Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Gaunson, Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies, RMIT University

In 2020, Stan announced its endeavour to produce 30 original series filmed in Australia over the next five years.

A particular focus of the network is crime productions. Scrublands is just the latest, joining Black Snow (2023) and The Tourist (2023), in addition to remaking the popular Australian feature films Wolf Creek (2016) and Romper Stomper (2018).

Scrublands is also on familiar ground, joining several other adaptations of small town Australian crime novels like Peter Temple’s Broken Shore (written in 2005 and adapted in 2013) and Jane Harper’s The Dry (written in 2016 and adapted in 2020).

In his original novel, Chris Hammer masterfully presents an epic tale of a dying town. He meticulously details its struggles where the op-shop opens only twice a week, the hotel shuts down and the Black Dog Motel is the sole accommodation, with a strict “no animals allowed” policy.

With a backdrop rooted in the author’s non-fiction work on the Murray-Darling Basin – The River (2010), The Coast (2012) – Hammer weaves a crime novel that peels back the layers of fictitious Riversend, a New South Wales town grappling with economic decline, drought and the trauma of a devastating massacre just 12 months earlier.

As with the novel, this horrific and inexplicable traumatic act is where Greg Mclean’s gripping series begins.

Read more:
Black Snow, a new pacy murder mystery, addresses the complicated legacy of slavery in Australia

Secrets and suspicion

In the town’s country church, Father Byron Swift (Jay Ryan), donned in white and purple robes, unexpectedly emerges with a rifle in hand. He commits a shocking act by opening fire on parishioners, resulting in the deaths of five men.

The clergyman is subsequently shot in self-defence by the local police officer, Robbie Haus-Jones (Adam Zwar), setting the stage for the unfolding saga of Scrublands.

It is a town full of secrets and suspicion of outsiders. The series follows burnt-out journalist Martin Scarsden (Luke Arnold) arriving 12 months later with a seemingly simple mission: to craft a human interest narrative on the aftermath of the mass shooting. His Sydney-based editor (Nicholas Bell) urges him to investigate how Riversend is faring one year after the horrific act.

The suspenseful narrative unfolds gradually across each episode, exposing the town’s hidden truths and pulling Scarsden deeper into the web of lies and secrets that have come to define this drought-stricken town.

All of the performances are strong, but Bella Heathcote who plays the grieving Mandy Bond is the standout.

As the audience is literally shown whodunit in this opening scene – replayed from different perspectives across the series – it is not a whodunit as much as a “howcatchem”.

A howcatchem is a crime narrative where the commission of the crime is shown or described at the beginning, usually including the identity of the perpetrator. The case then follows as the detective begins a hunt to restore the moral world by bringing justice to the community.

Scrublands offers a variation to this howcatchem sub-genre. The perpetrator is not at large but dead. The why of his violence, however, remains unsatisfactorily unanswered – and Scarsden intends to find out.

An immersive story

Further variations to the expected crime narrative continue with the victims being grown men rather than young women. Was the priest killing at random? Were his victims a calculated selection?

As Scarsden navigates the intricacies of Riversend, director McLean offers an expansive portrayal of the town. This gives viewers time to immerse themselves in the environment and multifaceted characters.

The story unfolds with a deliberate steady pace, allowing McLean to continue his interest in rural landscape stories (Wolf Creek, Rogue) where he has more recently branched beyond just Australia through international co-productions including Jungle (2017), set in the Amazon rainforest, and The Darkness (2016) about a family that visits the Grand Canyon.

The show is most successful through its links to rural crime noir with the emphasis on pulling apart the vulnerability and deception of this small town. All of these somewhat innocent characters are complicit in the criminality that was allowed to corrupt the town.

Scrublands is produced by Easy Tiger, the company behind adapting the Peter Temple Jack Irish novels for the ABC. Similarly, this is a detective story about a non-law-enforcement protagonist who has to rely on his own instincts rather than police intel.

Besides, the police here are just as suspicious as the crims being pursued.

The series builds at a nice tempo before the truth is finally revealed. Secrets are exposed, but nobody is less traumatised by the conclusion – including journalist Scarsden, whose own haunted past is equally exposed.

Hammer’s second novel, featuring the same protagonist, was the more impressive Silver (2019). There is another ready-made source work if Scrublands is renewed for a second series.

Scrublands is on Stan from today.

Read more:
Roald Dahl, time-bending crime, and queer pirate comedy: the best of streaming this November

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

– ref. Scrublands: not a whodunit but a ‘howcatchem’, a new suspenseful Aussie inversion of the genre – https://theconversation.com/scrublands-not-a-whodunit-but-a-howcatchem-a-new-suspenseful-aussie-inversion-of-the-genre-217365

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

Last week the High Court ruled that holding high-risk asylum seekers in indefinite detention was unconstitutional. As a consequence of the court decision, more than 80 people, some of whom were convicted of serious crimes including murder and rape, have been released. The government is now expected to rush in legislation to deal with the fallout.

In this podcast, Liberal senator and Shadow Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security James Paterson joins The Conversation to discuss the High Court’s ruling, his concerns about increasing anti-Semitism across the country, the rising cyber risks, and Australia’s future relations with China.

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

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: James Paterson on the High Court’s decision on detention and rising anti-Semitism – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-james-paterson-on-the-high-courts-decision-on-detention-and-rising-anti-semitism-217808

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nataliya Ilyushina, Research Fellow, Blockchain Innovation Hub, RMIT University

On November 4, X owner Elon Musk unveiled his new AI chatbot Grok: a sarcastic ChatGPT alternative supposedly “modelled” after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of Musk’s favourite books.

The verb Grok means “to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with”. Science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein first coined the term, which is now used by people in the computer science industry.

According to xAI, another company in Musk’s diversified technology portfolio, Grok “is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humour!”

Grok is built on a large language model (LLM) in much the same way as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and is being positioned as a potential rival.

Although Grok isn’t available to the general public yet, the beta version has been released to a small group of testers and some of X’s Premium+ subscribers. However, Musk said access would be granted according to the length of the Premium+ membership, which suggests new subscribers will have to wait.

If you’re impatient, a number of Grok’s “witty” interjections have made their way to X feeds. What stands out the most is just how foulmouthed the chatbot is programmed to be.

Is there any benefit to having a chatbot of this nature? And why might have Musk taken this approach?

AI with a ‘rebellious streak’

Musk has tweeted a number of his interactions with Grok, which has provided no shortage of snarky responses. Several other early adopters have also shared their experiences.

While some of Grok’s answers seem as good as other chatbots’ outputs, some are poorer. For example, one user reported Grok was unable to provide a news summary and analysis when asked about the United States’ off-year elections on November 7. Instead, it went through recent tweets on the topic.

This may be because Grok is still an early beta product. It had reportedly been through about two months of training at the time it was launched.

Although Grok is meant to be modelled after Douglas Adams’ 1979 satirical novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, critics have been quick to point out there’s little similarity between the chatbot and the characters and humour that made Adams’ book a worldwide success.

Nevertheless, Grok stands out for a number of reasons. Its essence lies in a perpetual satire and jest, which users are invited to relish.

It’s also willing to, as xAI put it, “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems”. This trait has proven to be effective in making Grok go viral.

Early posts from users show it enthusiastically engaging in conversations about sex, drugs and religion, which other chatbots such as Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard would refuse to do.

Learning from tweets

It’s not clear how Grok’s style will affect its practical use. While it does slightly outperform ChatGPT 3.5 on mathematical and multiple-choice knowledge tests, there don’t seem to be examples of how it would perform when asked to write a professional report or email, wherein humour would be inappropriate.

Grok has real-time and direct access to posts on X, along with standard training datasets. In other words, its responses are based on the content of a platform that has been heavily criticised for enabling hate speech and being poorly moderated since Musk’s takeover last year.

Since AI chatbots are largely reflective of the quality of their training data (and additional human feedback training), Grok could end up adopting the myriad biases and problematic traits inherent in X’s content. This would lead to safety risks, including the spread of harmful ideas and misinformation, a concern that’s commonly cited by experts calling for AI regulation.

While ChatGPT now has real-time access to the internet, it also trains on a separate dataset called Common Crawl. This allows developers to have more control of what goes in the chatbot’s “brain”.

According to xAI:

A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform.

But this could also mean much less filtering of the content that goes into and comes out of Grok.

Why does Grok exist?

Controversially, Grok was launched just days after the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom, where 27 countries signed the Bletchley declaration towards mitigating the risks of AI.

Musk also participated in the summit. In fact, just hours before his flight to the UK, he spoke about how AI might pose an existential risk to humanity if it becomes “accidentally anti-human”.

Yet, a few days after discussing these risks and taking part in an AI summit, Musk releases an AI tool that disregards all the premises of safety engraved in the Bletchley declaration.

However, he may not see it that way. In an interview with Joe Rogan, Musk said he bought X (then Twitter) to fight the “woke mind virus” and “extinctionists” who “view humanity as a plague on the surface of the Earth”.

Training Grok to be politically correct, he said, is the risk itself – and this is why he wanted to develop a chatbot that says what it “thinks” (or rather, what the average user thinks).

That would make Grok the AI chatbot version of the “average Joe” on X. It’s hard to say whether, in the grand scheme of things, the majority of people need or even want such a tool. But we should certainly consider the safety risks it may pose.

In the meantime, at least Grok has a more comprehensive answer to the meaning of life than “42”.

Nataliya Ilyushina receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence.

– ref. Grok is Elon Musk’s new sassy, foul-mouthed AI. But who exactly is it made for? – https://theconversation.com/grok-is-elon-musks-new-sassy-foul-mouthed-ai-but-who-exactly-is-it-made-for-217284

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Bird, DIscipline Leader, Corporate Governance & Senior Lecturer, Swinburne Law School, Swinburne University of Technology

Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin is set to front a Senate inquiry this week, probing last week’s colossal outage which left millions stranded without internet or mobile phone connectivity for a staggering 14 hours.

The company has faced severe criticism for its handling of the outage, including for its lack of urgency in updating the public.

Loss of trust and confidence aside, if the national outage has taught us anything, it is there are real dangers in leaving the management of critical national infrastructure to a 100% privately owned company, in this case, a subsidiary of Singapore Telecommunications Limited, or Singtel as it is better known.

As a private company, Optus has no legal obligations to report publicly on its financial statements or governance arrangements, unlike its competitor, Telstra Ltd. They don’t even have to report to government, despite holding a licence to be a carrier under federal legislation.

Optus is the second largest supplier after Telstra of national carrier infrastructure in Australia. Its services are critical to the operation of our economy and community wellbeing. An illustration of this was the failure of the emergency 000 service during the outage. People with Optus couldn’t contact emergency services for up to 14 hours.

The obligations of listed companies

If Optus was a publicly listed company, like Telstra, it would have to comply with the listing rules of the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX). This means it would have to disclose any information that could reasonably be expected to affect the price or value of the entity’s shares.

An unexplained system-wide outage of carrier services would arguably warrant this. If these rules applied to Optus, it would have had to issue regular market updates on developments during the outage. The odd, unannounced phone call by the Optus CEO to a radio program would be unsatisfactory.

A quick review of the Optus website’s “About Us” section suggests a number of apparent shortcomings. Contrary to the recommendations of the ASX corporate governance rules not a single member of the Optus executive board of directors qualifies as an independent director, that is, a director with no apparent ties to the company.

The idea of the independent director is to help a company board break out of its group think. In a crisis, for example, this would mean asking hard questions of executive management. While ASX governance rules technically only apply to public companies, they are a role model for all corporates, including large proprietary companies like Optus.

No details of the company’s risk-management arrangements are given either, including the chief risk officer. This is extraordinary for a company whose recent history (cyber hack, system outage) shows its exposure to extremely high levels of risk.

There are also no details of who monitors the executive management of Optus. It is important to see this for what it is – Optus devolves its corporate governance responsibilities to Singtel and runs a very lean operation in Australia.

This is seemingly good for Optus from a cost management viewpoint, but bad for Australia because we are leaving the governance of critical national infrastructure to a company with no direct accountability to the public and minimal accountability to the federal government.

Poorly prepared for a crisis

The absence of a comprehensive crisis management plan was obvious during last week’s outage. Despite experiencing a wide-scale cyber hack in 2022 Optus seemed ill-prepared to handle the system outage. You have to ask: why wasn’t a plan prepared well in advance of any such crisis?

Crisis management should entail a communication hierarchy and a systematic response. It is a key part of a company’s risk management system. This means knowing who needs to be notified and when to notify them. Presumably, high on that list would be the government. Instead, Bayer Rosmarin phoned radio programs revealing snippets of information in an ad-hoc way.

As part of crisis management, system fixes should be prioritised and companies obliged to tell the public the order in which these will be tackled. For example, the first fix should be health and hospital services. This did not happen. Instead, the absence of a clear plan only fuelled public anger.

Optus likes to control the narrative

Optus likes to tightly control its communication narrative. It refused to publicly release the Deloitte report on its 2022 cyber hack, until late last week when it was ordered to make it available to litigants in a class action.

Similarly, the chief executive was reluctant to explain the current system outage, effectively asserting that there was no point until they had “bottomed out the root cause” and could make it more digestible to the public.

Optus held all the power, yet when it did finally explain the failure days later, it was described as caused by a system upgrade and a failure of routers. Hardly more digestible than the system failure we already knew it to be.

In an increasingly digitised world, technology failures and system outages have become a fact of life. ASX Ltd, the licensed operator of Australia’s equity market, experienced a bad one in 2022, known as the collapse of the Clearing House Electronic Subregister System replacement project.

Knowing less than we would like

We know more about that failure than we will ever know about the Optus crisis because the ASX is a public company and was required to make continuous disclosure to the market.

In addition, ASX is also accountable for the management and governance of its critical infrastructure on an annual basis under licence arrangements overseen by the Reserve Bank and the Australian Securities and Investment Commission .

Like Optus, these failures have been the subject of hearings before parliament. However, there are no equivalent accountability requirements for Optus. Surely, the national telecommunications infrastructure managed by Optus is every bit as important as ASX’s clearing house infrastructure?

It is time to ask what accountability mechanisms should be in place for companies like Optus, whether they are enough and who watches over them. Where are the yearly assessments of that infrastructure by government agencies? The Senate inquiry, which was announced the day after the outage, will hopefully tackle these issues with the serious attention they deserve.

Helen Bird is a member of ASIC’s corporate governance panel. She has received funding from the Criminology Research Council and the Australian Research Council in the past.

– ref. The Optus outage shows us the perils of having vital networks in private hands – https://theconversation.com/the-optus-outage-shows-us-the-perils-of-having-vital-networks-in-private-hands-217660

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Erin Madden, PhD Candidate and Research Program Officer, University of Sydney

The debate on how to combat social media misinformation is as relevant as ever. In recent years, we’ve seen medical misinformation spreading alongside COVID, and political misinformation impacting the outcome of elections and national referendums.

Experts have largely placed the impetus to stop misinformation on three groups: social media users, government regulators, and social media platforms themselves.

Tips for social media users include educating themselves on the subject, and being aware of the tactics used to spread misinformation. Government bodies are urged to work together with social media platforms to regulate and prevent the spread of misinformation.

But all of these approaches depend on social media content we can easily recognise as “reliable”. Unfortunately, our new study just published in The Journal of Health Communication shows reliable content is not easy to find. Even we – researchers and subject matter experts – struggled to identify the evidence base of the social media posts we analysed.

Based on our findings, we have developed new guidelines to help experts create engaging content that also clearly communicates the evidence behind the post.

Read more:
Misinformation, disinformation and hoaxes: What’s the difference?

What did our study find?

We collected and analysed 300 mental health research-related X (formerly Twitter) posts from two large Australian mental health research organisations, posted between September 2018 and September 2019. We chose this timeframe to avoid the influence of recent major events like the Australian bushfires (starting November 2019) or the COVID-19 pandemic (starting March 2020) on our findings.

We assessed the written content within each individual post, whether the post contained hashtags, mentions, hyperlinks and multimedia, and whether the post featured an evidence-based source, such as a peer-reviewed journal article, conference presentation, or clinical treatment guidelines.

We found it was challenging to reliably establish the evidence behind the posts. Our team agreed on whether a post contained evidence-based information only 56% of the time. These chances are not much better than a coin flip.

When people with years of relevant training can’t reliably identify evidence-based content, how can we expect everyone else to?

Although some posts appeared to be evidence-informed (for example, a researcher commenting on their area of expertise), the source of their statement was unclear in the majority of posts.

This raises further questions about the distinction between misinformation or disinformation, and “poor quality information”. We would argue the latter happens when the level of evidence supporting a post is not recognisable even to those trained in the field.

While some posts contained links to evidence-based sources, such as peer-reviewed papers, most contained expert opinions only, such as news articles. To judge how reliable this content is, a user would need to put in significant extra work – reading resources thoroughly and following up on sources.

It’s not realistic to ask social media users to do this, especially when peer-reviewed sources use complex, technical language and often require payment to access.

Read more:
Removing author fees can help open access journals make research available to everyone

How can researchers communicate evidence-based content?

Academics are encouraged to translate their research for the public, but there is limited guidance on how to balance audience engagement with evidence-based information.

As part of our study, we aimed to create simple, evidence-based guidelines for researchers, on how to effectively disseminate mental health research via X. For example, we found that researchers can boost engagement by emphasising the specific population group the research relates to (for example LBGTIQA+ or culturally diverse communities) and by using images and videos.

Our guidelines encourage experts to create engaging content that also clearly communicates “what” the information is, “where” the information is from, and “who” the information is for.

We outlined five main points:

What do I say?

1. tell the audience what the information is, and where it came from

2. tell your audience who you’re speaking to

How do I say it?

3. use media that adds to the post, expanding on what the information is and where it came from

4. use hyperlinks to verify research information in the post

5. minimise over-use of hashtags.

We also created mock “before and after” posts inspired by the posts from the study dataset, which outline the use of the guidelines in practice.

The recent increased focus on tackling online misinformation points to a hopeful future for information quality on social media platforms. But we still have a long way to go to promote evidence-based research in an accessible manner.

Research organisations and experts have a unique opportunity to show leadership in this area. Academics can add their voices to the public discourse as trusted and reliable sources of content people want to engage with – all while maintaining research integrity.

Additionally, in today’s world where health information is often promoted, shared and re-shared by everyone, these guidelines also provide useful tips to help anyone share clear and reliable information, and empower people to effectively navigate health information on social media.

Read more:
More stick, less carrot: Australia’s new approach to tackling fake news on digital platforms

Louise Thornton receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council

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

– ref. Even experts struggle to tell which social media posts are evidence-based. So, what do we do? – https://theconversation.com/even-experts-struggle-to-tell-which-social-media-posts-are-evidence-based-so-what-do-we-do-217448

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nial Wheate, Associate Professor of the School of Pharmacy, University of Sydney

In an era where chronic pain affects millions worldwide, the search for effective and safe pain relief has never been greater.

PanaNatra is a line of herbal products from Haleon, the makers of Panadol. Haleon claims the three PanaNatra’s products, made from plant extracts, help manage and provide relief from mild joint aches, mild muscle pain, and mild pain affecting sleep.

They contain different combinations of four plants:

• Boswellia serrata (contained in the joint and muscle products)
• Curcuma longa (in the joint and muscle products)
• Piper nigrum (just in the joint product)
• Withania somnifera (just in the sleep product).

These products are “listed medicines” in Australia. This means the ingredients are considered broadly low risk, have been used in traditional medicine, and are manufactured to a high standard. But the manufacturer has not provided evidence to the government regulator that they work.

So can herbal ingredients effectively and safely relieve different types of pain?

What does the evidence say?

Let’s consider the evidence for the four main ingredients.

Boswellia serrata

Indian Frankincense (Boswellia serrata) has been described in traditional Indian Ayurveda texts since the 1st century AD. Key active compounds derived from the gum resin of the tree called boswellic acids are thought to have anti-inflammatory effects.

The Boswellia serrata dry concentrate extract (Rhuleave K) used in the Muscle Pain product contains 50 mg of the herb per tablet, whereas the Joint Pain product includes 33.3 mg as a different formulation (Apresflex).

A review of various human clinical trials using a range of formulations of this herb supports its ability to reduce some types of pain and improve function in osteoarthritis. But a key finding of the study was that improvement only begins when Boswellia serrata is used continuously for four weeks and at a dose of at least 100–250 mg per day.

In a clinical trial, 100 mg daily of a Boswellia serrata gum-based product was found to reduce pain and improve physical functions for people with osteoarthritis.

Read more:
9 signs you have inflammation in your body. Could an anti-inflammatory diet help?

Curcuma longa

Turmeric (Curcuma longa) has been used in Chinese and Indian medicine for at least 2,000 years. It contains a well-known chemical called curcumin, a natural compound used for its anti-inflammatory properties, especially for osteoarthritis.

Turmeric compounds such as curcumin are often combined with Boswellia serrata compounds to improve their anti-inflammatory effects to reduce pain.

A review of 16 different clinical trials found turmeric extracts were effective for knee osteoarthritis.

A similar conclusion was drawn from a review of 11 clinical trials which examined the use of curcuminoids (of which curcumin is one) for one to four months. It found curcuminoids had similar pain-relieving qualities as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory based drugs.

Read more:
These 5 foods are claimed to improve our health. But the amount we’d need to consume to benefit is… a lot

Piper nigrum

Black pepper (Piper nigrum) contains the chemical piperine, which has anti-inflammatory properties.

Piper nigrum is often added to curcumin products to improve the absorption of curcumin, as is the case with the PanaNatra Joint Pain product.

For musculoskeletal pain, a preliminary human trial that examined the effects of a 1,000 mg daily dose of Rhuleave K (the extract used in PanaNatra) found it was as effective as paracetamol.

But the study was not placebo-controlled and the dose of paracetamol given (1,000 mg per day) was below the recommended daily intake for pain relief.

Read more:
Knee pain: here’s why it happens and how you can fix it

Withania somnifera

Withania somnifera (also called Ashwagandha) has been used in traditional Indian Ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years to reduce stress and ease inflammation.

One of the key chemicals appears to be withaferin A which interferes with the inflammatory signalling pathway.

PanaNatra’s Pain and Sleep product contains 300 mg per tablet of a Withania somnifera extract called KSM66.

A human trial found a daily 600 mg dose of Withania somnifera extract improved sleep quality and helped in managing insomnia.

In a separate trial, Withania somnifera was found to improve sleep quality, again when administered at a dose of 600 mg per day.

Read more:
From Ayurveda to biomedicine: understanding the human body

So what does this mean?

Whether, and how well, a herbal medicine works is largely dependent on the formulation (how it’s made and the extract used) and the dose provided. The same herb used in one formulation may result in a different outcome than a different formulation containing the same herb.

It’s also important to note that effectiveness for one type of pain does not mean a product will work for other types of pain.

Overall, similar herb extracts to those that have been included in the PanaNatra products do have some evidence that they work for pain and sleep. Whether they work for you will depend on a number of factors including the effectiveness of the PanaNatra formulation, how much you take, and the extent of your pain.

Are they safe?

PanaNatra needs to be used carefully by some patients.

Overall, there is insufficient human data to recommend any of these herbal ingredients in pregnancy or lactation. In fact there is some evidence that Withania somnifera may be unsafe to use in pregnancy, and other than the amounts commonly found in food, turmeric and its compounds are not considered safe to use in pregnancy either.

The herbs may also impact the effectiveness and safety of other medicines. For example, the blood levels of the cancer drug tamoxifen may be reduced when taken concurrently with turmeric supplements.

Withania somnifera has been associated with drowsiness and cases of liver toxicity.

Curcuma longa products, including formulations containing curcumin and piperine, have also been associated with liver toxicity. As such, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration has proposed adding warning labels to any products that contain those ingredients. But this discussion is ongoing and a decision won’t be made until next year.

Bottom line

While there is a long history of traditional use of the herbs in the PanaNatra products, there is limited high-quality scientific evidence for the effectiveness and safety for these specific products.

Pregnant and breastfeeding women should not take these products, and you should not exceed the daily dose recommended by the manufacturer.

If you have an underlying health condition, or are taking other medication, before you try them, consult your doctor or pharmacist to check if these products are suitable for you.

Read more:
Do you know what’s in the herbal medicine you’re taking?

Nial Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, a member of the Australasian Pharmaceutical Science Association, and a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Nial is the chief scientific officer of Vaihea Skincare LLC, a director of SetDose Pty Ltd a medical device company, and a Standards Australia panel member for sunscreen agents. Nial regularly consults to industry on issues to do with medicine risk assessments, manufacturing, design, and testing.

Joanna Harnett is an academic University of Sydney’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Pharmacy School where she teaches and conducts research in the field of traditional, complementary, and integrative medicine (TCIM). She has received research funds from universities, organisations, and/or industry for TCIM research and education and received payments for providing expert advice about TCIM to industry, government bodies and/or non-government organisations, and/or spoken at workshops, seminars and/or conferences for which registration, travel and/or accommodation has been paid for by the organisers.
The institutes, centres and universities associated with the authors receive research grants, donations and endowments from foundations, universities, government agencies, individuals, and industry. Sponsors and donors have provided untied funding to advance TCIM education and research. This viewpoint article was not undertaken as part of a contractual relationship with any donor or sponsor.

– ref. What is the PanaNatra line of painkillers and can herbal products effectively relieve pain? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-pananatra-line-of-painkillers-and-can-herbal-products-effectively-relieve-pain-216445

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By C.J. Cabilan, Adjunct Lecturer, The University of Queensland

Violence against nurses is pervasive. They are more likely to experience physical violence than any other health-care professionals. Violence against nurses occurs in the context of violence against women, with 87.5% of Australia’s nursing workforce identifying as women.

Nurses report being punched, hit, struck, having objects or body fluids thrown at them, being kicked, grabbed, spat on, threatened, pushed, slapped, strangled, scratched, bitten, or sexually assaulted by patients. These actions are assault, which is a crime. In recent years Western Australia, Queensland, South Australia and Northern Territory have implemented tougher penalties for those who assault nurses on the job as a deterrent.

But nurses don’t feel empowered or supported to report these crimes and patients are not being held accountable for their actions. Harsher penalties alone aren’t enough to protect nurses.

Read more:
Doctors are being sexually harassed at work. This needs to stop

Unhelpful responses from employers and police

We surveyed 275 nurses as part of our research. About 83% had been assaulted by patients. Around a third of the nurses in our study reported experiencing more than one form of assault.

But only about one in three assaulted nurses report attacks to the police. Nurses say the support they receive from their employers and police is generally poor, and they feel discouraged from proceeding with the reports they do make. Nurses said:

I felt like the decision was taken away from me and my management didn’t do anything in support of me.

I did not pursue charges as [there was] pressure from police to drop charges and no further support from my department in doing so.

Assaults still seen as ‘part of the job’

Nurses in our study spoke about how they see assaults as “part of the job”. As one said:

I was told to return to work as soon as I regained consciousness […] I had to look after the same patient because ‘there aren’t enough staff to replace you, and this is part of nursing […] There is only four hours left of your shift. Then you can go home and sleep it off’.

Another nurse said assaults were common:

[…] this sort of treatment from patients happens often and no one reports it. There’s this sort of culture that you just move on and get over it […] I have been physically and sexually assaulted a few times over the last year but not reported to police as I feel like I’m wasting time and resources and my claim isn’t important enough.

This self-limiting culture appears to be longstanding, and reinforced by substandard responses from their employer and police.

Nurses don’t report based on misconceptions

In our research nurses thought patients who are intoxicated or have a mental illness wouldn’t satisfy the requirement of a guilty mind (mens rea) required for conviction. Or that, they have to be physically hurt for assaults to be seen as an offence.

But patients who are intoxicated or have mental illness can be held accountable.

In legal terms, neither intoxication or mental illness equate to a lack of capacity to know what is right or wrong. And to say someone cannot be held responsible for their actions due to mental illness, can be seen as stigmatising or unjust. It is not up to a nurse, employer or police to decide a person’s mental capacity. Every person is to be presumed of “sound mind” unless proven otherwise during prosecution.

Another misconception is that nurses have to be physically hurt for assaults to be reported. As one nurse said:

I didn’t think that it was worth reporting it to the police as there was no visible harm done to me.

Harms from assault can be physical, emotional or psychosocial (impact on one’s thought and how they interact with others). However, assault is not characterised by its impact, but rather the act itself. A patient can be guilty of assault if they physically attack a nurse or if they threaten to do so.

Read more:
Aged care staff urgently need training to report and prevent sexual assault

Benefits of reporting to the police

Laws help set standards of what is right or wrong in society. To enforce the law, nurses must first report and make a statement to the police, so charges can be laid against a patient who commits violence. Police can then present this evidence to a prosecutor, who makes a decision if there is sufficient evidence for conviction.

Reporting to the police could have far-reaching impacts including:

• enforcing a culture of respect and safety, improved staff retention and wellbeing
• helping patients learn their rights to seek health care must be balanced with nurses’ rights to a safe workplace
• setting a consistent standard of acceptable behaviours in society that includes health-care settings.

Many nurses have been assaulted by patients, but only few are reporting to the police. Employers and authorities must work together to empower and support nurses to report assaults. It is through this collective effort that we can hold patients to account, and ultimately keep nurses safe from harm.

Read more:
Paramedics have one of Australia’s most dangerous jobs — and not just because of the trauma they witness

C.J. Cabilan received funding the PA Research Foundation to conduct this research. She currently serves as the Director of Occupational Violence Prevention and Management for Canberra Health Services. The views described in the article are her own based on evidence.

– ref. ‘I was told to return to work as soon as I regained consciousness.’ Why only a third of assaulted nurses report it to police – https://theconversation.com/i-was-told-to-return-to-work-as-soon-as-i-regained-consciousness-why-only-a-third-of-assaulted-nurses-report-it-to-police-217288

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Avenell, Professor in Modern Japanese History, Australian National University

In 2024, the youngest of Japan’s baby boomers will turn 75. The boomers are called the “bunched” generation in Japan because they were born in a short spurt in the late 1940s, in the aftermath of the end of the second world war.

The sheer size of this cohort has made it a lightning rod for many of the thorny social and economic debates in Japan today. Japanese boomers are variously criticised for generational wealth disparity, national debt, and even the environmental crisis.

Historically, the boomers’ experience is very much the story of Japan’s postwar success. But were the boomers just lucky free-riders? And how have they shaped contemporary Japan?

The children of war defeat

Japan was under US-led occupation and struggling with a tattered economy when the boomers were born. Millions of soldiers and settlers had flooded back from the colonies and battlefields. As the Japanese began to rebuild their nation, they also enthusiastically procreated. From 1947 to 1949, Japan recorded around 2.7 million births annually, with a fertility rate exceeding 4.3.

Never again would Japan witness such stunning fertility. Apart from a short-lived uptick in the 1970s, annual births have been declining precipitously.

In 2020, Japan recorded its lowest number of annual births at 840,835 with a fertility rate of just 1.33. This is not the lowest in Asia, but it is well beneath the replacement rate of 2.1.

The protest generation

Japan’s boomers were both the engines and beneficiaries of the country’s economic miracle of the 1950s to 1970s, when GDP growth regularly hit the double digits.

In an age when most youth finished education in their teens, the boomers provided labor for Japan’s heavy, chemical, automotive, and electronics industries. Many migrated to cities like Tokyo, taking up jobs in small factories and retail stores.

The small percentage of boomers lucky enough to enter universities in the 1960s became the flagbearers of youth protest. They rallied against Japan’s subservience to America and its involvement in the Vietnam War. They demanded universities lower fees and give students a greater voice.

Beyond protest, they fashioned new cultures in music and art. Indeed, they were actors in the great theatre that was the “global 1960s”.

As student protest descended into violence in 1970s Japan, public opinion turned against the young boomers. A handful embraced murderous left-wing terrorism, but the majority chose the safety of corporate Japan.

Read more:
Baby Boomers, be nice to your grandkids: they may save Australia

Boomers fashion Japan’s economic miracle

In 1975, the youngest of Japan’s boomers were in their mid-20s. Japan was recovering from a massive hike in oil prices in 1973 and would face another petroleum shock in 1979.

It was the hardworking boomers who sustained Japan through these troubled economic times. In an age of rigidly defined gender roles, boomer men became Japan’s corporate and industrial warriors, while boomer women raised children and cared for elderly parents. Accordingly, they orchestrated Japan’s second – and last – postwar baby boom in the 1970s.

When Japan emerged as an economic superpower in the 1980s, it was the boomers who reaped the rewards. Although not all benefitted equally, Japanese baby boomers, now in their 30s, enjoyed relatively secure employment, a thriving economy, and superior standards of living.

At the same time, as the economy surged, the boomers faced financial pressures in housing and education. Some even worked themselves to death inside Japan’s pressure-cooker corporations.

Nonetheless, things were good for the boomers during Japan’s “bubble” economy of the 1980s. By the end of the decade, the youngest were in their 40s. As mid-career workers, they could both save and spend – something later generations would only dream of.

Intergenerational tensions in recessionary Japan

Just as the boomers were moving into the middle echelons of society, Japan’s economic miracle ended abruptly. What followed from the 1990s onwards has been called Japan’s “lost decades”, an “ice age” of employment, and an era of youth uncertainty and despair.

The boomers, however, survived largely unscathed. Thanks to an employment system that protected senior workers, most (although not all) of the boomers retained their jobs while their children struggled to find even casual work. Many boomers also had savings to fall back on.

But in recessionary Japan, the now-ageing boomers raised thorny issues for the country. As a healthy, long-lived, and very large cohort, their approaching retirement in the 2000s threatened the viability of Japan’s already-strained pension and health schemes. Youth born in a post-bubble Japan are faced with carrying this burden.

Not surprisingly, intergenerational tensions have arisen. For the boomers, it is easy to label youth as lazy and lacking perseverance. For the young, boomers were simply lucky to be born in an era of growth. And, to make matters worse, now the young must support the boomers in retirement.

Ageing boomers in the oldest society

Given the electoral clout of the boomers, politicians are treading carefully around solutions involving redistribution from the old to the young. Ultimately, intergenerational blaming is not the solution.

Japan’s baby boomers were born into a nation rising, but they also helped to fashion that success. Youth can draw on the boomers’ journey from the ashes of defeat to stunning affluence. But the boomers must also recognise how their generation has contributed to the demographic and socioeconomic challenges facing Japan today.

As the world’s oldest society continues to age, intergenerational empathy from the boomers is now more important than ever.

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

– ref. Generational tensions flare as Japan faces the economic reality of its ageing baby boomers – https://theconversation.com/generational-tensions-flare-as-japan-faces-the-economic-reality-of-its-ageing-baby-boomers-217289

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maarten De Brauwer, Research fellow, CSIRO

Figuring out what species live in an ecosystem, and which ones are rare or just good at hiding is an essential way to understand and care for them. Until now, it’s been very labour intensive.

But now we can do it differently. Take a sample from the ocean and match tiny traces of DNA in the water with the species living there.

It’s not science fiction – it’s environmental DNA sampling. This approach opens the door to rapid, broad detection of species. You can find if pest species have arrived, tell if a hard-to-find endangered species is still hanging on, and gauge ecosystem health.

Because eDNA testing is still new, there are questions about its strengths and weaknesses and how it can best be used. For instance, we can tell if extremely rare freshwater sawfish are present in a Northern Territory river – but not how many individual fish there are.

Today CSIRO released a roadmap created through consultation with many experts to show how eDNA technologies can be best integrated into marine monitoring at a large scale – and what the future holds.

How does eDNA sampling work?

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a very special molecule. It acts as the code for all life on Earth, holding the cellular instructions to make everything from a beetle to a human. Because DNA is unique to each species, it’s like a product barcode in a supermarket.

As animals and plants live their lives, they shed fragments of their DNA into their environment through dead skin, hair, saliva, scat, leaves or pollen. These traces make up environmental DNA. There’s enough DNA in water and even air to tell species apart.

The real power of eDNA sampling is how broad a net it casts. With one sample, we can detect anything living, from bacteria to whales, and in potentially every environment with life, from the deep sea to underground caves.

Read more:
Environmental DNA – how a tool used to detect endangered wildlife ended up helping fight the COVID-19 pandemic

Importantly, this method lets scientists detect species even if we can’t see or capture them. This comes in handy when working with rare or very small species, or when working in environments such as murky water where it is impossible to see or catch them. It will, for example, make it easier to study critically endangered pipefish in estuaries.

To date, much eDNA research has focused on detecting species in water, because it’s relatively easy to collect, concentrate and extract eDNA from liquids. But we now know we can produce species lists based on the eDNA in soil, scat, honey, or even the air.

How do scientists actually measure eDNA?

Typically, you collect samples, perform molecular analysis and interpret results.

Collect samples: Scientists collect a sample from the environment. This can be water, soil, or virtually any environmental substrate which might contain eDNA. We then process the sample to concentrate and stabilise the DNA. You might collect two litres of water with a bucket, filter it and then freeze or chemically stabilise the eDNA coating the filter.

Molecular analysis: The first step in the lab is to purify DNA from a sample. The next step depends on your goal. If you want to detect a single species, you would generally use a technique called quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), similar to how you test for COVID.

But to detect whole communities of species, you have to use high-throughput DNA sequencing. Where detecting a single species with eDNA takes only a few days days, completing the labwork for species communities can take weeks to months. At the end, you arrive at a long list of thousands or even millions of DNA barcode sequences.

Interpreting results: Single species interpretation is simple. Was DNA from your species of interest present or not? But when the goal is to identify multiple species, scientists use DNA reference libraries to link the DNA barcodes detected in the sample back to individual species.

This works well – but only if we already have the species listed in these libraries. If not, you can’t detect it with eDNA methods. That means eDNA can’t be used to detect new species or those only known from photos and videos.

Why does eDNA matter? Look at marine parks

Australia boasts one of the world’s largest and most biodiverse networks of marine parks. But as ocean life reels from climate change, overfishing and plastic pollution, it’s certain the oceans of the future will look very different to that of today.

Gauging impact to support evidence-based decisions across such a vast, diverse and remote area poses challenges difficult to solve with standard hands-on survey methods like like diving, video or trawling.

That’s where eDNA methods can help, offering a powerful, non-destructive, cost-effective and quick form of monitoring that can complement other techniques.

eDNA means we can fine-tune monitoring for specific purposes, such as detecting pests, endangered, or dangerous species.

This is just the start. Imagine a future where eDNA data could be collected from the most remote oceans by autonomous vehicles, analysed by the drone or on board a research vessel, and integrated with other monitoring data so marine managers and the public can see near-real time data about the condition of the ocean.

Science fiction? Not any more.

Read more:
You shed DNA everywhere you go – trace samples in the water, sand and air are enough to identify who you are, raising ethical questions about privacy

Maarten De Brauwer receives funding from the CSIRO and the National Geographic Society. He is a board member at the Southern eDNA Society.

Oliver Berry receives funding from the CSIRO, the Australian Government, and the Minderoo Foundation. He is a board member of the Southern eDNA Society (Australia and New Zealand’s professional society for eDNA scientists and other stakeholders).

– ref. It sounds like science fiction. But we can now sample water to find the DNA of every species living there – https://theconversation.com/it-sounds-like-science-fiction-but-we-can-now-sample-water-to-find-the-dna-of-every-species-living-there-216989

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mona Krewel, Senior lecturer in Comparative Politics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

The threat of disinformation on social media in the lead-up to New Zealand’s 2023 election loomed large for the Electoral Commission and academics studying fake news.

So how bad did it really get?

As part of the New Zealand Social Media Study, we analysed more than 4,000 posts on Facebook from political parties and their leaders. Our study focused on the five weeks ahead of election day.

What we found should give New Zealanders some comfort about the political discourse on social media. While not perfect, there was not as much misinformation (misleading information created without the intent to manipulate people) and disinformation (deliberate attempts to manipulate with false information) as everyone feared.

Looking for fake news and half truths

To identify examples of both of those, a team of research assistants analysed and fact-checked posts, classifying them as either “not including fake news” or “including fake news”.

Fake news posts were defined as completely or mostly made up, and intentionally and verifiably false.

An example of this type of disinformation would be the “litter box hoax”, alleging schools provided litter boxes for students who identified as cats or furries.

Originating from overseas sources, this story has been debunked multiple times. In New Zealand, this hoax was spread by Sue Grey, leader of the NZ Outdoors & Freedoms Party.

Read more:
Social media can be information poison when we need facts most

In cases of doubt, or when the research assistants couldn’t prove the information was false, they coded the posts as “not including fake news”. The term “fake news” was therefore reserved for very clear cases of false information.

If a post did not include fake news, the team checked for potential half-truths. Half-truths were defined as posts that were not entirely made up, but contained some incorrect information.

The National Party, for example, put up a post suggesting the Ministry of Pacific Peoples had hosted breakfasts to promote Labour MPs, at the cost of more than $50,000. While the ministry did host breakfasts to explain the most recent budget, and the cost was accurate, there was no indication the purpose of this event was to promote Labour MPs.

How 2023’s election compared to 2020

At the beginning of the campaign, the proportion of what we identified as fake news being published on Facebook by political parties and their leaders was 2.5% – similar to what we saw in 2020.

The proportion of fake news posts then dropped below 2% for a long period and even fell as low as 0.7% at one point in the campaign, before rising again in the final stretch. The share of fake news peaked at 3.8% at the start of the last week of the campaign.

Over the five weeks of the campaign, we identified an average of 2.6% of Facebook posts by political parties and their leaders in any given week qualified as fake news. In 2020, the weekly average was 2.5%, which means the increase of fake news was minimal.

The sources of much of the outright fake news were parties on the fringes. According to our research, none of the major political parties were posting outright lies.

But there were posts from all political parties assessed as half-truths.

Half-truths stayed well below 10% during the five weeks we looked at, peaking at 6.5% in the final week. On average, the weekly share of half-truths was 4.8% in 2023, while in 2020 it was 2.5%.

So while the number of “big lies” – also known as “fake news” – did not increase in 2023 compared to 2020, the number of “small lies” in political campaigns is growing.

All of the political parties took more liberties with the truth in 2023 than they did in 2020.

Playing on emotions and oversimplifying

More than a third of all misleading posts in 2023 were emotional (37%), targeting voters’ emotions through words or pictures. Some 26% of the social media posts jumped to conclusions, while 23% oversimplified the topics being discussed. And 21% of the posts cherry-picked information, meaning the information presented was incomplete.

Some of the social media posts we identified as fake news or half-truths used pseudo-experts: people with some academic background, but who are not qualified to be expert witnesses on the topic under discussion (18%).

We also saw anecdotes of unclear origin, instead of scientific facts (15%), while 7% had unrealistic expectations of science, such as expecting science to offer 100% certainty.

Some of the posts included the claim that the posts’ authors had a silent majority behind them (5%). Another 5% of the social media posts identified as disinformation included personal attacks, rather than debating someone’s arguments.

Staying vigilant

The levels of misinformation and disinformation on social media during the past two elections in New Zealand have been fairly low – and certainly no cause for panic. But that doesn’t mean it will always stay that way.

On the one hand, we need to keep an eye on the social media campaigns in future elections and, in particular, monitor the development and use of misinformation and disinformation by political parties on the fringe.

Read more:
Beyond fake news: social media and market-driven political campaigns

We also need to keep eye on the major parties, as small lies might pave the way for more fake news or conspiracy theories in the future.

On the other hand, we need to resist overstating the use of misinformation and disinformation in New Zealand. Currently, there doesn’t appear to be the appetite to spread disinformation on social media by our major political parties or leaders.

This is a good thing for the health of our democracy, and we need to ensure it stays that way.

Mona Krewel is affiliated with the advisory panel to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to strengthen the country’s capacity to identify and address misinformation and disinformation. This article reflects her personal opinions as a researcher.

– ref. Fake news didn’t play a big role in NZ’s 2023 election – but there was a rise in ‘small lies’ – https://theconversation.com/fake-news-didnt-play-a-big-role-in-nzs-2023-election-but-there-was-a-rise-in-small-lies-216338

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Quoc Phuong Tran, PhD Candidate in Prebiotic Chemistry, UNSW Sydney

How did life begin? How did chemical reactions on the early Earth create complex, self-replicating structures that developed into living things as we know them?

According to one school of thought, before the current era of DNA-based life, there was a kind of molecule called RNA (or ribonucleic acid). RNA – which is still a crucial component of life today – can replicate itself and catalyse other chemical reactions.

But RNA molecules themselves are made from smaller components called ribonucleotides. How would these building blocks have formed on the early Earth, and then combined into RNA?

Chemists like me are trying to recreate the chain of reactions required to form RNA at the dawn of life, but it’s a challenging task. We know whatever chemical reaction created ribonucleotides must have been able to happen in the messy, complicated environment found on our planet billions of years ago.

I have been studying whether “autocatalytic” reactions may have played a part. These are reactions that produce chemicals that encourage the same reaction to happen again, which means they can sustain themselves in a wide range of circumstances.

In our latest work, my colleagues and I have integrated autocatalysis into a well-known chemical pathway for producing the ribonucleotide building blocks, which could have plausibly happened with the simple molecules and complex conditions found on the early Earth.

The formose reaction

Autocatalytic reactions play crucial roles in biology, from regulating our heartbeats to forming patterns on seashells. In fact, the replication of life itself, where one cell takes in nutrients and energy from the environment to produce two cells, is a particularly complicated example of autocatalysis.

A chemical reaction called the formose reaction, first discovered in 1861, is one of the best examples of an autocatalytic reaction that could have happened on the early Earth.

In essence, the formose reaction starts with one molecule of a simple compound called glycolaldehyde (made of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen) and ends with two. The mechanism relies on a constant supply of another simple compound called formaldehyde.

A reaction between glycolaldehyde and formaldehyde makes a bigger molecule, splitting off fragments that feed back into the reaction and keep it going. However, once the formaldehyde runs out, the reaction stops, and the products start to degrade from complex sugar molecules into tar.

Read more:
Can bleach help solve the origin of life in the primordial soup?

The formose reaction shares some common ingredients with a well-known chemical pathway to make ribonucleotides, known as the Powner–Sutherland pathway. However, until now no one has tried to connect the two – with good reason.

The formose reaction is notorious for being “unselective”. This means it produces a lot of useless molecules alongside the actual products you want.

An autocatalytic twist in the pathway to ribonucleotides

In our study, we tried adding another simple molecule called cyanamide to the formose reaction. This makes it possible for some of the molecules made during the reaction to be “siphoned off” to produce ribonucleotides.

The reaction still does not produce a large quantity of ribonucleotide building blocks. However, the ones it does produce are more stable and less likely to degrade.

What’s interesting about our study is the integration of the formose reaction and ribonucleotide production. Previous investigations have studied each separately, which reflects how chemists usually think about making molecules.

Generally speaking, chemists tend to avoid complexity so as to maximise the quantity and purity of a product. However, this reductionist approach can prevent us from investigating dynamic interactions between different chemical pathways.

These interactions, which happen everywhere in the real world outside the lab, are arguably the bridge between chemistry and biology.

Industrial applications

Autocatalysis also has industrial applications. When you add cyanamide to the formose reaction, another of the products is a compound called 2-aminooxazole, which is used in chemistry research and the production of many pharmaceuticals.

Conventional 2-aminooxazole production often uses cyanamide and glycolaldehyde, the latter of which is expensive. If it can be made using the formose reaction, only a small amount of glycolaldehyde will be needed to kickstart the reaction, cutting costs.

Our lab is currently optimising this procedure in the hope we can manipulate the autocatalytic reaction to make common chemical reactions cheaper and more efficient, and their pharmaceutical products more accessible. Maybe it won’t be as big a deal as the creation of life itself, but we think it could still be worthwhile.

Read more:
We’ve been wrong about the origins of life for 90 years

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

– ref. Did this chemical reaction create the building blocks of life on Earth? – https://theconversation.com/did-this-chemical-reaction-create-the-building-blocks-of-life-on-earth-216843

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Ogloff, University Distinguished Professor of Forensic Behavioural Science & Dean, School of Health Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology

A new Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report on the health of people in Australian prisons makes for sobering reading.

It reveals that compared to the general population, people in prison have higher rates of mental health conditions, chronic disease, communicable disease, and acquired brain injury. This is despite the fact the prison population is relatively young.

This is a problem for everyone. Research shows mental health intervention and engagement helps reduce offending among offenders with serious mental illness.

Good health care in prisons, with continuity of community health care upon release, not only helps the person being treated. It also helps the community through reduced levels of offending.

Read more:
Good mental health care in prisons must begin and end in the community

The new report

Data were collected in 2022 from 371 people entering prison during a given two-week period, and 431 who were due to be released during the data collection period or in the following four weeks. The report includes information drawn from 73 of 87 prisons across Australia (excluding Victoria, which didn’t participate in the survey this year).

The researchers also collected data from 4,500 people who visited the prison health clinic and another 7,100 people who received medications while in prison.

According to the data, around one in two prison entrants reported a chronic physical health condition.

One in two prison entrants reported having been told they had a mental health condition, with almost one in five currently taking mental health related medication.

Around one in five prison entrants reported a history of self-harm.

Self-reported levels of distress were high:

The report also revealed:

• two-thirds of prison entrants reported they had previously been in prison

• around two in five younger prison entrants reported a family history of incarceration

• around two in five prison entrants reported having dependent children in the community

• nearly one in three prison entrants reported their highest level of schooling as year nine or under

• nearly one in two prison dischargees expected they would be homeless on release

• almost one in three prison entrants reported consuming at least seven standard drinks of alcohol in a typical day of drinking

• almost three in four prison entrants reported being current smokers.

Shocking, though unsurprising

As someone who has worked in prisons and researched prisoner health for more than three decades, I was sadly unsurprised by these grim findings. The results are largely consistent with previous reports and confirm people in custody have particularly high health needs.

It’s easy for us to lose sight of the health needs of people in prison while they are locked away.

A high percentage of people in prison are on remand pending trial and once sentenced most are back in the community relatively soon.

Once sentenced, most spend a relatively short time in prison, particularly those who commit low or medium-risk offences.

A high proportion of people cycle back into prison after release. There is very little continuity of care between health care in prison and in the community. The failures in the system help replicate disadvantage and leave the whole community worse off.

Why is the prisoner population generally in such poor health?

Many prison entrants are poorly educated, impoverished, come from families with an incarceration history, and experience homelessness.

They are also more likely than others in the community to have poor employment skills and histories, and to have experienced child abuse.

A disproportionate number of people in prison are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders, a group that generally experiences significantly poorer health than the general community.

Recent evidence also shows many people in prison have poorer levels of health literacy than people in the general community. In other words, they may struggle to obtain, understand, and use information to make appropriate health decisions.

Why is this a problem for all of us?

Prisons are very much part of our community and most people are incarcerated temporarily. By enhancing the health care of people in prison and ensuring continuity of care to the community, we can reduce the costs associated with health care more generally. Investing early to improve the health of prisoners can save a lot of taxpayer money down the track.

And as some types of mental health conditions are related to a higher risk for offending, better health care can help enhance public safety.

Read more:
Victoria’s prison health care system should match community health care

What needs to be done?

We need to reassess how we think of prisons and those detained in them.

We have an opportunity to target people entering prisons to increase their health care and health literacy. Health care, and particularly mental health care, are critical ingredients in enhancing prisoners’ wellbeing, their health literacy and their continuity of care upon release.

All states screen detainees upon admission for health issues. And, encouragingly, the new report on prisoner health reveals almost three-quarters of prison dischargees rated the health care they received in the prison clinic as good or excellent.

But as good as they are, correctional health services cannot effectively overcome systems issues. Health care in prison is not enough to address health literacy, prevention of health problems, and continuity of care upon release.

Read more:
Raising the age of criminal responsibility is only a first step. First Nations kids need cultural solutions

The health and mental health care service system in Australia is fundamentally flawed.

Prison health services are funded by state governments without federal funding enjoyed by all other Australians through the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).

This funding inequity and systemic issues contribute to the overall disadvantage in health care for people in prison.

And in some states, the responsibility for prisoner health care rests with the department of justice rather than the department of health.

This contributes to a breakdown in integrated service planning and delivery, which should include prisoner health care, health care upon release, and continuing care while in the community.

Boosting health literacy among people detained in prisons can help. Health literacy includes health-related critical thinking, communication, and problem-solving.

It means equipping people with the skills they need to actively participate in their own health and wellbeing.

Read more:
‘They weren’t there when I needed them’: we asked former prisoners what happens when support services fail

James Ogloff has received funding from the Australian Research Council and is a Strategic Advisor for the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health (Forensicare). Forensicare provides mental health services in prisons in Victoria.

– ref. New report reveals shocking state of prisoner health. Here’s what needs to be done – https://theconversation.com/new-report-reveals-shocking-state-of-prisoner-health-heres-what-needs-to-be-done-217558

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gary Sacks, Professor of Public Health Policy, Deakin University

Too many Australian children are eating diets high in added sugars, saturated fats, salt, energy and ultra-processed foods. And often they’re not getting enough fruits, vegetables and wholegrains.

A key driver of unhealthy diets among Australian children is that unhealthy foods and drinks are ever-present and aggressively marketed.

In a new study, we looked at how manufacturers are targeting Australian children with marketing techniques on the packaging of unhealthy foods. We found widespread, unregulated use of promotional techniques, like cartoon characters, that directly appeal to children.

Read more:
Social media platforms need to do more to stop junk food marketers targeting children

Children are vulnerable to food marketing

There’s strong evidence food marketing works. When children are exposed to food marketing, such as in ads on social media or on TV, it increases brand awareness, results in positive brand attitudes, and leads to increased purchase and consumption of marketed products.

Even very young children are affected. For example, there’s evidence kids as young as 18 months can recognise corporate labels, at 20 months can associate items with brand names, at two years old can make consumer choices, and by two to three can draw brand logos.

The way food packaging is designed can also have an important influence on what people buy and consume.

The use of techniques such as cartoon and movie characters, gifts, games and contests on product packs has been shown to encourage children to think of these products as tasty, more fun and more appropriate for them.

Kids’ vulnerability to food marketing leaves parents having to juggle competing desires and demands. The concept of “pester power” recognises the power children have in influencing purchasing decisions.

Our study

We analysed the packages of around 8,000 Australian foods and drinks across a range of categories. These included biscuits, confectionery, breakfast cereals, non-alcoholic drinks, dairy, snack foods, and foods for infants and young children.

We assessed the number of products carrying child-directed promotional techniques on the pack, and grouped the techniques into two major categories:

1. “child-directed characters”, including branded or licensed cartoon characters, children or child-like figures, personified characters (for example, spoons with faces) and celebrities that appeal to children

2. “non-character-based elements”, including gifts, games and contests that appealed to kids, unconventional packaging, or product names that specifically reference children (for example, “kids bar”).

We then assessed the healthiness of products that used child-directed promotional techniques on the pack.

What we found

Some 901 out of 8,006 (11.3%) products had one or more child-directed promotional technique on the pack. Promotions were most common on foods for infants and young children, confectionery, snack foods, and dairy.

Child-directed characters were twice as common as non-character-based elements. Personified characters were the most popular tactic.

We found the vast majority of products using child-directed promotional techniques on their packaging were unhealthy. Some 81% of the child-directed marketing was on ultra-processed products, and the average health star rating of the products with child-directed marketing was 2.34 (out of 5).

How are other countries managing this issue?

To protect children’s health, the World Health Organization recommends governments implement policies to restrict children’s exposure to the marketing of unhealthy foods and drinks across a wide range of media.

In line with those recommendations, several countries have rules in place that ban child-directed promotions on food packaging.

For example, in Chile and Mexico, legislation prohibits the use of child-directed promotions on packaging of products that are high in ingredients such as sugar and salt. These bans are part of broader efforts to address unhealthy diets.

If Australia adopted similar legislation to Mexico, 95.5% of the products in our study with child-directed promotions would have to remove them from the pack.

What regulations does Australia have in place?

In Australia, there are some limited government regulations that restrict some unhealthy food advertising on free-to-air television during dedicated children’s programs.

There are also a range of voluntary guidelines developed by the food and advertising industries that restrict some types of food advertising.

But public health experts have criticised these voluntary codes for being weak and ineffective. They also exclude product packaging.

If Australia is serious about improving children’s health, stronger regulation of child-directed promotional techniques on the packaging of unhealthy foods is warranted.

What changes are needed?

Australia could draw inspiration from Chile and Mexico, which have integrated marketing restrictions with their front-of-pack labelling policies.

In Australia, a similar approach would mean foods that score below a threshold health star rating (say less than 3.5 out of 5) would not be able to use child-directed promotions on the pack. For this to operate effectively, the health star rating system, which is currently voluntary, would need to be made mandatory on all packs.

Read more:
Is it finally time to ban junk food advertising? A new bill could improve kids’ health

In the short term, it’s worth noting nearly two-thirds of products using child-directed promotions in our analysis were made by just 15 manufacturers. This offers some potential for action targeting specific manufacturers to request they voluntarily stop using such tactics on unhealthy foods.

This may be particularly fruitful for Australia’s large supermarket chains, given international examples where this has worked. Lidl in the UK removed cartoon characters from a selection of its own-brand cereals, for instance.

However, given the likely reality that most manufacturers won’t voluntarily abandon the revenue they gain from marketing to children in this way, government regulations are likely to be necessary to drive meaningful and sustained change.

Gary Sacks receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Australian Research Council (ARC), and the National Heart Foundation of Australia.

Alexandra Jones receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council. She has also received recent funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for work on nutrition labelling.

– ref. Promotional techniques on junk food packaging are a problem for children’s health – Australia could do better – https://theconversation.com/promotional-techniques-on-junk-food-packaging-are-a-problem-for-childrens-health-australia-could-do-better-216538

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Danie Nilsson, Behavioural Scientist, CSIRO

Changing habits can be hard. So when a single episode of an Australian television show prompted a national shift in behaviour, as behavioural researchers, we took notice.

The first (2017) and second (2018) seasons of the ABC TV program War on Waste reached audiences of 3.8 million and 3.3 million viewers, respectively. That’s one in seven Australians. It inspired action, slashing the waste footprint of hundreds of Australian organisations. So it remains a valuable example of TV driving social change, and one we can still learn from today.

Through focus groups conducted in 2018, we explored how the first season encouraged Melbourne millennials’ to adopt reusable coffee cups. Then, when the COVID pandemic prompted greater use of disposable consumer products, we revisited the data and delved deeper into behavioural science.

Our analysis revealed people were drawn to the engaging storytelling, confronting visuals and prankster ex-Chaser host Craig Reucassel. He demonstrated, step-by-step, how to minimise waste in a relatable and guilt-free way. Our research, recently published in the journal Communication Research and Practice, can guide others to achieve similar success in behavioural change.

Read more:
What makes people switch to reusable cups? It’s not discounts, it’s what others do

Educational entertainment

In War on Waste, Reucassel confronts Australia’s many waste-management problems and potential solutions.

The series is an example of what behavioural psychologists call “entertainment-education interventions”.

In one episode, Reucassel staged a stunt on a Melbourne tram during peak hour, proclaiming it was filled with 50,000 disposable coffee cups – the amount sent to landfill every 30 minutes in Australia.

Almost overnight, KeepCup sales quadrupled, crashing the company’s website. Membership of a Responsible Cafes initiative promoting reusable coffee cups spiked from 400 cafes to 1,800.

An ABC study found more people of all ages bought coffee in reusable cups after War on Waste aired (up from 37% to 42%).

The survey also revealed millennials (aged 18-34 in 2017) were generally less likely to adopt waste-reduction behaviours compared with other age groups. But they excelled in using reusable coffee cups.

Why was the show so successful in encouraging people, and specifically millennials, to use reusable coffee cups?

If we can explain why this behaviour was so readily adopted, perhaps we can promote other sustainable behaviours at scale, in other entertainment-education interventions.

Our research uncovered five tactics used by the show to get these results.

1. Use a relatable host

Humans relate to people on TV. Research shows celebrities and people we consider engaging and credible are more likely to influence us.

Reucassel is a popular host with celebrity status. One focus group participant said:

A lot of films […] feel very preachy. It’s often either an expert, or just a narrator, who clearly didn’t know anything about the topic beforehand, who has now researched things, who is telling you things. Whereas in the case of the War on Waste, it felt more like he [Reucassel] was learning it with you, at the same time.

In the first season, we watched as Reucassel sorted the contents of a recycling bin, sharing the learning experience with the viewer. Research shows we are more likely to adopt a new behaviour if we’re shown how to do it rather than told what to do.

2. Mix statistics with confronting visuals

High-impact visuals have lasting effect. Reucassel’s many stunts served not only as an engaging way to present statistics, but also a way to connect with viewers by stirring up emotions. This approach builds audience knowledge and willpower, making a change in behaviour more likely.

As one focus group participant put it:

My favourite thing about the show was all the stunts that Craig pulled – it’s classic Chaser stuff. Like the big rolling ball of plastic bags and the tram full of coffee cups. I thought that aspect of it was the most hard-hitting and interesting.

Read more:
We found 3 types of food wasters, which one are you?

3. Promote widespread community action

A common problem with behaviour change initiatives is a person will only change their behaviour if they feel like others are going to change their behaviour too. This often leads to “the tragedy of the commons”, where no one ends up taking action.

The opposite was true for War on Waste. Focus group participants felt the show created a groundswell for environmental change, so they were more inspired to take action because they felt others were taking action too. In the words of one:

I really enjoyed how it was a mix of personal actions [and] more systemic changes […] like getting Coles and Woolworths to change cosmetic standards [for fresh produce] but also the episode with the fast fashion, about getting the teenage girls to consider their own personal choices.

Read more:
Households find low-waste living challenging. Here’s what needs to change

4. Choose behaviours with an easy learning curve

Reducing waste may never be “easy”, but by choosing behaviours perceived to be low-cost with little inconvenience, we have a better chance of success.

Swapping the disposable coffee cup for a reusable cup was considered relatively easy with a “quick learning curve” – compared to composting or having a worm farm – and so became more readily adopted than other behaviours demonstrated in War on Waste.

5. Show how behaviour can reveal social identity

People from all generations prefer to act in accordance with what society deems acceptable. So pro-environmental behaviours are more likely to be adopted when social pressure is placed on them.

War on Waste placed social pressure on us all to reduce our waste. Adopting a reusable coffee cup became a visible symbol for millennials to demonstrate to others that they were doing their bit, while expressing their environmental values.

As one participant said:

I think it’s just a trendy, convenient way to maybe look and feel like you are doing something that’s […] the right step.

What can we learn from this, and what’s next?

Many of the strategies we identified as successful in season one reappeared this year in season three, such as confronting visual stunts, shared learning experiences and targeting easy behaviours.

Based on the findings from our research, we expect to see further positive change generated from this season.

Our research also presents an opportunity to practitioners wanting to create behaviour change at scale by providing them with behavioural science strategies to embed in entertainment-education interventions.

Read more:
What to wear for a climate crisis

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

– ref. Here’s how a TV series inspired the KeepCup revolution. What’s next in the war on waste? – https://theconversation.com/heres-how-a-tv-series-inspired-the-keepcup-revolution-whats-next-in-the-war-on-waste-210718

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kevin McConkey, Emeritus Professor , UNSW Sydney

Research plays a pivotal role in society. Through research, we gain new understandings, test theories and make discoveries.

It also has a huge economic value. In 2021, the CSIRO found every A$1 of research and development investment in Australia creates an average of $3.50 in economy-wide benefits.

But how do we know if individual research projects being conducted in Australia are good quality? How is research recognised? The key way this happens is through “research assessment”.

Read more:
Tumult and transformation: the story of Australian universities over the past 30 years

What is research assessment?

Research assessment is not a centralised or necessarily formal process. It can involve various processes and measures to evaluate the performance of individual researchers and research institutions. This includes assessing the quality, excellence and impact of various outputs.

Research assessment can be qualitative or quantitative. It can include publications in journals and the number of people who cite the research, gaining grants to do further research, commercialisation, media engagement and impact on decision-making or public policy, prizes and invitations to speak at conferences.

If research assessment is working fairly and effectively, it should achieve several things. This includes: helping to develop researchers’ careers, making sure innovative research does not get avoided in favour of short-term gains and helping funders and the community have confidence research is providing value for money and adding to the public good.

Read more:
We solve problems in 30 days through ‘research sprints’: other academics can do this too

Our project

Our new project aimed to provide a better understanding of how research assessment affects research in Australia.

In a report released today, we surveyed more than 1,000 Australian researchers and more than 50 research organisations.

This included universities, research institutes, industry bodies, government and not-for-profit organisations. The majority of researchers (74%) were in academic roles. Across those research sectors, we also conducted 11 roundtables involving around 120 people and 25 intensive interviews to understand the issues.

This work was commissioned by Chief Scientist Cathy Foley and conducted by the Australian Council of Learned Academies (involving the academies of science, medical science, engineering and technological sciences, social sciences and humanities).

It also comes as the Universities Accord review examines how research is funded and approached within higher education.

What we found

We found some difficulties with the current approach to research assessment.

We heard there is a tendency by some researchers to “play it safe” in terms of doing research they believe will score well. We also heard how the assessment process can unintentionally exclude or devalue particular forms of knowledge, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, where outputs can be less easily quantified or less immediately seen.

As one interviewee said:

What is assessed and how it is assessed are an indication of what the
organisation values. You only assess what you care about. Values and
culture drive assessment.

Our roundtables told us senior staff and supervisors are often seen to reinforce the culture of “publish or perish”, with the number of articles being valued more highly than the quality.

We heard early and mid-career researchers and people from underrepresented backgrounds can have difficulties trying to “play the game” to advance their careers. For example, early-career researchers are often expected to produce work that benefits their larger team, at a cost to their own capacity for promotion.

As one interviewee noted:

Metrics are essential for defining value and comparative difference, but
Australia requires a modern and fair framework for assessing our current
and next generation of researchers.

Survey results

Our survey found a high level of dissatisfaction with the state of research assessment. This included:

• 73% of respondents agreed assessment processes are not consistently or
  equitably applied across disciplines, in particular between the humanities and the sciences

• 67% said there are not enough opportunities to provide input into research assessment practices

• 70% said assessments took up unreasonable time and effort.

Read more:
Fieldwork can be challenging for female scientists. Here are 5 ways to make it better

The way forward

In our survey, we asked “What is one specific change you would
recommend to improve current research assessment processes?”.

Respondents wanted to see a shift towards quality over quantity. This means not just a focus on publishing as many papers as possible, but supporting research that may take longer for its value and benefits to emerge.

They wanted interdisciplinary research to be promoted and rewarded, because many of the complex problems of our world – from climate change to domestic violence to housing affordability – require multiple disciplines to be involved in finding solutions. In the same vein, they also wanted collaboration and team work to be rewarded more clearly and transparently.

They wanted less bias towards STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) research and more promotion of diversity and of early-career researchers. This included better understanding of their personal and cultural situation, more focused career development and better managed teamwork.

To achieve all of this, and more, we will also need to understand that no single measure can assess all research or researchers. So, several tools will be needed, including quantitative indicators as well as qualitative measures and peer review.

Ana Deletic, Louisa Jorm, Duncan Ivison, Robyn Owens, Jill Blackmore, Adrian Barnett, Kate Thomann, Caroline Hughes, Andrew Peele, Guy Boggs and Raffaella Demichelis were all part of the expert working group supporting this work.

Kevin McConkey has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council. He is the current chair of the Policy Committee of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. He is the chair of the Expert Working Group of the the Australian Council of Learned Academies, which prepared the report referred to in this article.

– ref. ‘You only assess what you care about’: a new report looks at how we assess research in Australia – https://theconversation.com/you-only-assess-what-you-care-about-a-new-report-looks-at-how-we-assess-research-in-australia-217541

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Vasantkumar, Lecturer in Anthropology, Macquarie University

A simple software upgrade went wrong. Across the country economic life ground to a halt. Groceries were abandoned at supermarket checkouts. Commerce was paralysed as the nation waited for its payment system to be brought back on line.

The Optus outage lingers fresh in our minds yet the scene described here is not Melbourne or Sydney in November 2023, but Zimbabwe four years ago when the southern African nation suffered a 72-hour outage of the mobile money service known as Ecocash.

At a time when up to 96% of the country’s transactions were cashless, EcoCash, owned by the privately held telco, EcoNet, boasted more than three times the number of registered users than there are Zimbabweans who hold traditional bank accounts, and a near monopoly on mobile money payments.

Read more:
Optus has revealed the cause of the major outage. Could it happen again?

Occurring soon after a deeply unpopular move towards a cashless economy, this outage, along with a shorter one due to rolling blackouts earlier that same year, exacerbated concerns about the reliability of non-cash payments.

Abandoning the cashless experiment

Four years on, Zimbabwe has retreated from cashlessness, with the pandemic facilitating a return to cash in US dollars as the preferred means of payment. While the 2019 outage was not the only reason Zimbabwe returned to a cash economy, increasing frustration with mobile phone transactions contributed to it.

When I talk informally to Australians about these events and their possible implications for our own economic behaviours, I commonly hear some variant of the reply “but Australia isn’t Zimbabwe!”

But the Zimbabwean case holds some important lessons for us about the undesirability of eliminating cash in the aftermath of the latest Optus outage.

First, these outages highlight a key advantage of physical cash – it never goes down. We can rely on it to be there when we need it in contrast to cashless payment systems such as EFTPOS which suffered disruptions during the 2020 fires in NSW and Victoria.

We’re using less cash but we still won’t let go

Many Australians might argue for the need to keep cash as a fall back in the event of future natural and technical disruptions but the main reason they want to hang onto it has nothing to do with using it to buy and sell.

Read more:
Optus said it didn’t have the ‘soundbite’ to explain the crisis. We should expect better

Indeed its use in buying and selling has been in decline for 20 years and continued to decline during the pandemic. The total percentage of economic transactions cash accounted for dropped from 69% in 2007 to 13% in late 2022 according to the Reserve Bank’s June Bulletin on Consumer Payment Behaviour in Australia.

By contrast, much of the continuing demand for cash can be attributed to its use as a store of value — something you hold onto rather than spend. During the pandemic there was more cash being kept under metaphorical mattresses as a source of security and comfort, than was being spent.

A March 2021 RBA report found from March 2020 to February 2021, the value of banknotes in circulation rose 17.1% to A$97.3 billion because people were holding onto money at home? Moreover, even as its most recent report on cash usage highlights decreased reliance on cash across all demographics, the percentage of respondents stating they would “experience a ‘major inconvenience’ or ‘genuine hardship’ if cash was hard to access or use” has remained unchanged since 2019 at just over a quarter.

Read more:
Going cashless isn’t straightforward. Ask Sweden, or Zimbabwe

This desire to access cash even as its circulation declines highlights the degree to which doing away with it might be ill-advised and potentially destabilising. Indeed, this is exactly what happened in Zimbabwe — the country went cashless very quickly and without buy-in from most people.

Other reasons to keep cash, apart from dodgy technology

Other concerns about going cashless include the lack of privacy in the electronic payment system plus it being more difficult to control spending.

Even as some Australian banks move away from handling cash, other countries, Sweden most famously, have been forced to walk back such measures to respond to the needs of communities left behind by the shift to cashless payments.

These include the elderly, people in regional and remote areas, migrants and people who don’t have a bank account? While these groups are decreasing in size we ignore people who don’t have the knowledge the confidence or reliable access to cashless payment systems at our peril.

The financial transaction process needs to be inclusive. Standard, state-issued currency has historically been a public good that is accessible to all and ideally not a source of profit.

Read more:
Depending on who you are, the benefits of a cashless society are overrated

Going cashless is a form of privatising money. It moves transactions into a world where you must rely on banking institutions to buy and sell things while someone is making money off your financial dealings through fees. We wouldn’t usually think about this as similar to selling off the power grid but in some ways it is.

And as we saw all too vividly with the Optus debacle, a transition to privatised payment infrastructures opens up new kinds of vulnerability to go along with their convenience.

This article draws on research funded in part by a Macquarie University New Staff Grant and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

– ref. Cash may no longer be king, but the Optus debacle shows it is still necessary – https://theconversation.com/cash-may-no-longer-be-king-but-the-optus-debacle-shows-it-is-still-necessary-217520

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tashi Dema, PhD Candidate in Language and Politics, University of New England

Dechen, 40, grew up in Thimphu, the capital city of Bhutan. Her native language was Mangdip, also known as Nyenkha, as her parents are originally from central Bhutan. She went to schools in the city, where the curriculum was predominantly taught in Dzongkha, the national language, and English.

In Dechen’s house, everyone spoke Dzongkha. She only spoke her mother tongue when she had guests from her village, who could not understand Dzongkha and during her occasional visits to her village nestled in the mountains. Her mother tongue knowledge was limited.

However, things have now changed.

With 90% of Bhutanese people using social media and social media penetrating all remotes areas in Bhutan, Dechen’s relatives in remote villages are connected on WeChat.

She is in three WeChat groups where people usually communicate through voice messages in their native language. Most WeChat users in rural parts of the country communicate in their oral native language.

“I learn many words. I learnt how to say a lot of things in my own language,” the mother of two now living in Western Australia told me.

Dechen’s story is not isolated. Social media is giving a new lifeline to Bhutan’s native languages, which do not have written script and lack proper documentation. By communicating through voice messages, social media is giving Bhutanese people in both urban and rural areas a new opportunity to use their local language.

Read more:
What can the kingdom of Bhutan teach us about fighting corruption

Losing Bhutan’s languages

Bhutan is a tiny Himalayan nation with a population of under 800,000 people. Internet and television was introduced only in 1999 and mobile phones in 2004.

The country has more than 20 local languages, but only Dzongkha has written text and is promoted as the national language.

The country struggles to promote the national language and its usage against English. Today most urban residents, especially the elites, speak English as their primary language.

Many languages – especially minority languages – are vanishing or becoming endangered as younger generations switch to Dzongkha and English.

The medium of instruction in schools is mostly in English; Dzongkha is taught only as grammar and literature. Students are shamed and often punished for using their local languages.

The preservation and promotion of local languages, therefore, depends on the speakers. A language faces extinction when its speakers die out or switch to another language.

Linguist Pema Wangdi has researched languages in Bhutan, and he told me many people are losing their native language.

“When we lose our language, we lose a piece of our national identity,” he told me.

Wangdi has identified there are no longer any speakers of Olekha, an indigenous dialect of Rukha in Wangdu Phodrang.

“The loss of a single language is a loss of a piece of our national linguistic heritage and identity,” he said. “When a language is lost, cultural traditions which are tied to that language such as songs, myths and poetry will be lost forever.”

Other Bhutanese languages – including Tshophu language of Doyaps in Samtse, Monpa language of central Bhutan, and Gongdukha of Mongar – are endangered and at the brink of extinction.

Preservation of local languages

The future of the minority languages are at threat. The Constitution of Bhutan mandates the preservation and promotion of local languages, but there are no official efforts to preserve native languages.

But encouraging people to speak their native languages can have far reaching benefits in preserving and promoting Bhutan’s rich culture and tradition. Language embodies identity, ethnicity and cultural values: a thriving local language would help transfer this intangible wealth to the younger generation.

Social media could be an invaluable tool in this preservation.

Bhutan could save its languages from becoming extinct with promotion of social media usages and language education could be done on the social media platforms. With both young and old people glued to social media, encouraging more people to use local languages in social media could generate interest among the youth to learn their local languages.

It could also help in documenting the endangered local languages as the older generation can record their voices on WeChat.

Many elder citizens feel strongly about their language and emphasise teaching their mother tongue to the younger generation and their grandchildren. Social media – joining the younger generation on platforms where they feel at home – could be the way forward.

Read more:
Thinking of taking up WeChat? Here’s what you need to know

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

– ref. How social media is breathing new life into Bhutan’s unwritten local languages – https://theconversation.com/how-social-media-is-breathing-new-life-into-bhutans-unwritten-local-languages-210280

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

The Albanese government is about to have to make a really important decision.

It’s going to have to decide what’s more important: supporting Australians who are financially under water, or keeping an election promise.

And it’ll have to do it soon. It’s already working on its May budget, now just six months away.

That choice will affect almost every Australian, and it could shape whether you’re thousands of dollars a year better off – or not – from July next year.

Household budgets are shrinking

When Labor took office in May 2022, Australians were doing well. Consumer spending and economic growth were on the up and up, and mortgage rates and rents were only starting to climb.

A promise to keep the proposed multi-billion dollar Stage 3 tax cuts – announced but not implemented by the Coalition back in 2018 – seemed worth making to clear away any reasons any voters might have not to vote Labor.

Since May 2022, just about everything has got worse for “ordinary” Australians – those on typical incomes, which are about $85,000 for full-time workers and $43,000 for adult part-time workers.

The best measure of the buying power of after-tax incomes is real household disposable income per capita. During the past year, it shrank 5.3%, which is more than it shrank in either the early 1990s recession or the global financial crisis.

On my calculations, it’s the worst collapse in 40 years.

From those incomes have to be taken rents and mortgage payments.

The Reserve Bank says scheduled mortgage payments are now taking up a larger share of household disposable income than at any time in history – 10% when averaged over all households, including those that don’t have mortgages, and many times that for those that do.

This means when you go to the supermarket and find you can’t afford what you used to, you’re not imagining it. It hasn’t been like this in decades, and it’s about to get worse.

The Christmas bonus is missing

In the lead up to each of the past four Christmases, ordinary earners have received a bonus from the tax office – the so-called low and middle income earner tax offset, initially worth $1,080 and increased to $1,500 in 2022.

This year, it’s gone. It means middle-earners’ pre-Christmas tax refunds will be up to $1,500 smaller or replaced with bills. Taxpayers who normally have a tax bill will get a bill up to $1,500 bigger.

An estimated 10.5 million Australians submitted their tax forms by October 31.

Most of them – most of those earning up to $90,000 and previously eligible for the full $1,500 offset – are about to find themselves a good deal worse off.

Read more:
Why do I suddenly owe tax this year? It could be because the Low and Middle Income Tax offset is gone, forever

Average earners will lose, while the rich get thousands

The very expensive Stage 3 tax cuts (costing $20 billion in their first year, and $313 billion over ten years) were meant to come to the rescue. They begin next July.

Speaking notes prepared for Treasurer Jim Chalmers and released under freedom of information laws say they will provide relief to low and middle earners and kick in at $45,000.

But someone on that income will get no relief. That person will lose an offset of $1,275 in return for a tax cut of zero. Someone on a higher wage of $50,000 will lose $1,500 in order to gain $125, and someone earning the typical full-time wage of $85,000 will have to lose $1,500 to gain just $1,000.

That’s right, a typical full-time worker will get relief of $1,000 from the Stage 3 tax cuts in return for losing the axed tax offset of $1,500.

Much higher earners will do much, much better. An Australian earning twice as much as is typical – $190,000 – will get $7,500. An Australian earning a bit more than that again – $200,000 – will get $9,000.

Labor has been handed an opportunity

Handing $9,000 to a high earner but only $1,000 to an ordinary full-time earner is
an indulgence that might have seemed okay when it looked as if ordinary earners were doing alright, or wouldn’t notice.

But it’s about to happen, and it’s about to cost $20 billion in its first year. That’s as much as the government plans to spend on the pharmaceutical benefits scheme in that year and almost twice what it plans to spend on higher education.

What if it kept the tax cuts, but reoriented them to Australians who actually needed them – to the more than 80% of Australians who earn less than $120,000 a year – while still providing generous cuts to those who earned more than $120,000?

That’s a task Matt Grudnoff and Greg Jericho set themselves at the Australia Institute, coming up with four options. Each of those four would cost less than Stage 3 cuts; deliver more to Australians on less than $120,000 – and even fund a $250 per fortnight increase in the JobSeeker unemployment benefit.

Jericho’s punchline, delivered to the revenue summit at Parliament House last month: “I actually wish it was harder than it was”.

Option 4 costs $70 billion less over ten years but leaves every taxpayer earning up to $132,000 better off.

It doubles the tax cut Stage 3 gives to a typical full-time earner on $85,000, and still gives high earners $2,197 a year each.

Stage 3 vs Australia Institute Option 4, tax cut as percent of taxable income

His point wasn’t that this is the best option. It was that there are options, many of which give the bulk of Australians – the stressed ordinary voters Labor and the Coalition will need in the next election – much more than Stage 3.

What’s wrong with making 80% of the electorate better off at a time when they desperately need it, and cutting future budget deficits by $70 billion?

Only that it would break a promise, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese likes keeping promises.

But when asked in an Australia Institute survey what was more important – keeping a promise or reacting to changing economic circumstances – 61% picked reacting to changing circumstances.

Even among Coalition voters, 56% supported reacting to changing circumstances.

It puts the Stage 3 tax cuts in play. There’s still time, and plenty of electoral and economic reasons to rejig them.

Peter Martin is Economics Editor of The Conversation.

– ref. We could make most Australians richer and still save billions – it’s not too late to fix the Stage 3 tax cuts – https://theconversation.com/we-could-make-most-australians-richer-and-still-save-billions-its-not-too-late-to-fix-the-stage-3-tax-cuts-217560

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thea van de Mortel, Professor, Nursing, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Griffith University

Dual outbreaks of gastro and COVID on the Grand Princess cruise ship that docked in Adelaide on Monday have now been declared over by the doctor on board.

A spokesperson for Princess Cruises, which operates the ship, said a number of passengers had presented with symptoms on a previous voyage. But the ship has since been disinfected and the number of people who were ill when the ship arrived into Adelaide was said to be in single digits.

While this is positive news, reports of infectious outbreaks on cruise ships evoke a sense of deja vu. We probably all remember the high-profile COVID outbreaks that occurred on cruise ships in 2020.

So what is it about cruise ships that can make them such hotspots for infection?

First, what causes these outbreaks?

Respiratory infectious outbreaks on cruise ships may be caused by a range of pathogens including SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) and influenza viruses. These can be spread by respiratory droplets and aerosols released when people breathe, talk, laugh, cough and sneeze.

Historically, troop transport ships also helped to spread the lethal 1918 flu virus between continents.

Gastro outbreaks on cruise ships are similarly well documented. More than 90% of cruise ship gastro outbreaks are caused by norovirus, which is spread from person to person, and through contaminated objects or contaminated food or water.

Gastro can also be caused by other pathogens such as bacteria in contaminated food or water.

Read more:
Cruise ships can be floating petri dishes of gastro bugs. 6 ways to stay healthy at sea this summer

What is the risk?

In 2020, around 19% of Diamond Princess passengers and crew docked in Japan tested positive to COVID. Ultimately, nearly one in four Ruby Princess passengers and crew docked in Sydney tested positive.

However, COVID generally presents a lesser risk nowadays, with most people having some level of immunity from vaccination or previous infection. The outbreak on the Grand Princess appears to have been much smaller in scale.

A three-year study before COVID of influenza-like illness (which includes fever), acute respiratory illness (which doesn’t require fever to be present) and gastro on cruise ships found these were diagnosed in 32.7%, 15.9% and 17% of ill passengers, and 10.9%, 80% and 0.2% of ill crew, respectively.

An analysis of data from 252 cruise ships entering American ports showed the overall incidence of acute gastro halved between 2006 and 2019. Passenger cases decreased from 32.5 per 100,000 travel days to 16.9, and crew cases from 13.5 per 100,000 travel days to 5.2. This decline may be due to a combination of improved hygiene and sanitation standards.

The risk of getting sick with gastro was significantly higher on bigger ships and longer voyages. This is because the longer you are in close contact with others, the greater the chance of exposure to an infectious dose of viruses or bacteria.

Why are cruise ships infection hotspots?

On cruise ships, people tend to crowd together in confined spaces for extended periods. These include dining halls, and during social activities in casinos, bars and theatres.

The risk goes up when the environment is noisy, as more droplets and aerosols are shed when people are laughing, shouting or talking loudly.

Passengers may come from multiple countries, potentially bringing variants from different parts of the world. Influenza, which is usually seasonal (late autumn to early spring) onshore, can occur at any time on a cruise ship if it has international passengers or is calling at international ports.

Human behaviour also contributes to the risk. Some passengers surveyed following cruise ship gastro outbreaks indicated they were ill when they boarded the ship, or they became ill but didn’t disclose this because they didn’t want to pay for a doctor or be made to isolate, or they thought it wasn’t serious.

Those who became ill were more likely than those who did not to think that hand hygiene and isolation were not effective in preventing infection transmission, and were less likely to wash their hands after using the toilet. Given faecal contamination is a major source of norovirus transmission, this is concerning.

Read more:
Cruise ships are back and carrying COVID. No, it’s not 2020. But here’s what needs to happen next

While there are usually a la carte dining options on board, many people will choose a buffet option. From personal experience, food tongs are handled by multiple people, some of whom may not have cleaned their hands.

What can help?

The Department of Health and Aged Care recommends cruise companies encourage crew and passengers to be up-to-date with flu and COVID vaccinations, and encourage anyone who becomes ill to stay in their cabin, or at least avoid crowded spaces and wear a mask in public.

They also recommend cruise ships have a plan to identify and contain any outbreaks, including testing and treatment capacity, and communicate to passengers and crew how they can reduce their transmission risk.

All passengers and crew should report any signs of infectious illness, and practice good hand hygiene and respiratory etiquette, such as covering their mouth if coughing or sneezing, disposing of used tissues, and washing or sanitising hands after touching their mouth or nose.

Read more:
Fleas to flu to coronavirus: how ‘death ships’ spread disease through the ages

South Australia’s chief health officer has commended the Grand Princess crew for their infection protection and control practices, and for getting the outbreak under control.

Thea van de Mortel teaches into the Master of Infection Prevention and Control program at Griffith University.

– ref. From COVID to gastro, why are cruise ships such hotbeds of infection? – https://theconversation.com/from-covid-to-gastro-why-are-cruise-ships-such-hotbeds-of-infection-217534

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justin Ellis, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Newcastle, University of Newcastle

The New South Wales Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ hate crimes has held its final public sitting in Sydney today.

The special commission investigated unsolved suspected hate crime deaths of LGBTIQ people (or people who were presumed to be LGBTIQ) in NSW between 1970 and 2010.

In his closing remarks, Justice John Sackar reiterated that the objective was “to provide some recognition of the truth” for LGBTIQ victims in cases where “the response of the community, of society, [and] of its institutions to these deaths was sadly lacking”.

The inquiry has revealed new leads in decades-old cold cases, and importantly, been dogged in its pursuit of justice for victims and their families.

Read more:
Gender, sexual orientation and ethnic identity: Australians could be asked new questions in the 2026 Census

Months of hearings, piles of evidence

Launched by the NSW government in April 2022, the special commission had extensive powers to compel witnesses to give evidence and to compel the production of more than 150,000 documents.

The deaths of 32 people have been examined in 17 public, and 48 private hearings.

The special commission was driven by a need to clarify aspects of previous investigations by the NSW Police Force, including Strike Forces Parrabell, Macnamir, and Neiwand.

This was recommended by a NSW parliamentary inquiry into gay and transgender hate crimes between 1970 and 2010.

Research published by ACON, a community health organisation, was integral in the inquiry.

Breakthroughs in decades-old cases

The special commission has uncovered a range of issues with some of the initial investigations. These included lack of investigation, forensic testing issues, and problems with the Strike Force inquiries undertaken by NSW Police Force.

But it has also made several breakthroughs. Justice Sackar noted two of these in his closing remarks.

One is in relation to the death of Crispin Dye, who died on Christmas Day in 1993 after being assaulted two days earlier.

In the 30 years since 1993, almost none of the exhibits collected by the NSW Police Force at that time had been subjected to forensic testing. This included his bloodstained clothing.

The special commission arranged for such testing to occur, and which led to two major developments.

It unearthed a match to a DNA profile taken from a 2002 crime scene. This resulted in the identification of an unknown (but now deceased) man and revealed possible avenues of inquiry into him and his associates.

The second case mentioned was that of Ernest Head, who was murdered in his home in Summer Hill in 1976. His body was found naked, having been stabbed 35 times.

The Special Commission arranged for re-analysis of palmprints and certain other exhibits in relation to Head’s case, which resulted in the identification of a known (but now deceased) man, thought to be involved in Head’s death.

The man in question had never previously been identified as a possible person of interest in relation to this unsolved homicide.

Read more:
The Chinese government claims LGBTQ+ people are protected from discrimination. Our interviews with 26 activists tell another story

Victims front and centre

The special commission received and reviewed information provided by more than 130 members of the public and has clarified ambiguities over unsolved suspected hate crime deaths of LGBTIQ people in NSW.

In addition to the cases noted above, it has generated new leads in cold cases that may provide comfort to family and friends who continue to seek answers about what happened to their loved ones.

In shining a light on everything that is known or could be found out about what happened in these cases, Justice Sackar stated in his closing remarks:

Many voiceless people have been given a voice. Recommendations will be made. Improvements in processes and procedures should follow. There is scope for people of goodwill – of whom there are many in this arena – to come together, if they so choose, and work towards a better future.

As such, the special commission has emphasised the importance of the pursuit of justice, even decades after crimes have been committed.

Read more:
‘Don’t say anything about it’: why so many LGBTQIA+ Buddhists feel pressure to hide their identities

State commission, national significance

At a time when LGBTIQ individuals and communities in Australia and globally are experiencing a resurgence of online and in-person hate, the Commission’s findings are likely to have national ramifications.

Given the indifference towards violence and hostility directed at LGBTIQ people in NSW over the 40 year period examined by the special commission, it is timely that other Australian jurisdictions consider whether they also need to address these issues.

The special commission is a timely reminder of the necessity for LGBTIQ individuals and communities to remain vigilant, for police to better respond and listen to victims’ and witnesses’ experiences, and for governments to actively prioritise inclusion.

The final report from the special commission will be handed to the NSW Governor by 15 December 2023.

Nicole L. Asquith was contracted by and received funding from the Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes to provide expert testimony. Nicole is the Convenor of the Australian Hate Crime Network.

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

– ref. Shining a light on injustice: how an inquiry fought for LGBTIQ recognition – https://theconversation.com/shining-a-light-on-injustice-how-an-inquiry-fought-for-lgbtiq-recognition-217537

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anya Schiffrin, Senior Lecturer in Discipline of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

In a time of war and populism, the world needs quality information and credible news outlets. Local news is a part of this healthy ecology.

But news publishers have struggled to find ways to make money in recent years – especially as referral traffic and ad revenue from social media sites continue to fall.

The monopoly power of large platforms, and the control they exert over news distribution, was one reason Australia’s competition authorities introduced the News Media Bargaining Code in 2021.

This code has prompted Google and Meta to strike deals with a number of Australian media organisations, addressing the longstanding conundrum of how to get platforms to pay for news. It has even become a template for other countries looking to compensate their own media businesses.

But what exactly is fair compensation in this case? Our new report suggests the amounts of money Google and Meta should be paying news publishers are far greater than anyone imagined, and far more than the tech companies themselves claim.

When Australia’s bargaining code went global

Australia broke new ground when it passed the News Media Bargaining Code, successfully pushing Google and Meta to reach voluntary commercial agreements with a number of media organisations.

It was a world-first piece of legislation, as La Trobe University Professor Andrea Carson put it.

Read more:
Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code led the world. It’s time to finish what we started

According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, payments made under the code total about A$200 million each year. It’s no surprise other governments are looking at Australia’s law to find ways to get payments for their news too.

Indonesia, New Zealand, South Africa and Switzerland have all considered similar laws. Japan conducted a study on the online distribution of news content, and in September warned tech platforms low payments to publishers could violate antimonopoly laws.

In Brazil, attempts to introduce platform remuneration legislation were scuppered in May after significant pressure from Google, but are currently being revived.

In the United States, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which would allow collective bargaining by news publishers, was introduced by Democratic Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar in March.

Then, in June, the California State Assembly passed the California Journalism Preservation Act, which would require large tech companies to share their advertising revenue with news outlets. However, the bill has been put on hold until 2024.

Whether or not the laws pass, Google and Facebook are coming out against them, threatening to drop news from their platforms in several countries. Facebook dropped news in Canada in August, and in Australia in February 2021 (before bringing it back a short while later).

Read more:
Stuff-up or conspiracy? Whistleblowers claim Facebook deliberately let important non-news pages go down in news blackout

Google and Meta suggest news isn’t core to their business and can be dropped or de-emphasised. At the same time, reports say they’re continuing to give small amounts of money to publishers.

In fact, interviews we conducted over the past couple of months with people working for different outlets suggest Google has recently been raising payments made to publishers worldwide, in what we think is an attempt to forestall legislation.

Globally, publishers have estimated what they believe they’re owed under platform remuneration acts similar to Australia’s. But these amounts are covered under non-disclosure agreements when publishers make direct deals with Google and Meta.

Our working paper is the first to estimate what Google and Meta owe US publishers. We have made our methodology public so it can be checked and replicated.

We found that in the US, Google and Meta owe news publishers between US$11 billion and US$14 billion per year. This is much more than the sums being paid out, which we know about through interviews and specific cases in which amounts have been made public.

Sharing surplus value fairly

At the core of our study and its conclusions is what economists call “surplus” – the additional value created when two sides enter into a mutually beneficial interaction. Importantly, the value generated from the interaction is larger than if the two sides were to operate in isolation.

Digital platforms benefit from having varied, credible and timely news content provided by publishers. This enhances user engagement and makes their platform more attractive to advertisers. News publishers benefit by finding an avenue through which they can distribute their content, thereby reaching more readers.

Our methodology found this additional surplus value generated from the platform-publisher interaction, and then used insights from the economics of bargaining, and from historical benchmarks, to calculate a “fair” payment owed to news publishers.

Our methodology is transparent and replicable, and offers the flexibility to change underlying assumptions based on the market and geography being analysed. With this report, we hope to broaden the discussion over the payments that large digital platforms such as Google and Facebook owe news publishers.

It’s more important than ever that deals between platforms and media businesses are fair and transparent, and that publishers stick together as they negotiate. More value is created when bargaining is collective.

The Conversation reached out to Google for comment but did not receive a response before the deadline.

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

– ref. Why Google and Meta owe news publishers much more than you think – and billions more than they’d like to admit – https://theconversation.com/why-google-and-meta-owe-news-publishers-much-more-than-you-think-and-billions-more-than-theyd-like-to-admit-216818

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Parmeter, Research Scholar, Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, Australian National University

More than five weeks into Israel’s war with Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not outlined his future vision for Gaza.

He has said many times the war will continue until Hamas is eradicated. But his battle plan for achieving that objective is far from clear.

As calls grow louder around the world for a ceasefire, Israel is finding itself under increasing pressure to respond. This is placing more scrutiny on Netanyahu’s overall strategy for prosecuting the war – and what could happen after it’s over.

Constantly in the background of Israel’s military campaign is the fate of more than 200 hostages – Israelis and other nationals – held by Hamas. Netanyahu has said there will be no ceasefire until all the hostages are released. Hamas has responded that no hostages will be released in advance of a ceasefire.

Neither side shows signs of budging and Hamas has now suspended negotiations over hostage releases because of Israel’s siege of Al Shifa hospital, Gaza City’s main medical centre. Israel says a Hamas complex is hidden in tunnels underneath the hospital – a claim Hamas denies.

Most of Gaza’s population is now crowded into the southern part of the strip. Some of Hamas’ key leaders are likely hiding there, raising another pertinent question as the war drags on. How will the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) succeed in their mission of eradicating Hamas if its operatives are hiding among civilians in such a crowded area? Netanyahu has given no public indication.

Read more:
Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership is questioned even as Israelis rally round the flag

Growing US-Israeli frictions

With so many key questions left unanswered, there is a growing disconnect between Netanyahu and the Biden administration in the United States.

President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have both said Israel should not reoccupy Gaza after the war. They have also indicated a preference for the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas, to extend its authority to Gaza after Hamas’ removal.

By contrast, Netanyahu has said Israel will need to retain control over security in Gaza after the war.

Moreover, he has rejected the Palestinian Authority as a successor administration to Hamas for various reasons, including the fact it has not issued an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’ attack on Israel.

Netanyahu’s balancing act

Netanyahu’s planning seems to be edging towards a demilitarised Gaza with IDF forces based outside the strip, ready to re-enter the enclave when any security threat to Israel is detected.

But he does not seem to be addressing the risk that a power vacuum following Hamas’ removal might be filled by another militant group, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which would certainly not be to Israel’s liking.

Nor has he addressed the probability that disarming those Palestinians who are already radicalised will only be a partially effective exercise.

The problem with understanding Netanyahu’s thought process is that he is dealing with several imperatives simultaneously:

1) Appeasing hard-line members of his government

The coalition government he leads is the most right-wing in Israel’s history. Though the influence of extremists has been diluted by the addition of the centrist Benny Gantz to the war cabinet, Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu still suggested Israel might use a nuclear weapon against Gaza. He was repudiated by Netanyahu, but the comment was indicative of hardline sentiment that remains in the government.

After the war, Netanyahu doubtless hopes to resume governing with this coalition, so he must take their interests into account when it comes to formulating a post-war plan for Gaza.

2) Assuaging the anger of hostages’ families

The families are demanding Netanyahu prioritise negotiations to free their loved ones over the military campaign. Netanyahu claims he is prioritising both. But that claim has lost some cogency since reports emerged that Netanyahu rejected a deal for a five-day ceasefire early in the war in return for release of some of the hostages.

3) Securing his own political future

Netanyahu will be acutely aware that the only other Israeli political leader to have presided over a security and intelligence failure of the magnitude of Hamas’ October 7 attack was Golda Meir at the start of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. And she resigned soon after the Egyptian and Syrian forces were defeated.

The longer the current war continues, the greater the chance Netanyahu can severely diminish Hamas’ leadership structure. And this would allow him to burnish his tarnished credentials as Israel’s security guarantor.

He will also have noted former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s comment that Israel probably has only weeks left to eliminate Hamas before international public opinion completely turns against Israel. This adds urgency to Netanyahu’s need for an outcome he can describe as a victory.

4) Dealing with pressures from the White House

The Biden administration is also letting it be known through media leaks that it has concerns over Israel’s conduct of the war, particularly the high number of civilian casualties and apparent lack of an exit strategy. The US is also warning Israel more explicitly that international support for its military operation is waning.

This is of growing concern to the Biden administration because its strong support for Israel comes with increasing risks. First, American diplomats have said anger in the Arab world is so intense over continued US support for Israel, it is “losing us Arab publics for a generation”.

And there is also the risk Biden’s embrace of Israel could hurt him during next year’s presidential election. Many of the anti-war demonstrators in the US are young, college-educated progressives who helped elect Biden in 2020. If these voters fail to turn out for him next year, the likely Republican candidate, Donald Trump, could prevail.

Reaching an acceptable – and achievable – endgame

Biden and Netanyahu are thus on a collision course. Netanyahu wants a long war in order to maximise his chances of eliminating Hamas – and to delay the inevitable post-war reckoning over the Israeli security failure that led to so much carnage on October 7.

Biden agrees Hamas has to be destroyed, but he needs the war to be as short as possible in order to limit the blow-back against US interests internationally, as well as against him domestically.

There is also uncertainty about the amount of purchase Biden might have if he attempts to rein in Netanyahu. That uncertainty is compounded by the question of what might be an acceptable – and achievable – endgame in Gaza for both.

Read more:
‘We remain afraid of the future’ – how Palestinian children’s optimism was fading even before this crisis

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

– ref. As calls grow louder for a Gaza ceasefire, Netanyahu is providing few clues about his strategy or post-war plans – https://theconversation.com/as-calls-grow-louder-for-a-gaza-ceasefire-netanyahu-is-providing-few-clues-about-his-strategy-or-post-war-plans-217653

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark A Gregory, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, RMIT University

Around 4.05am on Wednesday November 8 2023, Optus suffered a nationwide network outage lasting well into the evening, more than 12 hours later.

Now, Optus has released some information on what happened, stating “we now know what the cause was and have taken steps to ensure it will not happen again”.

As a telecommunications expert, I believe we should have no confidence in this statement, because the poorly worded explanation leaves many questions unanswered.

Could a similar outage happen again? We don’t know – but there are ways to make it less likely.

Read more:
Optus blackout explained: what is a ‘deep network’ outage and what may have caused it?

How did the outage unfold?

The Optus outage caused all services to go offline. Landlines, mobile phones, home internet, small business and enterprise, and cloud connections all dropped out.

The most serious impact of the outage was that Optus landlines couldn’t dial 000 and Optus mobile phones were unable to connect to the 000 emergency call service unless the connection occurred through Telstra or Vodafone infrastructure.

More than 10 million Optus customers were affected by the outage that brought Melbourne’s trains to a halt and left Optus’s small business customers unable to carry out EFTPOS transactions.

So, what went wrong with Optus?

Optus has revealed that a “routine software upgrade” triggered a cascading failure in the Optus internet protocol (IP) core network – the central backbone of their network that authorises device access and provides customer management.

Optus has provided a brief answer on why the entire network went offline:

“These routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers which could not handle these. This resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves.”

Routing information is used to find a path from one location on the internet to another – a router is a device that manages the traffic flows.

The explanation provided by Optus points to human error. This confirms what industry experts suspected had happened. The resulting flood of “routing information changes” overwhelmed key routers in the core network causing them to disconnect, thereby bringing the entire network to a halt.

Read more:
Explainer: what is the ‘core network’ that was crucial to the Optus outage?

Should the outage have been preventable?

Outages of this kind are not uncommon – human error has led to major companies going offline in the past.

But an entire telecommunications network going offline is unusual. The network should be designed in such a way that redundancy (backups) and resiliency are built in from the outset.

Before a software upgrade occurs, there should be modelling, testing and several layers of sign-off.

In case something goes wrong, there should be infrastructure and system redundancy. An automated or manual procedure should exist to ensure the redundant systems become operational within a few minutes.

In 2021, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram disappeared from the internet for roughly six hours due to an incorrect routing configuration.

Meta’s lengthy and informative statement at the time provides an example of the level of detail that we should expect Optus to provide.

With the Optus outage and similar incidents at other companies that have led to major outages, in nearly every case the outage was preventable and highlighted deficiencies in the organisation.

Read more:
In a crisis, Optus appears to be ignoring Communications 101

What should Optus do now?

The national outage means the Optus network is not fit for purpose.

It can be assumed Optus has a number of deficiencies, such as problems with engineering capability, testing, procedures, network redundancy and resilience.

Optus states they are “committed to learning from what has occurred” and will continue to work to “increase the resilience” of their network.

For this to lead to an effective outcome, Optus will need to carry out a review and put in place new processes, infrastructure and systems to prevent a similar outage in the future.

How do we know a similar outage won’t happen again?

We don’t.

We need enhanced government regulation of the Australian telecommunications network operators to provide improved visibility of the redundancy and resilience of their networks. The Senate has commenced an inquiry into the Optus outage.

Telecommunications is an essential service. Australians should be able to connect to the 000 emergency call service at all times. Reliable access to medical services, EFTPOS and the internet are vital.

If necessary, penalties should be introduced into the Telecommunications Act 1997 to ensure telecommunications network operators implement and maintain “best practice” related to network operation, redundancy and resilience.

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

– ref. Optus has revealed the cause of the major outage. Could it happen again? – https://theconversation.com/optus-has-revealed-the-cause-of-the-major-outage-could-it-happen-again-217564

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan Hutchinson, PhD Candidate, Australian National University

On November 1, Pakistan began a nationwide operation to deport over 1.7 million Afghans it says are living in the country illegally. There are now an estimated 10,000 people returning to Afghanistan each day.

Pakistan has indicated the deportations are designed to reduce cross-border incursions from Taliban fighters based in Afghanistan. But it is more likely the interim military government is succumbing to populist politics around inflation, housing shortages and cost of living pressures in the country.

There were already over a million Afghans living in Pakistan before the Taliban came back into power in Afghanistan in August 2021. But the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been unable to process all of the estimated 600,000 to 800,000 Afghans who have fled to Pakistan since then. It is estimated only about a third of Afghan refugees in Pakistan are registered with the refugee agency.

The level of documentation that Afghans in Pakistan have varies extensively. Some entered the country without visas and passports. Some entered on visas and have been waiting indefinitely for renewal, others are on expired visas.

The UNHCR has subcontracted much of the registration of refugees to other organisations in Pakistan. Often, payment to a local broker is the only way refugees are able to get an appointment. This is entirely unreasonable when countries like Australia require UNHCR registration of refugees to facilitate priority processing.

Many refugees experience lengthy waiting periods to be registered, formally recognised as refugees and then issued an ID card, let alone referred for onward resettlement. Shelter, food and medical assistance are not even considered.

Refugee identity documents are not even enough to protect people from deportation. There have been reports of police detaining and threatening people with valid Pakistani visas. Activists told me of incidents in which police have torn up valid visas and Afghan passports.

Many Afghans have applied for resettlement in countries that were members of the NATO-led force that maintained security in Afghanistan, such as the US, Canada, Australia and countries in the European Union. But as the world has turned its eye to other conflicts, those countries have fallen drastically short of their promises to Afghan refugees. It is estimated only 200,000 Afghans have been resettled globally since August 2021.

Read more:
‘I feel suffocated’: Afghans are increasingly hopeless, but there’s still a chance to preserve some rights

A trickle of visas approved for Afghans

Human Rights Watch has also highlighted the unreasonably slow processing times for Afghan refugees in resettlement countries, such as the US, UK, Germany, Australia and other EU countries. This is particularly true for women and girls, the organisation says:

Afghan women and girls have often faced greater barriers to obtaining asylum, as destination countries have often prioritised assisting Afghans – overwhelmingly men – who contributed to their military efforts.

Since the Taliban returned to power, only 12,200 Afghan applicants have received a humanitarian visa to enter Australia. During the 2022 federal election campaign, Labor promised to increase the total refugee and humanitarian intake to 27,000 people annually. But this hasn’t happened.

Australia has promised just 26,500 humanitarian and 5,000 family places for Afghans from 2021-26.

Yet, there are more than 147,000 Afghan applicants still in the queue waiting to be processed from the 189,000 applications received since August 2021. And earlier this year, the Department of Home Affairs quietly removed human rights defenders from its list of groups to receive priority visa processing from Afghanistan.

A dire situation for women and girls

Former US President George W. Bush said in the early 2000s that the US went to Afghanistan to liberate the country’s women, but those women have been forgotten now.

Today, Afghanistan remains in one of the world’s most dire humanitarian crises.

The United Nations has described a system of gender apartheid under Taliban rule, in which women are prevented from participating in any public life, education or economic activity outside the home.

Infant and maternal mortality rates have skyrocketed because women are not allowed to travel to seek medical attention, female doctors are not allowed to work and male doctors are not allowed to treat female patients.

Leaders of NGOs that work on women’s education and other women’s rights continue to be disappeared. Women who are brave enough to protest on the street are beaten. Journalists are routinely detained for covering such issues.

Last year, the UN Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund launched a new program dedicated to supporting women’s human rights defenders around the world. However, I’ve been told this program is now facing a US$14 million (A$22 million) funding shortfall.

This fund provides small grants to a number of Afghan women’s human rights defenders to fund their ongoing advocacy work and relocate them or help them flee when their lives are in danger. Often, these women need this money to pay exorbitant prices for visa extensions to stay in Pakistan, or for exit permits to leave the country if they are given a resettlement place elsewhere.

If countries like Australia and the US help make up this shortfall, more women will have access to these grants and be able to escape extreme security risks.

What now for Afghans living in limbo?

Western countries must keep their promises to process refugee visa applications for Afghans in a timely fashion.

Australia refuses to grant refugee visas to people currently in Afghanistan. Yet, the government is still taking years to process the claims of incredibly high risk individuals outside the country who meet several priority processing criteria. Those people fled to countries like Pakistan and Iran and are now being deported because the process has taken so long.

Read more:
As the Taliban returns, 20 years of progress for women looks set to disappear overnight

Similarly, Afghans who are eligible for special immigrant visas to the US can also wait for years. Even if they get an appointment with the US embassy in Islamabad, there is no guarantee of a timeline when they will be sent to the US.

These timelines have to change. Globally, poorer countries shoulder the burden as the hosts of the overwhelming majority of refugees. Pakistan is now deporting Afghans. Iran, host to more than three million Afghan refugees, will likely follow soon.

Susan Hutchinson is executive director of Azadi-e Zan, an NGO dedicated to helping Afghan women’s human rights defenders. This is an unpaid role. She is also a member of the Australian Civil Society Coalition for Women, Peace and Security.

– ref. Why Western countries share the blame for the plight of 1.7 million Afghans being deported from Pakistan – https://theconversation.com/why-western-countries-share-the-blame-for-the-plight-of-1-7-million-afghans-being-deported-from-pakistan-217532

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stacey Pizzino, PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland

When armed conflict breaks out, we first focus on the people affected. But the suffering from war doesn’t stop when the fighting does. War trashes the environment. Artillery strikes, rockets and landmines release pollutants, wipe out forests and can make farmland unusable.

One in six people around the world have been exposed to conflict this year, from civil war in Sudan to Russia’s war in Ukraine to the Israel-Hamas war.

War has returned. Conflicts are at their highest point since the second world war. Deaths are at a 28-year high. As we grapple with the immediate plight of people, we must not lose sight of what war leaves behind – the silent casualty of the environment.

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What damage does war do?

Armed conflict leaves a long trail of environmental damage, which in turn can worsen our health and that of other species.

Chemical weapons and pollution from weapons stay in the environment as a toxic legacy. Explosives release pollutants such as depleted uranium into soil, while landscapes can be destroyed by troop movement and the breakdown of infrastructure.

The damage can last far longer than you’d think. The bloody second world war Battle of Verdun in France left the once-fertile farmland contaminated. Over a century later, no one can live in the Red Zone due to the threat from unexploded bombs.

As the Russia-Ukraine war wears on, severe air pollution, deforestation and soil degradation have mounted.

Conflict also causes habitat loss and decreased biodiversity. Between 1946 and 2010, wildlife noticeably declined in African nations affected by armed conflict.

Landmines are particularly bad, as they are designed to remain in place until stepped on. Long after a war ends, they can still kill people or animals. Landmines also cause degradation and limit access to safe land, which can then become over-exploited. Landmines have been unearthed by flood waters in Libya, Ukraine, Lebanon and Bosnia Herzegovina.

Many explosive weapons are designed to withstand short periods of intense heat. But when high temperatures linger, unexploded bombs can detonate. As the world heats up, we may see more explosions – not just from remnant bombs, but from munitions dumps.

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In the fast-heating Middle East, this is already happening. In Iraq, six arms depots exploded during intense heatwaves between 2018 and 2019. In Jordan, heatwaves have been blamed for a similar arms dump explosion in 2020.

At war’s end, weapons are often dumped in the ocean. From the first world war until the 1970s, out of date munitions and chemical weapons in the United Kingdom were dumped into the sea. It may have seemed like an easy solution, but the bombs haven’t gone away. Over 1 million tonnes of munitions litter the floor of a natural ocean trench between Northern Ireland and Scotland. These sometimes detonate underwater, while chemical weapons have washed up on beaches.

During the second world war, intense fighting took place on the Solomon Islands. Even today, people die or are wounded every year when uncovered bombs go off. Fishers have to be wary of underwater bombs.

Environmental exploitation such as illegal logging or diamond mining can accelerate during wartime, with profits used to buy weapons to fuel more fighting. At least 40% of civil war and internal conflicts between 1946–2006 were tied to natural resources such as teak and gold, according to the United Nations.

Sometimes, natural resources can become targets, as in the deliberate firing of oil wells in Kuwait or destruction of Ukraine’s Kakhovka Dam. These scorched-earth tactics do untold damage to the environment.

How do war and climate change interact?

The long-running war in Sudan’s Darfur region has been dubbed the world’s first climate change war due to its origins in drought and ecological crisis. While it’s difficult to clearly draw a link between the changing climate and an armed conflict, climate change is at minimum an indirect driver of armed conflict and can exacerbate existing social, economical and environmental factors. In turn, conflict worsens the damage done by climate change as it limits people’s ability to respond or cope with climate shocks.

Wars and extreme weather can both force people from their homes. At the end of last year, the number of people forced to seek refuge elsewhere in their own country was at an all time high. When people are forced to move, the disruption can add extra environmental damage through plastic and other types of waste.

When wars are raging, they take priority for governments. That, in turn, can limit efforts to reduce emissions or adapt to climate change.

That can make disasters worse. Colombia’s deadly 2017 landslide killed over 300 people. Why was it so deadly? In part, because many people had fled to the affected town, Mocoa, to avoid war and had built makeshift houses with no protection against disasters. We also know deaths from disasters increase in nations riven by armed conflict.

The world’s military forces are intense users of fossil fuels, accounting for 5.5% of global emissions. If we took the world’s military forces as one country, they would be the fourth highest emitter, after China, America and India.

We can no longer ignore the devastating coupling between war and environmental damage, including climate change. Wars make our ability to adapt to climate change worse, and environmental damage from conflict will exacerbate climate change.

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War leaves a toxic legacy that lasts long after the guns go quiet. Can we stop it?

Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur organisme de recherche.

– ref. Conflict pollution, washed-up landmines and military emissions – here’s how war trashes the environment – https://theconversation.com/conflict-pollution-washed-up-landmines-and-military-emissions-heres-how-war-trashes-the-environment-216987

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ritesh Shah, Senior Lecturer in Education, University of Auckland

In October alone, more children were reported to have died in Gaza than the total number of children killed annually in all other conflicts since 2019. The awful statistic led to United Nations Secretary General António Guterres calling Gaza a “graveyard for children”.

Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, the humanitarian catastrophe has been unprecedented in scale and scope. While not as acute in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the impact on young people in those territories has also been severe.

Scores of schools have been shut due to security concerns, and movement between towns is significantly limited. Violence between Israeli settlers and the Palestinian population has increased, with little apparent intervention by the Israeli military or government.

According to a UNICEF briefing to the UN Security Council, the recent escalation could lead to “trauma which could last a lifetime” for children in both Palestine and Israel. Even before this crisis, however, the toll of the protracted conflict on Palestinian children has been clear.

Over the four years between 2019 and 2022, I led a study exploring children’s wellbeing in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Conducted in partnership with the Norwegian Refugee Council, we surveyed approximately 800 children and their teachers. The trends we observed were cause for grave concern – even before events of the past month.

‘Insecure all the time’

The children we surveyed in Gaza had lived through at least three large-scale Israeli military operations in their lifetimes. Due to Israel’s longstanding blockade of the territory, they have grown up with food insecurity and unreliable supplies of electricity and drinking water.

With most of their caregivers unemployed, many children are vulnerable to poor living conditions, as well as violence within the home.

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Despite this, the children of Gaza we surveyed in 2019 showed tremendous resilience: 80% felt things would be better in the future. For many, attending and succeeding in school offered the hope of finding a way out of their circumstances.

By 2022, however, the situation had changed markedly. COVID-19 lockdowns, followed by a major escalation in violence in the spring of 2021 just as students returned to school full time, saw only 20% positive about their future.

Such circumstances had deflated their capacity to aspire, hope and dream of a better tomorrow. As one group of boys described in a story they wrote together:

We remain afraid of the future, and not trusting it will bring us any more hope. We can’t forget the events we have been through and feel insecure all the time.

Pandemic respite

Our research suggests the same is true for children in parts of the West Bank which face the ongoing presence of Israeli settlers and military in their communities.

Children surveyed in the part of Hebron under Israeli military control (Hebron H2), and in East Jerusalem, face daily restrictions as they travel to and from school. Many need to pass through military checkpoints where they face delays and harassment.

For these children, the pandemic offered a kind of respite from having to make these daily journeys. One group of girls living in Hebron H2 wrote:

The streets were calm and quiet, and there was not the usual conflict between us and the soldiers.

Read more:
Israel-Hamas conflict: what Gaza might look like ‘the day after’ the war

Schools reopened after the pandemic at the same time as tension and violence mounted across the West Bank over the rapid expansion of Israeli settlements on seized Palestinian land. Attacks in and around schools increased, as did Palestinian casualties.

For the most acutely affected areas, our survey recorded significant declines in children’s wellbeing, particularly in their ability to calm themselves when scared, and to think of solutions to daily challenges they faced. One group of girls at a school outside Jerusalem wrote:

Whenever there are incidences, we have strikes which close our school again and return us to learning from home which we don’t like. We are frustrated, depressed, and [made] angry by the situation.

Read more:
International reaction to Gaza siege has exposed the growing rift between the West and the Global South

Frustration and escalation

Pressure is now mounting for a ceasefire to end this latest cycle of violence. If and when this happens, humanitarian organisations and donors will flood back in to restore, repair and attempt to remediate the physical and psychological damage.

But if the root causes and drivers of the Israel-Palestine conflict remain unaddressed, and if there is no greater international resolve to change the status quo once and for all, it seems inevitable we will witness more bloodshed and suffering.

Children on both sides of the conflict deserve a durable and lasting solution. Our survey suggests their resilience was already seriously declining before the current emergency. Without hope, this will deteriorate even further. As one school principal told me:

We feel trapped by the situation we are in, and the violence just escalates out of frustration.

Ritesh Shah received funding from the Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations for this research.

– ref. ‘We remain afraid of the future’ – how Palestinian children’s optimism was fading even before this crisis – https://theconversation.com/we-remain-afraid-of-the-future-how-palestinian-childrens-optimism-was-fading-even-before-this-crisis-217535

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kiri Joy Wallace, Research Fellow in Restoration Ecology, University of Waikato

Biodiversity continues to decline globally, but nowhere is the loss more pronounced than in Aotearoa New Zealand, which has the highest proportion of threatened indigenous species in the world.

We hope our Eco-index initiative, which today launches an online ecosystem restoration map for New Zealand, will help change the story for nature.

Planning large-scale biodiversity restoration projects – whether they’re run by NGOs, governments or Indigenous groups – requires high-quality data.

Despite the rising demand, however, accessible biodiversity data have not been collected regularly or consistently. There are also challenges around the standardisation, storage and sharing of such data.

This means it has been difficult to quantify native ecosystems and biodiversity at scale. Cost-benefit analyses often have information gaps, meaning prioritising the various options for restoration projects can become guesswork.

Read more:
Despite its green image, NZ has world’s highest proportion of species at risk

Better data with help from new technologies

Without accurate information, improving biodiversity becomes harder. But emerging technologies – such as remote sensing and artificial intelligence – are making it easier to gather better data.

The Eco-index Ecosystem Restoration Map provides New Zealand’s first public, open-access digital tool in this area. It aims to address information gaps in biodiversity restoration, and to show users which native ecosystems are appropriate to reconstruct in any given catchment area.

It also shows where the highest restoration priorities are – such as in areas with very low native ecosystem cover. And it allows anyone to view the restoration targets for each native ecosystem in any catchment.

The map was developed with input from Indigenous leaders, rural professionals, community group leaders, government and industry bodies. Our goal is to share science-based information to support national discussion, policy and planning for ecosystem restoration.

It will be most useful when used alongside local information based on regional council guidance and local restoration expertise.

Ecological, economic, social and data science underpin the map’s development, as well as mātauranga Māori (Indigenous knowledge). The map will continue to be refined with data from new technologies and user feedback.

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Biodiversity in policy and business

Internationally, there is growing interest in more strategic biodiversity support, including improved policy frameworks and sustainable finance.

New Zealand is addressing some national biodiversity issues through policy, such as the release of a national biodiversity strategy. The strategy encompasses three pillars, with objectives to improve systems that influence biodiversity, empower residents to take action, and protect or restore native biodiversity.

New Zealand’s National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity requires regional councils to safeguard native biodiversity and to “set a target of at least 10% Indigenous vegetation cover”.

The Eco-index has a minimum goal of 15% native ecosystem cover. It recommends land managers tackle ecosystem restoration from wherever they are now. This may mean aiming for 10% cover in the next ten years, followed by 15% in 15 years, and 30% in two decades.

The rationale behind the 15% goal is that large tracts of native ecosystems support more native species than small, fragmented patches. Once an area drops below 10-20% of its original land cover, the number of species it can support declines suddenly.

Read more:
Without a better plan, New Zealand risks sleepwalking into a biodiversity extinction crisis

Aotearoa New Zealand is also a signatory to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework against which biodiversity strategy outcomes will be assessed and reported internationally.

Beyond this, global discussions focus on the development of biodiversity credit frameworks and include considerations such as the United Nations-supported Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures. The potential of these separate but aligned initiatives to create cumulative, positive impacts for nature is substantial.

Read more:
Slow solutions to fast-moving ecological crises won’t work – changing basic human behaviours must come first

Creating change

The success of these policies and frameworks hinges on the availability of high-quality data to understand the current state and trends in biodiversity, and to monitor outcomes.

Initiated in 2020, the Eco-index group focuses on biodiversity in Aotearoa New Zealand being protected, restored and connected by 2121. This long term vision aligns with inter-generational land-management thinking. It acknowledges that it takes time to fully realise these native biodiversity ambitions.

Eco-index also claims the status of being the first digital public good in New Zealand. The interactive public map is the first publicly available tool, with other digital tools in development for release next year.

The wider toolkit aims to empower large-scale restoration planning with a range of customised spatial and economic tools. These can help identify the best locations for planting, inform costings, and provide valuations of ecosystem services.

They can also detect native ecosystems remotely, using satellite imagery and artificial intelligence.

If successful, the toolkit can be expanded for global use. It could also include specialised tools for natural hazard mitigation, such as the restoration of urban wetlands for flood control.

These tools are developed from the best information available, including Planet satellite imagery and data from Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research and Rongowai Science Payloads Operations Centre in partnership with the Geospatial Research Institute.

Kiri Wallace receives funding from the New Zealand Biological Heritage National Science Challenge. Fonterra and Environment Canterbury have also provided funding for some aspects of Eco-index work.

John Reid receives funding from the New Zealand Biological Heritage National Science Challenge. Fonterra and Environment Canterbury have also provided funding for some aspects of Eco-index work.

Penny Payne receives funding from the New Zealand Biological Heritage National Science Challenge. Fonterra and Environment Canterbury have also provided funding for some aspects of Eco-index work.

– ref. Restoring ecosystems to boost biodiversity is an urgent priority – our ‘Eco-index’ can guide the way – https://theconversation.com/restoring-ecosystems-to-boost-biodiversity-is-an-urgent-priority-our-eco-index-can-guide-the-way-217092

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Dawel, Clinical psychologist and Lecturer, Research School of Psychology, Australian National University

Does ChatGPT ever give you the eerie sense you’re interacting with another human being?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has reached an astounding level of realism, to the point that some tools can even fool people into thinking they are interacting with another human.

The eeriness doesn’t stop there. In a study published today in Psychological Science, we’ve discovered images of white faces generated by the popular StyleGAN2 algorithm look more “human” than actual people’s faces.

AI creates hyperrealistic faces

For our research, we showed 124 participants pictures of many different white faces and asked them to decide whether each face was real or generated by AI.

Half the pictures were of real faces, while half were AI-generated. If the participants had guessed randomly, we would expect them to be correct about half the time – akin to flipping a coin and getting tails half the time.

Instead, participants were systematically wrong, and were more likely to say AI-generated faces were real. On average, people labelled about 2 out of 3 of the AI-generated faces as human.

These results suggest AI-generated faces look more real than actual faces; we call this effect “hyperrealism”. They also suggest people, on average, aren’t very good at detecting AI-generated faces. You can compare for yourself the portraits of real people at the top of the page with the ones embedded below.

But perhaps people are aware of their own limitations, and therefore aren’t likely to fall prey to AI-generated faces online?

To find out, we asked participants how confident they felt about their decisions. Paradoxically, the people who were the worst at identifying AI impostors were the most confident in their guesses.

In other words, the people who were most susceptible to being tricked by AI weren’t even aware they were being deceived.

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Biased training data deliver biased outputs

The fourth industrial revolution – which includes technologies such as AI, robotics and advanced computing – has profoundly changed the kinds of “faces” we see online.

AI-generated faces are readily available, and their use comes with both risks and benefits. Although they have been used to help find missing children, they have also been used in identity fraud, catfishing and cyber warfare.

People’s misplaced confidence in their ability to detect AI faces could make them more susceptible to deceptive practices. They may, for instance, readily hand over sensitive information to cybercriminals masquerading behind hyperrealistic AI identities.

Another worrying aspect of AI hyperrealism is that it’s racially biased. Using data from another study which also tested Asian and Black faces, we found only white AI-generated faces looked hyperreal.

When asked to decide whether faces of colour were human or AI-generated, participants guessed correctly about half the time – akin to guessing randomly.

This means white AI-generated faces look more real than AI-generated faces of colour, as well as white human faces.

Implications of bias and hyperrealistic AI

This racial bias likely stems from the fact that AI algorithms, including the one we tested, are often trained on images of mostly white faces.

Racial bias in algorithmic training can have serious implications. One recent study found self-driving cars are less likely to detect Black people, placing them at greater risk than white people. Both the companies producing AI, and the governments overseeing them, have a responsibility to ensure diverse representation and mitigate bias in AI.

The realism of AI-generated content also raises questions about our ability to accurately detect it and protect ourselves.

In our research, we identified several features that make white AI faces look hyperreal. For instance, they often have proportionate and familiar features, and they lack distinctive characteristics that make them stand out as “odd” from other faces. Participants misinterpreted these features as signs of “humanness”, leading to the hyperrealism effect.

At the same time, AI technology is advancing so rapidly it will be interesting to see how long these findings apply. There’s also no guarantee AI faces generated by other algorithms will differ from human faces in the same ways as those we tested.

Since our study was published, we have also tested the ability of AI detection technology to identify our AI faces. Although this technology claims to identify the particular type of AI faces we used with a high accuracy, it performed as poorly as our human participants.

Similarly, software for detecting AI writing has also had high rates of falsely accusing people of cheating – especially people whose native language is not English.

Managing the risks of AI

So how can people protect themselves from misidentifying AI-generated content as real?

One way is to simply be aware of how poorly people perform when tasked with separating AI-generated faces from real ones. If we are more wary of our own limitations on this front, we may be less easily influenced by what we see online – and can take additional steps to verify information when it matters.

Public policy also plays an important role. One option is to require the use of AI to be declared. However, this might not help, or may inadvertently provide a false sense of security when AI is used for deceptive purposes – in which case it is almost impossible to police.

Another approach is to focus on authenticating trusted sources. Similar to the “Made in Australia” or “European CE tag”, applying a trusted source badge – which can be verified and has to be earned through rigorous checks – could help users select reliable media.

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AI image generation is advancing at astronomical speeds. Can we still tell if a picture is fake?

Amy Dawel receives funding from the Australian Research Council. The funder had no role in the design and execution of this study, analyses, interpretation of the data, or decision to submit results.

Ben Albert Steward receives funding from the Australian Government Research Training Program. The funder had no role in the design and execution of this study, analyses, interpretation of the data, or decision to submit results.

Clare Sutherland receives funding from the Australian Research Council. The funder had no role in the design and execution of this study, analyses, interpretation of the data, or decision to submit results.

Eva Krumhuber et Zachary Witkower ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur poste universitaire.

– ref. Can you spot the AI impostors? We found AI faces can look more real than actual humans – https://theconversation.com/can-you-spot-the-ai-impostors-we-found-ai-faces-can-look-more-real-than-actual-humans-215160

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lynley Wallis, Professor, Griffith University

First Nations people please be advised this article speaks of racially discriminating moments in history, including the distress and death of First Nations people.

A pillar of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is truth-telling. This is easy to say, but not easy to do. Truth-telling involves the practice of revealing things that are uncomfortable, long hidden or forgotten. Truth-telling practices across the country (and globally, such as in Canada) are bringing attention to histories and societal inequities that are often contentious and difficult to hear.

The Native Mounted Police is one such difficult story in Queensland’s truth-telling process.

The Native Mounted Police operated in Queensland for 80 years, starting in 1849. It consisted of small groups of between six and 15 Aboriginal troopers under the command of white officers. The troopers were typically recruited from areas far from where they were sent to serve.

Detachments of troopers were regularly sent out on patrol, covering large areas along the frontier of the colony in pursuit of Indigenous people who were considered to be “problematic”. Their main job was to protect civilian settlers, the lands they had taken up, and their livelihoods – by whatever means necessary.

While on patrol, the Native Mounted Police are known to have engaged in violence against Aboriginal people, including killings of men, women and children, kidnappings, rape, and the forcible removal of children.

Truth-telling will mean coming to terms with this violence. Their actions radically altered the makeup of First Nations groups, diminished their populations, and changed where and how survivors could live.

With respect to this history, renowned Badtjala artist and scholar Dr Fiona Foley has said

I believe this country carries deep wounds from the trauma of these frontier wars. We carry it inside our souls whether we are conscious of them or not.

What we’ve found in our research

For seven years, we have been reconstructing the activities of the Native Mounted Police in order to help Queenslanders begin to understand this history.

In our research, we combed through archaeological work on Native Mounted Police camps and artefacts, examined historical documents (newspapers, colonial government documents, private diaries, hospital records and maps) from public archives and libraries, and conducted oral histories with a range of people, including descendants of Native Mounted Police officers and troopers, and descendants of massacre survivors.

We have organised all of our findings – nearly 20,000 documents in total – in an online database to shed light on the lives of the 450 officers and over 1,000 Aboriginal troopers who made up the Native Mounted Police, and the violence they administered.

Some people question why Aboriginal boys and men would enlist in a force whose job was to hunt down and kill other Aboriginal people. As we discuss at length in a research article, the reasons are varied and many. Some were directly or indirectly coerced through threats of violence or reduced prison sentences, but many seemingly “volunteered”. Many recruits may have had few, if any, other viable options – in essence, they were faced with a “choiceless choice”.

Like other native policing forces used by the British in Africa and India, the Queensland Native Mounted Police also deliberately exploited the fact that Indigenous people from one part of the country often regarded those from another as strangers, if not enemies.

The extent of frontier conflict

Other researchers have mapped massacre events in Australia in which more than six people were killed. Not all frontier conflict resulted in the deaths of large numbers of people, however. Large massacres were typically preceded by a series of smaller events and followed by others afterwards. These often included attacks on livestock or property rather than people, or the killings of individual people on both sides.

Our aim was to reconstruct as comprehensively as possible the scale and nature of all frontier conflict events, including violence that took place before the Native Mounted Police were officially established. All of this conflict would have set the scene for Indigenous people in their subsequent interactions with settler-colonists.

We divided conflict into four categories: attacks on stock or property, attacks on non-Indigenous people, attacks on Indigenous people and attacks on the Native Mounted Police themselves.

All together, we mapped more than 2,500 of these conflict events across colonial Queensland from 1623 until 1911. Our findings show violence occurred everywhere, but was especially common along the east coast and on Cape York Peninsula.

Violence commenced in Queensland in 1623, with the voyage of the Dutch vessel Pera, captained by Janszoon Carstensz. After settler colonists arrived in the early 1800s, we found violent incidents taking place in every decade from the 1820s onwards, peaking in 1866.

Because historical documents are biased in their focus on violence towards settlers, the most common form of conflict recorded was the killing of livestock, such as sheep, cattle and horses.

Pastoralists, agriculturalists, farmers and selectors had often invested their life savings in buying livestock and taking up land. They could little afford to lose their animals to Aboriginal spears. When they did, they often called in the Native Mounted Police, whose presence began a series of retaliatory events.

Read more:
Friday essay: ‘killed by Natives’. The stories – and violent reprisals – behind some of Australia’s settler memorials

Potentially higher death rates from conflict

Of the 165 Native Mount Police camps we have identified in our research, 150 have relatively secure beginning and end dates, with an average duration of 13 years per camp. This suggests that, generally, it took just over a decade to curb Aboriginal resistance in any given region.

In some areas, though, it took much longer. In the Cook Pastoral District (which covers most of Cape York Peninsula), for example, a staggering 54 Native Mounted Police camps operated from 1868 until 1929.

When the areal extent of different historic pastoral districts is taken into account, however, some had an even greater density of Native Mounted Police camps than Cook. Even though the Wide Bay District in southeast Queensland had only six camps between 1850 and 1864, its small size meant the Native Mounted Police presence here was quite intense.

Our data also suggests the death rates of frontier Aboriginal peoples was considerably higher than previous estimates.

Historians Raymond Evans and Robert Ørsted-Jensen have estimated some 41,000 Aboriginal people could have been killed at the hands of the Native Mounted Police between 1859 and 1897. Their estimate was based on reasonable and minimal assumptions drawn from historical documents and an average seven-year lifespan per camp.

Extending the duration of a camp to 13 years, in line with our newly identified data, increases the total deaths to potentially over 60,000.

Read more:
‘Why didn’t we know?’ is no excuse. Non-Indigenous Australians must listen to the difficult historical truths told by First Nations people

Ripples in Australia today

The government policies that allowed this decimation of Indigenous lives continue to have very real implications in Australian society today.

Australia’s colonial history has been built on policies designed to secure and maintain possession of Indigenous lands. Historically, colonial powers employed forces like the Native Mounted Police to enact widespread violence on the Indigenous people who stood in the way of this.

We can see the repercussions of historical actions to displace Aboriginal communities in processes such as native title claims. These processes force Aboriginal people to prove generational connections to land from which they were, at best, marginalised, and at worst, excluded.

Many Aboriginal groups can trace their families back to only a handful of ancestors because so many people were killed outright, died from starvation and disease, or were removed through measures such as the Stolen Generations.

The resounding defeat of the recent Voice to Parliament referendum is another case in point. It reveals a lack of understanding of the historical nature of violence against Indigenous people, the racist foundations of settler Australia, and how these continue to impact communities today.

Lynley Wallis receives funding from the Australia Research Council. She is affiliated with the Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists Inc. and Wallis Heritage Consulting.

Heather Burke receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Troy Meston receives unrelated funding from Education QLD, NIAA, UNESCO, Griffith University.

– ref. Our mapping project shows how extensive frontier violence was in Queensland. This is why truth-telling matters – https://theconversation.com/our-mapping-project-shows-how-extensive-frontier-violence-was-in-queensland-this-is-why-truth-telling-matters-216726

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sacha Pidot, Molecular microbiologist; laboratory head, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest global threats to health, food security and development. This month, The Conversation’s experts explore how we got here and the potential solutions.

Imagine a world where simple infections could become life-threatening, where a small cut could spell disaster, and where doctors couldn’t treat diseases effectively anymore. This isn’t the plot of a science fiction movie – it’s a real concern.

For decades, antibiotics have been used successfully to fight a wide range of bacterial infections. However, overuse of these medicines has led to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, known as “superbugs”.

Scientists are now in a race against time to discover new antibiotics that can defeat these bacteria. While this has been a difficult task, the recently discovered antibiotic clovibactin has renewed hope that we can fight our way out of this antibiotic resistance crisis.

So is clovibactin the saviour we’ve been hoping for? Or is it another in a long list of antibiotics that will remain only useful for research? The results so far are mixed.

Read more:
The rise and fall of antibiotics. What would a post-antibiotic world look like?

Remind me, how do antibiotics work?

Antibiotics work by either directly killing bacteria or preventing them from growing and dividing. They do this by targeting parts of the bacterial cell that are not present in human cells.

Bacteria are surrounded by a cell wall. It might be helpful to imagine the cell walls around bacteria as the walls of a fortress, which helps them survive in the environment.

Antibiotics are like a group of knights trying to breach the walls and take down the enemy inside. Traditional antibiotics, like penicillin, act to weaken these walls. They kill the bacteria and make it easier for our immune system to finish the job.

However, bacteria have evolved to resist these attacks, meaning that antibiotics in some cases no longer have any effect.

Read more:
How do bacteria actually become resistant to antibiotics?

What about clovibactin?

Clovibactin works differently. It targets bacteria from the inside out, taking away the bricks that are used to build the wall in the first place.

Bacteria have very limited options when choosing bricks to build their walls, so this approach means that resistance is much less likely to develop.

This mechanism of action is unique and offers hope that we can use clovibactin as a model to develop other antibiotics that act in a similar way.

But significant challenges still lie ahead.

Why do most antibiotics fail?

The field of antibiotic discovery is littered with drugs that have failed to progress beyond the early stages of research.

Antibiotic testing usually progresses from the laboratory bench to animal trials and, eventually, to human trials. While some antibiotics are very effective at killing bacteria in the lab, they are not always used to treat patients.

There are many reasons why this happens that cannot be predicted when an antibiotic is first discovered. An unfortunate, yet common, example is that antibiotics that appear safe in animals may turn out to be toxic at the higher doses required to treat humans.

Such unforeseen complications during the development phase are one part of the reason why more than 98.5% of newly discovered antibiotics never make it out of the lab.

Even for those with a perfect development pathway, the average time to market is nine years at a cost of greater than US$1 billion.

For clovibactin, the early signs look promising. No toxicity in human cells was detected and it successfully cured mice infected with golden staph.

However, there are still risks and market forces that may also be against clovibactin.

Pharmaceutical companies want a return on their investment

Antibiotics are not particularly profitable drugs and for a drug company to recoup their investment, an antibiotic must kill as many different bacteria as possible.

Health bodies such as the World Health Organization and the United States Centers for Disease Control have compiled lists of bacteria that pose the greatest threat to humans and for which we have limited treatments. Although clovibactin can kill some of the drug-resistant bacteria on these lists, it is not effective against the most troublesome and damaging bacteria.

Even for those it can kill, it does not appear to be superior to already available drugs, such as vancomycin.

Such shortcomings may prevent clovibactin from gaining future United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.

Although, scientists may be able to overcome these issues by chemically “tweaking” clovibactin to give it the desired traits.

Read more:
Will we still have antibiotics in 50 years? We asked 7 global experts

Even if it works, we’ll still need other antibiotics

Although clovibactin offers hope, one new compound alone cannot solve our current antibiotic resistance crisis. In fact, even the 64 antibiotics currently in clinical trials will be insufficient, particularly as 80% of these will likely hit development hurdles.

The good news is that more than one-third of these 64 antibiotics target infections for which we desperately need new treatments, including tuberculosis and gut infections caused by Clostridium difficile.

As we eagerly await the day new antibiotics become part of our standard medical treatments, it’s crucial for all of us as individuals to continue practising good hygiene and following prescribed antibiotic regimens.

Continuing support for research to combat antibiotic resistance is also needed, not just from governments and non-profits, but also through policies that incentivise private sector investment.

In doing so, we can maintain these effective weapons in the fight against bacterial infections for as long as possible.

Read the other articles in The Conversation’s series on the dangers of antibiotic resistance here.

Sacha Pidot receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council for research on antibiotics.

– ref. Could new antibiotic clovibactin beat superbugs? Or will it join the long list of failed drugs? – https://theconversation.com/could-new-antibiotic-clovibactin-beat-superbugs-or-will-it-join-the-long-list-of-failed-drugs-212774

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Levy, Principal Scientist/Environment and Climate Research Leader, GNS Science

Projecting when and how fast the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will lose mass due to current and future global ocean warming – and the likely impact on sea level rise and coastal communities – is a priority for climate science.

We know deep water flowing towards and around Antarctica is warming, and the fringes of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) are increasingly vulnerable to ocean-driven melting.

Submerged continental shelves along large portions of West Antarctica, including offshore Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers in the Amundsen Sea, are already bathed by upwelling arms of this relatively warm water.

Ice shelves in this region – massive floating slabs of ice that flow out from the coast – are already losing mass. Because ice shelves float, their melting doesn’t affect sea levels. But they hold back land-based ice, which does.

Recent research suggests increasing flow of warm deep water in this area will speed up the melting of the WAIS over the coming decades, regardless of future anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

This would mean global net-zero emissions targets cannot limit the amount of future sea-level rise caused by the melting of the WAIS. This poses significant challenges for coastal communities in low-lying regions as they plan for and adapt to unavoidable change.

Our project, an ambitious international collaboration known as the “Sensitivity of the WAIS to 2°C” (SWAIS2C), aims to retrieve sediments from the seafloor beneath the Ross Ice Shelf to explore how West Antarctica responded to warmer periods in Earth’s past – and what might happen in a warming future.

Read more:
Increasing melting of West Antarctic ice shelves may be unavoidable – new research

We may have (some) time

While it may appear too late to slow or stop the retreat of the WAIS in areas where the ocean cavities beneath ice shelves are already “warm”, the inevitable demise of the entire WAIS is not so certain. There are also regions where ice shelf cavities are currently “cold”.

The Ross and Ronne-Filchner are Earth’s largest ice shelves and currently buttress and stabilise large regions of ice in the West Antarctic interior. The ocean cavity that lies beneath the Ross Ice Shelf is cold, generally characterised by temperatures at or below minus 1.8°C.

A recent ice sheet modelling study shows these large ice shelves and the WAIS will remain largely intact under low-emissions pathways which aim to keep warming close to or below 2°C above pre-industrial values.

Read more:
Widespread collapse of West Antarctica’s ice sheet is avoidable if we keep global warming below 2℃

Modelling experiments indicate an emissions pathway in line with the goals of the Paris agreement can still limit the total contribution to sea level rise coming from the Antarctic ice sheet to 0.12–0.44  metres by 2100 (0.45–1.57  metres by 2300).

Importantly, these experiments also show that spatial patterns of ice thinning and retreat in the Amundsen Sea region are similar for 2100 compared to 2015 (see figure below) under both low and high emissions.

The clearest contrasts between the scenarios occur in the Ross Sea sector, where the grounding line of the ice shelf advances in low-emissions (“sustainable”) scenarios but the shelf ice thins or even collapses in high-emissions (“fossil fuel intensive”) scenarios.

Observation gaps from key Antarctic regions

Global surface temperature is likely to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial values by the early 2030s. It may warm by as much as 4.4°C by the end of this century.

Our current global policy and action trajectory will yield 2.7°C of warming by the end of century, but more ambitious pledges and targets could keep global warming to 2.0°C. We need to know how sensitive the large, cold-cavity ice shelves are to these increases in global temperature.

Ice sheet modelling suggests rapid cuts in emissions can still limit WAIS melt, but we lack direct observations to support these findings. Collecting new data from locations around the WAIS margin will offer insights into present-day changes and a possible future response to warming.

Significant effort to address data gaps has been made in the Amundsen Sea around the Thwaites Glacier region, but observations beneath the Ross Ice Shelf, especially near the point where the WAIS begins to float, are limited. The SWAIS2C project aims to address this knowledge gap.

Tapping the geological record

SWAIS2C is an international collaboration involving scientists, drillers, engineers and science communicators. Our team will travel to the Siple coast, close to the centre of West Antarctica, to melt holes through the ice shelf at two sites.

Oceanographic measurements and geophysical observations at each site will improve our understanding of current ocean mechanics and ice sheet dynamics. But to understand the potential future contribution to sea-level rise from melting of the WAIS, we will need to turn to the geological record.

Seafloor sediments from beneath the Ross Ice Shelf represent an archive of climate information from warmer periods in Earth’s history and offer a means to “see” how the ice shelf and ice sheet responded to past warmth.

We will drill up to 200 metres below the seafloor to recover a geological record of changing rock types that reflect environmental conditions at the time they formed.

These data will allow us to identify previous episodes when the ice shelf thinned and disintegrated, driving retreat of the WAIS interior. Environmental data from these intervals will identify the regional climatic conditions that drove this retreat and help determine the sensitivity of the system to increases in global mean temperature.

SWAIS2C builds on other successful international scientific drilling programmes in the Ross Sea region, including ANDRILL and IODP and is supported by ICDP.

Richard Levy receives funding from the Antarctic Science Platform supported by the New Zealand Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment.

Dan Lowry receives funding from the Antarctic Science Platform supported by the New Zealand Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment.

Huw Horgan receives funding from the Antarctic Science Platform supported by the New Zealand Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment.

Tina van de Flierdt receives funding from the Natural Environment Research Council in the United Kingdom.

Denise Kulhanek, Gavin Dunbar, Molly Patterson, and Nick Golledge do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. We can still prevent the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet – if we act fast to keep future warming in check – https://theconversation.com/we-can-still-prevent-the-collapse-of-the-west-antarctic-ice-sheet-if-we-act-fast-to-keep-future-warming-in-check-215878

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Lindenmayer, Professor, The Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University

A third of the world’s forests are cut for timber. This generates US$1.5 trillion annually. But
wildfire threatens industries such as timber milling and paper manufacturing, and the threat is far greater than most people realise.

Our research, published today in the journal Nature Geoscience, shows that between 2001 and 2021, severe wildfires worldwide destroyed timber-producing forests equivalent to an area the size of Great Britain. Severe fires reach the tree tops and consume the forest canopy.

The amount of timber-producing forest burning each year in severe wildfires has increased significantly in the past decade. The western United States, Canada, Siberia, Brazil and Australia have been most affected.

Timber demand is expected to almost triple by 2050. Supplying demand is clearly going to be challenging. Our research highlights the need to urgently adopt new management strategies and emerging technologies to combat the increasing threat of wildfires.

Read more:
Our planet is burning in unexpected ways – here’s how we can protect people and nature

What we found

We combined global maps of logging activity and severe wildfires to determine how much timber-producing forest was lost to wildfire this century. Between 2001 and 2021, up to 25 million hectares of timber-producing forest was severely burned. The extent of fire has jumped markedly in the past decade, from an average of less than one million hectares a year up to 2015 to triple that since then.

At a national scale, the three countries with the largest absolute wildfire-induced losses of timber-producing forest were Russia, the US and Canada. When it comes to proportion of their forestry land lost, the nations with the highest percentages burnt were Portugal, followed by Australia.

Why are more forests burning?

Climate change is a major driver of fire weather and fire behaviour. The increased risk of high-severity wildfire is an entirely expected outcome of warmer temperatures and, in some places, reduced rainfall.

However, it remains unclear why so much wood-production forest is being lost, and why the increase in burnt area has been so marked in the past decade.

One possible reason is logging makes forests more flammable. This has been documented in parts of southeastern Australia, where intact forest always burnt at lower severity than harvested forest across the entire footprint of the Black Summer fires. Forests that have been subject to thinning also are at risk of high-severity wildfire.

What does this mean for us?

Whatever the reason, it is clear these fires in wood-production forests will have profound impacts on global timber supplies and all the industries associated with them. This is a huge problem for society and the environment, because timber demand is expected to triple by 2050, in part to facilitate the transition away from carbon-intensive cement in construction.

In many parts of the world, it typically takes 80–100 years or even longer to grow a tree to a size at which it can be a sawlog for products like furniture and floorboards. So the increased frequency of high-severity wildfire means fewer areas of forest will escape fire for long enough to reach timber harvesting age.

This is especially problematic where logging makes forests more prone to burning in a high-severity wildfire.

Furthermore, given the long-term nature of timber production, typically on cutting cycles ranging from 40 years to more than a century, future timber crops will face a very different climate as they mature.

Read more:
Why Tasmania and Victoria dominate the list of Australia’s largest trees – and why these majestic giants are under threat

Responding to the challenge

If wood production from forests becomes increasing costly and timber is increasingly hard to source, there may be more pressure from industry and government to log other places, such as tropical forests, with high biodiversity and conservation value.

One way to tackle the problem is to grow more timber in plantations. Plantations already produce a third of the main forms of wood-producing timber – called industrial roundwood. They do this from just 3% of the area of natural forests.

Well managed plantations can grow a successful timber crop within a couple of decades. This is a lot shorter than the many decades and sometimes even centuries required to grow sawlogs in native forests. Having a shorter growing time in plantations increases the chances of harvesting trees before they are destroyed in a wildfire.

But plantations, like some logged and regenerated native forests, can be highly flammable. Fire risks need to be carefully managed. That includes planning, to avoid putting neighbouring areas and human communities at greater risk of being burnt.

Another key strategy to better protect timber resources will be to adopt new technologies to more quickly detect and then rapidly suppress ignitions such as those originating from lightning strikes.

Big fires start as small fires. The best time to suppress fires is when they are small, and as soon as ignition occurs. We have been involved in the development of drone fleets and unmanned aerial water and fire suppressant dispensing craft to more quickly detect and extinguish wildfires.

New technologies, as well as more, better planned and managed plantations will be crucial in not only protecting forests, but also safeguarding the flow of marketable timber and the industries dependent upon them.

Read more:
Yes, climate change is bringing bushfires more often. But some ecosystems in Australia are suffering the most

David Lindenmayer receives funding from the Australian Government and the Victorian Government. He is a Councillor in the Biodiversity Council.

Chris Bousfield received funding for this research from the Natural Environment Research Council, UK.

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

– ref. Fire is consuming more than ever of the world’s forests, threatening supplies of wood and paper – https://theconversation.com/fire-is-consuming-more-than-ever-of-the-worlds-forests-threatening-supplies-of-wood-and-paper-216643

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Taren Sanders, Research Fellow, Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University

Ask any parent and it’s likely they’ll tell you they’re worried about their kids’ screen time. A 2021 poll found it was Australian parents’ number one health concern for their kids – ahead of cyberbullying and unhealthy diets. But how worried should parents be?

The information that’s out there can be confusing. Some psychologists have compared it to smoking (amid concerns about “secondhand screen time”), while others are telling us not to worry too much about kids and screens.

Academics are also confused. As The Lancet noted in 2019, researchers’ understanding of the benefits, risks and harms of the digital landscape is “sorely lacking”.

In our new research, we wanted to give parents, policymakers and researchers a comprehensive summary of the best evidence on the influence of screens on children’s physical and psychological health, education and development.

What we did

Meta-analyses are one of the best forms of evidence because they summarise the findings of lots of research all at once.

This can give us a much better view of what is happening than just looking at a single study of one group of people. So we gathered all meta-analyses conducted in English on any form of screen time in children, regardless of the outcome.

We found 217 meta-analyses, with almost half published in just the last two years. These meta-analyses represent the findings from 2,451 individual studies and have a combined sample size of more than 1.9 million children and adolescents up to 18 years. The individual studies were done between 1954 and 2021 and the meta-analyses were done between 1982 and 2022.

The good news

We found some things that should reassure parents.

The overall size of the influence of screens across the outcomes (for example, depression, body weight, literacy and sleep) in children were small.

Almost all of the results had correlations less than 0.2, which is about the same as the correlation between height and intelligence. That doesn’t mean the effect for an individual child will always be that small, just that on average, the relationship is small.

How kids use screens matters

We also found it’s not the screen itself that really matters but what’s on it and the way kids use it.

Television is a form of screen time that has worried parents for more than half a century. We did find general television viewing was associated with poorer academic performance and literacy skills. Our study did not give us time limits, but found a linear relationship. That is, the more TV a child watched, the poorer their literacy skills were.

But if the program was educational or if the child was watching with a parent, we found there was a benefit to their literacy. This is probably because it gives parents an opportunity to talk about things in the show (“I think Bluey is feeling dissapointed”) or ask questions (“what is Bingo drawing?”) which develops language skills.

Read more:
More Bluey, less PAW Patrol: why Australian parents want locally made TV for their kids

The not so good news

We did find some forms of screen time are consistently associated with harm and had no evidence of benefits.

Chief among these was social media, which was associated with depression, anxiety and risk taking. Again, our research found a relationship between the more time a child spent on social media, the more likely they were to have a mental health issue.

This is similar to the advice released this year from the US Surgeon General. This noted while social media could provide community and connections for young people (particularly from marginalised groups), it could also harm their mental health.

Read more:
Excessive screen time can affect young people’s emotional development

What does it mean?

As other education experts have noted, “screen time” is a bit of a useless term.

Nobody thinks facetiming Nanna and scrolling TikTok are equivalent, but both would fall into the category of “recreational screen time” in the Australian guidelines.

So, a key message from our study is to focus less on an unachievable time limit, and instead focus on what kids are actually doing on screens. Try to steer them towards educational apps, TV programs and video games.

But it can’t be education all the time – kids also need time for recreation. And if you watch with your child, it can also have benefits.

Read more:
If your kid is home sick from school, is unlimited screen time OK?

Don’t forget to be active

Regardless of what screen-based activities you choose to allow, remember most screen time is sedentary. Long periods of sitting aren’t great for kids (or adults!), so breaking up these periods with movement is still important.

Ultimately, the most important factor for child development is quality parenting. Being present, spending quality time and creating a caring environment are what really make a difference for children. You matter more to your child’s mental and physical health than the screen.

Taren Sanders receives funding from the Australian Research Council, NSW Department of Education, and Sport Australia.

Chris Lonsdale receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Medical Research Future Fund, Australian Research Council, NSW Department of Education, and Sport Australia.

Michael Noetel receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Medical Research Future Fund, Sport Australia, and the National Health and Medical Research Council. He is a director of Effective Altruism Australia.

Philip D Parker receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Northern Territory Department of Education, and Catholic School NSW.

– ref. TV can be educational but social media likely harms mental health: what 70 years of research tells us about children and screens – https://theconversation.com/tv-can-be-educational-but-social-media-likely-harms-mental-health-what-70-years-of-research-tells-us-about-children-and-screens-216638

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matilda Hatcher, PhD Candidate, Australian National University

At 20, Peter Weir’s 2003 masterpiece Master and Commander remains a captivating historical drama – and an emblem of wholesome masculinity.

A deeply detailed film set in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, Master and Commander follows Captain “Lucky” Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) and his men aboard HMS Surprise. Accompanied by the eccentric amateur naturalist Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), the crew are hunting the French ship Acheron through the Pacific Ocean.

Its depiction of life at sea is gritty and brutal: intense battle scenes; Maturin performing surgery on himself; Hollom’s suicide. And yet Master and Commander delivers a nostalgic, idealised lifestyle that still has many men dreaming of ditching their office jobs and sailing the high seas.

But it is not necessarily the masculine, nautical adventures that appeal to men so much as the film’s healthy and loving male relationships.

Gentle, subtle and lifelike

Jack Aubrey is a classic masculine hero. In the face of apparently impossible odds, he simply remarks: “well then, there’s not a moment to lose.”

Fighting against the tyranny and oppression of the French, his is the classic underdog tale. Acheron has twice the guns and twice the men. Taking it on is a test of nerve, discipline and courage.

The performances of the protagonists are gentle, subtle and lifelike. Crowe gives a rugged and charismatic performance as the tradition-loving Aubrey. Bettany as the charmingly lubberly Maturin is the perfect complement to Aubrey, even as he differs from his book counterpart, his role as an intelligence agent being conspicuously absent from the script.

The portrayals of these two men and their friendship – their abiding love for each other overcoming differences of politics and personality – carry the film. At times, Weir’s film seems to be a pure character study; the Acheron’s chase and capture matter much less than the development of this key male friendship.

Director Taika Waititi has called it his comfort film as well as his favourite romance movie, saying their relationship is “palpable”.

It is this aspect of the film, among a surplus of amputation, hard tack, hierarchy and public flogging, that has great appeal to men.

The dangers of the manosphere

Men are increasingly facing issues of loneliness, mental ill health and disenfranchisement.

The online “manosphere” can seem like an opportunity for some men to deal with their very real issues of hopelessness and isolation. These online communities say they are looking to combat feminism and restore the role of traditional male dominance in society, offering men a space of connection and comradeship.

Read more:
The draw of the ‘manosphere’: understanding Andrew Tate’s appeal to lost men

But this online masculine ideal is rigid and conservative, emphasising toughness, hypersexuality, aggression, control and self-sufficiency.

Rather than offering a positive community, these online spaces have been increasingly associated with toxic masculinity characterised by violence, hostility to women and emotional repression. These ideals create harm towards men themselves and those around them.

Read more:
‘Toxic masculinity’: what does it mean, where did it come from – and is the term useful or harmful?

The HMS Surprise offers an alternative picture of male camaraderie. On board Surprise, the masculine environment is a supportive one. It allows men to feel their differences while still inspiring and caring for each other. From gentle, scientific sorts to burly able seamen, all take pride in their community on board their “little wooden world”.

Online, 20 years after the film’s release, many men are finding comfort and inspiration in this contrasting picture of what masculinity can look like.

Wholesome masculinity

Master and Commander’s intimate study of male friendship makes the film a touchstone of wholesome masculinity. Memes abound attesting to audiences’ yearning for a life of honest work and male companionship.

One meme captions a heroic picture of Jack Aubrey standing against the sea asking: “is the cure to male loneliness sailing the high seas with your bros?”

A tweet announces the “hot new bachelor party activity” is historic gunnery exercises, with the “boys hooting and hollering as they drink grog firing three broadsides in two minutes”.

One Reddit commenter, explaining its popularity, describes it as a “wholesome bromance, which is the ultimate catnip for straight dudes”.

This admiration of the Surprise’s masculine community, where different kinds of men are celebrated, serves as a positive counter model to the angst and toxicity of the manosphere.

At sea, men like Jack Aubrey enact traditional masculine values without the fear of losing power and without restrictive gender norms: they share joy, grieve together, and play music together.

Despite epic battles and award-winning cinematography, by far the most iconic scenes in Master and Commander are quiet examples of our protagonists’ friendship: Jack and Stephen playing a duet, or doubly delighting and exasperating each other with various puns.

By the closing frame, the HMS Surprise and her men are no closer to capturing their prize than when they started out. And yet, as Jack and Stephen strum their instruments companionably, the Surprise’s endless drift into the future is a promise of an unending life of adventure, community and companionship.

It is this promise that keeps men returning, two decades later, to Master and Commander. Much like Stephen’s flightless bird, it’s not going anywhere.

Read more:
Building healthy relationship skills supports men’s mental health

Matilda Hatcher receives funding from an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.

– ref. Master and Commander at 20: how a film about men fighting at sea is actually a safe harbour of positive masculinity – https://theconversation.com/master-and-commander-at-20-how-a-film-about-men-fighting-at-sea-is-actually-a-safe-harbour-of-positive-masculinity-215593

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Flavio Macau, Associate Dean – School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University

Australians getting ready for Christmas this week had reason to believe even the best of preparations were not enough after a cyberattack hit all its major ports.

DP World, which operates container ports in Australia and the region, first detected problems last Friday so unplugged its systems to minimise the impact while it examined what had happened.

While operations resumed at the ports yesterday, the cause is still unclear and the incident continues to be investigated.

With responsibility for about 40% of freight movement at Australian ports, and a significant 10% of global trade through its international operations, the attack disrupted the flow of goods coming from ports DP World operates.

Deliveries of import items such as videogames, air-conditioners, furniture and pharmaceuticals were held up.

As well, Australian exports of goods including processed meat, dairy products and fruits, all with limited shelf life, were delayed.

Why this cyber attack is significant

While DP World seems to be recovering, the incident highlights the potential vulnerability of global networks.

Supply chains rely on fully integrated solutions, from sellers overseas to buyers in Australia, to work efficiently. Information technology is embedded into them through equipment automation and data processing. Product visibility, customs clearance and checks for biosecurity risks rely on cargo information detailing where goods come from, who is responsible for them and their trading value.

With sensitive data linked to the movement of containers, it is no wonder logistics professionals recognise cybersecurity as a major threat to operations – not to mention their obligations under the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act.

If there is still no certainty of the specific nature of the incident with DP World, there are few likely causes.

Ransomware has been on the rise, with incidents aligned to prolific cyber-criminal gangs including REVil and more recently LockBit.

In an attack, data is usually extracted from an organisation and then rendered inaccessible to users – typically using encryption. The organisation will usually receive a ransom demand to “unlock” the data, often payable using a crypto-currency.

In recent years the trend of double-extortion has become common, where the criminals incentivise their victims to pay by threatening to release the data publicly if they refuse.

While refusal is a possibility, the nature of the disruption could mean a loss of access to critical systems and information. If data is inaccessible, operations would need to be halted, leading to even greater losses.

Recovering systems would require restoration from backups and a thorough inspection for any traces of the original infection or compromise. Finally, checks would be needed to ensure no data had been lost and to identify any missing consignment data after the previous backup had taken place.

Read more:
Major cyberattack on Australian ports suggests sabotage by a ‘foreign state actor’

If the incident is a direct cyber-attack that infiltrated systems and stole or modified data, this would also require a complete system shutdown. Without the integrity of systems, consignment data cannot be trusted and the Australian Border Force would be unable to verify the content of shipments. There would also be issues with the collection of duties, taxes and fees.

Disconnecting DP World from networks allowed the investigating team to inspect systems to look for impacted systems and to evaluate the depth of any infection. This process also needs to consider the original infection mechanism – you don’t want the systems re-infected.

The timing could have been worse

The cyberattack caused the ports operated by DP World to start filling up with containers, but it had not yet become critical.

While Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas are an extra busy time for retailers, there is usually a marginal increase in movement compared to other times of the year, typically less than 10%. With around 1.4 million containers to be moved in the last three months of the year, the impact of losing a few days should be minimal.

Read more:
Is Australia a sitting duck for ransomware attacks? Yes, and the danger has been growing for 30 years

Big retailers typically start making orders for Christmas in August, with deliveries starting as early as October. While they keep inventory in check, it is unlikely that operations work in just-in-time mode.

Especially in Australia, where the distance from major global flows, the lack of alternatives such as railroad imports and lessons learned from COVID has bred risk averse businesses that are extra cautious to avoid empty shelves.

Also, ports can quickly recover. When container volumes go up, extra labour and equipment can be organised to increase the output of a terminal. In the last three years the number of time slots used by trucks has seldom reached 90% of total availability.

DP World should quickly be able to resolve any backlogs arising from this incident.

The hidden problem behind this attack

A problem for Australia is the potential effect of the cyberattack on its reputation as a shipping destination. When port facilities fill up with containers to the point where ships are delayed, costs quickly escalate to millions of dollars.

And numbers haven’t been shiny lately.

The Maritime Waterline 69 report shows ship turnaround time increased from 35 hours early in 2020 to more than 50 hours in 2022. Port congestion went from a little over 10% of ships waiting for more than two hours to over 22%. And average waiting time at anchorage went up from 17.3 hours before COVID to 126.5 hours in mid-2022.

Add the risk of cyberattacks to this and Australian ports may lose their competitiveness, with fewer companies interested in sending their ships down here – or requiring a premium price to do so.

While the DP World cyberattack is unlikely to upset Christmas, the aggregated impact such attacks could have on Australia’s reputation as an important shipping hub, must be taken seriously.

Flavio Macau receives funding from the Planning and Transport Research Centre – PATREC. He is currently involved in the Last Mile Delivery (LMD) project which looks at parcel distribution to the end consumer. This article, and the ports impacted in this incident, are not connected with the LMD project or the funding provided by PATREC.

Paul Haskell-Dowland receives funding from the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre. He is currently involved in the Augmenting Cyber Defence Capability (ACDC) project which looks at cyber security in Maritime Ports. This article, and the ports impacted in this incident, are not connected with the ACDC project or the funding provided by the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre.

– ref. Has the cyberattack on DP World put Australia’s trade at risk? Probably not … this time – https://theconversation.com/has-the-cyberattack-on-dp-world-put-australias-trade-at-risk-probably-not-this-time-217533

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Clair, Lecturer, Australian Centre for Housing Research, University of Adelaide, and Research Associate, ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change, University of Essex

People’s experiences of private rental housing are linked to faster biological ageing, our recent research finds.

While chronological ageing happens at the same speed for everyone, biological ageing varies greatly. It depends on the lives we lead and the risks we’re exposed to. Biological age reflects the gradually accumulating damage to cells and tissues in the body.

Our research explored associations between pace of ageing and many aspects of housing and other social determinants of health. Our strongest finding about housing was that people living in a privately rented home tended to age faster than those who owned their home outright. Every year of private renting was associated with an extra 2.4 weeks of ageing on average.

Our findings also suggest being a private renter has a greater effect on biological age than being unemployed (adding about 1.4 weeks of ageing per year), obesity (about 1 week), or being a former smoker (about 1.1 weeks).

The insecurity of private renting appears to be the key factor in its biological ageing effect. The good news is that policies that improve housing security can redress this.

Read more:
The insecurity of private renters – how do they manage it?

How do we measure biological age?

Faster ageing is associated with poorer health. Outcomes include poorer physical and cognitive function and a higher risk of chronic illness and even early death.

To measure ageing, we use an indicator of DNA methylation. This is an epigenetic process – a way in which the environment can affect how our genes are expressed. By analysing the locations of DNA methylation across a person’s DNA, we can estimate their pace of biological ageing.

Read more:
Difficult childhood experiences could make us age prematurely – new research

It’s hard to get the data for this sort of analysis. We needed blood samples that have gone through complex processing to estimate biological ageing, as well as survey data on many aspects of people’s lives. We controlled for income and health behaviours, among other things.

The data we used describe the British population, but our findings are directly transferable to Australians. Given the increasing numbers of renters in Australia, many in insecure housing, our findings are directly relevant to our current housing debate.

Read more:
More rented, more mortgaged, less owned: what the census tells us about housing

The experiences of private renting are similar in Britain and Australia. Short tenancy agreements (12 months on average in Australia) mean insecurity is a feature of private renting in both nations.

No-fault/no-grounds/no-cause evictions in some states further undermine renters’ security. Even renters who do everything right can be evicted at short notice.

Insecure housing is bad for your health

We found no negative effects for people renting social housing. In both Britain and Australia, social renters have far greater security of tenure than private renters. This suggests it is not renting itself that is related to faster ageing, but specifically the insecurity of private renting.

These findings are important for Australian housing policy. The social housing sector – managed by state or community providers – has shrunk. Today less than 4% of households are in social housing.

Governments have edged away from publicly provided social housing. They prefer to subsidise renters in the private sector.

The role of private rental housing has also changed in both countries. Rather than being a form of housing in which a relatively small number of people live in for a short time while studying or starting their career, more people are living in privately rented homes for longer. As access to both social housing and home ownership becomes harder, many will probably rent for life.

This means more people are exposed to housing insecurity and the negative health impacts for longer.

Read more:
Stability and security: the keys to closing the mental health gap between renters and home owners

What does this mean for policy?

Public debate and health messaging often focus on individual behaviours and characteristics such as smoking and obesity. Our research emphasises how important housing is for people’s health. It’s also an area where policy changes can make a big difference.

The insecurity of private renting in Australia and Britain is not inherent to private renting itself. It’s a result of policy choices that:

• emphasise housing as an asset
• minimise the state’s role in providing or regulating housing
• do little to protect renters.

This approach can change, and the appetite for change appears to be increasing. There are efforts to end no-fault/no-grounds evictions in both Australia and Britain.

State governments have talked about ending no-grounds evictions. New South Wales has yet to do anything about it. Despite reforms in other states, they still permit no-grounds evictions when fixed-term leases end.

Scotland has adopted a new model of tenancy that does not permit no-fault evictions with few exceptions – to allow landlords to sell the property, for example. The UK government has been talking about ending such evictions since 2019, but progress has been slow.

However, there are glimmers of hope. The Australian government is paying more attention to renters’ needs. South Australia is working to end no-grounds evictions for both fixed and periodic tenancies. In NSW, the new government has promised to end such evictions.

In the UK, the Renters (Reform) Bill finally had its second reading on October 23.

Private renting can work better for tenants, but shouldn’t be the only option for people who don’t own their homes. Our finding that renting social housing was no different to outright ownership lends weight to calls for greater support for social housing. Housing should be good for everyone’s health, whether or not they own their home.

Emma Baker receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, and the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. She holds a voluntary board position with Habitat for Humanity.

Meena Kumari receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/T014083/1; ES/S012486/1).

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

– ref. Insecure renting ages you faster than owning a home, unemployment or obesity. Better housing policy can change this – https://theconversation.com/insecure-renting-ages-you-faster-than-owning-a-home-unemployment-or-obesity-better-housing-policy-can-change-this-216364

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Avril Horne, Research fellow, Department of Infrastructure Engineering, The University of Melbourne

When it was clear the Murray-Darling Basin Plan could not be completed on time, Federal Water Minister Tanya Plibersek announced a new agreement (without Victoria) to deliver in full the plan’s aim of restoring the health of this vast river system.

The new agreement required changes to the Water Act to allow more water for the environment to be purchased from irrigators (water buybacks). Concerns about these changes prompted a Senate inquiry.

The report from that inquiry, released on Friday, supports buybacks but also makes key recommendations to remove “constraints” to water delivery. These are physical constraints or limits to the movement of water through the river system. Managers can only deliver so much water before it spills out of the river onto private land.

The report goes so far as to ask whether constraints should be removed before more water is recovered. This is a question we have been asking in our research. And our results suggest the answer is yes.

Currently, we cannot physically deliver all of the water recovered from other uses for the environment (known as environmental water) to where it’s needed without flooding private property along the way. And the government is not prepared to do that.

Read more:
Murray-Darling Basin Plan to be extended under a new agreement, without Victoria – but an uphill battle lies ahead

Basin health is improving but challenges remain

Under the Basin Plan, about 20% of water used for irrigation a decade ago is now used for environmental purposes. This has improved river health, encouraging fish to spawn and plants to grow, and reduced salt levels in the Lower Lakes and Coorong.

These benefits rely on the river’s flow regime, not just the annual volume. Higher flows inundate wetlands, move sediment down the river, and provide natural triggers for various species to breed or migrate.

But raising water levels in the river channel isn’t enough to get environmental water everywhere it’s needed. Sometimes larger flows are required. Unfortunately, sending more water down the river runs the risk of inundating private property or damaging infrastructure such as low-lying pumps on floodplains.

Restoring the river’s health requires not only recovering water but also completing projects that allow more of this water to flow despite physical constraints such as a narrow stretch of river. These projects might involve modifying or improving infrastructure such as low-lying roads and bridges, as well as working with communities to limit damage and compensate for flooding of private property.

The Senate inquiry report highlights the challenges for these projects. It also supports improving the approach to delivering these projects across the southern basin.

Challenges, priorities and solutions may differ

Our research on the Goulburn River in Victoria’s part of the Murray-Darling Basin shows recovery of additional water for the environment does not guarantee environmental outcomes.

This is because the amount of water that can be sent down the river is constrained. So having more environmental water at your disposal does not help, because it is physically impossible to get all the water to where it is needed, when it is needed, without risking inundation of private property.

Current river system operations, including rules and physical constraints, prevent the full volume of environmental water held in Goulburn River being delivered at the right time and in the right way to achieve the best environmental outcomes.

Narrow sections of the river and adjacent private development limit releases from Lake Eildon. River managers are not allowed to deliberately inundate the floodplain if it risks private property.

So the volume of environmental water available in the Goulburn River is not the issue – delivering this water is the challenge. In this regard, Victoria’s refusal to sign up to the new basin deal is understandable, because more water buybacks would potentially cause more pain to the local community than gain to the local environment.

However, neither Victoria nor New South Wales has addressed these capacity constraint issues, significantly limiting the ability to get better environmental outcomes with less water. So the challenge is much more complex than simply redistributing entitlements and buying back environmental water.

Read more:
Water buybacks are back on the table in the Murray-Darling Basin. Here’s a refresher on how they work

The elephant in the room: climate change

Temperature, rainfall and streamflow have already changed in parts of the Murray-Darling Basin. Over the coming decade these changes will become more pronounced, widespread and entrenched, causing more frequent floods and droughts.

While the precise consequences for water availability remain to be seen, the impact on the basin will be immense.

But climate change simply adds to the need to have difficult conversations around the future of communities along the Murray-Darling. Focusing on whether buyback targets have been achieved does not resolve this. In many regions, there will not be enough water, with or without buybacks, to achieve current management objectives.

Buybacks should be placed in the context of this imminent threat. In rivers like the Goulburn, addressing capacity constraints provides the single best climate adaptation option to improve environmental outcomes in the short and medium term.

Removing these constraints would allow more water onto the lower Goulburn River floodplain, with due care for land and infrastructure that could be affected. For example, projects may offer landholders options to avoid or compensate for any water damage and associated costs.

This is because removing constraints gives river managers more flexibility, which can increase the resilience of the environment to a wider range of future climates. More water from buybacks provides very limited additional benefit because it doesn’t change how environmental water can be delivered.

The senate report emphasises the need to embed consideration of climate change in the Water Act and Basin Plan. The decisions we are making now on water recovery and constraints relaxation will have big impacts on communities.

Our work shows considering climate change is essential to ensuring lasting benefits and resilient outcomes for the rivers and communities that rely on them.

The first basin plan took a big step towards sustainable management of the vast Murray-Darling river system. But it was always meant to be the first step in an adaptive policy process. Priorities and solutions will look different across the basin. We need a holistic approach where buybacks may very well be part of the solution, but are not the whole solution. We also need to ensure we can deliver this water where and when the environment needs it.

Read more:
Victoria’s plans for engineered wetlands on the Murray are environmentally dubious. Here’s a better option

Avril Horne receives funding from the Victorian Government Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action.
Avril has recently been appointed as a member of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority Advisory Committee on Social Economic and Environmental Sciences.

Andrew John receives funding from the Victorian Government Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action.

– ref. Murray-Darling water buybacks won’t be enough if we can’t get water to where it’s needed – https://theconversation.com/murray-darling-water-buybacks-wont-be-enough-if-we-cant-get-water-to-where-its-needed-203142

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Tuffley, Senior Lecturer in Applied Ethics & CyberSecurity, Griffith University

A serious cyberattack has disrupted operations at several of Australia’s largest ports, causing delays and congestion. Late on Friday, port operator DP World detected an IT breach that affected critical systems used to coordinate shipping activity.

DP World is one of Australia’s largest port operators, handling approximately 40% of the nation’s container trade across terminals in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Fremantle.

DP World reacted quickly to contain the breach, including shutting down access to their port networks on land, to prevent further unauthorised access. This means they essentially “pulled the plug” on their internet connection to limit possible further harm.

DP World senior director Blake Tierney said it is still possible to unload containers from ships, but the trucks that transport the containers cannot drive in or out of the terminals. This is a precaution when the full extent of a data breach is not known.

The latest media reports suggest cargo could be stranded at the ports for several days.

Australian Federal Police and the Australian Cyber Security Centre are investigating the source and nature of the attack, deemed a “nationally significant incident” by federal cybersecurity coordinator Darren Goldie.

Is there evidence of this being a malicious attack?

The timing, scale and impact of the disruption do suggest this was a targeted attack.

It occurred on a Friday night, when most staff were off duty and less likely to notice or respond to the incident. The target was a major port operator that handles a significant share of Australia’s trade and commerce. Such an attack can have serious consequences for Australia’s economy, security and sovereignty.

The identity and motive of the attackers are not yet known, but the skills needed to mount such an attack suggest a foreign state actor trying to undermine Australia’s national security or economic interests.

In recent years, cyberattacks on ports and shipping have become more common. For instance, in February 2022, several European ports were hit by a cyberattack that disrupted oil terminals. In another incident early this year, a ransomware attack on maritime software impacted more than 1,000 ships. Also in January 2023, the Port of Lisbon was targeted by a ransomware attack which threatened the release of port data.

These incidents highlight the vulnerability of the maritime industry to cyber threats and the need for increased cybersecurity measures.

How might the attack have happened?

So far, the details have not been disclosed. But based on what we know about similar cases, it is possible the attack took advantage of vulnerabilities in DP World’s system. These vulnerabilities are normally closed by applying a “patch” in the same way your browser needs updating every week or two to keep it safe from being hacked.

Once hackers gained access, the breach likely pivoted to infiltrate the operational systems that directly manage port activities. Failing to isolate and secure these control networks allowed the incident to impact operations.

It is also possible access was gained via a phishing email or a malicious link. Such an attack may have tricked an employee or a contractor into opening an attachment or clicking on a link that installed malware or ransomware on the network.

Read more:
Don’t click that link! How criminals access your digital devices and what happens when they do

Now what?

DP World is working urgently to rebuild affected systems from backups. However, resetting port management networks is a complicated process that could take days or weeks. Until the operator’s core systems are securely restored, cargo flows may face ongoing delays.

The Australian government is closely involved in managing the situation, providing support and advice to DP World and other affected parties through the Critical Infrastructure Centre and the Trusted Information Sharing Network. These government agencies are equipped to provide timely support in times of crisis.

How can we prevent future attacks?

The DP World cyberattack is a clear warning of the risks to the essential transportation services that power Australia’s trade and commerce.

Ports are difficult targets. To cause such a disruption, the attackers would have to be highly skilled and plan ahead. The fact ports have been successfully hacked more than once in recent times suggests threats from cybercriminals are steadily increasing.

For companies such as DP World, it’s important to continuously monitor networks in real time, promptly install security updates and keep critical systems separated from each other.

Dedicated, well-resourced cybersecurity personnel, employee training and incident response plans are key to improving preparedness.

Ports should closely coordinate with government counterparts and industry partners on intelligence sharing and cybersecurity best practices. Cyberthreats evolve so quickly, always being prepared for the latest one is a significant challenge.

For a seamless flow of goods, we need to be constantly vigilant of potential threats to our supply chain infrastructure. This latest attack is an urgent reminder that cyber resilience must be a top priority.

Read more:
How to make fragile global supply chains stronger and more sustainable

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

– ref. Major cyberattack on Australian ports suggests sabotage by a ‘foreign state actor’ – https://theconversation.com/major-cyberattack-on-australian-ports-suggests-sabotage-by-a-foreign-state-actor-217530

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shannon Davis, Lecturer in Landscape Planning, Lincoln University, New Zealand

Auckland Council recently voted to decrease the amount of city fringe land available for development, citing flood risks and infrastructure costs.

Meanwhile in Christchurch, plans for an 850-home development north of the city have been rejected because of the area’s “existing rural nature and the lack of public transport and local jobs”.

Cities around the world face a similar dilemma: population growth and housing shortages mean urban expansion often encroaches on rural productive land.

Fertile soil is one of the reasons why many cites were originally set up in certain sites, but now the loss of these food-producing landscapes to urban growth is widely recognised as a concern to local food security.

The edges of cities – the “peri-urban” zone – are critically important for urban resilience. Apart from food, they supply ecosystem services such as flood and stormwater mitigation, cooling and climate regulation, carbon storage, waste treatment and recreation.

It could be said that the conversion of peri-urban agricultural land for urban expansion unwittingly undermines the very life support on which city dwellers depend.

Our research explores possible solutions that allow food production and housing to co-exist within peri-urban zones.

Read more:
How sustainable, liveable and resilient housing can help us adapt to a changing future

The housing-agriculture conundrum

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the competition for land for either housing or food production within the peri-urban zone is intense. Local and regional councils
have to attempt to mediate between two recently gazetted national policy statements that seem at odds.

The 2020 National Policy Statement for Urban Development requires councils to remove barriers to urban expansion, both up and out. The 2022 National Policy Statement on Highly Productive Land requires councils to avoid urban encroachment and protect highly productive land for agriculture.

A recent Ministry for the Environment report states:

The area of highly productive land that was unavailable for agriculture (because it had a house on it) increased by 54% from 2002 to 2019.

Urban resilience and food production

Peri-urban zones have an important role in supplying locally produced food. This helps reduce transport emissions to meet New Zealand’s emissions reduction targets. But there is a growing disconnect between where New Zealand’s food is produced and where the majority of New Zealanders live.

The dominant approach to urban growth is through greenfield development (building on undeveloped land), and this ultimately compromises the productive land belt around many cities and settlements. This can result in the irreversible loss of some of our most fertile soils.

Read more:
National’s housing u-turn promotes urban sprawl – cities and ratepayers will pick up the bill

Multiple factors affect where food can be produced within the peri-urban zone. This includes policy, land value, soil versatility, natural resources such as water and, increasingly, the level of “reverse sensitivity” – a term used to describe, in this instance, the impacts of newer land uses (such as housing) on prior activities (agriculture) in mixed-use areas.

Planning policy often fails to keep up with changes in housing markets, agricultural practice and lifestyle choices. This then results in reactive planning approaches, putting high-value soil and other land suitable for food production at continued risk of development and fragmentation.

This is compounded by public and political pressures that can lead to tensions between food producers and their residential neighbours.

Combined land use

Our team has surveyed households and food producers living and operating within the peri-urban zone of Ōtautahi Christchurch to better understand the issues. We also wanted to explore opportunities arising from food production and housing co-existing within peri-urban zones.

Based on the views of surveyed participants, we developed five land-use design concepts, which were then evaluated by participants during a public workshop.

Of these five options, a multi-functional green belt (below) was most favoured. This green belt is a publicly accessible buffer between urban areas and conventional farms, including public open spaces, community gardens, sports fields, walking tracks, native plantings, stormwater management zones and playgrounds.

Other scenarios included different options of either separating or integrating urban and rural land uses.

What did peri-urban residents and food producers say?

Our research reveals that residents like having food-producing landscapes close to where they live. More than 60% of respondents felt “extremely positive” and 32% “mostly positive” towards these landscapes.

One of our key findings suggests residents were mostly happy to accept the day-to-day nuisances of farm operations, but they wanted their household to benefit by being able to access food produced locally.

Food producers expressed more neutral feelings towards operating in the peri-urban zone. For them, being close to their potential customers, as well as benefiting from urban infrastructure such as high-speed internet, was important.

But our survey also highlights that peri-urban residents are concerned about possible negative impacts of nearby intensive farming, and producers fear facing complaints from their urban neighbours. Both groups called for greater agricultural literacy for urban New Zealanders.

Read more:
Building on the greenbelt is central to solving the housing crisis – just look at how the edges of cities have changed

Integrating people and production

How should we prioritise peri-urban food production alongside strategic urban expansion?

The loss of agricultural land to urban development, the disconnect between local farms and their urban markets, and the recent drive to create more sustainable infrastructure within and around cities, have all engendered planning and urban design programmes that aim to protect and reconnect cities with their food.

Redesigning peri-urban land-use patterns to integrate housing with productive land uses has the potential to connect New Zealanders with the land while mitigating the current rural-urban dichotomy approach to planning.

Embedding mana whenua values of connectedness with the environment offers significant opportunities to nourish both the land and communities that reside within. The reintegration of mahinga kai (food-gathering sites) and māra kai (food gardens) principles would support the health and resilience of both people and the land connected to cities.

Accessible local food production is an essential component of long-term urban resilience. To achieve this, we argue that we need a new approach to peri-urban land-use planning for Aotearoa New Zealand in which landscapes for both people and production are integrated and mutually beneficial.

We are grateful for the significant contribution to this research made by Guanyu Hanley Chen and Naomi Darvill from Lincoln University, and John Blyth, Sara Hodgson and Lydia Shirely from BECA.

This research was funded by the National Science Challenge: Our Land and Water. Shannon is a member of the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects.

– ref. Growing NZ cities eat up fertile land – but housing and food production can co-exist – https://theconversation.com/growing-nz-cities-eat-up-fertile-land-but-housing-and-food-production-can-co-exist-215706