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

Should the public know the details of all the Victorian aged care facilities that have had COVID-19 cases?

“Yes” seems the obvious answer. But not according to the Health department or Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck.

At Tuesday’s hearing of the Senate committee monitoring the government’s responses to the pandemic, Greens senator Rachel Siewert sought this information, asking about providers, residents, cases and deaths.

Health department secretary Brendan Murphy – formerly chief medical officer who in that role was often at Scott Morrison’s side at news conferences – asked to provide the information to the committee “in camera”.

“Some of the facilities don’t want it publicly known that they have outbreaks,” Murphy said.

“Many, many of them have been open about it and it’s in the media. But some of them have just had one staff member and the facility has been locked down and it’s been controlled. And they’re obviously worried about reputational issues.”

When Siewert put it that the public had a right to know, Colbeck said the families with a member in a facility were “aware of what’s happening.

“But I am concerned about the stress that’s placed on facilities by some of the public elements of this process.

“I understand where you’re coming from in one sense, but talking to, particularly some of the smaller facilities, their capacity to deal with a huge influx of, say media inquiry can severely impact on the facility.

“And in the circumstance where they’re doing well, the families are being appropriately advised … I’m reluctant to have a public hit list of facilities that have been unfortunate enough to have an outbreak of COVID within them.”

He and Murphy said facilities with outbreaks are locked down and don’t take new residents.

Victorian premier Daniel Andrews reported on Tuesday that all of the latest 11 deaths were linked to outbreaks in aged care facilities. They are part of a chain of multiple deaths, now announced day after day, from aged care in this Victorian second wave. On Tuesday’s figures, there were 1186 active COVID cases relating to aged care facilities (this includes residents and staff).

The Victorian government provides a list of the facilities that have had the largest outbreaks. State government sources, asked on Tuesday night, said it is not seeking to keep secret the others. It doesn’t provide details of deaths in circumstances where that would identify individuals.

The arguments advanced by Murphy and Colbeck for secrecy are flawed and can give the public little confidence.

These are institutions funded and regulated by the federal government, and provided with a great deal of taxpayers’ money. There should be total transparency about what happens in them.

We know from official and media reports over years, and the experience of many families, that it’s vital to get as much information as possible in real time about what’s happening in aged care.

While facilities that have had minimal COVID cases are not in the same class as those with massive outbreaks, it doesn’t mean the details of those homes and cases should be hidden.

It is understandable facilities do not want “reputational” damage. But the magnitude of what is occurring in the sector in Victoria means we are past that concern. It is now a question of accountability.

Colbeck is worried about “media inquiries” and a “hit list”.

“Media inquiries” refers to journalists asking for facts, questions the public would reasonably want answered. As for a “hit list”: families making decisions in the future about institutions have the right to know how an institution performed in the COVID crisis.

How cases arose in facilities – even a single case – is also relevant to assessing the pandemic across the sector.

Committee chair Katy Gallagher said later on Twitter the committee would consider Murphy’s request for the information to be provided in camera.

But she added it would need to be persuaded “of the public interest test of keeping it secret”. That, one would think, would be very difficult.

– ref. View from The Hill: There’s no case for keeping secret any aged care facility’s COVID details – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-theres-no-case-for-keeping-secret-any-aged-care-facilitys-covid-details-143920

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Flavio Romero Macau, Senior Lecturer in Supply Chain Management and Global Logistics, Edith Cowan University

With Victoria’s declaration of a state of disaster and imposition of Stage 4 restrictions, many Melburnians have returned to panic buying. Supermarket shelves across the city have been stripped of canned goods, fresh vegetables and meat.

The meat buying, at least, makes some sense.

After aged care homes, meat-processing facilities have been a major contributor to Victoria’s COVID-19 outbreak. Hundreds of coronavirus cases have been linked to about a dozen sites, with the biggest outbreaks at those in Melbourne’s outer western and northern surburbs.

There were expectations following the state government’s lockdown announcement on Sunday that these facilities might be closed completely, along with the other business restrictions announced on Monday.

Read more: Melbourne non-essential retailers closed, as Morrison unveils pandemic leave

That didn’t happen. But the state’s 70-plus meat-processing facilities will be required to reduce their production capacity by one-third.

They must also implement, in the words of premier Daniel Andrews, “some of the most stringent safety protocols that have been ever put in place in any industrial setting”, including workers dressing “as if they were a health worker – gloves and gowns, masks and shields.”

This is going to affect the supply of meat to Victorian supermarkets, and prices. But thankfully not for long.

Why meat processors?

Processing meat is the opposite of an assembly line. It’s a disassembly line, the equivalent of auto workers pulling apart cars – removing the wheels, doors, seats, engine and so on – to sell the parts. Now imagine each car is slightly different, and must be taken apart in a slightly different way, at fast pace.

Automating such work is difficult. It is complex and intensive manual labour. Lots of people work close together, in a hard environment, for long hours, in cold and dry spaces. These factors make it easy for COVID-19 to spread.

The Victorian government’s directive that meat-processing facilities reduce output by one-third is to ensure workplace changes such as gaps between shifts, more physical distancing, and more attention to measures such as wearing personal protective equipment and not sharing cutting equipment.

So production will go at a slower pace. Output will be lower, and the per-unit cost of packaging meat products for consumers will be higher.

Synchronising the system

Quality and price are key purchasing decisions for most meat shoppers, and the meat industry has been geared to providing fresh produce at lowest cost.

Getting your favourite beef, lamb, chicken and pork cuts to your local supermarket or neighbourhood butcher is a complex game. Meat processing and distribution centres work out how much to produce, where to deliver and when to do it with great precision, planning up to 90 days ahead. They must synchronise supplies from farmers with demand from retailers.

Think of the system’s smooth operation as being like keeping a roomful of clocks synchronised.

If one clock fails, no problem. You can fix it. But what if a handful more clocks fail before you can fix it, and then dozens more fail? In a short time there will be so many faulty clocks that coordination is compromised. Eventually you won’t even know what the right time is.

Reducing capacity in one or two abattoirs for a few days could be worked around with minimal effects to consumers. But there’s no quick fix to reducing capacity in all of them for six weeks.

Supplies for some meat products will almost certainly be lower, and prices could increase. This is most likely to occur for the most common and popular meat cuts, like T-bone steaks or chicken drumsticks. If your preference is offal or giblets, though, you may not have a problem.

Read more: Disagreeability, neuroticism and stress: what drives panic buying during the COVID-19 pandemic

What is the good news?

Yes, there is good news.

First, thanks to refrigerated transport, meat processors in other states can help meet lower production in Victoria. The industry has some flexibility to move from north to south, from west to east.

Second, supermarkets have been quick to bring restrictions back to prevent the panic buying and hoarding that make shortages even worse. Coles and Woolworths have already imposed two-pack limits on meat packages (and other products).

Third, to hoard meat you need freezer capacity, and it’s quite possible those disposed to stockpiling still have frozen meat from the first COVID-19 wave.

Read more: Don’t panic (again): here’s why Melbourne’s supermarket shortages will quickly pass

Fourth, supermarkets and hundreds of smaller operators such as butchers will be affected in different ways at different times. Finding what you want may simply require looking in more than one shop.

Fourth, there are options. Not just between different fresh products such as beef, chicken, pork, lamb and fish, but between preserved, frozen and canned alternatives.

So it might be just a bit harder to have your preferred choice of meat for dinner in the coming days. But the situation won’t be as dire as some fear.

– ref. What Victoria’s abattoir rules mean for the supply and price of meat – https://theconversation.com/what-victorias-abattoir-rules-mean-for-the-supply-and-price-of-meat-143895

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Noble, Education Policy Fellow, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

Read more: Melbourne non-essential retailers closed, as Morrison unveils pandemic leave

Childcare services and most preschools have remained open throughout the COVID-19 restrictions in Australia. From Wednesday, however, Melbourne’s stage 4 restrictions mean most children (except for vulnerable children and those of essential workers) in metropolitan Melbourne will no longer be able to attend early childhood education and care for at least six weeks.

Kindergarten and early childhood centres in regional Victoria, however, remain open to all children.

So, what will not being able to send children to childcare or preschool mean for Melbourne’s families and the early childhood education and care sector?

What it means for families

Around 287,000 children aged 0-4 live in Melbourne. Of these, one-fifth of one year olds and around 90% of four year olds attend a range of early childhood education and care services and preschools.

Most of these children will have to stay at home with their families for at least six weeks, plus school holidays for children attending sessional kindergarten.

Only children whose parents work in permitted industries, or vulnerable children (presumably those in contact with the child protection system or who have a disability, although the details have not yet been announced) will have access to early learning services during this period.

Parents will face similar challenges as parents whose young school children were learning from home in terms two and three. But they’ll be doing this with younger children with different (often greater) needs, without the learning and developmental remote support being provided by schools.

Recent research with parents of schoolchildren shows this is likely to take a significant emotional toll as parents attempt to balance care, early learning and paid work. Guilt and anxiety about not doing any of these jobs well is common among parents.

Women are likely to carry a disproportionate share of the load, and may reduce work hours to support their family. Workforce participation by Australian women already lags behind many countries with more generous childcare policies.

Read more: We need a new childcare system that encourages women to work, not punishes them for it

What has the government done?

The government put in place a relief package in April to support families and services in the early childhood education and care sector, because many people pulled their children out of childcare.

The government provided centres with around 50% of their revenue based on enrolment numbers between February 17 and March 2, on the basis parents weren’t charged any fees. Services were also able to access JobKeeper for eligible employees.

Childcare was the first sector to lose JobKeeper in July, as part of the transition back to pre-COVID funding arrangements. The federal government is providing a transition payment to operators until September 27. The payment makes up 25% of the childcare service fee revenue from February 17 – March 1.

This is one way of addressing the fact only a few early childhood education and care workers are eligible for JobKeeper. The Minister for Education Dan Tehan told a press conference on Tuesday nearly one-third of the early childhood workforce weren’t eligible for the package.

Read more: Increasing the childcare subsidy will help struggling families — and the economy

Parents whose income has been reduced due to COVID-19 are eligible for an increase in subsidised hours (up to 100 per week), but they’ll still have to pay the gap fees. For many families who have lost income, these fees are likely to be unaffordable, and the increased allowance won’t make a difference.

Dan Tehan said on Tuesday the federal government (which funds the childcare sector) is working with Victoria on a suitable arrangement for parents and the sector during the stage 4 restrictions. Further announcements are expected later this week.

Will the sector survive a six-week shutdown?

Australia’s mixed model of childcare provision means unlike government schools, there won’t be a common plan rolled out across the sector. Private companies and non-profit and community organisations will need to assess their own situations, make their own plans, and communicate these with families.

Even before the latest restrictions, many providers were struggling to adjust to the transition arrangements and meet additional COVID-related costs. There are instances of services charging parents fees when children were absent, where providers were unable to manage any reduction in income.

Some providers have exhausted their financial reserves and are facing serious financial difficulty.

Some providers have said closing for six weeks is easier than remaining open with low numbers.

Support to providers will be critical to ensuring services can remain open for families of permitted workers, and open their doors too all families as restrictions are eased.

What are the options, and what if this happens again?

The transition payment to childcare operators was designed to support the shift back to stage one and two restrictions — it is not fit for stage 3 or 4 restrictions. This payment to providers should be increased to ensure they can survive the next few months.

The government should be considering several options, geared towards minimising damage and disruption for children, families and the sector.

JobKeeper could be reintroduced for early childhood educators to protect educators’ jobs and support services. But while JobKeeper provided a guaranteed level of funding to support employers and employees, large numbers of casual early childhood educators were not eligible.

A better option would be to temporarily increase the federal government’s transition payment to services, with the remainder of services’ revenue made up by fees from parents whose children are still attending, and federal government subsidies. This could also be improved by strengthening the employment guarantee provisions for educators.

The employment guarantee linked to the transitional payment only requires employees to keep their jobs, which for many casuals may mean only a few shifts per week.

Read more: Childcare is critical for COVID-19 recovery. We can’t just snap back to ‘normal’ funding arrangements

This may not be the last time we experience stage 4 restrictions in Australia. The childcare sector has been near collapse, followed by government rescue twice in 2020, in stark contrast with the stable schools system, that has been able to focus all their attention on children’s and educators’ learning and well-being.

It’s time for Australia to get serious about developing a more sustainable system that provides high quality and genuinely affordable early learning to all Australians, which is not at constant risk of collapse as we navigate the challenges of COVID-19.

– ref. Childcare closed to most families, no JobKeeper: what Melbourne’s stage 4 lockdown means for parents and the sector – https://theconversation.com/childcare-closed-to-most-families-no-jobkeeper-what-melbournes-stage-4-lockdown-means-for-parents-and-the-sector-143845

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Crowe, Professor of Law, Bond University

The Queensland government has quietly released the state Law Reform Commission’s long-awaited report on reforming the state’s controversial sexual consent laws.

After much lobbying by survivors of sexual assault for comprehensive changes to the law, the recommendations are a huge disappointment.

The QLRC review was prompted by concerns about the mistake of fact excuse in rape cases — what some have called a “loophole” that allows rapists to walk free.

Defendants in rape trials often argue the other person consented to sex. However, the mistake of fact excuse also allows defendants to argue they honestly and reasonably believed the other person consented to sex — even if that person did not. The excuse has been part of Queensland law since 1899.

Read more: Australian law doesn’t go far enough to legislate affirmative consent. NSW now has a chance to get it right

The state attorney-general, Yvette D’Ath, asked the QLRC to examine the mistake of fact excuse last July, along with the state’s consent laws generally.

This followed a high-profile campaign led by Women’s Legal Service Queensland, author and activist Bri Lee and myself.

The Queensland Law Society and the Queensland Bar Association both strenuously opposed any reforms to the existing laws on consent and mistake of fact, claiming there was insufficient evidence of the need for changes. The QLRC’s report effectively endorses this position, while giving the superficial appearance of progressive change.

None of the five recommendations significantly changes the existing law. The proposals do nothing to strengthen the law on sexual consent, nor do they address the problems that prompted the review in the first place.

The definition of consent

Rape in Queensland is defined as sexual intercourse without free and voluntary consent. The QLRC’s report recommends three amendments to the definition of consent in the criminal code.

The first change would state that a person is not assumed to have consented to a sexual act just because they don’t actively say no. This is an important principle. However, as the QLRC acknowledges, it is already well established in case law.

Importantly, this proposal leaves open the possibility that passivity can still amount to consent in some circumstances. The QLRC quotes a recent judgement by the Queensland Court of Appeal president, which says “in some circumstances” consent may be expressed “by remaining silent and doing nothing”.

Read more: Rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment: what’s the difference?

The second recommendation by the QLRC would clarify the same definition of consent applies to rape and other sexual assaults. This is a technical reform that does not change the definition of consent itself.

The third reform would amend the law to state there is no consent in situations where a sexual act continues after consent is actively withdrawn. This principle, too, is already part of case law.

This reform is potentially problematic because it seems to put the onus on people who are subjected to unwanted sexual acts to withdraw their consent. This may not be realistic when a previously consensual sexual encounter turns violent or the nature of the activity suddenly changes.

Mistake of fact and consent

The QLRC’s fourth and fifth reforms address the mistake of fact excuse.

The fourth reform would allow juries to consider anything a defendant said or did to determine if the other person wanted to have sex in deciding whether the defendant made an honest and reasonable mistake.

This amendment, too, does not change the existing law. Notably, the proposal falls short of requiring defendants show the positive steps they took to ascertain consent — as is the case in Tasmania.

In practice, this means defendants could point to anything they said or did to determine consent, no matter how inadequate, to bolster their mistake of fact argument. On the other hand, a defendant who did nothing to ascertain consent may still be able to use the excuse.

The QLRC’s fifth recommendation clarifies that a defendant cannot rely on their drunkenness to argue a mistake about consent was reasonable. This principle, like the others, is already part of case law.

Under the existing law, a defendant’s intoxication does not make their mistaken belief more likely to be reasonable. It can, however, make the mistake more likely to be considered honest.

The defendant’s drunkenness can therefore lower the bar for the mistake of fact excuse. The QLRC’s proposal does nothing to change this.

Survivors’ concerns ignored

The QLRC’s report completely ignores the most serious problems with the current law. The mistake of fact excuse can potentially be used even if a person is asleep or heavily intoxicated when a defendant has sex with them. The report says nothing about this.

There is also no mention of the role of the freezing response in mistake of fact cases, where rape victims “freeze” and are unable to vigorously fight off their attackers.

The QLRC’s own research found the mistake of fact excuse was raised more often in cases where a victim gives evidence of freezing during an attack or trying to placate an attacker. This potentially allows the defendant to use the victim’s lack of resistance to avoid conviction.

Read more: Cyber justice: how technology is supporting victim-survivors of rape

The QLRC report also ignores the role of rape myths in the mistake of fact excuse. Rape myths are false beliefs about sexual violence, like the idea that flirting with someone, kissing them or going to their house means you are “asking for sex”. All these factors have been found to potentially support a defendant’s mistaken belief in consent.

The QLRC report relies heavily on research from the UK to dismiss the idea that jurors are influenced by rape myths. This research, as the QLRC admits, “has not yet been published or peer reviewed”.

By contrast, the report overlooks recent peer-reviewed Australian research showing rape myths continue to influence rape trials.

What would real reform look like?

Bri Lee and I have proposed in peer-reviewed research that the mistake of fact excuse be limited so it can’t be used when a defendant is reckless or does nothing to find out if the other person is consenting.

Our proposal would also remove the excuse in cases where a victim is asleep, unconscious or heavily intoxicated, as well as preventing a defendant’s drunkenness from counting in their favour.

This proposal was unanimously endorsed by 39 sexual violence survivors and their supporters at a consultation session held by the QLRC in February.

The QLRC report mentions the session in passing, but does not discuss the views expressed at the meeting. The legal profession’s preference for the status quo seems to have prevailed over survivors’ calls for reform.

If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault or family violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit www.1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.

– ref. Queensland rape law ‘loophole’ could remain after review ignores concerns about rape myths and consent – https://theconversation.com/queensland-rape-law-loophole-could-remain-after-review-ignores-concerns-about-rape-myths-and-consent-141772

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elise Klein, Senior Lecturer, Australian National University

Australia is facing one of its biggest crises in unemployment since the Great Depression, and yet already, extra COVID-19 supports to the unemployed are being wound back.

From today, the conditions around JobSeeker payment will get tougher for all job seekers, apart from those in Victoria. Come Christmas time, it’s possible people on the unemployment payment could be back to a meagre $40-a-day payment.

Read more: The compromise that might just boost the JobSeeker unemployment benefit

This is counterproductive and counterintuitive. But unfortunately, it is not surprising.

Australia has a long history of viewing unemployment as some sort of moral failing that needs to be punished, rather than supported.

The current situation

JobSeeker – and its predecessor, Newstart – has not increased in real terms since 1994. Business, community groups and researchers are among the consistent chorus pushing for a significant boost to the payment which, on average, is about A$40 a day.

When COVID-19 hit, JobSeeker recipients were given an additional $550 payment per fortnight. But as we learned in last month’s economic update, this will reduce to $250 per fortnight come September 25. There is no certainty about what will happen after December 31.

Meanwhile, mutual obligation requirements are re-starting from today. This means Australians who are out of work will have to submit four job applications a month to keep their payments and will be penalised if they refuse a suitable job.

While these requirements do not apply to people in Victoria, it comes amid high unemployment rates around the country. The July jobs figures showed about one million Australians were unemployed. A further 250,000 people are now expected to be stood down Victoria due to the stage 4 restrictions.

According to recent estimates, there is only one job advertised for every 13 people on JobSeeker or Youth Allowance. Even well before the COVID-19 crisis, there was only one job for every eight people.

JobSeeker and the ‘impediment’ to finding work

When asked in late June about the level of JobSeeker, Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned generous payments could stop people finding jobs (even if the jobs don’t exist).

What we have to be worried about now is that we can’t allow the JobSeeker payment to become an impediment to people going out and doing work, getting extra shifts.

The sentiments expressed here go to the very heart of the problem with Australia’s attitudes towards unemployment payments – the belief social support needs to compel people into paid work. This means welfare is crafted as a deterrent against people in need.

The government’s frequent use of terms like “welfare dependency,” brand unemployment as a failure of the individual, not the economy. It also overlooks the vast number of Australians who do not receive JobSeeker Payment, but are dependant on government support with lucrative tax concessions for things like superannuation funds, business tax breaks and negative gearing.

Australia’s long history of blaming the unemployed

To fully understand our approach to unemployment, however, we need to look back in time. Australia has a long history of viewing unemployed people as somehow at fault.

Read more: How to get both JobKeeper and JobSeeker

During the Great Depression, sustenance or “susso” was given to the unemployed in the form of either a payment, rations or community work. Each state administered these programs differently, but the support was barely enough to survive.

The Depression was caused by Wall Street crashing and export industries suffering a downturn, with unemployment in Australia hitting a peak of 32%. But “susso” was still seen as degrading and those receiving it were portrayed as lazy or undeserving. There were newspaper reports of “huge dole frauds” threatening to “cripple” the system. The Daily Telegraph reported the case of a lazy, “chicken-eating” family, living in “luxury” on the dole.

These views acted in part as a deterrent. Only 53% of unemployed people in NSW took sustenance payments and work during the 1930s, while in Victoria, only 23% took up this support.

‘Dole blugers’, ‘activity plans’ and frozen Newstart

In the early 1990s, Australia had the recession we “had to have”. Even though Australia had a peak unemployment rate of about 11%, the Active Employment Strategy (AES) was introduced.

This centred around the “active participation” of the unemployed. For the first time, recipients were required to sign an “activity plan” in order to receive support.

This focus on a deficiency in the unemployed (as opposed to the economy) has led scholars to view the AES as a “less social and more moral” shift in Labor’s policy.

The Howard government then increased the use of “mutual obligation” – or the tasks people need to do in order to obtain welfare payments – introducing “work for the dole” in 1997. The same year, the Coalition tied Newstart to inflation – as opposed to the pension, which is tied to wages. This effectively froze the payment.

Popular support for this shift was helped by media stories of “dole bludgers” and arguments young people were “too fussy” when it came to finding work.

This general distrust of the unemployed has continued under successive Labor and Coalition governments, reinforced by austerity measures in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Punitive approaches to welfare, such as plans to drug test welfare recipients and the introduction of cashless debit cards, have only intensified.

It’s OK to give people adequate payments

Social security doesn’t need to be so harsh. The $550 Coronavirus Supplement has enabled people to spend money on essentials like fresh fruit, heating, medical needs and education.

Read more: The coronavirus supplement is the biggest boost to Indigenous incomes since Whitlam. It should be made permanent

Also, just because people are unemployed, it doesn’t mean they aren’t working. Unpaid work, such as care, volunteering and artistry, contributes overwhelmingly to the economy.

Providing adequate, non-punitive welfare support doesn’t stop people from trying to get jobs when they are available, either. In the 1970s, Canada’s Negative Income Tax trials showed only a small decrease in labour market supply when people were given an adequate payment. The people who delayed returning to work were women re-entering the workforce after having children and young people staying longer in education.

Morrison didn’t flinch in June when he announced $270 billion would be spent on missiles in the name of national security.

Yet when it comes to people’s economic security, it is so often framed as a trade-off against reducing the budget deficit. This is despite the importance of spending to help the economy recover from our current recession.

Australia has a long history of stigmatising and distrusting its unemployed. With hundreds of thousands of Australians out of work due to COVID-19, now is the chance to break with tradition by providing non-punitive and adequate income support.

Read more: Forget JobSeeker. In our post-COVID economy, Australia needs a ‘liveable income guarantee’ instead

– ref. Australia has been stigmatising unemployed people for almost 100 years. COVID-19 is our big chance to change this – https://theconversation.com/australia-has-been-stigmatising-unemployed-people-for-almost-100-years-covid-19-is-our-big-chance-to-change-this-143349

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ray Mahoney, Senior Research Scientist, Australian E-Health Research Centre, CSIRO

The federal government recently announced 16 Closing the Gap targets, seen by some as a policy re-set for yet another “once in a generation” chance to address Indigenous disadvantage.

But one barrier Indigenous people still face when accessing health care remains under-discussed: some are so concerned about how they will be treated in hospital, they don’t identify as Indigenous when asked.

We need to understand why that’s happening and address the reasons, or we’ll be left lamenting yet another failure to deliver on closing the gap.

Read more: Chelsea Bond: The ‘new’ Closing the Gap is about buzzwords, not genuine change for Indigenous Australia

Many Indigenous patients are incorrectly identified

In general, most hospital data in Australia is of a very high standard. Hospitals collect information about patient care, waiting times, disease and other factors. These data are sent to the national hospital information reporting system run by the Australian Institute of Welfare (AIHW). By and large, this data set is comprehensive, coordinated and consistent.

Indigenous status has been a mandatory data item since 1996 for all hospitals in Australia. But as the most recent report from the AIHW on hospital data notes, the “true” number of separations (meaning hospital admissions) should be about 9% higher than reported for Indigenous Australians.

Studies measuring identification of Indigenous patients in hospitals, GP clinics and other health services have found rates of accurate identification could be as low as 34%.

My study of 784 cardiac patients (70% Indigenous and 30% non-Indigenous) found only 60% of the Indigenous patients were accurately recorded as Indigenous at hospital.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) also acknowledges that accurately calculating Indigenous life expectancy isn’t easy, noting “particular methodological challenges” and that the proportion of the increase in the Indigenous population in Census counts changes in a way that can’t be easily explained. In other words, people’s propensity to self-identify as Indigenous can change over time or depending on circumstances.

Read more: New ‘Closing the Gap’ targets will cover attachment to land and culture

The responsibility for accurately counting Indigenous patients falls on the service provider. The beliefs, knowledge, attitudes and skills of staff (clinical and administrative) may be instrumental in determining how accurately Indigenous patients are counted.

Hospital staff may be reluctant to ask a patient whether they are Indigenous, because they may harbour a belief Indigenous people get preferential treatment, or may fear provoking an angry response from patients.

When hospital staff harbour negative attitudes about collecting Indigenous status or feel reluctant to ask, they may make assumptions; they may assign Indigenous status based on physical appearance or name alone.

Other countries, such as the United States and Canada, also have issues collecting information about race and ethnicity.

Ethnicity data for First Nations peoples in Alaska and the rest of the US was said to be “very problematic” and the validity of ethnicity information was related to the way it was collected. Data collection was inconsistent and often inaccurate.

Differing levels of care

Indigenous people are reluctant to identify for many reasons, including:

• uncertainty around having to prove they are Indigenous (even though it’s not a requirement to prove their Aboriginality)
• mistrust
• previous negative experiences
• concerns about confidentiality or clinical and cultural stereotyping.

It’s no wonder some are concerned about receiving different treatment.

AIHW reports that Indigenous Australians have, in general, longer waiting times than other Australians for many surgical procedures.

After acute coronary syndrome (heart attack), Indigenous Australians receive, on average, fewer diagnostic investigations and procedures compared with non-Indigenous patients with the same condition.

Indigenous patients have, on average, higher death rates for cardiovascular disease after leaving hospital compared with non-Indigenous patients.

It’s not uncommon to hear rhetoric suggesting this lower standard of care is somehow the fault of the Indigenous patient; that poorer outcomes can be put down to incomplete health records, lower levels of education, or competing personal and family demands. Cultural misunderstandings, transport issues, financial constraints or “being more mobile” are also sometimes used to excuse poor health-care delivery.

These excuses reinforce the dominant cultural viewpoint in Australia about Indigenous people to explain away systemic shortcomings that reinforce and perpetuate racism.

Geographical access is not the cause, as only 12% of the Indigenous population live in very remote areas. Most Indigenous people live in cities and urbanised areas with well-equipped local hospitals.

Hospital staff (both clinical and administrative) reflect the attitudes and beliefs of their own community. But we assume and expect them to park unconscious biases and personal prejudices at the door when they start work.

My study into cardiac care for a cohort of Indigenous patients found racism influenced the patient journey of Indigenous people within mainstream hospital and health services.

Racism is, as Beyond Blue says in its campaign, the invisible discriminator.

In 2017, the federal government’s National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards implemented six specific actions aimed to meet the needs of Indigenous patients.

Central to these actions is the idea that care should be culturally safe and identification of Indigenous status should be improved.

However, we are yet to see meaningful progress.

It’s important to collect and report data on Indigenous status among hospital and health-care patients. But we must make sure it is done in a way that is respectful and clinicians take more responsibility in collecting and reporting Indigenous status. Indigenous status must be used to inform a higher quality of care for Indigenous patients first, then used to report on Closing the Gap targets.

Clinicians must be better trained to prevent conscious and unconscious bias creeping into their work practices. We need to combat racism in the health-care sector, and we’re not going to achieve that while Indigenous status remains just another box-ticking exercise.

Read more: We have 16 new Closing the Gap targets. Will governments now do what’s needed to meet them?

– ref. Yes, we need to Close the Gap on health. But many patients won’t tell hospitals they’re Indigenous for fear of poorer care – https://theconversation.com/yes-we-need-to-close-the-gap-on-health-but-many-patients-wont-tell-hospitals-theyre-indigenous-for-fear-of-poorer-care-143678

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Siouxsie Wiles, Associate Professor in Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, University of Auckland

The restrictions in place for metropolitan Melbourne now are in some ways stricter than those that were in force during New Zealand’s COVID-19 lockdown. A curfew is in place and most people have to wear masks when they leave their home – neither of which happened in New Zealand.

But the state of Victoria has lost valuable time to bring the outbreak under control. Stage 3 restrictions that came into force on July 8 for everyone living in metropolitan Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire provided too many opportunities for the virus to spread. As a result, there are now around 7,000 active cases, and still several hundred new cases each day. For more than 2,000 cases, contact tracers don’t yet know where people were exposed to the virus.

My major concern with Victoria’s approach is that cases outside Melbourne will continue to grow under stage 3 restrictions. The sad reality is that the more opportunities the virus has to spread from person to person, the harder it will be to stop community transmission.

Putting the entire state under stage 4 restrictions would give Victoria the best chance of success, rather than setting it up to play an endless game of COVID-19 whack-a-mole.

There is a major difference in how Australia and New Zealand approached COVID-19 when it first emerged. New Zealand decided on an elimination strategy, while Australia took the suppression path. It meant Australia could be looser with their earlier restrictions and relax them more quickly.

Read more: Takeaway coffee allowed, but no wandering through Bunnings: here’s why Melbourne’s new business restrictions will reduce cases

In March, New Zealanders entered an alert level 4 lockdown, aimed at stopping community transmission of the virus altogether. And it worked. In contrast, the goal of Australia’s suppression strategy was to lower community transmission to some manageable level.

Between early April and the middle of June, new case numbers in the state of Victoria were between one and 20 each day, including some cases of community transmission. But they began to rise again from the end of June.

How asking people to stick to their ‘bubble’ could help

During New Zealand’s alert level 4, our households became “bubbles”.

There were no funerals and we couldn’t get takeaways. Bakeries and butchers were closed. Construction was shut down unless the work was needed to make a building safe.

The bubble concept helped people to restrict their contact to those within a home or between households with shared care arrangements. It reinforced that any contact with people from another bubble would provide an opportunity for the virus to spread.

Even under Melbourne’s stage 4 lockdown rules, that message of choosing a bubble at the start of lockdown and trying hard to stick to it could be a helpful addition to Victoria’s health messaging.

While announcing the new business restrictions for Melbourne and regional Victoria yesterday, the Victorian premier Daniel Andrews was asked about how his lockdown rules compared to New Zealand – and he replied that “this is a uniquely Australian and Victorian approach”, adding:

If you look at what New Zealand did, they went a fair bit further than this.

And in many ways he’s right: while Melbourne has a curfew and compulsory mask wearing, it’s not closing as many non-essential businesses or restricting people’s movement for things like takeaways as strictly as New Zealand did in level 4 lockdown.

While Victoria and New Zealand have similar populations, no one should pretend that one country’s strategy is the perfect solution for another. Victoria today is at a very different stage to New Zealand a few months ago.

New Zealand went into lockdown with just 102 confirmed cases and no known deaths. Compare that to about 7,000 active cases for Victoria right now. That’s why I think it’s all the more important to make the stage 4 lockdown state-wide. Without it, Victoria runs a very high risk of having to do it all again in a few months’ time.

– ref. ‘An endless game of COVID-19 whack-a-mole’: a New Zealand expert on why Melbourne’s stage 4 lockdown should cover all of Victoria – https://theconversation.com/an-endless-game-of-covid-19-whack-a-mole-a-new-zealand-expert-on-why-melbournes-stage-4-lockdown-should-cover-all-of-victoria-143831

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julia Kindt, Professor, Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Sydney

In our series Art for Trying Times, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.

During the lockdown in Sydney, I turned to my shelf of well-loved books and found Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Browsing through it again, I realised that the situation in which the book’s narrator finds himself uncannily resembled my own: crash-landed in the middle of a desert, his plane’s motor broken, he had nowhere to go.

He was stuck – stuck in a place that seemingly provided little hope of surprise or wonder.

The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand, a thousand miles from any human habitation. I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean.

But little did he know! The next morning, a boy appears seemingly out of nowhere who claims to be a prince from a faraway planet.

His account of intergalactic travels takes the desert castaway to a number of places as strange as they are familiar: one planet inhabited by a king and nobody else, another by a conceited man, a third by a lamplighter, a fourth by a businessman, a fifth by a tippler and so on.

In Saint-Exupéry’s book, first published in French in 1941, the point is that all these individuals live in their own little worlds.

The king believes everybody arriving on his planet to be a subject. The conceited man considers each comer a potential admirer. The lamplighter turns the single streetlight on his little planet on and off, on and off, multiple times a day. The businessman counts all the stars he can see in the belief this will make them his own. The tippler drinks to forget that he feels guilty for drinking.

Even though they pursue different ends, there is a certain uniformity to these characters: in the uncompromising resoluteness with which they apply themselves to their tasks, they reduce and diminish their lives and worlds.

Read more: P.G. Wodehouse in a pandemic: wit and perfect prose to restore the soul

The lockdown cuts back the radius of our actions. Even though some of the frantic activity that defines our days continues online, it deprives us of many of our usual interactions. No more twice-daily commutes, no more school runs, no more rushing to social engagements, no more travel.

Rather than looking for adventure outside, in public and faraway places, lockdown involves taking a fresh look at things close to home. And this long hard look in the mirror can bring the realisation that our pre-pandemic lives resembled those of the king, the conceited man, the lamplighter, the businessman, and perhaps even the tippler in more ways than we are prepared to admit.

‘People where you live,’ the little prince said, ‘grow five thousand roses in one garden, … yet they don’t find what they are looking for.’

In some sense, and in addition to other central themes such as love, friendship and loss, The Little Prince is a story about looking: about how we see only what we are prepared to see; about the narrowness that can come with our perspectives, professional and otherwise; about the way grownups and children look at the world differently.

Read more: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the funniest, filthiest comfort TV around

Reassessing in moments of rupture

Moments of rupture, of crisis, and distress, when everything we took for granted suddenly seems up in the air, always also harbour an opportunity to take stock and to reassess. To look at our life and the lives of those around us from the point of view of an intergalactic traveller, or, indeed, a child.

‘Men,’ said the little prince, ‘set out on their way in express trains, but they do not know what they are looking for. Then they rush about, and get excited, and turn round and round…’

Back home in lockdown with my little daughter (aged seven), I was fortunate to have my own guide who took me to once familiar but long-forgotten places: listening to the sounds of the sea in an empty seashell; throwing paper planes down a cliff; blowing dandelion seeds; gazing at the stars at night. Our radius had shrunk considerably. And yet the world seemed rich and marvellous and full of wonder.

At one point in the book, the little prince explains to the castaway that real seeing is not even a physical activity but a matter of the heart.

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

What changes our world and our being in the world is that there are things, activities, and people we care for deeply; and we make them as special (for us) as they are. In Saint-Exupéry’s book it is a flower with four thorns back on his home planet, that the little prince misses and holds dear. But it could be anything, really …

Saint-Exupéry’s book ends with the little prince returning home and the narrator repairing his plane and returning to civilisation. And yet, he never looks at the world again with the same eyes.

The knowledge that somewhere up there among the myriad little planets there was one with a prince and his beloved flower, a sheep, and three volcanoes (one extinct) made all the difference.

And what about us? Will we too look at the world differently once this has passed? Or will we return to the routines and habits that defined our worlds before?

Ask yourselves: Is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes …

– ref. ‘The essential is invisible to the eye’: the wisdom of The Little Prince in lockdown – https://theconversation.com/the-essential-is-invisible-to-the-eye-the-wisdom-of-the-little-prince-in-lockdown-143095

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Hickie, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Sydney

As Victorians face yet another long period of enforced lockdown, serious concerns are being raised about people’s capacity to comply with the new orders and the mental health impacts of such prolonged social isolation.

The risks of being dispirited, chronically stressed and socially disconnected are real and substantial. While the behavioural consequences of “lockdown fatigue” are becoming more obvious, the questions to be answered from a mental health perspective are:

• who is most likely to be harmed by a longer, more stringent lockdown?

• what are the public policy responses that are most likely to deliver real benefits?

Job losses and social disconnection

On the first issue, Sydney University’s Brain and Mind Centre has produced both place-based models and a provisional national simulation model to estimate the possible size of the impact of the pandemic on mental health and suicide rates, as well as identifying those who are most likely to be affected.

Prior to the recent spike in cases in Victoria, our most conservative estimates were a 14% increase in overall suicide rates due to COVID-19 restrictions and the subsequent social dislocation and economic fall-out nationally.

We also estimated at least a 25% increase in suicide rates in rural and regional areas with pre-existing high levels of unemployment and educational disadvantage.

The real drivers of these substantive health risks are job losses, social disconnection and, for young people, the availability of support for ongoing education and training.

Read more: We need to flatten the ‘other’ coronavirus curve, our looming mental health crisis

Given the return to lockdown in Melbourne, we now expect to see much greater levels of uncertainty about job prospects — particularly in those industries like hospitality, tourism and the arts that were already devastated — as well as a more prolonged period of social disconnection.

For both of these factors, both the duration of the lockdown and the degree of uncertainty it generates really do matter.

What can government do to minimise harm to people?

Given the necessity to “act fast and go hard” to contain the spread of the virus, the harder question to answer is the second one: what can our political and social leaders do to minimise the impact on people’s mental health and well-being?

Top of the list is job certainty. Conceptually, JobKeeper is critical because it ties people to real workplaces, social contacts and their social identity.

However, in its initial application it missed many casual workers, women and young people. Each of these groups were massively affected by COVID-19 restrictions and are now facing even tougher long-term employment prospects.

Our model suggests JobKeeper, in its current or appropriately modified form, now needs to be in place until at least 2022. And our place-based approach suggests policy-makers need to think about how it can best function in Melbourne and surrounding districts.

From a social connection perspective, all governments need to get their public messaging on track. An over-emphasis on top-down, law-and-order directives has limited and short-term utility for achieving the required behaviour changes. Often, it has the reverse effect to that intended.

What is really required are public health messages that engage people to be community-minded and active in their local settings to support and care for each other in really testing times.

The diverse faces and voices of genuine and trusted community leaders, elders, celebrities, sporting identities and young people — not simply politicians — are critical. These have much greater impact on two key outcomes: promoting best public behaviour and providing the necessary person-to-person support we all require.

Importantly, from a public mental health and health services perspective, any substantive actions rely heavily on close cooperation between the federal and Victorian governments. We cannot risk a retreat to the finger-pointing we saw during the Ruby Princess and quarantine hotel failures, and are now starting to see in the COVID-19 aged care crisis.

As indicated by the recent Victorian royal commission and the Productivity Commission report on mental health, both levels of government are responsible for the current deficiencies in our public mental health systems.

How to send the right message

From a public messaging perspective, people experiencing mental distress are being encouraged to use mental health hotlines or seek help from their family doctor or other mental health practitioners.

While these may seem to be straightforward and sensible messages, we have shown that simply increasing awareness without expanding the actual capacity of an already thinly stretched (if not broken) care system can have more negative outcomes.

What is really required are two clear actions. One is public messaging about supporting each other, and those who are distressed, within our families, workplaces, communities and churches throughout this period. The other is rapid action to fix key elements of the mental health system.

Read more: Is your mental health deteriorating during the coronavirus pandemic? Here’s what to look out for

As demonstrated by Health Minister Greg Hunt’s actions in the early phases of the pandemic, it is possible to mobilise simultaneously both our private and public health services to respond to a national emergency.

That is now urgently required for mental health. We need to use our private health capacity to help public hospital emergency departments, and other acute care services, meet the increasing need for mental health services.

For instance, we could immediately make use of private hospital beds and clinics for those who have attempted suicide or are in need of urgent care, but who do not require admission to a public psychiatry unit.

Read more: Predicting the pandemic’s psychological toll: why suicide modelling is so difficult

While this need will soon likely become acutely obvious in Melbourne, we have already seen evidence in national surveys, and other state systems, of the escalating demand for these types of mental health services.

This has been most obvious for young people, who often do not easily connect with general practice doctors and typically present for care in a crisis situation.

Amid the chronic uncertainty that is now emblematic of the COVID-19 pandemic — often confusing government responses and the long-term economic and social impacts of the crisis — it is now time we respond to this looming mental health crisis cohesively, collectively and intelligently.

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

– ref. As ‘lockdown fatigue’ sets in, the toll on mental health will require an urgent response – https://theconversation.com/as-lockdown-fatigue-sets-in-the-toll-on-mental-health-will-require-an-urgent-response-143817

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Hickie, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Sydney

As Victorians face yet another long period of enforced lockdown, serious concerns are being raised about people’s capacity to comply with the new orders and the mental health impacts of such prolonged social isolation.

The risks of being dispirited, chronically stressed and socially disconnected are real and substantial. While the behavioural consequences of “lockdown fatigue” are becoming more obvious, the questions to be answered from a mental health perspective are:

• who is most likely to be harmed by a longer, more stringent lockdown?

• what are the public policy responses that are most likely to deliver real benefits?

Job losses and social disconnection

On the first issue, Sydney University’s Brain and Mind Centre has produced both place-based models and a provisional national simulation model to estimate the possible size of the impact of the pandemic on mental health and suicide rates, as well as identifying those who are most likely to be affected.

Prior to the recent spike in cases in Victoria, our most conservative estimates were a 14% increase in overall suicide rates due to COVID-19 restrictions and the subsequent social dislocation and economic fall-out nationally.

We also estimated at least a 25% increase in suicide rates in rural and regional areas with pre-existing high levels of unemployment and educational disadvantage.

The real drivers of these substantive health risks are job losses, social disconnection and, for young people, the availability of support for ongoing education and training.

Read more: We need to flatten the ‘other’ coronavirus curve, our looming mental health crisis

Given the return to lockdown in Melbourne, we now expect to see much greater levels of uncertainty about job prospects — particularly in those industries like hospitality, tourism and the arts that were already devastated — as well as a more prolonged period of social disconnection.

For both of these factors, both the duration of the lockdown and the degree of uncertainty it generates really do matter.

What can government do to minimise harm to people?

Given the necessity to “act fast and go hard” to contain the spread of the virus, the harder question to answer is the second one: what can our political and social leaders do to minimise the impact on people’s mental health and well-being?

Top of the list is job certainty. Conceptually, JobKeeper is critical because it ties people to real workplaces, social contacts and their social identity.

However, in its initial application it missed many casual workers, women and young people. Each of these groups were massively affected by COVID-19 restrictions and are now facing even tougher long-term employment prospects.

Our model suggests JobKeeper, in its current or appropriately modified form, now needs to be in place until at least 2022. And our place-based approach suggests policy-makers need to think about how it can best function in Melbourne and surrounding districts.

From a social connection perspective, all governments need to get their public messaging on track. An over-emphasis on top-down, law-and-order directives has limited and short-term utility for achieving the required behaviour changes. Often, it has the reverse effect to that intended.

What is really required are public health messages that engage people to be community-minded and active in their local settings to support and care for each other in really testing times.

The diverse faces and voices of genuine and trusted community leaders, elders, celebrities, sporting identities and young people — not simply politicians — are critical. These have much greater impact on two key outcomes: promoting best public behaviour and providing the necessary person-to-person support we all require.

Importantly, from a public mental health and health services perspective, any substantive actions rely heavily on close cooperation between the federal and Victorian governments. We cannot risk a retreat to the finger-pointing we saw during the Ruby Princess and quarantine hotel failures, and are now starting to see in the COVID-19 aged care crisis.

As indicated by the recent Victorian royal commission and the Productivity Commission report on mental health, both levels of government are responsible for the current deficiencies in our public mental health systems.

How to send the right message

From a public messaging perspective, people experiencing mental distress are being encouraged to use mental health hotlines or seek help from their family doctor or other mental health practitioners.

While these may seem to be straightforward and sensible messages, we have shown that simply increasing awareness without expanding the actual capacity of an already thinly stretched (if not broken) care system can have more negative outcomes.

What is really required are two clear actions. One is public messaging about supporting each other, and those who are distressed, within our families, workplaces, communities and churches throughout this period. The other is rapid action to fix key elements of the mental health system.

Read more: Is your mental health deteriorating during the coronavirus pandemic? Here’s what to look out for

As demonstrated by Health Minister Greg Hunt’s actions in the early phases of the pandemic, it is possible to mobilise simultaneously both our private and public health services to respond to a national emergency.

That is now urgently required for mental health. We need to use our private health capacity to help public hospital emergency departments, and other acute care services, meet the increasing need for mental health services.

For instance, we could immediately make use of private hospital beds and clinics for those who have attempted suicide or are in need of urgent care, but who do not require admission to a public psychiatry unit.

Read more: Predicting the pandemic’s psychological toll: why suicide modelling is so difficult

While this need will soon likely become acutely obvious in Melbourne, we have already seen evidence in national surveys, and other state systems, of the escalating demand for these types of mental health services.

This has been most obvious for young people, who often do not easily connect with general practice doctors and typically present for care in a crisis situation.

Amid the chronic uncertainty that is now emblematic of the COVID-19 pandemic — often confusing government responses and the long-term economic and social impacts of the crisis — it is now time we respond to this looming mental health crisis cohesively, collectively and intelligently.

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

– ref. As ‘lockdown fatigue’ sets in, the toll on mental health will require an urgent mental health response – https://theconversation.com/as-lockdown-fatigue-sets-in-the-toll-on-mental-health-will-require-an-urgent-mental-health-response-143817

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alicia Dennis, Associate Professor MBBS, PhD, MPH, PGDipEcho, FANZCA, University of Melbourne

In Victoria, more than 1,100 health-care workers have now been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Some 11% of active cases are workers in the health-care sector.

Health-care workers are reported to be among those fighting for life in Victorian intensive care units.

While we don’t know what proportion of the Victorian health-care workers currently infected with COVID-19 acquired it at work rather than in the community, it’s almost certain a portion of these infections were contracted in the workplace.

Early experience from China found the proportion of health-care workers who contract COVID-19 can be up to 29% in settings with inadequate personal protective equipment, or PPE.

Lessons from China also show workplace transmission of SARS-CoV-2 can be reduced to negligible numbers with sufficient supply, and correct use of, airborne precaution PPE.

Right now, Australia is sitting somewhere in the middle. National guidance needs to be urgently updated to reflect safest practice and acknowledge what we’re learning about the airborne spread of the virus.

Read more: Supplies needed for coronavirus healthcare workers: 89 million masks, 30 million gowns, 2.9 million litres of hand sanitiser. A month.

What is PPE?

PPE is a crucial part of controlling exposure to hazards in all workplaces.

It includes items such as masks, respirators, face shields, gowns and gloves.

PPE is categorised into three tiers, corresponding to the type of hazard.

Level 1: standard and contact precaution PPE

This PPE limits exposure to standard contact hazards. Examples include face coverings and administrative controls such as hand hygiene, cough etiquette and physical distancing.

Level 2: droplet precaution PPE

This PPE prevents exposure to contact and droplet hazards. Examples include surgical masks, eye shields or goggles, long-sleeved gowns, and gloves.

Level 3: airborne precaution PPE

This PPE aims to prevent exposure to contact, droplet and airborne hazards. It includes N95/P2 respirators or powered air-purifying respirators with a P2 filter, eye shields or goggles, fluid-resistant gowns, double gloves, disposable head and neck wear, and protective footwear.

Current Australian guidelines

The national guidance on the use of PPE in hospitals during the COVID-19 outbreak has been written by the Infection Control Expert Group and endorsed by the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee.

The guidance doesn’t recommend universal airborne precaution PPE for health-care workers dealing with patients suspected or confirmed to have COVID-19. It only recommends level 3 protection for highly specialised procedures such as intubating a patient.

Read more: Is the airborne route a major source of coronavirus transmission?

A preprint in the Medical Journal of Australia has criticised the current guidance, noting it’s not aligned with increasing scientific evidence regarding airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and is therefore inadequate to protect health-care workers.

Inadequate national guidance has led to an inconsistent and non-standardised approach to airborne precaution PPE across all health-care settings.

In the absence of strong national safety guidance, some hospitals and jurisdictions are making independent improved safety recommendations to their staff.

Why we need level 3

Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 occurs by direct contact with droplets and contaminated surfaces — but emerging data suggests it can also be spread by the airborne route.

An analysis of health-care worker deaths in the United Kingdom found none among wearers of level 3 PPE, suggesting airborne precaution PPE was protective.

Importantly, surgical masks are primarily designed to protect the environment from the wearer. They’re not designed to protect the wearer from respiratory pathogens.

A recent review found N95 respirators offered significantly better protection against viruses including COVID-19 than surgical face masks, while one study found N95 respirators provided 8-12 times more protection than surgical masks against small viral particles.

Read more: Rising coronavirus cases among Victorian health workers could threaten our pandemic response

In Australia, N95 is synonymous with P2 respiratory protection and refers to the filtration efficiency (so N95 means 95% of particles are filtered). But it’s the total inward leakage — what goes through and around the facemask — that’s the critical factor in determining the level of protection the wearer achieves.

To ensure total inward leakage is minimised, respiratory masks used under level 3 PPE must meet certain standards, including fit testing and the training of wearers in their use.

We need immediate action

SARS-CoV-2 is a highly contagious virus with the potential to cause significant ill health and death. In health-care settings, it should be classified as a lethal biohazard and managed accordingly.

The safest approach is to consider all people with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 in hospital, being transported to hospital or being tested for COVID-19 as being able to spread the virus via the airborne route. As such, the use of airborne precaution PPE with a correctly fitted N95/P2 respirator is essential.

Read more: Health-care workers share our trauma during the coronavirus pandemic – on top of their own

There’s also an urgent need for a national registry of health-care worker infections, containing data about the category of health-care worker, where the infection was acquired, severity of disease, hospitalisation, intensive care and death numbers.

This will give us a better understanding of the scope and specifics of the problem, and inform policy and prevention strategies.

Finally, adequate supply of airborne precaution PPE must be available throughout Australia to protect health-care workers from COVID-19.

– ref. PPE unmasked: why health-care workers in Australia are inadequately protected against coronavirus – https://theconversation.com/ppe-unmasked-why-health-care-workers-in-australia-are-inadequately-protected-against-coronavirus-143751

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthea Batsakis, Deputy Editor: Environment + Energy, The Conversation

Weaving creative, heartfelt or even risqué words into the formal Latin names for new species has long been common in taxonomy — the science of classifying flora and fauna.

An 18th century botanist, for example, named a genus of flower “Clitoria” after the human clitoris, and some scientists have named species after celebrities, or their loved ones.

In any case, naming a species is the first step to understanding and protecting our precious biodiversity. Only 30% of the world’s species have been named and many are lost to climate change, deforestation and introduction of invasive species before ever being known to science.

Here, five experts tell the stories behind species they’ve named or researched, from a Hugh Jackman-esque spider to a tiny crustacean named for the researcher’s partner’s swimming prowess.

Wolverine (Wolf) spider, Tasmanicosa hughjackmani

Volker Framenau

This wolf spider species honours the Australian actor Hugh Jackman, who played Wolverine in the X-Men film series. I named the spider in 2016 after Jackman’s extraordinary artistic skills, and for his numerous philanthropic activities.

Of course, wolf spiders are much more remarkable than wolverines. For example, if you hold a torch or spotlight near your head, their sparkling green eyes reflect back into yours.

They can orientate using polarised light, even in the absence of direct sunshine or moonlight. This allows spiders to position themselves along coastal or riverbank environments, without needing a direct view to water.

The wolverine spider can also “fly” using gossamer threads (their spider silk) to catch the wind. They also use multimodal (visual, chemical, percussive) communication. Their mothers carry their eggs and subsequently often hundreds of young on their back, and they can live without food for more than a year.

Read more: It’s funny to name species after celebrities, but there’s a serious side too

Butterfly pea, Clitoria ternatea

Michelle Colgrave

The genus name Clitoria, is taken from Latin, meaning “from a human female genital clitoris”. And if you look at the distinctive shape of the flower, you may be able to see why.

I’ve researched species within this genus, such as Clitoria ternatea, but it was 18th century Swedish botanist Carl von Linne (or Carolus Linnaeus) who named it. Linnaeus is credited with formalising “binomial nomenclature”, the way we name species today. And he was largely responsible for several rather ribald names, including orchids, named Orchis from the Greek word for “testicle”.

Read more: Oh, oh, oh! The clitoris certainly gives pleasure. But does it also help women conceive?

Clitoria ternatea, or the butterfly pea, is a legume originating in Africa, but is now widespread through much of Asia and tropical regions in Australia. It was used in a variety of indigenous medicines throughout Asia ascribed with a range of activities, including anecdotal evidence of their use as an aphrodisiac.

Clitoria ternatea has found numerous uses in Australia as a forage crop for grazing or for soil remediation. It is popular in horticulture for its bright blue flowers, and is revered in India as a holy flower. It’s also widely used in food and beverages — from rice to tea to cocktails and liqueurs.

More recently, it has been found to offer protection from insect pests, and has been commercialised as Sero-X, an eco-friendly insecticide.

If this sparks your interest, then you might also be interested in Nepenthes species or Amorphophallus titanum!

The Beyoncé fly, Plinthina beyonceae

Bryan Lessard

Naming a species after a celebrity is a creative way to draw attention to a particular creature and taxonomy.

The first species I ever named was a golden horse fly from the Atherton Tableland in Queensland. It was originally collected in 1982, but there were no horse fly experts in the country to identify it, so it was archived in Australian natural history collections for 30 years.

Then, during my PhD in 2012, I immediately recognised it as a new species, and named it after Beyoncé since I was listening to a lot of her music while examining the species under the microscope. The specimens were even collected in the same year she was born!

Plinthina beyonceae, its official name, sparked a global discussion on the importance of flies. And scientists are just starting to realise how important the Beyoncé fly and other horse flies are at pollinating some of our iconic native plants including eucalypts, tea trees and grevilleas.

Since the Beyoncé fly, our team at CSIRO has been more imaginative in naming species. Our PhD student Xuankun Li recently named a species of a winter-loving bee fly with crown of thorn-like spines after the Night King from Game of Thrones. And just last week our undergraduate student Isabella Robinson named a heroic group of assassin flies after Deadpool and other Marvel characters.

Mogurnda mosa

Aaron Jenkins

I’ve been fortunate enough to discover, describe, and name several species new to Western science, including 11 new species of fishes. While many of these critters have legitimately avoided recognition in any language, several have long been known and named by local indigenous people.

So, to say I “discovered” and “named” them is blatantly untrue and pongs of colonial misappropriation of traditional knowledge.

About 20 years ago I was the first person to SCUBA dive in Lake Kutubu — an exceptionally clear, high altitude lake in Southern Highlands in Papua New Guinea. As part of this marvellous experience I found several species of fishes new to Western science. One of which was a preferred food fish for the local Foe people, named “mosa” in Foe tokples (local language in Melanesian Pidgin).

In recognition of the tokples name of this species, I simply provided mosa as the species name in my scientific description. This new species is now named Mogurnda mosa in Western science, combining “Mogurnda”, which is an Aboriginal name used in Australia, and the tokples name “mosa”.

This fish is a true indigenous species of Oceania, named to honour the original names of the traditional custodians. But oil and gas drilling around the lake significantly threatens the entire known, critically endangered population. Additional threats include invasive species.

Moody’s swamp amphipod, Kartachiltonia moodyi

Rachael King

Finding tiny crustaceans in unusual places is one of the best parts of my work as a research scientist. I’ve trawled the deep-sea floor on big oceanographic vessels, fished down bore holes in arid deserts, and dug in swamps, seeps and springs in the outback — all in an effort to find new species.

In 2009 my colleague and I travelled to Kangaroo Island and collected specimens from a new site to us — a spring-fed swamp near Rocky River. The specimens ended up being a new genus and species of amphipod, which we called Kartachiltonia moodyi.

The name breaks down roughly as “Karta” for the local Indigenous name of Kangaroo Island, and “chiltonia” for the family (Chiltoniidae) it belongs to.

The last part to the species name was named after my partner, whose last name is Moody. This animal basically has a whole extra set of gills that no other Australian chiltoniid amphipods had — and my partner was a good competitive swimmer in his youth. It made perfect sense to me (Phar Lap had a bigger heart, right?!).

He’s quite happy to have a species named for him, and also happy any similarities weren’t based on something like a giant head or weirdly shaped feet (neither of which he, or the amphipod, has).

And with the recent bushfires roaring through this swamp area on Kangaroo Island, we have been on tenterhooks to see if the species managed to survive. This week we’ve managed to get some samples from nearby, and it’s looking good, but I won’t know for sure until I get them under a microscope.

Read more: Click through the tragic stories of 119 species still struggling after Black Summer in this interactive (and how to help)

– ref. From superheroes to the clitoris: 5 scientists tell the stories behind these species names – https://theconversation.com/from-superheroes-to-the-clitoris-5-scientists-tell-the-stories-behind-these-species-names-142922

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Vargo, Research Fellow in the Antarctic Research Centre, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

Glaciers around the world are melting — and for the first time, we can now directly attribute annual ice loss to climate change.

We analysed two years in which glaciers in New Zealand melted the most in at least four decades: 2011 and 2018. Both years were characterised by warmer than average temperatures of the air and the surface of the ocean, especially during summer.

Our research, published today, shows climate change made the glacial melt that happened during the summer of 2018 at least ten times more likely.

As the Earth continues to warm, we expect an even stronger human fingerprint on extreme glacier mass loss in the coming decades.

Read more: A bird’s eye view of New Zealand’s changing glaciers

Extreme glacier melt

During the 2018 summer, the Tasman Sea marine heatwave resulted in the warmest sea surface temperatures around New Zealand on record — up to 2℃ above average.

Research shows these record sea surface temperatures were almost certainly due to the influence of climate change.

The results of our work show climate change made the high melt in 2011 at least six times more likely, and in 2018, it was at least ten times more likely.

These likelihoods are changing because global average temperatures, including in New Zealand, are now about 1°C above pre-industrial levels, confirming a connection between greenhouse gas emissions and high annual ice loss.

Changing New Zealand glaciers

We use several methods to track changes in New Zealand glaciers.

First, the end-of-summer snowline survey began in 1977. It involves taking photographs of over 50 glaciers in the Southern Alps every March.

From these images, we calculate the snowline elevation (the lowest elevation of snow on the glacier) to determine the glacier’s health. The less snow there is left on a glacier at the end of summer, the more ice the glacier has lost.

The second method is our annual measurement of a glacier’s mass balance — the total gain or loss of ice from a glacier over a year. These measurements require trips to the glacier each year to measure snow accumulation, and snow and ice melt. Mass balance is measured for only two glaciers in the Southern Alps, Brewster Glacier (since 2005) and Rolleston Glacier (since 2010).

Both methods show New Zealand glaciers lost more ice in 2011 and 2018 than during earlier years since the start of the snowline surveys in 1977.

Images taken during the end-of-summer snowline survey show how the amount of white snow at high elevations on Brewster Glacier decreases over time, compared to darker, bluer ice at lower elevations.

Read more: Why long-term environmental observations are crucial for New Zealand’s water security challenges

Attributing extreme melt

Earlier research has quantified the human influence on extreme climate events such as heatwaves, extreme rainfall and droughts. We combined the established method of calculating the impact of climate change on extreme events with models of glacier mass balance. In this way, we could determine whether or not climate change has influenced extreme glacier melt.

This is the first study to attribute annual glacier melt to climate change, and only the second to directly link glacier melt to climate change. With multiple studies in agreement, we can be more confident there is a link between human activity and glacier melt.

This confidence is especially important for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, which use findings like ours to inform policymakers.

Recent research shows New Zealand glaciers will lose about 80% of area and volume between 2015 and the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at current rates. Glaciers in New Zealand are important for tourism, alpine sports and as a water resource.

Glacial retreat is accelerating globally, especially in the past decade. Research shows by 2090, the water runoff from glaciers will decrease by up to 10% in regions including central Asia and the Andes, raising major concerns over the sustainability of water resources where they are already limited.

The next step in our work is to calculate the influence of climate change on extreme melt for glaciers around the world. Ultimately, we hope this will contribute to evidence-based decisions on climate policy and convince people to take stronger action to curb climate change.

– ref. How climate change made the melting of New Zealand’s glaciers ten times more likely – https://theconversation.com/how-climate-change-made-the-melting-of-new-zealands-glaciers-ten-times-more-likely-143626

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Phillips, Associate Professor in Education, James Cook University

All Victorian school students will be learning remotely from Wednesday. Prior to the state’s premier Daniel Andrews announcing a tightening of restrictions over the weekend, only students in prep to Year 10 in Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire were learning from home.

But on Wednesday, schools will close for Year 11 and 12 students in Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire, as well as every student across Victoria — except for students in special schools and children of essential workers.

Like with the last remote learning period in Australia, the current uncertainty in Victoria might cause disarray and stress among teachers, parents and students.

Read more: Students in Melbourne will go back to remote schooling. Here’s what we learnt last time and how to make it better

In response to the closures in April, with seven other researchers across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the US, we designed a survey that asked teachers 16 open-ended questions about how COVID-19 affected them and their students.

The teachers ranged from early childhood education through to school and university. We also included other educators, such as at museums.

The survey opened on May 4, 2020 while most countries in the survey engaged in home-based learning. There have been 621 responses to date. Of these, 179 are from Australian teachers, with 65% having over 21 years teaching experience, from which this article reports.

Our survey gained rich responses about the sudden closure of schools, transition to online learning, and the difficulties of negotiating social-distancing and increased hygiene maintenance.

Relentless workload

When asked, “How has COVID-19 impacted your teaching and learning?”, responses most commonly referred to technical issues, then the pragmatics of teaching and workload.

Overwhelmingly, teachers from early childhood to higher education experienced a significant increase in their workload. One teacher said the sudden change to online learning created “endless paperwork and programming issues” and “has been relentless”.

Another said

It’s definitely added significantly to my workload and taken the holiday time that would normally provide some respite, meaning I am closer to burnout than ever.

Social distancing requirements also increased teachers’ workload, creating “lots of additional cleaning requirements and having to collect children from the carpark as families are not allowed to enter”.

One teacher said

It is draining. Exhausting. Time consuming. The work never stops.

‘I don’t want to teach anymore’

The impact on the mental and physical health of teachers was the next most frequently expressed — after the technical, pragmatic and workload issues.

One teacher told us:

I struggle to sleep at night for thinking about work all the time. I’m very stressed and anxious; my physical health has been impacted.

Another said:

It has challenged everything I enjoy about teaching.

And another wrote:

All the teachers I work with are EXHAUSTED beyond measure.

Teachers said a lack of voice and agency in decision making made them feel “unmotivated” or “unvalued”.

(we) may have felt more supported had we been consulted and listened to by management and government.

One teacher wrote:

In the beginning, I felt I could have dropped dead at home and my workplace wouldn’t even notice.

Another said:

Going through this, not feeling safe, and then seeing teachers belittled in the media, has made me come to the realisation that I don’t want to teach anymore.

‘It was a scramble’

When asked, “What are the issues you are struggling with and need support with?” some teachers mentioned the management and decision-making concerning school closures.

The word cloud below shows the most frequent words in response to the question.

One teacher said:

Our school closed down at the end of term one. It was a scramble and our management made some decisions which made life harder for teachers.

One early childhood and childcare teacher said:

The government has largely ignored the realities of EC [early childhood] environments, the impossibility of social distancing with children under five, and the fact we have high exposure to bodily fluids.

But the most frequently mentioned struggle for teachers in Australia was maintaining quality in pedagogy and curriculum delivery. Teachers are worried the quality of education might be compromised during this uncertain time.

One teacher said:

We are in social repair time. And you know what — no one cares what we are doing in our rooms — just get through ‘til term’s end.

The teachers named student disengagement, uncompleted work and the disparity of access to online materials as the key challenges to quality.

Read more: ‘We had no sanitiser, no soap and minimal toilet paper’: here’s how teachers feel about going back to the classroom

The second most frequent struggle was insufficient time to attend to teaching and learning demands. Many reported working 60% to three times more hours than they were contracted and paid. The sudden shift to online required teachers to self manage production and delivery of online teaching and learning materials, without adequate training and resourcing.

In the longer term, this sudden change in education may lead us to think of innovation in the area. But for now, teachers, schools and students are just trying to survive, and they need all the resources necessary to make it through this year — and beyond.

– ref. ‘Exhausted beyond measure’: what teachers are saying about COVID-19 and the disruption to education – https://theconversation.com/exhausted-beyond-measure-what-teachers-are-saying-about-covid-19-and-the-disruption-to-education-143601

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Power, Senior Research Fellow, Geography and Urban Studies, Western Sydney University

Older women renters are struggling in an insecure and unaffordable rental housing market. A combination of high rents and low incomes leaves many living in substandard housing and unable to afford necessities like food and energy bills.

My research shows rent increases further stress household budgets, and evictions magnify these risks. COVID-19 makes the need for reform even more urgent. Secure housing is the first line of community defence against the pandemic.

Read more: 400,000 women over 45 are at risk of homelessness in Australia

Unaffordable, substandard rentals

Rental stress occurs when households spend more than 30% of their income on rent. On average, low-income households spend “almost 40% of their disposable income on rent”.

Many households experience relatively short periods of rental stress. However, older low-income renters have very limited options.

In a report released today, single older women living on low incomes describe to me how high and rising rents left them struggling to meet day-to-day costs. Many paid rent before they bought food or paid power bills because the alternative was eviction. This is why the Productivity Commission describes rental affordability as a “driver of disadvantage” for low-income households.

Read more: Growing numbers of renters are trapped for years in homes they can’t afford

For example, a rent increase left Tracey, a participant in my research, with only $30 after other essential costs were covered. She described her efforts to survive as “like my job. I’d go to one [charity] where they had the food cupboard and fresh produce” and to another where she could get a monthly food voucher. This experience was common.

To reduce their rental costs women often lived in substandard housing. For example, Michelle moved house seven times to find more affordable housing. She described her most recent house:

Gaps around all the windows and all the doors where literally, when it was windy, the curtain would blow and the wooden shutters, the wooden blinds, would actually blow.

While the rent was affordable, the cost for the house “rose astronomically” due to the need to use a heater throughout winter. Another participant, Toni, bought heavy curtains to try to block out the cold in her rental and, in an extreme example, clad the outside of two properties with tarpaulins to reduce draughts.

Rental insecurity

Older women also lived with high levels of rental insecurity. Private renters move more often than people in other housing tenures.

Most older Australians wish to age in place in a familiar home and community. This is not an option for many older renters.

Read more: For Australians to have the choice of growing old at home, here is what needs to change

Older renters face a higher risk of eviction. Landlord decisions to repurpose housing or increase rents can trigger involuntary moves. These are recognised drivers of first-time homelessness in older age.

For low-income older renters moving house drives financial risks. Moving house can be expensive. Costs include bond (typically four weeks’ rent, paid in advance), disconnection and reconnection of utilities, and removalists or vehicle hire.

As Gwen explained, “It’s all a cost factor.” For women living on already stretched budgets the risks are magnified.

Many women borrowed money to cover moving costs. This left them in debt that, as Gail explained, could take “months” to recover from.

Most downsized their possessions to make moving house cheaper and more manageable. Jenny explained:

You’ve got no choice. You’re parting with things that – well everything you’ve got together are part of your belongings and part of who you are and who you’ve established yourself to be. […] It’s part of your home.

Michelle drew parallels with the experiences of people “whose house caught fire or who’d had a flood” – only she was able to make choices about what to keep and what to give away.

The emotional costs were immense. Women described the stress and disappointment of forced relocations. Jenny explained the need to emotionally detach from her house:

And once you know you’re moving, all of a sudden that house is no longer your home. You get to the point of saying, okay, this house isn’t mine – it’s only a house where I’m living at the moment.

Relocating, Alice explained:

[…] means rifling through my paltry possessions fairly often and that I find upsets me a bit. […] uprooting, no matter how small a plant you are, is a trauma.

I report on these experiences of having to move house in further detail in a just-released research paper.

Read more: What sort of housing do older Australians want and where do they want to live?

It is time for reform

Our federal government needs to permanently raise the JobSeeker payment and act on housing affordability to give low-income renters a fighting chance.

At a state level, it is time to end “no grounds” evictions. “With cause” measures, as recently introduced in Victoria, better balance tenants’ needs for housing security with the rights of landlords to repurpose properties when required.

We also need quantified minimum rental housing standards. New Zealand’s Healthy Homes standards can be a model for us. These standards ensure only properties that are healthy and sound go to market.

Read more: Chilly house? Mouldy rooms? Here’s how to improve low-income renters’ access to decent housing

The number of older Australians who rent is projected to increase over the next decade as home ownership levels decline. The stories of older women in the private rental sector are a warning about the risks that declining housing affordability and rental insecurity pose to this growing group. They are the “canary in the coalmine” for Australia’s housing system.

– ref. ‘Uprooting, no matter how small a plant you are, is a trauma’: older women renters are struggling – https://theconversation.com/uprooting-no-matter-how-small-a-plant-you-are-is-a-trauma-older-women-renters-are-struggling-142907

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Debbie Faulkner, Senior Research Fellow, UniSA Business, University of South Australia

Older women have been recognised as the fastest-growing group of homeless people in Australia in recent years. Yet until now we have not known exactly how many older women are at risk of homelessness. Our research, released today, finds about 240,000 women aged 55 or older and another 165,000 women aged 45-54 are at risk of homelessness.

The startling data from our research give us a much better picture of the scale of the problem. We also quantify the impacts of the various factors that may increase women’s risk of becoming homeless.

Read more: ‘Uprooting, no matter how small a plant you are, is a trauma’: older women renters are struggling

Effective policy is grounded in quantifying the nature and complexity of issues. To date, a limited but growing number of studies have highlighted the experiences of older women who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. But few studies quantified the numbers at risk and the factors that increase the risk.

What puts women at risk?

Older people are generally considered to be at less risk of homelessness because of their higher rates of home ownership. But increasingly unaffordable housing has added to concerns about the circumstances and living situations of older people who do not own homes, have limited wealth and savings and do not have the benefit of living in social housing. These households rely on the private rental market and are at considerable risk of housing affordability stress and hence homelessness.

Read more: Older and poorer: Retirement Income Review can’t ignore the changing role of home

To examine risk profiles, we constructed an empirical model of risk of homelessness since the 2007-09 Global Financial Crisis using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. The modelling included people who hold a mortgage or pay rent in private or public housing and are aged 45 or older.

This work found older women are more likely to be at risk of homelessness if they have one or more of the following characteristics:

• have been at risk before

• are not employed full-time

• are an immigrant from a non-English-speaking country

• are in private rental housing

• would have difficulty raising emergency funds

• are Indigenous

• are a lone-person household

• are a lone parent (but little evidence for those never married).

We estimated these profiles using a statistical model to analyse the relationship between homelessness risk and the characteristics of interest. We controlled for other characteristics that are likely to influence the risk of becoming homeless but which were not the focus of the study.

Risk factors compound each other

Multiple factors compound the risk of being homeless. While noting sampling limitations (small samples in subgroups of the data and annual volatility), the HILDA data for the post-GFC period suggest:

• for women aged 55-64 in a private rental, about 28% are likely to be at risk

• for women who are also not employed full-time the percentage at risk increases to about 34%

• for those who are also a lone parent the risk rises to over 65%

• the risk increases to over 85% if, in addition, they have experienced at least one prior occurrence of being at risk.

Clearly, a person’s propensity to be at risk of homelessness is cumulative over time.

Read more: More and more older Australians will be homeless unless we act now

Why the numbers at risk will grow

Our estimates of the numbers of people at risk are accurate to within plus or minus 10%. Based on Australian Bureau of Statistics population projections, it is clear that, without changes to policy, these numbers are likely to increase due to one important factor. The model shows a lone-person household is a dominant factor in increasing the likely risk of homelessness.

Lone-person households are expected to comprise 24-27% of all households by 2041. This equates to between 3.0 and 3.5 million Australians (of all ages). Female lone-person households are projected to increase by between 27.6% and 58.8% (ABS 2019b).

Australia has made little policy progress on housing affordability. We also have a severe shortage of social housing to meet demand. This points to the need to pursue other avenues to improve the lives of older low-income households.

Read more: What do single, older women want? Their ‘own little space’ (and garden) to call home, for a start

The Ageing on the Edge Older Persons Homelessness Prevention Project – funded by the JO and JR Wicking Trust and administered by Housing for the Aged Action Group (HAAG) – has worked over the past five years to give voice to these older women who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. The project works with interested agencies (government and non-government) to identify and promote early intervention and prevention strategies and to lobby for government policy change.

Of course, there is one simple answer to achieving long-term outcomes that allow people the basics of a decent older age: an appropriate affordable home.

– ref. 400,000 women over 45 are at risk of homelessness in Australia – https://theconversation.com/400-000-women-over-45-are-at-risk-of-homelessness-in-australia-142906

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cameron Murray, Research Fellow – Henry Halloran Trust, University of Sydney

Throughout Australia, when land is rezoned from industrial to high-rise residential, a charge is levied to help fund the required infrastructure.

In NSW it is called an infrastructure contribution.

The NSW government is reviewing it in order to cut “red tape” and “fix the uncertainty”.

They are words that ought to set off alarm bells. Queensland tells us how it is likely to play out.

A decade ago Queensland developers complained that a similar system lacked transparency and was not proportional to underlying infrastructure needs. So the Queensland government fixed it by by requiring each council to publish a standard schedule of charges based on estimated infrastructure costs.

Problem solved. Right?

No, as it happens. In 2011 the Queensland Premier suddenly announced a cap on charges. Overnight the system was disbanded and replaced with a fixed charge statewide.

Developers want lower infrastructure charges

The reality was that developers didn’t just want certainty and transparency, and they weren’t particularly keen on proportionality. They wanted lower charges.

In Victoria the property lobby is arguing for lower charges directly, without going through the charade about wanting less uncertainty and red tape.

To see the value of lower charges for developers, consider that current contributions in NSW are usually in the range of A$20,000 to A$70,000 per new apartment.

Read more: Four ways we can clean up corruption in land rezoning

If a $50,000 charge was halved, for example, it would create a $2.5 million windfall for the owner of a site who developed 100 apartments. Add that up across all the sites owned by developers and it comes to billions.

Yet they are enriched by rezoning

It’s not as if developers can’t afford what’s charged. The moment their properties are rezoned they make much, much more.

Here’s an example.

A well-situated industrial site in Sydney’s inner west was bought for $8.5 million, rezoned high density residential, then sold again for $48.5 million. The 470% windfall was the result of a government decision: rezoning.

Not only are these windfalls enormous, they can add to the cost of infrastructure.

An industrial site in Altona North in Melbourne was bought by a developer for $8.7 million, rezoned for “comprehensive development” and then compulsorily acquired by the Victorian government for the West Gate Tunnel project for $22.5 million.

The Altona North rezoning added $14 million to the cost of the tunnel.

Why not charge for rezoning?

The simplest way to fund council infrastructure would be to remove all fees and charges and sell the property rights granted through rezoning at market prices.

It could raise eight times what infrastructure charges do.

We know it can be done because the Australian Capital Territory has been doing it since 1971, charging 75% of the market price for new property rights granted through rezoning.

Read more: Property developers pay developer charges, that’s why they argue against them

In Sao Paulo, Brazil, the rights to develop to at higher densities have to be bought from the government at auction.

Developers won’t like it. Yet it would give them what they say they want, which is certainty. More than anyone else, they are acutely aware of what rezoning does to the value of their properties.

– ref. Our states are crying poor. They wouldn’t if they charged for rezoning like the ACT – https://theconversation.com/our-states-are-crying-poor-they-wouldnt-if-they-charged-for-rezoning-like-the-act-142838

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daryl Sparkes, Senior Lecturer (Media Studies and Production), University of Southern Queensland

It wasn’t the first time I’d crashed a film set. My first was the 1984 film The Coolangatta Gold. You’ll recognise me in one of the shots because I’m the only person wearing jeans on a beach.

Many years, and many film sets later, I heard from a friend who was working on a movie that mixed cute furry farm animals with state of the art technology. I knew instantly I had to get smuggled on this one.

That film is now one of the most cherished children’s classics of the 90s – Babe. It has been 25 years since the talking pig first appeared on international screens, and revisiting the film today shows it has not lost any of its charm or wonder.

Directed by Chris Noonan and starring James Cromwell and Magda Szubanski as farmers Mr and Mrs Hoggart, Babe made over US$250 million (A$351 million) at the international box office. It spawned a (much less succesful) sequel, Babe: Pig in the City in 1998.

The story of a young piglet raised by a Border Collie to become a sheep herding star was a crowd favourite not just because of the cute animals, but because of the dazzling technology, which makes these animals look like they really are speaking.

With its story of achieving in the face of adversity, coupled with simple lessons – cooperation is better than intimidation, you can aspire to more than what others expect of you – Babe still appeals to both adults and children alike.

Hollywood is here

I’d never heard of the book the film was based on, The Sheep Pig by Dick King-Smith, so at the time I went looking for the Babe film set I knew next to nothing about the story apart from the fact that it featured talking animals.

Read more: Auteur vs computer: the frightening complexity of visual effects

When I got to Bowral, NSW, no one could resist telling me Hollywood had come to the region. Ask anyone where Babe was filming and they pointed along the road to Robertson, a 25-minute drive east, through gentle hills and valleys surrounding a small village.

It was not long before the conglomeration of film trucks, tents and trailers came into view. But the thing that really caught my eye was the pens full of animals – dozens of sheep, chickens, cows, dogs and pigs.

Because filming took months, the production needed to constantly bring in new baby animals – the ones they filmed one week would soon grow too large and need replacing.

I was used to the hustle and bustle of a hot set, but this was like a circus.

Taking risks

Why was Babe such a massive worldwide hit? It wasn’t the first film to feature talking animals. Disney had made an industry out of this with The Jungle Book, The Lion King and, of course, Mickey, Minnie and Donald.

The combination of computer graphics and animatronics used in Babe is common now, but 25 years ago it was cutting edge and known only to a few specialists: the movie even beat Apollo 13 for the Oscar for best visual effects.

Still, while Babe was a film big on technology it didn’t let the multi-million dollar special effects get in the way of the story and characters. The heart of the story is always the animals.

Children feel a strong bond to the animals in the film because they are portrayed as child-like themselves. In Babe, the central character is a piglet and speaks with a child’s voice. He has a sense of innocence and wonder.

As a kids’ movie, Babe, also took big risks. The pigs, sheep and cattle on Hoggett’s farm were explicitly meat animals, and at one point, wild dogs kill a sheep – dark concepts for small children.

The scene where Babe is told humans eat pigs is particularly disturbing for younger viewers. But these risks are handled sensitively, and pay off.

It has even been said these scenes sparked positive arguments for animal rights: Cromwell became vegan after filming, and PETA calls it “a classic animal rights movie”.

Out of time

I think why the film was embraced internationally was because it isn’t what we would classify as an “Australian ” film. There’s very little in it that defines it as “Aussie”.

Hoggett’s farm looks more Dorset or Devon in the south of England. There are no kangaroos or koalas, there’s no red-dirt “outback” in sight. Even the accents are a global mish-mash. Babe doesn’t belong to any one time or place.

Audiences of all nationalities could enjoy it because it was truly international. Ultimately, though, Babe stays in our hearts and minds because it was a good story, well told. Do we really need anything else? That’ll do, pig, that’ll do.

– ref. That’ll do, pig, that’ll do: Babe at 25, a trailblazing cinematic classic – https://theconversation.com/thatll-do-pig-thatll-do-babe-at-25-a-trailblazing-cinematic-classic-143813

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Coates, Program Director, Household Finances, Grattan Institute

The announcement of stage 4 restrictions in Victoria marks a new, and depressing, stage in Australia’s response to COVID-19.

The new measures will close non-essential retailers and most child-care centres across Melbourne, and impose stringent controls on industries such as meatworks and construction. The Victorian government estimates the measures will stop a further 250,000 workers from travelling to work.

Read more: Melbourne non-essential retailers closed, as Morrison unveils pandemic leave

The Victorian economy will probably be better off with this sharper, hopefully shorter lockdown than persisting with Stage 3 restrictions for many months.

The federal government has taken the sensible step of announcing pandemic leave disaster payments of $1,500 for those Victorians that need to isolate for 14 days. But it will need to do more to help Victorian businesses and households make it safely to the other side.

Victoria was already struggling before stage 4

Even before Sunday’s announcement of Stage 4 restrictions, economic activity in Melbourne was back down to similar levels to the first shutdown. Movement around the city, as measured by the number of times people used Apple Maps to get directions, was about half its February level.

By comparison, in Perth (where the virus has been effectively suppressed) drivers were out and about a little more than in February. Sydney was more or less back to normal, with a slight dip at the end of July as people curtailed their movements a little. Across all three cities public transport use remains dramatically below its normal levels, with Melbourne much further away from normal than Sydney and especially Perth.

The number of jobs in Victoria was 7.3% lower in mid-July than in mid-March, a deeper fall than any other state. In inner Melbourne, the number of jobs was down nearly 10% from mid-March levels. Eight of the ten federal electorates hardest-hit by job losses are now in Victoria. Without JobKeeper, the picture would be much worse.

Under the new restrictions on workplaces in Melbourne, employment in construction, manufacturing and retail will plummet. These industries employ about 900,000 Victorians between them. Not all of these people will be thrown out of work, but many will.

JobKeeper and JobSeeker are needed even more

The federal government should reconsider its plans to begin winding back JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments after September. JobKeeper is set to fall from A$1,500 to A$1,200 for full-time workers, and to A$750 for part-timers. And JobSeeker falls from $1,215 to $815 a fortnight.

These income-support programs were absolutely necessary in March when Stage 3 restrictions were imposed. They are even more necessary now, as Stage 4 restrictions put an even tighter clamp on economic activity, stretching many businesses to breaking point and throwing more Victorians out of work.

Read more: How to get both JobKeeper and JobSeeker

The “tapering” of these support payments clearly cannot happen from late September, as currently scheduled.

By the end of September Victoria will hopefully be out of Stage 4 restrictions. But at best Melbourne will be back to Stage 3, the same level of restrictions for which the federal government to introduced the JobKeeper and the JobSeeker schemes.

The eligibility rules for JobKeeper should also be reconsidered.

Some businesses whose revenue did not fall enough to qualify for JobKeeper in March will now take a bigger hit. Other companies that qualified in March but saw a rebound in June will be excluded by the current rules from receiving JobKeeper beyond September.

The federal government COVID-19 “disaster payment” should help address the crucial problem of those without paid leave entitlements being forced to choose between self-isolating and going to work to pay their bills. But the scheme is palliative rather than preventative, since it only applies in states once community transmission has ramped up to disaster levels.

Two-speed economy

The diverging fortunes of Victoria and the rest of Australia gives new meaning to the term “two-speed economy”.

The federal government may be reluctant to do what’s needed just for one state, given the recovery is progressing elsewhere, but that would be a mistake. Victoria accounts for one quarter of the national economy. There is no “moral hazard” here. No state is going to allow thousands of its citizens to catch a deadly virus on the expectation the federal government will turn on the fiscal taps.

The federal government should waste no time wrangling over who pays the costs of getting through the crisis. Trying to split the bill with Victoria will take valuable time, and only concentrate costs on the state hardest hit by the crisis.

Last week the federal government finalised arrangements to borrow A$15 billion through issuing 31-year bonds. These bonds have a fixed interest rate of 1.94%, below the bottom of the Reserve Bank’s inflation target band.

Read more: The government has just sold $15 billion of 31-year bonds. But what actually is a bond?

That means investors buying the bonds were willing to lend money to the federal government and most likely get back less, in inflation-adjusted terms, three decades from now. And investors were queuing up to buy them. In fact the government could have sold A$37 billion worth, rather than A$15 billion.

The federal government should use this ample fiscal firepower to ensure Victorians get through this crisis. Australia’s economy won’t recover unless Victoria does too.

– ref. Australia won’t recover unless Victoria does too. The federal government must step up – https://theconversation.com/australia-wont-recover-unless-victoria-does-too-the-federal-government-must-step-up-143840

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

How do you occupy a child for long enough to get any work done?

This will be the question confronting more than 150,000 Melbourne families for at least the next six weeks.

The Stage 4 restrictions announced by the Victorian government to contain the city’s COVID-19 outbreak include closing all child-care centres for the first time in the pandemic.

Read more: State of disaster called as Melbourne moves to nightly curfew and stage 4 restrictions

Only services for vulnerable children and children whose parents are deemed essential workers will continue.

This will have a big impact on workforce participation – particularly for mothers, who take on the lion’s share of unpaid care.

Child-care and workforce participation

The health advice is that these closures are needed to get Victoria’s COVID-19 outbreak under control. So the focus needs to be on what governments can do to cushion the impact on parents – and to support workforce participation on the other side.

Child-care is critical for women’s workforce participation. Its closure will have significant economic fallout. About 170,000 Melbourne children aged five and under are enrolled in formal early childhood education and care services. The average child in long day care attends for more than 25 hours a week.

The common backup plan for parents in lieu of professional child-minding services – grandparents – is not an option for many either, given health concerns and travel restrictions.

Most parents with young children don’t have much “slack”. On average, they do more than 80 hours a week of paid and unpaid work – the most of all adults.

It seems inevitable the only way many households will be able to manage their caring responsibilities is by reducing their paid work. This will be a financial hit not only for them but for the wider economy, further reducing spending and economic activity.

Women most affected

The closure of child-care centres will be especially tough on working mothers. Australian women still do the bulk of looking after children and housework.

A 2019 Deloitte analysis estimated the average Victorian woman spent 13 hours more on unpaid work and care a week than the average Victorian man. Men generally do more paid work, but this still doesn’t make up the full gap.

Deloitte’s findings are consistent with patterns Australia-wide, where the balance of paid and unpaid work in heterosexual couples is more gendered than almost anywhere else in the western world.

During the first lockdown, the unpaid workload increased for both women and men, but more for women.

Responses to an online Work and Care in the Time of COVID-19 survey between early May and June suggest women have more commonly borne the brunt of juggling work and children, including supervising online schooling.

These patterns indicate it will be women who are most likely to reduce their hours of paid work without school or day-care services available. This has already been seen overseas.

Any hit to women’s workforce participation – particularly if it becomes entrenched – will further widen the lifetime earnings gap between men and women. On pre-pandemic working patterns, the average 25-year-old woman who goes on to have at least one child could expect to earn 47% less than an average 25-year-old man who becomes a father.

Policy can help on the other side

The challenge for policy makers is to prevent this short-term economic pain becoming permanent.

The federal government has introduced temporary arrangements to enable Victorian parents to keep their child-care place through this lockdown. Providing income support for child-care workers who may be stood down during the shutdown is also important.

But these policies alone will not be sufficient to support female workforce participation when child-care reopens.

If governments are serious about reducing the fallout, we need to talk about making it more affordable on the other side.

Read more: Permanently raising the Child Care Subsidy is an economic opportunity too good to miss

Child-care costs are one of the biggest barriers to female workforce participation.

Raising the federal government’s Child Care Subsidy would help parents, particularly women, get back to work – supporting both the short-term economic recovery and growing the economy in the longer term.

– ref. Victoria’s child-care shutdown is a hard blow for working mothers – https://theconversation.com/victorias-child-care-shutdown-is-a-hard-blow-for-working-mothers-143837

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

Non-essential retailers across Melbourne will be shut except for “click and collect” and delivery sales, and industries including meatworks and construction will be drastically scaled back, under Victoria’s unprecedented lockdown.

The business shutdown details came as Scott Morrison announced a “pandemic disaster payment” worth $1,500 for Victorian workers who have to isolate for two weeks and do not have sick leave.

The leave can be taken multiple times if needed but it will only be available to those hit by the Victorian disaster.

Premier Daniel Andrews estimated 250,000 more workers would be stood down as a result of his government’s measures, which run for six weeks. “We know there is about 250,000 people stood down in one form or another and this will add a further 250,000 in rough numbers.”

Read more: State of disaster called as Melbourne moves to nightly curfew and stage 4 restrictions

Melbourne supermarkets, grocery stores, bottle shops, pharmacies, petrol stations, banks, newsagents and post offices will remain open, giving people access to necessities.

Businesses have been put into three categories:

• those able to stay open

• full “onsite” closures – including retail stores and services, some manufacturing and administration – which must shut by 11.59pm Wednesday

• those that will have to drastically reduce their operations.

While most of the restrictions relate to Melbourne, the provision for meatworks – on which many COVID cases have been centred – apply across the state.

Andrews said workers in these enterprises would be dressed like health nurses – with shields, masks, gowns, gloves – and have to undergo temperature tests. The on-site workforces at meat works will have to be reduced by one third.

Bunnings, which has been particularly popular during the pandemic, will be only allowed to offer “drive through” sales to the public, although tradespeople will be able into the store for purchases.

Services from tradespeople to the public will be confined to emergencies. Cleaners will not be able to go to houses.

Different rules will apply to various parts of the construction industry, which will move to what Andrews called “pilot light” levels.

Workforces constructing large commercial buildings above three stories will need to be reduced at any one time to no more than 25% of normal numbers.

No more than five people will be able to be working on a house-building site at one time.

The state government has already reduced its large-scale projects and will look at further reduction.

Warehousing and distribution centres in Melbourne will be limited to no more than two thirds of their normal workforce on site at one time.

Workplaces that are continuing to operate will have extra requirements including more personal protective equipment, staggered shifts and breaks, health declarations and more support for sick workers to ensure they stay home.

Daniels announced the latest Victorian number of new cases was 429; there had been 13 deaths, of whom eight were linked to aged care.

Morrison said many Victorians “would have reached breaking point trying to come to terms with what has happened in their state”.

Andrews warned if the changes didn’t work “we’ll need a much longer list of complete shutdowns”.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg flagged changes to eligibility for JobKeeper to take account of the impact of the Victorian hard lockdown.

Last month the government announced eligibility would be tightened under the revised scheme to operate after September – businesses would have to demonstrate they had met the relevant 30% decline in turnover test in both the June and September quarters.

But on Monday Frydenberg foreshadowed tweaking to ensure businesses badly hit in the September quarter were not disadvantaged because they had not had low turnover in the June quarter.

The change would apply nationally, not just in Victoria.

Read more: View from The Hill: COVID has brought us a state in disaster and a prime minister in a mask

The Business Council of Australia and the ACTU on Monday wrote jointly to the federal government strongly urging it “to move quickly to introduce a paid pandemic leave scheme”.

After the announcement, the ACTU said the pandemic leave disaster payment was a step forward but didn’t go far enough. 

“The $1500 a fortnight is the minimum wage when the average wage is double this amount. This means that nearly every fulltime worker will still suffer a financial penalty for isolating. Only full wage replacement, like sick leave, can fix this,” the ACTU said.

The Australian Industry Group said the economic impact of the draconian Victoria lockdown would “devastate the livelihoods of millions in the state”.

CEO Innes Willox said: “Closing or restricting large swathes of manufacturing and construction as well as their supply chains brings the hammer down on sectors that have been responsible for relatively little transmission, which have followed strict COVID-safe plans and are vital to the community and the country’s economic well-being.”

– ref. Melbourne non-essential retailers closed, as Morrison unveils pandemic leave – https://theconversation.com/melbourne-non-essential-retailers-closed-as-morrison-unveils-pandemic-leave-143835

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip Russo, Associate Professor, Director Cabrini Monash University Department of Nursing Research, Monash University

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has announced sweeping changes to businesses across metropolitan Melbourne, including closure of retail stores and restrictions on some industries, including construction. The new constraints come into force from midnight on Wednesday night.

They come after metropolitan Melbourne moved to stage 4 restrictions on Sunday, with a nightly curfew and stricter limits on residents’ movement.

Read more: State of disaster called as Melbourne moves to nightly curfew and stage 4 restrictions

Andrews said maintaining stage 3 restrictions would mean new daily cases plateau at 400-500 indefinitely, so the aim of these new stronger restrictions is to drive daily numbers down. Given the apparently widespread transmission of the virus at workplaces, the hope is that restrictions on business will help improve the situation.

We also expect to see the effects of mandatory mask-wearing alongside other measures, to become evident in the case numbers over the coming week, and further reduced numbers from the latest round of lockdown restrictions to become apparent in two weeks’s time. But this will only happen if we stick to the rules.

What are the new restrictions?

Monday’s restrictions relate to businesses, and will be in place for at least six weeks. The Victorian government has grouped businesses into three categories:

1. those that can continue full operations on-site, while maintaining COVID-safe practices. This group includes supermarkets, grocers, butchers, bottle shops, post offices, pharmacies, fuel stations and facilities involved in the frontline pandemic response

2. others that have to operate under new restrictions. This group includes meat processing and construction sites, which will have to observe new limits on staffing levels

3. some that will cease all on-site activity and move to home or drive-through delivery where possible. This includes non-essential retailers and restaurants.

Andrews assured Melburnians that the continued operation of supermarkets and grocers means there is “no need to be buying months’ worth of groceries”. Melburnians can also take heart in the fact takeaway coffee is still allowed.

Construction and meatworks can continue but will look very different. Major government infrastructure projects, such as level crossing removals, will continue but with around 50% fewer on-site personnel. Large commercial buildings above three storeys need to reduce to the “practical minumum”, operating at no more than 25% staff capacity. Residential building sites can have no more than five people working on-site at any time.

Abbatoir workers will be required to wear full personal protective equipment, including masks, face shields, gloves and gowns. They will also have their temperatures checked and will be regularly tested for COVID-19. Meat processing facilities will reduce to two-thirds operating capacity. The rules to abattoirs apply statewide, not just in metropolitan Melbourne – a move Andrews said was essential to prevent the industry’s problems with COVID-19 spreading to regional areas.

The retail sector will have to close storefronts. However, these businesses can continue to provide “click-and-collect”, takeaway or delivery services where possible, all of which minimise interactions between people.

Hairdressers, education, elective surgery, brothels and strip clubs, legal services, advertising, and food courts will all be required to cease on-site operations.

Andrews has flagged a “permit system” under which certain workers can be granted permission to travel more than 5km from their homes, and to breach curfew. More details will be provided on this later in the week.

Why are the new measures important?

The most common method of spread is through close contact, and a lot of transmission of the coronavirus has been occurring in workplaces. This is because, ultimately, workplaces bring people together. Even masks won’t stop the spread if people come very close together.

The new restrictions will reduce the movement of people, reducing the frequency of contact and the contact time between them. They will reduce the risk of transmission in key industries that have had clusters in the past, such as the Cedar Meats outbreak.

Melbourne needs to see hundreds of thousands fewer interaction between people every day to bring case numbers down from their current levels.

But the central messages remain

The new measures are welcome, in epidemiological terms at least, and are likely to reduce the spread of the virus. And despite the new strictures, the underlying message remains the same: staying at home, and limiting your interactions with other people as much as possible, is crucial to slowing transmission.

Even when we need to leave the house for one of the accepted reasons, physical distancing still remains the most effective preventative intervention.

These new restrictions will not work unless we follow them.

Read more: 723 new COVID-19 cases in Victoria could reflect more testing – but behaviour probably has something to do with it too

When will we see change?

Every morning, Melburnians wake up and look at the new daily numbers — often with despair. Over the past few weeks, since the start of stage 3 restrictions, new cases have plateaued at around 400-500 every day, but are not decreasing.

As Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton pointed out today, stage 3 restrictions have prevented cases spiralling out of control, but have not reduced numbers as much as we would like.

The latest restrictions will apply for six weeks, but there will be a daily review of the data by health authorities. The restrictions could be modified or extended if there are any hiccups along the way.

We expect to see the effects from the latest round of lockdown restrictions to become apparent in roughly two weeks’ time.

Read more: Which mask works best? We filmed people coughing and sneezing to find out

This article is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

– ref. Takeaway coffee allowed, but no wandering through Bunnings: here’s why Melbourne’s new business restrictions will reduce cases – https://theconversation.com/takeaway-coffee-allowed-but-no-wandering-through-bunnings-heres-why-melbournes-new-business-restrictions-will-reduce-cases-143814

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Haskell-Dowland, Associate Dean (Computing and Security), Edith Cowan University

In what seems to be a common occurrence, Chinese video-sharing app TikTok is once again in the headlines.

After months of speculation about national security risks and users’ data being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party, US President Donald Trump has announced plans to ban TikTok in the United States any day now.

In response, a deal is being negotiated between TikTok’s parent company ByteDance and US software giant Microsoft. If successful, Microsoft will take over the app’s operations in the US and potentially also in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

A US ban would not be unprecedented. India barred TikTok last month, alongside dozens of other Chinese-owned apps and websites.

The Microsoft deal

According to reports, ByteDance has agreed to sell some of its TikTok operations to Microsoft. The deal, which is unlikely to progress before mid-September, would appease US regulators and could be seen as a way forward for TikTok in Australia.

Microsoft has indicated any takeover would include a complete security review and an offer of:

… continuing dialogue with the United States government, including with the president.

Moving ownership to a US company could help address concerns surrounding the perceived influence of the Chinese government over TikTok. But there will need to be strong oversight to ensure existing user data is transferred entirely to Microsoft’s control.

While Microsoft has pledged to ensure TikTok data are deleted “from servers outside the country after it is transferred” – it would be difficult to prove copies had not been made before control was handed over.

What’s more, a Microsoft-owned TikTok may not appeal to everyone. Some may think Microsoft is too closely tied to the US government, or may consider it a monopoly holder in the personal computing market.

Also, it would be naive to think foreign governments will not be able to covertly access US-stored user data, if they are so inclined.

Who will benefit?

Should the deal go ahead, it may open an opportunity for the Australian and New Zealand governments to align with a US-supported initiative.

Australia is still deciding how to proceed, with the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media due to hear from TikTok representatives on August 21. The committee has been tasked to look at the influence of social media on elections and the use of such platforms to distribute misinformation.

TikTok won’t be alone though – Facebook and Twitter are both due to attend. It is, however, unlikely the Microsoft acquisition will have much influence on the proceedings as the deal is still in the early days of discussion.

Microsoft’s acquisition may introduce fresh concerns about the US government’s influence over TikTok. Although, this is perhaps more politically palatable than potential Chinese government influence over the app – given the Chinese Communist Party’s unsavoury record of privacy abuses.

Perhaps the only winner from the deal would be ByteDance itself. A product that is increasingly disliked by foreign governments will only become harder to sell with time. It would make sense for ByteDance to cash out its asset sooner rather than later.

The deal would also likely earn it a significant payout, given TikTok’s millions of users.

Read more: TikTok tries to distance itself from Beijing, but will it be enough to avoid the global blacklist?

Are the risks real?

Despite ongoing allegations, there is no solid evidence of a threat to either national security or personal data from using TikTok. Many of the concerns hinge on data sovereignty – specifically, where data are stored and who can use and access them.

TikTok has responded to allegations by stating its user data are not stored in China and are not subject to Chinese government influence or access.

That said, while TikTok user data may well be stored outside China, it is unclear whether the Chinese government has already secured access, or will seek to do so later through legal channels.

Read more: China could be using TikTok to spy on Australians, but banning it isn’t a simple fix

There are, however, other potential issues that may be driving the US’s concerns.

For instance, in 2018 an unexpected consequence of sharing fitness tracker data through the Strava website inadvertently revealed the locations of secret US military bases.

Thus, services such as TikTok which are meant to be relatively benign (if used ethically) can, under certain circumstances, present unexpected threats to national security. This may explain why Australia’s defence forces have banned the app.

Read more: Strava storm: why everyone should check their smart gear security settings before going for a jog

Another Trump power move?

Threats from the US against TikTok are not new.

The country’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated TikTok was being examined by US authorities in early July. And suggestions of a national security review go as far back as November last year.

However, in regards to Trump’s most recent threat, one contributing factor may be the personal feelings of the president himself.

There are theories much of the new hype over TikTok could be a reaction from Trump to an ill-fated political rally in Tulsa.

A number of TikTok users reserved tickets to the Trump rally and didn’t show up, as a protest against the president. The rally saw only a few thousand supporters attend, out of hundreds of thousands of allocated tickets.

– ref. Microsoft’s takeover would be a win for TikTok and tech giants – not users – https://theconversation.com/microsofts-takeover-would-be-a-win-for-tiktok-and-tech-giants-not-users-143818

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephanie Trigg, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Literature, University of Melbourne

In our series Art for Trying Times, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.

The Greeks are at the gates, and the city of Troy is under siege.

Every day, the Trojans ride out to do battle with Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax and the aggrieved husband Menelaus, whose wife Helen has been abducted by the Trojan prince Paris. But despite this crisis, the Trojan leisured classes carry on with their lives.

Read more: Fall of Troy: the legend and the facts

One joyful spring morning, when the sun is shining and the meadows are filled with flowers, a beautiful young widow, Criseyde, sits in her palace, in a paved parlour with two other ladies, while a young maiden reads to them the story of another siege, that of the Greek city of Thebes.

This pleasant scene is interrupted by Criseyde’s uncle Pandarus, who is bringing the astonishing news that Paris’s younger brother Troilus has fallen in love with her.

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his great romance Troilus and Criseyde around 1386. I teach this text every year in my honours class. It is long and difficult, and we normally spend half the semester working through the poem. Even then we don’t read it all in detail.

This year, the global pandemic brings a new context for reading this poem about a passionate but doomed love affair between two Trojans, conducted under siege conditions, in addition to all the constraints Chaucer’s very medieval lovers place around themselves.

A secret affair

Chaucer’s language in this text is rich and ornate, and the poem is written in a rhyming stanza whose syntax ranges from elegant to knotty. The narrative is both leisurely and intense.

It offers philosophical digressions about the nature of free will and predestination; but it is also full of intricate private meditations, and absorbing, intense conversations between the three main characters.

Nothing in the brutal rough and tumble of Shakespeare’s later play Troilus and Cressida can prepare you for the lyric drama of this poem.

Criseyde’s father has abandoned Troy and gone over to the Greek camp. She has been allowed to remain in Troy, but she is very vulnerable and fearful. The love affair must remain secret to protect her honour; Troilus and Criseyde cannot marry because he is a prince and she is the daughter of a traitor; and nor can they leave Troy and abandon their city.

They are also both overcome by shyness, dread, and reluctance to speak to each other. Indeed, the lovers do not exchange a single word until the beginning of the third book, and by the beginning of the fifth and final book they have parted, never to meet again.

Every year my students bring fresh insights to this poem’s emotional and cultural drama. Although I am on long service leave this semester, I am still conducting my annual reading of the poem on Zoom with a group of friends and colleagues.

Our Middle English Reading Group is made up of staff, present and former students, and members of a thriving community of scholars and lovers of medieval and early modern culture.

This year, reading together through Zoom offers a powerful contrast with Chaucer’s scene of medieval women’s communal reading.

Read more: Say what? How to improve virtual catch-ups, book groups and wine nights

Reading aloud

When Pandarus enters Criseyde’s paved parlour, where the maiden is reading from the book about the siege of Thebes, she greets him warmly and brings him to sit next to her. Hoping to turn her mood to thoughts of love, he asks what they are reading: is it a book about love? Is there anything he can learn?

Criseyde teases her uncle and when they have finished laughing she tells him where they are up to. She points to “thise lettres rede,” the rubricated or decoratively coloured chapter heading that introduces the next section.

Pandarus replies that he knows all about that sorrowful story but insists they should turn their thoughts to spring, as a prelude to introducing his news about Troilus. He invites her to dance but Criseyde recoils in horror. As a widow, she says, it would be better for her to live in a cave, to pray, and read the lives of the saints.

In typical Chaucerian fashion, this passage shows a female character’s awareness of what she might do, and perhaps should do, but does not.

Read more: Guide to the classics: Homer’s Iliad

Unhappy endings

The domestic charms of this safe interior space, Pandarus’ fearful invitation, and the pleasures of reading and talking about familiar books distract us from the dreadful history lesson in the book they are reading. For just as Thebes was destroyed under siege, so too will Troy be.

Chaucer’s readers knew this; we know it; and even Criseyde’s father, a soothsayer, knows it: he has already abandoned Troy and gone over to the Greek camp, leaving her unprotected except for her uncle who is about to embroil her in the complexities of Trojan court politics.

We know that this love story will turn out badly. In the very first stanza, Chaucer has told us the ending of the story: that Troilus will win Criseyde, but that she will forsake him.

Knowing the ending doesn’t affect our pleasure in this text. And so we read on, absorbed by Chaucer’s capacity to conjure the lives of others as they balance distress with hope, and external disaster with private joy.

Like the Trojans, we may not be able to learn from the past so as to avoid disaster. But Chaucer is forgiving, and offers us the seductive pleasures of reading and rereading, and the comfort of repetition.

Read more: Missing your friends? Rereading Harry Potter might be the next best thing

– ref. Chaucer’s great poem Troilus and Criseyde: perfect reading while under siege from a virus – https://theconversation.com/chaucers-great-poem-troilus-and-criseyde-perfect-reading-while-under-siege-from-a-virus-142662

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Newman, Professor of Sustainability, Curtin University

Creative destruction “is the essential fact about capitalism”, wrote the great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. New technologies and processes continuously revolutionise the economic structure from within, “incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one”.

Change happens more quickly and creatively during times of economic disruption. Innovations meeting material and cultural needs accelerate. Structures preventing new, more efficient technologies weaken. As the old economy collapses, innovations “cluster” to become the core of the new economy.

Over the past three centuries there have been five great “waves” of economic disruption and clustering. The first was driven by harnessing water power, the second by steam power, the third by coal and electricity, the fourth by oil and gas, and the fifth by digital transformation.

We are now at the start of the sixth great wave, driven by renewable energy combined with electromobility and smart-city technology.

Though 2020 will be a difficult year for the entire economy, these technology trends are faring much better than the old-energy sector. Over the longer run the COVID-19 economic disruption should accelerate the wave.

Renewable energy

In renewable energy, solar photovoltaics and onshore wind are now the most economic new form of electricity generation for at least two-thirds of the global population, according to energy research provider BloombergNEF.

In Australia, the latest analysis of electricity generation costs by the Australian Energy Market Operator and CSIRO shows solar photovoltaics and wind are already cheaper than coal and gas. Solar PV costs are also predicted to fall sharply over the next decade, reducing its generation costs from about A$50 a megawatt hour to A$30 by 2030.

The following graph for renewable energy and coal consumption in the United States shows the acceleration towards renewables is well underway.

Statistics published last week by the US Energy Information Administration show in 2019 coal production fell to its lowest level since 1978. In 2020 coal production is projected to fall to 1960s levels.

Across all member nations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (including Australia), the International Energy Agency’s latest monthly statistics show coal production in April was down 32% on April 2019. Electricity generation from all non-renwables was down 12%. But generation from renewables was up 3%.

Electromobility

Electromobility encompasses electric vehicles including cars, buses and trackless trams. Globally, BloombergNEF projects electric vehicles to comprise 3% of new passenger car sales in 2020, 10% in 2025, 28% in 2030 and 58% in 2040.

Leading the charge is Europe, where sales of electric vehicles actually increased 7.5% in the first quarter of 2020, bucking the global downturn for electric cars and the industry overall.

The only major car maker to increase sales was Tesla, selling 88,496 cars. Its second-quarter sales of 90,650 cars was just 5% down on a year ago, compared to falls of about 25% for other makers. Tesla’s booming share price saw it overtake Toyota in May to become the world’s most valuable car maker.

Smart-city technology

Smart-city technology involves using sensors, machine learning, artificial intelligence, block-chain and the “internet of things” to improve infrastructure efficiency. They have been growing in use for transport, energy and housing.

Road sensors can help traffic managers coordinate traffic signals to cut congestion or to guide fast electric buses and trackless trams through traffic. Apps help us navigate through cities, and to know precisely when buses or trains are due.

In energy grids, smart technology can be used to balance electricity supply and demand, and to create low-cost and localised electricity markets.

In housing, smart systems can improve all aspects of a home’s energy and environmental performance.

Curtin University has partnered with Western Australia’s land development agency to integrate these technologies into the East Village housing project in Fremantle. It will use blockchain technology to leverage photovoltiacs, batteries, electric vehicles and water heating in a micro-grid supplying 100% renewable power to a community of 36 homes. This cluster of innovations are modular, so developers can experiment and then scale up.

Brake or accelerate

The economic and cultural benefits of renewable energy generation, electromobility and smart-city technologies are clear. They will led to a cleaner, greener economy with many more new jobs.

Read more: 45,000 renewables jobs are Australia’s for the taking – but how many will go to coal workers?

Together I estimate they have the potential to reduce the use of fossil fuel by 80% in a decade.

Eliminating the last 20% – gas and coal used in industrial processes such as steel production and mineral processing, and fossil fuels used for long-haul road, sea and air transport – will be harder.

Read more: Energy isn’t just electricity – the common mistake obscuring the mammoth task of decarbonisation

But hydrogen made with renewable energy can potentially replace fossil fuels in all these applications, though developing and commercialising the technology and needed infrastructure will likely take a decade or more.

Australia is already a global leader in uptake of solar generation and battery storage. We are also doing well in smart city technologies. But we have been slow in electromobility, and we will need to invest more in hydrogen research, development and deployment.

The only thing that will put the brake on these technologies becoming the core of the new economy sooner rather than later are backward-looking government policies that seek to prop up an obsolete fossil-fuel economy.

– ref. Creative destruction: the COVID-19 economic crisis is accelerating the demise of fossil fuels – https://theconversation.com/creative-destruction-the-covid-19-economic-crisis-is-accelerating-the-demise-of-fossil-fuels-143739

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deborah Lupton, SHARP Professor, Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Centre, UNSW

With Victorians heading into a new round of even harsher lockdown measures, there will again be a focus on how people will cope — the various ways such restrictions change lifestyles and how we adapt to them.

New data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics provides a snapshot of how Australians changed their behaviours, activities and consumption patterns as people were forced to stay home during the country’s first COVID-19 lockdown earlier this year.

To understand how the virus affected people’s everyday lives, the ABS ran a fortnightly survey with the same group of 1,000 people from April 1 to July 10. Here are some of the key findings.

Higher levels of anxiety

Lockdown restrictions began to be implemented in Australia from mid-March. Not surprisingly, in the first ABS survey in early April, respondents reported some immediate changes, such as a loss of contact with other people.

Just under half of people reported having no in-person contact with friends or family outside their household. Nearly all had used phone and video calls and text messages to keep in touch.

By mid-April, financial hardship was also starting to set in for people. Nearly a third of respondents reported their household finances had worsened due to COVID-19.

Read more: We need to flatten the ‘other’ coronavirus curve, our looming mental health crisis

People’s mental health was also beginning to suffer by mid-April. Compared with a pre-COVID health national survey of Australians, twice as many people reported feelings of anxiety at some point. One in nine Australians also felt hopeless at least some of the time.

More women and younger people reported these feelings compared with men and people aged 65 years and over.

Working from home and changes in diets

Survey results from early May 2020 began to show how people were adjusting their lifestyles to the new routines. Restrictions had just started to ease slightly at this point.

Findings from this stage showed some gender differences. Women (56%) were more likely to be working from home compared with men (38%). Perhaps related to this, women were also more likely to be feeling lonely than men (28% compared with 16%).

The ABS found some notable changes in consumption habits. The early May survey showed fewer people were purchasing additional household supplies (21%) compared with March (47%), suggesting panic-buying had subsided.

People were spending their money on other purchases instead. From early April to early May, one in five people reported eating more snack food, while 13% of respondents were eating more fruit and vegetables.

Purchase of takeaway or delivered food declined over this period, with almost a third of respondents reporting less frequent consumption.

Perhaps contrary to popular belief, the overwhelming majority of people were not drinking more in isolation. Just 14% of people reported increasing their alcohol consumption.

Read more: Coronavirus: it’s tempting to drink your worries away but there are healthier ways to manage stress and keep your drinking in check

More chores and reading

During the early May phase of the lockdown, people were also seeking solace in home-based activities.

Though a majority of people (60%) were reporting more time on screens during lockdown, others were turning to hobbies and other activities.

Forty-one percent of respondents said they were spending more time on household chores and other work around the house and garden: for instance, 39% were doing more reading and crafts, and 38% were spending more time cooking or baking.

When it came to physical health and exercise, though, just one in four people had increased their level of physical activity during lockdown, while one in five had actually spent less time exercising.

Restrictions ease but some lifestyle changes remain

As more restrictions began to ease around the country, people began to think about what they would do once lockdown ended. By late June, Australians’ mental health had improved compared with the height of the lockdown in April.

Fewer people reported feeling stressed, lonely, restless, nervous or that everything was an effort.

More than 90% were still keeping their distance from others, but fewer were avoiding social gatherings.

Interestingly, the easing of restrictions did not change other lifestyle routines that significantly: many people were still spending a lot of time on screens and with pets, cooking, baking and online shopping compared with before the lockdown period.

An optimistic outlook, except for Victorians

When the final ABS survey was conducted in early July, things were looking brighter for most Australians.

Three in five respondents reported their mental health status as good or very good. Most people had an optimistic outlook on the future, with over half believing life had already returned to normal or would return to normal within six months.

Read more: The psychology of comfort food – why we look to carbs for solace

The big exception was people living in Victoria. In late June and early July, Melbourne had begun to experience a second wave of infections and a re-introduction of restrictions.

Not surprisingly, only 2% of Victorians said their life had already returned to normal or had not changed due to COVID-19.

Where to from here?

The ABS has finished this survey, but is starting a new monthly survey in August, with a new group of respondents. This survey will also focus on Australians’ everyday lives and well-being during the pandemic.

There are also many university-based social research projects currently underway. Once completed, their findings will provide a more detailed picture of how life has changed in Australia during COVID-19 — a situation that continues to evolve day by day.

– ref. More screen time, snacking and chores: a snapshot of how everyday life changed during the first coronavirus lockdown – https://theconversation.com/more-screen-time-snacking-and-chores-a-snapshot-of-how-everyday-life-changed-during-the-first-coronavirus-lockdown-143805

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

The old maxim that truth is the first casualty of war has been borne out by the damning Report of the Government Inquiry into Operation Burnham.

It is almost ten years ago to the day that the fateful military operation took place in Afghanistan in 2010, and over three years since the book Hit & Run alleged there were civilian casualties, torture of detainees and a subsequent cover-up.

The result for the Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) is humiliating and will almost inevitably mean it is stripped of the relative autonomy it has enjoyed to this point.

The military betrayed the public trust

While not all of the assertions in Hit & Run were upheld, its main themes certainly have been. The Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) has proved itself untrustworthy in three crucial ways:

1. it made mistakes and did not fix them

2. superiors failed to question information, despite contradictory material being presented, and did not attempt to determine the truth

3. those same people made a series of erroneous and misleading public statements about the possibility of civilian casualties, preferring to repeat a false narrative and incorrect statements.

These were not small oversights. Rather, the evidence suggests systematic failures in key areas, including inaccurate and disingenuous communication with the minister of defence.

That is a disaster. Despite the NZDF’s recent success in Iraq in sustaining no casualties while part of the bulkhead that defeated ISIS, it has now bombed its own position as the trusted military arm of the state.

The military damaged its own reputation

Deception by any military in a democracy is dangerous. Furthermore, the actions of a few have caused untold damage to a reputation for integrity and honour proudly created over generations.

There is also a strong element of stupidity involved. The NZDF did not need to be deceptive about one of the central claims against it: that its forces were engaged in acts of retaliation, untethered by the laws of war.

That assertion was not upheld. The inquiry found the conduct of the soldiers involved in Operation Burnham was professional, not motivated by a desire for revenge, and pre-operation intelligence (that there were armed insurgents in the villages) was correct.

Although there were serious questions about decisions made during the operation, the bottom line is that all of the actions complied with the applicable rules of engagement. Many will find the result of these actions harsh (as war is), but the actions were not unjustifiable, nor unduly reckless, negligent or indiscriminate.

The torture findings are damning

Where the NZDF may have wanted to hide the truth was over allegations of torture. Although our soldiers may not have tortured prisoners themselves, they did hand some over to forces who did. This was clear in the case of one man, Qari Miraj, and possibly other instances involving hundreds more.

With each transfer, our authorities appear to have turned a blind eye or failed to meet the standards expected of them when they knew (or should have known) there was a real risk of torture.

Even when the NZDF knew torture had occurred, senior leaders and ministers were not briefed. Nor were any further steps taken to investigate, to state New Zealand’s position on torture, or to review its policy on detention.

This is a terrible finding. Any possible complicity in situations involving torture is abhorrent. If it is correct, apologies and compensation for the victims or their families should be offered.

The NZDF cannot police itself

Three of the inquiry’s four recommendations are the predictable slaps on the wrist we expect from official forums such as this: internal changes to ensure the NZDF comes up to international best practice for administration and record keeping; clear orders established for dealing with allegations of civilian casualties; and improved detention policies and procedures.

The other recommendation, however, is the most critical. It calls for the establishment by law of an independent inspector-general to oversee the NZDF. Such positions are created, as happened with both the police and the security intelligence agencies, when an organisation has proved unfit to govern itself.

The government has promised to implement the recommendations if it is re-elected, but it should be a priority for whichever party or parties win power. Only then can progress be said to have happened.

And let’s not forget, this would not have happened by itself. It took the brave investigative journalism of Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson, a government willing to critically examine the charges against its own defence force, and finally an excellent enquiry by Sir Terence Arnold and Sir Geoffrey Palmer.

We should hope that when these law changes are made the country will regain its confidence and pride in the NZDF. Never again should truth be the first casualty.

– ref. Operation Burnham: the New Zealand military’s self-inflicted wounds will not heal by themselves – https://theconversation.com/operation-burnham-the-new-zealand-militarys-self-inflicted-wounds-will-not-heal-by-themselves-143806

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Celia Harris, Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow, Western Sydney University

We are all living through a major historical event, a once-in-a-century pandemic that has radically changed how we work, learn, travel, socialise and spend our free time.

But for many of us juggling working from home, schooling at home and Friday night Zoom drinks, this is a period likely marked by memory failures. We forget who said what, who was at which meeting, what tasks and appointments we have, and even what day it is.

Why doesn’t our memory serve us well in this pandemic? Anxiety may be one explanation, but another reason comes from the way our memory works.

How we remember things

Recalling specific details from particular past events – such as who was at last Friday’s drinks, and who was there the week before that – is a complex mental feat.

Read more: Lockdown, relax, repeat: how cities across the globe are going back to coronavirus restrictions

To do it, our memory relies on distinctive cues, both to recall past events accurately and to remember to perform future actions.

Distinctive cues for a particular event might include the physical surroundings, people, tastes, sounds, smells, or the weather.

We remember which friend was at drinks because we recall details of the location – the bar we were at, where each person was sitting, what we were eating, and so on. This context helps us place the right person in that situation when we recall it later.

We remember who said what in a work meeting because we can visualise where they were sitting. We remember what day it is because we have landmarks in the week that remind us: karate lessons, choir practice, Friday afternoon traffic.

Same, same, same

Unfortunately, the pandemic has erased many of these cues. Many of us have instead been spending time sitting at our computer when ordinarily we might be at work or elsewhere. And this could leave us less able to distinguish events from one another.

Our memories are designed to focus on things that are new or distinctive. This means we are more likely to remember events when they are accompanied by a change in our environment, such as an overseas vacation. Conversely, we tend to merge events that are broadly similar.

This is useful as it helps us keep track of events in a systematic and useful way, without needing to perfectly record all the details of every event.

But in lockdown we don’t have physical transitions to differentiate one event from the next. We no longer walk between meetings or commute from the office to home. Many different events now share the same context (staying at home), which means your memory tends to blur them together.

What can we do about it?

Once we understand that our memories are going to find the current circumstances challenging, there are things we can do to improve the situation.

One way is to make an effort to create distinctive cues where possible. Can we all wear silly hats for our Friday night drinks (or board meetings)? Can we hold work meetings for different projects in different rooms of our house?

Ask someone different each time to chair recurring meetings? Going for a walk during meetings where we only need to listen can create a new set of physical cues to associate with what is being said.

Another way is to rely more heavily on our external memory systems: diaries, calendars, notes and records. Accepting that our internal memory might fall short means we can compensate by deliberately using tools and resources to store the information on our behalf.

These systems can later act as contextual memory cues too. For example, we can add a screenshot to our video meeting notes to record who was there and their location on the screen.

These kinds of recommendations are often given to people who experience memory failures for other reasons, such as brain injury.

Read more: Thinking about working from home long-term? 3 ways it could be good or bad for your health

But similar principles might help all of us whose internal memory resources are not designed for spending our time almost exclusively in one place.

When embracing external memory systems, it is important to ensure they are readily accessible and always accurate, so we can trust them completely and be sure of getting the reminders we need.

Working from home is the new normal for many of us. Developing new strategies that support our memory performance might help reduce the number of things we forget, and stop our recollection of the COVID-19 times turning into an amorphous mush.

– ref. Don’t know what day it is or who said what at the last meeting? Blame the coronavirus – https://theconversation.com/dont-know-what-day-it-is-or-who-said-what-at-the-last-meeting-blame-the-coronavirus-142086

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Howard Manns, Lecturer in Linguistics, Monash University

Things are really jeffed up for Karens right now. The Miley (“coronavirus”) did a Melba (“made yet another a comeback”), and Joe and Jane Bloggs are being drongos.

In the process, “Karen” has become the Bradman of ways for calling out selfish entitlement, racism and inequality.

Names are much more than just a tag or a label — they have a special force. This is why they often enter general vocabulary, not only in direct reference to the original celebrated name-bearer, as in the case of doing a Bradman or a Melba, or as common nouns like pavlova, lamington, granny smith, but also as shorthand for a certain “type”. Ask any Tom, Dick or Karen.

English speakers use proper names to mean all sorts of things – and we’re not always nice about it.

Read more: ‘Iso’, ‘boomer remover’ and ‘quarantini’: how coronavirus is changing our language

Karen: more Miss Ann than Biddy or Meg

Throughout history, many women’s names have been swept into English in unkind ways. Witness the deterioration of pet names such as “Dolly”, “Kitty”, “Biddy”, “Jill”, “Polly”, “Meg”, “Judy” or “Jude” — all have been contemptuous labels at one time or other, either for “drab and unattractive” women or the “promiscuous and attractive” ones.

But today’s “Karen” isn’t Dolly, Biddy or Meg. Attempts to frame Karen’s overall use as “sexist” miss the point. The term Karen has recently been used to call out white women whose behaviour is considered entitled, unreasonable and obnoxious. It has rightfully spawned a series of male equivalents, including “male-Karen”, “Kyle”, “Ken”, “Kevin” or “Steve”.

Importantly, the sort of entitled (and often racist) behaviour “Karen” is being used to call out existed long before the term. Many Black Americans have framed this behaviour in terms of a “Miss Ann” social type, historically linked to the white women of slave plantations. Some Black writers noted a surge in Miss Ann-like behaviour around the time of Donald Trump’s election.

Of course, these issues have long existed in Australia, too. Famously, last year an actual person named “Karen” did a Karen by trying to take down a neighbour’s Indigenous flag. A viral video led to the spread of the catch-phrase: “It’s too strong for you, Karen.”

Karen then joins a series of labels like “Miss Ann”, “Mr Charlie” and “Becky” to call out obnoxious behaviour and privilege. And, to loosely paraphrase the Claytons faux whisky ad, Karen debates are the debates you’re having when you should be debating privilege.

Awash with joshing Johnnies and Joes

That said, it’s worth sympathising with people named Karen, who have entered a sometimes less-than-illustrious club of people hard done by in the English language, unkindly “joed” and “joshed”, often for centuries.

Whether, when and how people (or animals!) enter this club depends on a range of factors. Media, politics and celebrity are obviously important (“Melba”, “Bradman” and poor old “drongo”). And often there’s verbal play involved, as in the end-clipped rhyming slang “Miley (Cyrus)” for “coronavirus” or “jeffed” and “jeffing” (famously from “Jeff Kennett”, but echoing many an effective cussword).

And then there’s frequency. Karen joins those whose names have been swept into society due to sheer number. Karen appeared on the most common names lists in the late 1960s but is no competition for “John”, which has been among the English-speaking world’s most common names since the 13th century.

And “John” and “Johnny” have been pressed into service for a range of meanings in English, including “the client of a prostitute”, “someone easily duped”, “a sailor”, “an immigrant”, “a vacuous aristocrat”, “penis”, “hospital gown” and “an onion seller from Brittany”.

Indeed, the sheer number of Johns in English history means this name’s most prominent purpose is to “erase” or “anonymise” — in other words, to reduce its referent to an “everyman”, as in “John Q. Public” (for everyday citizen), “Johnnie Raw” (for a new military recruit), or “John-of-all-trades”, among many, many others.

But we’re likely more familiar with a “Jack-of-all-trades”, which points to another common phenomenon: a proliferation of naming alliteration around “j” names. “Jack” is a familiar alternative for John, so it’s probably not surprising to see it being used (since the late middle ages) in a similar everyman (“manual labourer”, “lumberjack”) or derogative sense (“jackanapes” for a “person displaying ape-like qualities”).

In fact, extended uses of Jack have produced well over a hundred different words and phrases, ranging from the slightly disparaging to the wildly offensive (we’re hard-pressed to think of a tabooed bodily function and secretion that doesn’t have an expression featuring “jack)”). So offensive was “Jack”, in fact, that those in polite 18th-century society euphemised “jackass” to “Johnny-Bum”.

And, just as “John Doe” has his “Jane”, so too does “Jack” have his “Jill”, as in “Jack and Jill” — a couple whose common names made them useful to a famous story about a drink-run gone bad. But the “jackanape” also has his “Jane-of-apes” equivalent (which for the record, preceded “Tarzan” by a few hundred years).

The tomfoolery of names: Karen in the dunce’s corner

Karen joins the likes of Scottish theologian and philosopher John Duns Scotus, who was an influential thinker in the 13th century. It was the perceived stubbornness of his 16th-century followers, known as dunsmen or dunses, that led to our current sense of “dunce”.

The club of dim-witted dunces has acquired many members over the years. The original Tom Fool has been around since at least the early 1300s; he joins other ninnies like Tom Doodle (the blockhead) Tom Farthing (the simpleton), Tom Towly (another simpleton), Tom Tug (rhyming slang for “mug”), not to mention “Errant Tony” and “Simple Simon”. These are the predecessors of the modern-day “charlie” or “wally” (from Walter but with happy reinforcement that comes from cucumbers pickled in brine — the “dill”).

Read more: Oi! We’re not lazy yarners, so let’s kill the cringe and love our Aussie accent(s)

Notably, Karen also joins the many people whose names through historical happenstance come to index “ignorance”, “backwardness” or “lack of sophistication”. “Hick” — an earlier, shortened form of Richard — has certainly developed this meaning. In the 16th century, Hick, Hob (shortened Robert or Robin) and Hans (a general term for a German or Dutchman) seem to be the Tom, Dick and Harry of no manners or consequence.

And we Aussies have our own bevvy of underdogs and uncultured types. “Ocker” was originally a pet form of “Oscar”. Its links to “boorishness” and “exaggerated nationalism” can be traced to Ron Frazer’s “Oscar” character on The Mavis Bramston Show. In the 1970s, he teamed up with “Norm” — the supreme couch potato.

Tom, Dick and Karen

As Oscar Wilde once put it, “Names are everything.” They’re the verbal expression for our personality, for those qualities and attributes that define us as individuals. More than that, names are a proper part of us.

It’s no surprise then people named Karen are upset. However, like inequality, this isn’t something you can just Houdini away.

– ref. What’s in a name? Well, quite a bit if your name is Karen (or Jack, John, Jeff, Dolly, Biddy, Meg …) – https://theconversation.com/whats-in-a-name-well-quite-a-bit-if-your-name-is-karen-or-jack-john-jeff-dolly-biddy-meg-143194

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn Moore, Social Researcher, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania

In his book Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe writes that settler Australians wilfully misunderstood, hid and destroyed evidence of Aboriginal Australians’ farming practices.

My analysis of secondary school textbooks shows this behaviour isn’t restricted to the past — it is ongoing.

In Australia, pre-invasion Aboriginal peoples tend to be portrayed as nomadic hunter-gatherers. For example, a 1979 textbook titled Australia’s frontiers: an atlas of Australian history by J.R.J. Grigsby and T.F. Gurry said:

The people of this distinctive race were hunters and gatherers […] They were constantly on the move, following game or seeking new sources of plant food.

However, physical evidence as well as the journals of early colonists show Aboriginal peoples farmed and built large villages, meaning many groups stayed in one place.

Sophisticated farmers

In the 1970s, evidence of Aboriginal farming in southwest Victoria recorded by white archaeologists confirmed what the local Gunditjmara people had always known: rather than living off whatever they came across, the Gunditjmara actively farmed the landscape. As in other areas in the world, intensive farming was accompanied by permanent dwellings.

Read more: The detective work behind the Budj Bim eel traps World Heritage bid

Writings of early colonists show Aboriginal agriculture was practised Australia-wide. In 2011, Bill Gammage used historical writings to explain how Aboriginal peoples created the park-like landscape “discovered” by early colonists.

Read more: The biggest estate on earth: how Aborigines made Australia

Bruce Pascoe’s recent book Dark Emu extends Gammage’s research. Writing about the journals of the early colonists, Pascoe wrote:

As I read these early journals I came across repeated references to people building dams and wells, planting, irrigating and harvesting seed, preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds or secure vessels, creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape – none of which fitted the definition of hunter-gatherers.

What are school children taught?

I analysed Australian history narratives in secondary school textbooks from 1950 to the present. Up until the 2000s, these textbooks repeated the myth that Aboriginal peoples were nomadic hunter-gatherers. For example, a 1984 text said:

The Aborigines were nomads or wanderers. The wandered from place to place as they searched for food and water. But each tribe has its own special territory and members of the tribe did not move outside this area […] The Aborigines knew the places where they would be most likely to find water and things to eat and they visited each place in turn […] The Aborigines did not farm the land. They didn’t plant and harvest crops or herd animals.

Although factually incorrect, it’s likely the authors of these accounts believed them to be accurate.

Over time, the textbooks I studied gradually improved as various errors and omissions were corrected. However, it took until the early 2000s before the myth of hunter-gathering was corrected. In 2005, one text for middle school students openly refuted the traditional narrative:

It has generally long been accepted that Australia’s Indigenous people were traditionally all nomadic […] Archaeological evidence recently discovered in Victoria seems to suggest, however, that at least some Indigenous people might have had fixed settlements.

This change seems to reflect the impetus to correct misinformation. Remarkably however, this change was short-lived. The publisher reverted to the traditional narrative of Aborigines as hunter-gatherers the very next year. This is the only example I found where textbooks reverted to a previous account that was known to be incorrect. The publisher’s comparable 2006 text stated:

Collecting food and the natural resources needed to provide shelter and weapons typically took up most of the day […] Indigenous people took only the resources they needed to live. When a particular territory became too pressured by over-use, the people moved camp, allowing landscapes and resource stocks to be restored.

This pattern continued in subsequent years. For example, the same publisher’s 2012 textbook claimed:

The arrival of the British began the process that saw the Gadigal lose their lands and their self-sufficient, hunting and gathering way of life.

The most recent textbooks omit this topic entirely, which means the widely-held myth of hunter-gatherering persists.

Why aren’t our kids taught about Aboriginal farming?

In Dark Emu, Pascoe explains that denying Aboriginal farming practices enabled the colonisers to reject Aboriginal peoples’ rights to land, shoring up their own claims to legitimacy instead. The invasion and colonisation of Australia was based on the self-justifying legal doctrine terra nullius — land belonging to no one. A key aspect of this claim was that Aboriginal peoples supposedly didn’t farm.

European political thinking in the 1800s linked “industriousness” with rights to land. For example, in 1758, Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel argued societies based on the “fruits of the chase” (rather than agricultural production) “may not complain if more industrious Nations should come and occupy part of their lands”.

Read more: Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia, and other myths from old school text books

This line of thought allowed the British colonists to reassure themselves the continent was there for the taking and justify their dispossession of Aboriginal peoples.

It’s difficult to understand why a contemporary publisher of school textbooks would publish misleading or incorrect material. However, we do know changes to secondary school history textbooks have occurred in the context of the “history wars” in Australia.

The “history wars” refers to the conservative backlash to the increasing democratisation of Australian history.

From the 1970s, complexity was introduced to Australian histories. The traditional tale of heroic, elite, white men was moderated by including the perspectives and voices of Aboriginal peoples, non-white immigrants and white women and workers. The “history wars” is an attempt to marginalise these voices and return to traditional narratives.

Textbooks record the dominant understandings and values of the society in which they are published. The intrusion of the history wars into the school curriculum reveal a struggle to define these dominant understandings.

Read more: ‘Western civilisation’? History teaching has moved on, and so should those who champion it

History textbooks are crucial to students’ understanding of our nation. In colonised nations such as Australia, foundational narratives are fashioned to establish the legitimacy of the nation. In Australia, it seems as if this fashioning requires Aboriginal peoples to be portrayed as hunter-gatherers.

Most of us who’ve been educated in Australia hold racist stereotypes of Aboriginal society as primitive and savage. We’ve imbibed these stereotypes as part of our education. Resistance and refusal to acknowledge Aboriginal agricultural practices supports these stereotypes and leads to discriminatory attitudes which continue to impact Aboriginal Australians. Shattering these stereotypes is crucial to improving the lives of Aboriginal Australians. Our textbooks need to do better.

Read more: Why our kids should learn Aboriginal history

– ref. Secondary school textbooks teach our kids the myth that Aboriginal Australians were nomadic hunter-gatherers – https://theconversation.com/secondary-school-textbooks-teach-our-kids-the-myth-that-aboriginal-australians-were-nomadic-hunter-gatherers-133066

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carl Grodach, Professor and Director of Urban Planning & Design, Monash University

COVID-19 and the growing recession concentrated in the services sector will not just increase social inequality, but accelerate the growing spatial divide in our cities. As our new research report shows, the pandemic’s impacts reinforce the ongoing trend towards the suburbanisation of inequality.

There are two reasons for this. First, the industries vulnerable to the economic impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns rely heavily on low-wage, part-time employment. Second, the inner suburbs are home to the largest concentration of COVID-vulnerable workers.

Read more: Rapid growth is widening Melbourne’s social and economic divide

If we do not act now, more people will get pushed out of inner areas rich in jobs and amenities to lower-cost outer suburbs with poor access to jobs and community services.

Which industries and workers are vulnerable?

Our research analyses where people employed in the industries most vulnerable to COVID-19 lockdowns live and the kind of work they do. We map vulnerable employment areas in all suburbs of Australia’s five largest capital cities. We then examine the characteristics of people in vulnerable employment living in all suburbs of Australia’s current coronavirus hotspot, metropolitan Melbourne.

We define vulnerable employment based on a detailed review of industries with one-third or more firms reporting reduced worker hours one week after the first COVID-19 lockdown (March 30 2020). These firms are mainly in the consumer, travel and community services sectors. They employ people working in accommodation and food, arts and entertainment, education, “non-essential” health care, retail and transport.

Read more: How the coronavirus recession puts service workers at risk

We profile the characteristics of vulnerable workers in each of these sub-industries and by suburb. We classify suburbs (using SA2 level data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics) by share of vulnerable employment based on the worker’s place of usual residence.

Many at-risk workers live in inner suburbs

As the map below shows, the largest shares of vulnerable workers live in Melbourne’s inner suburbs.

Vulnerability levels clearly diminish moving outward from the city centre. In other words, many vulnerable workers live in some of the highest-rent suburbs.

On average, the share of vulnerable workers in the very high vulnerability suburbs is 32.2% of employed residents. The figure exceeds 40% in some of these areas.

Workers likely to be forced to move

Living in the inner suburbs, combined with the nature of their jobs, puts many COVID-vulnerable workers at high risk of displacement.

In the very high vulnerability suburbs, 47% of vulnerable workers are on low or very low incomes. And 54.3% work part-time (less than 38 hours a week). A large proportion (41.9%) are aged under 30 and about one-third are 30-44.

In fact, over half (53.5%) of the vulnerable workforce living in very high-vulnerability suburbs hold jobs in the most precarious, low-wage consumer services industries – accommodation and food services and retail and personal services. Another 30% work in arts, entertainment and education.

Suppressed consumer demand will not only have short-run employment impacts, but might permanently alter consumption patterns. The result would be enduring business closures and job losses for workers who live in these areas.

To make ends meet, many of those facing job loss and other employment pressures such as reduced hours will seek more affordable housing in the middle and outer suburbs.

However, although the outer areas are now home to the smallest proportion of vulnerable workers, the vulnerable workers that live there tend to be worse off. Just over 66% are on low or very low incomes and 60% work part-time.

As a result, the migration of COVID-vulnerable workers to the outer areas will add to the existing concentration of spatial inequality in Greater Melbourne.

Read more: Private renters are doing it tough in outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne

What can be done about this?

COVID-19 puts people working in low-end service jobs and the creative and educational services at high risk of losing their jobs. Those who manage to live in the high-cost inner suburbs are now particularly vulnerable.

Read more: Coronavirus: 3 in 4 Australians employed in the creative and performing arts could lose their jobs

It is therefore crucial to expand rather than retract the JobKeeper and JobSeeker programs. Proposed cuts to JobSeeker are estimated to push 370,000 Australians into poverty, 123,000 in Victoria alone. In tandem, we need interim policy in the rental housing market to defuse the impending “rent bomb” of tenants facing eviction if they can’t pay the accumulated debt of deferred rent.

Longer-term strategies are also needed. We must confront the reality that many service sector jobs will not return.

This requires investment in skills-building courses tied to strengthening the recovery of TAFEs and universities, particularly in areas like “essential manufacturing” – medical supplies, recycling, food – and communications technologies. JobTrainer is a good start.

Given the spatial dimensions of the crisis, place-based programs are crucial too. Preserving inner suburban industrial land can play a significant role in small enterprise start-ups, firm expansion and job creation. Inner industrial districts provide a flexible mix of space that allows businesses to grow and add quality jobs in place.

Read more: Three ways to fix the problems caused by rezoning inner-city industrial land for mixed-use apartments

At the same time, policymakers can better develop community infrastructure and employment hubs in the outer suburbs. Community hubs provide flexible, multipurpose spaces that cater to various community needs. These services range from youth, aged care and health facilities to collaborative workspaces and settings for workforce training providers.

While COVID-19 is clearly taking an immediate toll on the health and economies of our cities, we need a conversation about the longer-term impacts and responses.

– ref. Why coronavirus will deepen the inequality of our suburbs – https://theconversation.com/why-coronavirus-will-deepen-the-inequality-of-our-suburbs-143432