minister, rather than one its own three candidates, Srettha Thavisin, Paetongtarn Shinawatra or Chaikasem Nitisiri, as the prime ministerial candidate? Would Pheu Thai try to elevate Paetongtarn – the daughter of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra – into the role?

Another major question is whether Pheu Thai would agree to Move Forward’s controversial policy of reforming Thailand’s draconian lese majeste law. Move Forward wants to change the law, which criminalises insulting the monarchy, so it is less vulnerable to being weaponised as a way to attack political opponents. The party insists this is not a step towards becoming a republic.

The chances of both parties forming a working coalition would be strengthened if they could bring Bhumjaithai into the government. That party has swung between both sides of the political spectrum over the decades.

But this would mean Bhumjaithai accepting the stances of both Move Forward and Pheu Thai to roll back Thailand’s controversial decision last year to decriminalise marijuana. Both parties are proposing to restrict use to medical purposes.

Bhumjaithai’s leader, Anutin Charnvirakul, the current health minister and a cannabis advocate, has insisted that changing Thailand’s cannabis law is non-negotiable for his party.

Could a ‘judicial coup’ derail negotiations?

The third challenge facing the opposition parties is perhaps the most worrying. This is the possibility the conservative establishment in Thailand will find a way to invalidate the election result through court action, or a “judicial coup”, as it has become known in Thailand.

There are strong precedents for this, as previous progressive parties have been dissolved through court rulings – a misfortune yet to befall any of the conservative parties.

Pita is currently facing a lawsuit related to his possession of shares in a media company. Meanwhile, Pheu Thai is facing litigation related to allowing “outsiders” to run its affairs.

There is reason to think we may know the election outcome sooner than in 2019. The Electoral Commission seems to have performed more competently in counting votes this time, and does not have to decide how to implement a complicated formula to allocate party-list seats. This means the joint sitting of parliament should happen faster and a coalition will soon emerge.

But only then will we have any certainty the people’s voices have truly been heard.

Read more:
Thailand at a critical juncture with pro-democracy protesters again set to clash with police

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

– ref. Thailand is on the verge of a new democratic spring, but significant obstacles could stand in the way – https://theconversation.com/thailand-is-on-the-verge-of-a-new-democratic-spring-but-significant-obstacles-could-stand-in-the-way-205207

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Greg Raymond, Lecturer, Australian National University

The last time voters headed to the polls in Thailand was in 2019, following five years of a repressive military dictatorship. Thai voters spoke nervously of their democratic aspirations and allowed a military-led government into power.

Now, after four years of a functioning parliamentary democracy, Thai voters have roared. With nearly all votes counted in Sunday’s parliamentary election, they have resoundingly rejected the junta and its successor military-proxy parties.

Thailand’s most progressive party, Move Forward, looks set to gain the most seats in the new parliament. Close behind is the more established and similarly liberal Pheu Thai party of the polarising Shinawatra dynasty.

Following them in third place is Bhumjaithai. This rural-based, more traditional party of patronage politics had recently been the previous government’s coalition partner.

Trailing far behind, in fourth and fifth place, are the two military-proxy parties: Palang Pracharat, headed by former deputy prime minister and army chief Prawit Wongsuwan, and United Thai Nation, headed by current Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, leader of the 2014 coup.

Will this usher in a democratic spring?

The result reflects a huge boost in support for Move Forward, which won half as many seats outright in the 2019 election. Now, Move Forward looks likely to take all of but one of the 33 Bangkok seats in parliament, which in the past was seen as the stronghold of Pheu Thai.

It is hard not to wonder whether the strong performance of recently elected Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt, an independent who has set new standards in transparency, accountability and pure hard work, might have affected the choices of Bangkok voters.

Move Forward has a similar leader in the Harvard-educated former businessman Pita Limjaroenrat – someone who is both well-educated and business-minded.

The formation of a new government trenchantly opposed to the involvement of the military in politics seems logical, potentially ushering in a new progressive, democratic era in Thai politics, with Pita as the new prime minister.

This could be transformational for all of Southeast Asia – especially the countries on the mainland. Democratic institutions have taken a battering in the region in recent years, with Myanmar’s 2021 coup and Cambodia’s turn to increasingly autocratic rule under Hun Sen.

The dramatic decline in support for Thailand’s military-aligned, incumbent government likely reflects a general sentiment among the Thai people that it was simply time for the military to go.

Prayuth has been prime minister since May 2014, when as a military officer he undertook a coup against Yingluck Shinawatra’s democratically elected government. Since then, the Thai people have grown tired of his autocratic style of rule, short temper and mediocre management of the economy.

To speculate further, Thais may feel that the military’s job in overseeing a monarchical transition from Rama IX to Rama X is well and truly now complete.

Read more:
‘This country belongs to the people’: why young Thais are no longer afraid to take on the monarchy

But obstacles remain

But the election result also doesn’t guarantee Thailand’s opposition forces will be able to form a government.

The primary challenge facing the leading parties is the illiberal design of the 2017 constitution. Because it contains a clause allowing 250 unelected, junta-appointed senators to participate in a joint sitting to choose the next prime minister, the military-proxy parties can still, in theory, cobble together a coalition to retain power.

If they received the support of the parties that made up the previous government (Bhumjaithai and the Democrats), they could form a ruling coalition with the
roughly 170 seats they all won in total in Sunday’s vote, along with the support of the 250 junta-appointed senators.

If this were to occur, they would be a minority government, unable to pass laws without opposition support, and subject to no-confidence motions. But they might hope they could lure away opposition parliamentarians, using various inducements like ministerial positions, to achieve a majority in the lower house.

The second challenge for the opposition parties is forming a democratic coalition. Will Pheu Thai accept Pita as prime minister, rather than one its own three candidates, Srettha Thavisin, Paetongtarn Shinawatra or Chaikasem Nitisiri, as the prime ministerial candidate? Would Pheu Thai try to elevate Paetongtarn – the daughter of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra – into the role?

Another major question is whether Pheu Thai would agree to Move Forward’s controversial policy of reforming Thailand’s draconian lese majeste law. Move Forward wants to change the law, which criminalises insulting the monarchy, so it is less vulnerable to being weaponised as a way to attack political opponents. The party insists this is not a step towards becoming a republic.

The chances of both parties forming a working coalition would be strengthened if they could bring Bhumjaithai into the government. That party has swung between both sides of the political spectrum over the decades.

But this would mean Bhumjaithai accepting the stances of both Move Forward and Pheu Thai to roll back Thailand’s controversial decision last year to decriminalise marijuana. Both parties are proposing to restrict use to medical purposes.

Bhumjaithai’s leader, Anutin Charnvirakul, the current health minister and a cannabis advocate, has insisted that changing Thailand’s cannabis law is non-negotiable for his party.

Could a ‘judicial coup’ derail negotiations?

The third challenge facing the opposition parties is perhaps the most worrying. This is the possibility the conservative establishment in Thailand will find a way to invalidate the election result through court action, or a “judicial coup”, as it has become known in Thailand.

There are strong precedents for this, as previous progressive parties have been dissolved through court rulings – a misfortune yet to befall any of the conservative parties.

Pita is currently facing a lawsuit related to his possession of shares in a media company. Meanwhile, Pheu Thai is facing litigation related to allowing “outsiders” to run its affairs.

There is reason to think we may know the election outcome sooner than in 2019. The Electoral Commission seems to have performed more competently in counting votes this time, and does not have to decide how to implement a complicated formula to allocate party-list seats. This means the joint sitting of parliament should happen faster and a coalition will soon emerge.

But only then will we have any certainty the people’s voices have truly been heard.

Read more:
Thailand at a critical juncture with pro-democracy protesters again set to clash with police

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

– ref. Thailand is on the verge of a new democratic spring, but obstacles could stand in the way – https://theconversation.com/thailand-is-on-the-verge-of-a-new-democratic-spring-but-obstacles-could-stand-in-the-way-205207

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rose Cairns, Lecturer in Pharmacy, University of Sydney

As winter approaches, many parents will be bracing for the cold and flu season. Young children typically get at least six colds a year.

In previous generations, parents might have reached for the cough syrup to relieve a dry or chesty cough.

But we now know cough syrups aren’t very effective at treating children’s coughs.

And amid mounting evidence of harms from poisoning and deaths, many countries including Australia have restricted cough medicines so they can’t be given to children aged under six.

What’s in cough medicine?

Active ingredients in cough syrups vary depending on their claimed benefit. They can contain cough suppressants (dampening the body’s cough reflex), expectorants and mucolytics (both of which help clear phlegm).

Other medicines marketed for cold and flu often contain decongestants (to relieve a blocked nose) and sedating antihistamines to relieve sneezing, stop a runny nose and to aid sleep.

Read more:
Health Check: why do I have a cough and what can I do about it?

The riskiest medications are those with a sedative action, such as sedating antihistamines or opioid-based cough suppressants. While sedation may be a desired effect for parents with a sleepless child, young children are particularly at risk of serious harm or death. Sedatives can also cause agitation and hyperactivity.

While cough syrups that don’t contain sedatives are likely safer, there are very few studies of safety and efficacy of these products in children. Adverse events including agitation and psychosis
have been reported, especially with overuse.

Overuse may result from parents misreading the label, intentionally using more in the hope it will work better, inadvertent extra doses and the use of inaccurate measuring devices such as household spoons.

How are cough syrups restricted?

Young children under two years old are most at risk of a fatal overdose from cough syrups. But Australia’s drug regulator recommends against using cough syrups for anyone under six years of age. As such, there are no dosing instructions for children under six years on the labels of these products.

Cough syrups are still available for older children and adults. Pharmacists are likely to ask the age of the person who will take it and provide guidance on dosing and appropriate use.

Our research, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia, shows restricting the use of cough and cold medicines in children results in a significant and sustained decrease in poisonings.

Our study looked at dosing errors, adverse events at correct doses, and accidental “exploratory ingestions”, such as when a toddler helps themselves to the medicine cabinet.

The government mandated labelling changes in 2012 and 2020 for these products. In 2012, labels for medicated cough and cold products could no longer list dosing instructions for children under six, and had to carry additional warnings. In 2020, warnings were put on sedating antihistamines saying they were not to be used in children under two years for any reason (including allergy and hayfever).

This resulted in a halving of the rate of poisons centre calls, and a halving in the rate of hospitalisations. Despite this, hundreds of calls are still made to Australian poisons centres per year regarding these products in young children.

When is it OK to use cough syrups?

Harms have mostly been documented in younger children. This is likely due to their smaller size, meaning it takes less medicine to cause harm, and also their susceptibility to sedative effects due to their developing brains.

Cough syrups can be used for in children aged six to 11 years, however caution is still needed. These products should only be given in consultation with a doctor, pharmacist or nurse practitioner.

Read more:
Health Check: do cough medicines work?

Some herbal products are available and marketed for children, such as Hedera helix (ivy leaf extract). Unfortunately, there is no convincing evidence these medications meaningfully improve cough symptoms. But the risk of poisoning is low.

Simple syrups containing no medication can also be effective: up to 85% of the effectiveness of cough medicines has been put down to the “placebo effect”. This could be due to syrups coating the throat and dampening that irritating tickling sensation.

So what can I do for my kid?

The best thing you can do for your child is give them rest and reassurance.

Antibiotics will only be needed if a doctor diagnoses them with acute bacterial pneumonia or with a chronic cough due to a bacterial infection, such as protracted bacterial bronchitis, whooping cough or a lung abscess.

Paracetamol or ibuprofen can be used if they have fever, aches and pains along with their cough. Check the correct dosage on the packaging for your child’s weight and age.

If your child is older than 12 months and has a wet cough (producing phlegm in their throat), consider giving them honey. There is growing evidence honey can reduce the production of mucus and therefore, the amount of coughing.

Read more:
Still coughing after COVID? Here’s why it happens and what to do about it

Rose Cairns receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC, Investigator Grant). She is also the recipient of an untied educational grant from Reckitt to fund a PhD stipend into over-the-counter analgesic research. She has previously recieved honoraria/speaker fees from Reckitt, HealthEd and The Pharmacy Guild of Australia for giving educational presentations on poisoning.

Associate Professor Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, a member of the Australasian Pharmaceutical Science Association, and a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Nial is the chief scientific officer of Vairea Skincare LLC, a director of SetDose Pty Ltd a medical device company, and a Standards Australia panel member for sunscreen agents.

– ref. My child has a cough, so what’s wrong with using cough syrup? – https://theconversation.com/my-child-has-a-cough-so-whats-wrong-with-using-cough-syrup-205396

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jess Carniel, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Southern Queensland

In 2022, Ukraine won the Eurovision Song Contest in a landslide victory. Traditionally, the winner hosts the following year but due to the significant security issues posed by the ongoing war with Russia, Ukraine was unable to host.

As the 2022 runners-up, the United Kingdom stepped in to assist with hosting duties. It was the eighth time Eurovision has not been hosted by the winner, and the fifth time the UK has helped out. It is, however, the first time the contest has not been hosted by the winner due to an active conflict situation.

The production was a collaboration between last year’s Ukrainian winners and the UK hosts, to ensure both were fairly represented throughout. In addition to representation within the show itself – including the genuine co-host chemistry between Ukrainian rock goddess Julia Sanina and British actor Hannah Waddingham – a share of inexpensive tickets were reserved for displaced Ukrainians in the UK.

As per tradition, the grand final opened with the previous winners, Ukraine’s Kalush Orchestra, performing their winning song. This was followed by the flag parade, which featured past Ukrainian performers, including Go_A (2020-21) and the iconic Verka Serduchka (2007).

The postcards – the short videos used to introduce each performance – connected the co-hosts Ukraine and the UK to their performing guests via similar landmarks found in each country, from beaches to national libraries. In line with the year’s theme, “United by Music”, these sought to illustrate we are united by shared experiences.

The interval act during voting was a medley of songs by Liverpudlian artists, ending with 2019 winner Duncan Laurence performing Gerry and the Pacemakers’ You’ll Never Walk Alone. It, too, aimed to express solidarity with Ukraine.

Read more:
Ukraine’s Eurovision win shows us that despite arguments to the contrary, the contest has always been political

The politics of the non-political contest

The Eurovision Song Contest aims to be non-political. According to reports, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s request to address the audience was denied by the European Broadcasting Union because it would contravene their policy that the contest not be used for political ends.

(Representatives for Zelensky denied claims he had made the request.)

Politicians have appeared on Eurovision before. Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko presented the winner, Greece, with a special award for “the winning song that unites the whole Europe” when the country first hosted in 2005. Appearances by politicians can never be fully divorced from their political context, but they can be tempered by limiting these to an appearance rather than directly addressing the audience on a political issue.

The Eurovision production didn’t ignore the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but focused on framing it through the more acceptable values-based politics of humanitarianism, empathy and solidarity.

Read more:
Ukraine’s Eurovision win shows us that despite arguments to the contrary, the contest has always been political

But what about the performances?

Austria opened the show with the catchy Who the Hell is Edgar?, a song critiquing gender bias and artist remuneration in the music industry.

Read more:
‘Who the hell is Edgar?’ – a viral Eurovision song about Edgar Allan Poe evokes a strange history of mediums and creative possession

It’s not the first time Austria has sent an act critical of the music industry. Schmetterlinge’s Boom Boom Boomerang in 1977 mocked the commercialisation of the European music industry.

Reigning champions Ukraine placed sixth with Tvorchi’s Heart of Steel, while their co-hosts placed second-last – a reversal of fortunes from last year’s second-place finish.

While the live performance of Mae Muller’s radio-friendly I Wrote A Song didn’t capture votes, the UK garnered a lot of goodwill for the production itself. It shows why Eurovision is still a good cultural (and political) investment for them, win or lose.

In another reversal of fortunes, Norway illustrated the power of the popular vote. Alessandra’s feminist sea shanty, Queen of the Kings, moved from 17th in the jury vote to fifth overall thanks to the audience televote.

This included four points from the rest of the world. For the first time ever, audiences from non-participating countries were able to vote online for their favourite performances. This vote has the same weight as the votes from a single country. Their points – the maximum 12 points – were awarded to Israel.

While this vote isn’t enough to shift the contest’s outcome, it is a welcome recognition of the contest’s global reach and audience. Eurovision is watched by more than 180 million viewers around the world each year.

Finland proved to be a crowd favourite. The arena audience could be heard chanting the chorus throughout the voting. Käärijä’s infectious industrial hyperpop, Cha Cha Cha, narrates escaping the drudgery of everyday life by hitting the dancefloor with a piña colada.

(It was reported anecdotally many Finnish supermarkets sold out of piña colada ingredients this weekend.)

Eurovision powerhouses

Sweden’s victory with Loreen’s Tattoo is record-breaking.

Loreen is now the second person to win Eurovision twice, the first woman to win twice, and the first LGBTQIA+ artist to win twice. She previously won in 2012 with Euphoria, credited with changing the artistic direction of the modern Eurovision.

Sweden now tie with Ireland for the most Eurovision victories, seven. Somewhat auspiciously, the 2024 Eurovision marks the fiftieth anniversary of ABBA’s iconic first win for Sweden in 1974 – again, at a Eurovision hosted by the UK.

Read more:
The ‘gay world cup’: why LGBTQ+ audiences love Eurovision

Australia’s highest ever finish

This year marked another anniversary: the 40th anniversary of the Eurovision broadcast in Australia. It is also the end of Australia’s five-year participation agreement with the European Broadcasting Union.

Western Australian prog-synth band Voyager made a strong case for the continuation with Promise. They placed ninth overall, after winning their semi-final.

Fingers crossed Australia will be getting up at 5am next year to support its artists again.

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

– ref. Eurovision under the shadow of war: how the 2023 contest highlighted humanitarianism, empathy and solidarity – https://theconversation.com/eurovision-under-the-shadow-of-war-how-the-2023-contest-highlighted-humanitarianism-empathy-and-solidarity-205468

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leon Salter, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation, Massey University

The number of number of people aged 65 years or older living in New Zealand is likely to hit one million by 2028, according to the latest statistics – up from under 300,000 in 1980. Caring for this ageing population will become increasingly important.

Research has shown New Zealanders prefer to retain independence for as long as possible with the help of home-based care. Yet home support workers (HSWs) – those who assist older people, as well as people with disabilities and long-term conditions – have been underpaid and underappreciated for decades.

This is affecting the long-term sustainability of the workforce. According to a 2019 survey, over 35% of care workers were aged 55-64. Only 11% were aged 25-34. In other words, care workers are getting older too.

Partly to address this, care provider companies (predominantly for-profit) are introducing platform technologies – or “care apps”. The rationale is that these empower care workers, create efficiencies for cost-conscious government agencies, and offer autonomy for clients.

It’s been claimed automation in the homecare sector will lower overhead costs and allow for staff pay to increase. Provider companies say it will also streamline the management of timesheets, salary payment, leave applications and access to client notes.

Our research and recently launched report critically interrogates these claims, as well as the broader impact of these platform technologies on the working lives of HSWs, and their resulting ability to provide dignified care.

Rather than support claims of empowerment and efficiency, our interviews and focus groups with HSWs suggest the care apps, as they are currently used, are exacerbating pre-existing systemic failures. These lead to disempowering underpayment, declining professional autonomy and alarming health and safety risks.

Trust and communication

Our interviewees’ experiences describe four broad themes:

Digital frustration: a lack of input into the design of the technology affects not only worker wellbeing, but also the quality of care that can be provided.

For example, one participant described how sudden changes to her roster made through the app disrupt the client trust she has established over time. This affects her ability to provide tailored care based on detailed knowledge of the client’s needs and personal circumstances, as well as contributing to a feeling of having little professional autonomy or control:

Sometimes [the app] doesn’t work that well because suddenly they change your roster. So I can ring my clients I’ve had the night before and say, yep I’m coming, I’ll see you around about 10 o’clock. And then the next day suddenly your roster has changed and that person now is not on your roster.

You now don’t have the phone number, so you can’t ring them to say my roster’s changed, I’m not going to come now, and then they’re gonna get somebody else turn up unexpectedly.

Precarity: care apps add to the already significant burden of unpaid labour, while cementing trends towards deskilling and loss of professional autonomy. One participant described how she had to log into the app four times for a single client. Another described how she would have to phone a call centre and explain if she forgot to log in.

Care workers are paid per client in a piecemeal way. Rather than receiving a salary, they don’t get paid for time spent on these other activities.

Several participants described how the requirement to log in often interrupted their ability to provide client care, taking focus away from often urgent tasks, as well as the skilled work of building a trusting relationship.

Read more:
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Communication inequality: care apps (and smart phones more broadly) mean HSWs are always accessible to employers who can track their location with GPS technology. They can also add, remove and change clients with minimal notice (often causing distress to HSWs and their clients).

Meanwhile, participants described a lack of access to decision-makers, with local offices often having been closed and centralised into call centres. Functions for contacting managers or payroll departments through the app were often broken. As one participant said:

It’s difficult to get through to them […] You’ll ring the call centre, ask them to do something, or you leave a message […] and it just doesn’t happen. These are huge breakdowns in communication.

Health and safety: communication inequality exposes HSWs and their clients to undue risks, made even greater in the context of COVID-19. On top of insecure working conditions during the pandemic and difficulty getting adequate personal protective equipment, HSWs lacked access to up-to-date information about the COVID status of their clients, or access to expert support during medical emergencies.

Read more:
Voiceless and vulnerable, NZ’s gig workers faced more risk with fewer protections during the pandemic

Incorporating workers’ voices

According to the HSWs we interviewed, there is little recognition by their employers of the highly skilled work they do. Their valuable knowledge of the mechanics of providing care in the community has not been incorporated into the design of the care apps.

To ensure the new technology contributes to a sustainable workforce and to high-quality care in future, significant improvements to home care in general must be made.

Currently there are significant concerns about how home care is funded, delivered and accounted for. The lack of professional control, autonomy or trust experienced by workers, as well as the piecemeal pay system, must be addressed as part of the development of care apps if they are to be truly empowering.

This would deliver real improvements for clients and workers. Our evidence suggests that care apps imposed on a workforce without their professional input cannot be a magic bullet that solves the long-term challenges of demographic change and systemic inefficiency.

Read more:
After COVID: why we need a change in care home culture

Protecting the vulnerable

Home care is complex and messy, and things can change from minute to minute. Worker and client voices should be actively incorporated in both the design and evaluation of the technology.

This will protect their interests and ensure the right balance is struck between privacy protection and the provision of up-to-date information on client needs. Any data that are extracted and stored must also uphold the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Ensuring the voices of HSWs and their unions inform the technological parameters of their work will help prevent the worsening of their already fragile workplace conditions.

Ultimately, failure to ensure the sustainability of this vital workforce would be a collective failure to care for our most vulnerable people.

Leon Salter receives funding from MBIE/Royal Society.

Lisa Vonk has received a scholarship from the HOPE Foundation for Research on Ageing.

– ref. Home support work in NZ is already insecure and underpaid – automation may only make it worse – https://theconversation.com/home-support-work-in-nz-is-already-insecure-and-underpaid-automation-may-only-make-it-worse-205017

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mary Anne Kenny, Associate Professor, School of Law, Murdoch University

In February this year, the Albanese government announced that thousands of refugees living in Australia who were on Temporary Protection Visas (TPV) and Safe Haven Enterprise Visas (SHEV) would now be moved onto a permanent visa known as a Resolution of Status Visa (ROS).

When making the announcement, Immigration Minister Andrew Giles said this would end the limbo for refugees after they had “endured ten years of uncertainty”.

The change was welcomed by an estimated 20,000 refugees who can move to permanent visas. They are part of a larger group of around 31,000 asylum seekers who arrived in Australia by boat before January 2014. Known collectively as the “legacy caseload”, their refugee status was subject to a “fast track” process.

Read more:
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The trauma of uncertainty

The minister’s recognition of the impact of visa uncertainty resonates with recently published research we conducted with lawyers and migration agents who work with this group. They encountered clients in mental health crises, feeling marginalised, defeated and in some cases “lethal hopelessness”.

This research adds to existing evidence about the negative impact of temporary visas on the mental health of asylum seekers. The research goes further and found that years of delays and the process itself contributed to deteriorating mental health.

This research reveals how the government can use a trauma-informed approach to end visa uncertainty and create a shared future.

What is the new procedure for obtaining permanent residence? What are the options for those who do not have a TPV or a SHEV? How can the government end ongoing uncertainty for them?

Resolution of Status Visas

Refugees who currently hold TPVs and SHEVs will be eligible for a permanent Resolution of Status Visa.

Processing is under way and as of late March 2023 100 visas have already been granted. The department predicts most of these visas will be granted within 12 months. Funding to provide legal assistance to refugees is a welcome step towards facilitating a sense of stability and predictability as they await a visa.

Permanent visas will mean refugees can begin the process of family reunion after over a decade of separation. Last year, the government removed policy barriers that meant sponsors who arrived by boat were the lowest priority in the visas queue.

However, processing delays, high visa charges and strict rules around which family can be sponsored to Australia will mean refugees will continue to face ongoing separation from their partners and children.

Read more:
Australia’s temporary visa system is unfair, expensive, impractical and inconsistent. Here’s how the new government could fix it

What happens to those who do not hold a TPV or SHEV?

Giles has stated that the February 13 announcement “includes a pathway for all those in the cohort who are ultimately found to be owed protection”.

Statistics published by the department in February 2023 state there are 9,861 people who have been through the fast-track process and were refused visas. Around 5,000 of those are challenging those refusals in the courts. If successful, their cases will be re-examined by the Immigration Assessment Authority (IAA). If they are then found to be a refugee, they would be eligible for a Resolution of Status Visa.

Others may seek ministerial intervention. In late 2021, almost 200 people from Afghanistan were waiting for the minister to use his personal discretion to allow them to reapply for protection based on the Taliban takeover in 2021.

The minister also has the discretion to grant visas to individuals who may not meet refugee criteria, but may have Australian citizen partners, children or employers – as already done in the case of the Nadesalingham family.

Flaws in the fast-track process and in particular with the review process of the IAA have been documented previously. Dismantling the “fast track” system was part of the Labor Party platform. But, to date, no announcements have been made and the IAA continues to hear cases.

Reform may come as part of the upcoming overhaul of the administrative review system. What changes, if any, might be made are unclear, but this group of people face ongoing limbo.

Deterioration in mental health is directly linked to treatment

While the minister has declared there is a pathway for all those who are found to be owed protection, there continues to be doubt about what will happen to those whose cases have been refused.

In 2018 and 2019, we surveyed and interviewed lawyers and migration agents who worked directly with clients going through the “fast track” assessment process. They heard stories of overwhelming emotions (for example, despair and anger) as well as witnessing self-harm and suicidal behaviour.

A key driver of people’s mental distress was their inability to apply for a visa for several years. This was followed by a difficult and fast-paced application process in which they were expected to relay their stories of persecution. Many individuals were distressed and destabilised before the process began.

Legal professionals described clients feeling trapped by ongoing visa insecurity and having no control over their future. Family separation combined with uncertainty about their future undermined individuals’ capacity to cope with everyday life and decision-making.

These findings have significant practical implications for how the government handles law reform and policy development with this group. For those who have now found permanency, uncertainty around family reunification will continue to be a significant stressor. There are options to amend laws, policies and processes, which would make them more humane.

Clarity and trauma-informed approaches are essential. For those who do not hold a TPV or SHEV, the Australian government should urgently collaborate with community groups, mental health experts and legal providers to co-design pathways and communication on how their cases will be reviewed and progressed.

A recent High Court decision relating to how the minister’s intervention powers have been exercised will force a review.

The government has an opportunity to amend the guidelines and provide clear guidance for this group, which will allow those who were refused under the “fast track” system to be considered for visas that provide a pathway to certainty.

Mary Anne Kenny has previous received funding from the Australian Research Council and sitting fees from the Department of Home Affairs

Nicholas Procter has previously received grant funding and sitting fees from from Department of Health and Department of Home Affairs.

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

– ref. Government must use trauma-informed approach to end uncertainty on refugee visa applications – https://theconversation.com/government-must-use-trauma-informed-approach-to-end-uncertainty-on-refugee-visa-applications-203758