A time to embrace the edge spaces that make our neighbourhoods tick

June 1, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Iampolski, PhD Candidate, Centre for Urban Research RMIT, RMIT University

As we emerge from COVID-19 lockdowns, it is timely to reflect on how the design of our neighbourhoods and the ways we interact with them affect our lived experience.

A clear lesson from the many conversations across fencelines, waves from porches, teddy bears in windows and chalk art on footpaths is the need for our cities to better embrace edge spaces between private property and the public realm.

These edge spaces, such as porches, balconies, front boundaries and footpaths, have been key to maintaining social connectedness amid physical distancing around the world; so much so that this week has been declared an international week dedicated to better activating them.

Australian cities and neighbourhoods have rarely embraced edge spaces well. This neglect is to all our detriment: many housing developments lack porches, front yards often seem like an afterthought, and most nature strips fail to live up to their name. As a result, talking to our neighbours can be a rarity.

Re-engaging with ‘living on the edge’

Action to embrace these spaces starts at the community level, through the practice of placemaking. It draws on the work of planners and designers and their understanding of the importance of “living on the edge”.

Typically, we regard our neighbourhoods as being divided between public and private spaces. But as many a front-yard conversation or colourful display on a wall has shown us during the recent lockdown, it’s the spaces of transition that bring us together, even when we are apart.

Compared to other types of urban space, edge spaces can provide more opportunity for people to build a sense of identity and community through creative expression.

Pedestrians and residents have re-envisaged the footpath as a canvas for chalk and a way to communicate with the street. Matt Novacevski. Author provided

Edge spaces are critical to the success of both public and private spaces, as urban designers and theorists like Christopher Alexander and Jan Gehl point out.

Edges that work can be described as “soft edges” or “active edges”. We can see through them and interact across them – they are comparatively porous. There is also life along them: plants, artwork or variations in colours or building materials.

Edges that are cold and unwelcoming, or comparatively “hard”, such as spaces dominated by tall fencing or blank walls, generate feelings of discord, coldness and even perceptions of danger.

Indeed, whole cities and neighbourhoods can succeed and fail at their edges, particularly at street level.

Even seemingly small interventions can turn a bland edge into a space that gives. Rachel Iampolski, Author provided

Reclaiming the edge through placemaking

So, what can we do about it? Well, quite a bit. Over recent weeks, many of us will have enjoyed the whimsy and wonder of chalk art on paths, teddy bears in windows and other warming trends that have lifted our neighbourhoods.

These visible expressions of joy create community in hard times. The edges between public and private space are reclaimed and made welcoming in ways that create conviviality and a sense of shared identity.

Residents in Carnegie have used art, plants and a street library to soften hard edges and make them more inviting. Rachel Iampolski, Author provided

These practices are an example of what is often described as citizen placemaking, where citizens create a sense of community through gestures of creativity and support.

Planning for welcoming, active edges

So why don’t we more often design our edges in ways that invite this kind of activity? For too long, policy, legislation and regulation have variously neglected the importance of edge spaces, or sought to actively limit activity within them.

In Victoria, for example, ResCode policies for housing design seek to regulate viewlines from balconies. These policies and others in Victorian planning schemes do little to encourage the return of the porch or balcony in housing or apartment design.

Chairs at the front of the house allow for contact with passersby – and the gnome is a friendly presence even when the chairs are empty. Matt Novacevski, Author provided

In the public realm, instances of over-zealous enforcement of regulation have closed down activities that bring life to footpaths and bring residents together. This risks promoting bland, homogenised streets that lead to social isolation.

We wonder how our neighbourhoods might change if planning policy, design and regulation were put to work, opening up possibilities to encourage softer and more active edges?

These opportunities bleed out from the front fence into the footpath and streets. As cities overseas have started to use tactical urbanism to promote safer social interaction, the task for government is two-fold: to enable tactical approaches that allow communities to shape spaces to meet their own needs, and to focus governance on making better places.

Whatever happens next, as citizens, we would all do well to use our imagination and remember the power and potential of the edge spaces where we live.

A map of projects being run around the world as part of Porch Placemaking Week, May 30-June 5.

– ref. A time to embrace the edge spaces that make our neighbourhoods tick – https://theconversation.com/a-time-to-embrace-the-edge-spaces-that-make-our-neighbourhoods-tick-138826

Australia’s first service sector recession will be unlike those that have gone before it

By The Conversation -

June 1, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Isaac Gross, Lecturer, Monash University

Australia is on the brink of its first recession in almost 30 years.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics will deliver the official economic growth figure for the March quarter on Wednesday.

If it is negative (as is likely because of the downturn and the bushfires, but not guaranteed because of the surge in spending as Australians stocked up on essentials in March) and is then followed by another negative result in the June quarter (which is all but certain) Australia will be in what some people regard as a technical recession.

But the technicalities don’t matter. Close to 20% of Australia’s labour force is either unemployed or underemployed, something that dwarfs previous recessions.

Data already released suggests it will be different in other ways; important ones with important implications.

It will be our first “service sector” recession.

Recessions are usually defined by large falls in investment; in new cars, new houses and new businesses.

As a result, in the early 1990s recession construction and manufacturing businesses were devastated. By contrast, employment in social services, education and food services continued to grow throughout the recession.

This time will be different.

Between March 14 and May 2 some 27% of the jobs in the accommodation and food services industry vanished, 19% of the jobs in the arts and recreation industry, and 11% of the jobs in professional and technical services – all well above the 6.5% and 7% of jobs lost in construction and manufacturing.

Jobs lost by industry, March 14 to May 2 ,

6160.0.55.001 – Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages in Australia, Week ending 2 May 2020

The closure of Australia’s borders coupled with the ongoing fear of infection, creates the risk that service sector job losses will continue to grow.

Even when the recession is over, they won’t bounce back in the way that manufacturing and construction jobs might have.

When previous recession temporarily slowed demand for things such as cars and buildings, the pent-up demand led to a surge in sales when incomes recovered.

But services are harder to store over time. Someone who skips the hairdresser for a year won’t buy a year’s worth of haircuts when conditions improve.

Nor will someone who stops going to pubs (probably) buy six months worth of drinks when pubs reopen.

It means most service sector businesses can’t expect a quick rebound. Four out of every five employed Australians work in services.

Not your grandparent’s recession

The usual playbook for dealing with a recession is to target the sectors most affected. This has meant rolling out big infrastructure projects that can hire newly-unemployed construction workers, and cutting taxes to encourage businesses to expand and hire.

But that strategy won’t be as effective this time. The tour guides and massage therapists whose service sector jobs have been destroyed are ill-suited to building high-speed trains.

And a lot of infrastructure programs are designed on the basis that Australia’s population would continue to expand. With almost two thirds of Australia’s population growth driven by overseas migration and borders now closed, that is no longer certain. Many projects that were previously considered worthwhile may no longer stack up.

The government will have to focus its recovery programs on those sectors hardest hit. For some, this will be straightforward.

The government already plays a large role in the education industry. Universities could have their funding boosted to make up for the shortfall of international students, and domestic students should be encouraged to enrol in virtual courses to improve their skills.

For some other service industries, the government should extend JobKeeper to provide continuing assistance after it is due to end in September. Social distancing requirements are likely to limit the operations of businesses such as cinemas and theatres some time. Tourism will also remain depressed as long as our borders remains closed.

Despite the focus on mining and manufacturing in our economic discourse, Australia’s economy is overwhelmingly dominated by services.

If the government wants to stop this recession from turning into a depression, it will have to redirect its policy playbook toward services.

– ref. Australia’s first service sector recession will be unlike those that have gone before it – https://theconversation.com/australias-first-service-sector-recession-will-be-unlike-those-that-have-gone-before-it-137994

A nice warm bowl of porridge: 3 ways plus a potted history

By The Conversation -

June 1, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Donna Lee Brien, Professor, Creative Industries, CQUniversity Australia

As winter begins, porridge makes an excellent choice for breakfast. For many, porridge is redolent with memories of childhood. It is warm, filling, high in fibre and associated with lowering blood cholesterol.

It’s very reliability may also be comforting in unsettling times; as actor Stephen Fry once tweeted: “Nothing in this world is at it seems. Except, possibly, porridge”.

Although most commonly used to describe a breakfast dish made with oats boiled with water or milk, any grain so cooked in liquid can be described as porridge. The dish’s history is deep.

Not so paleo

Porridge has an ancient lineage as a staple food, including in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. In 2015, National Geographic magazine reported on an analysis of a Palaeolithic pestle from 33,000 years ago, revealing it was dusted with oat starch. This suggests ancient humans were grinding oats into flour – at odds with the popular Paleo diet trend that holds humans weren’t eating grains then. The oat remnants on the pestle, found in an Italian cave, may have been cooked into a porridge.

In her book, A History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat writes early peoples might also have made something like thick pancakes by cooking various porridgey mixtures on hot stones placed on a fire’s embers.

Oats are traditionally associated with Scotland, although barley and a grain called bere were originally introduced by the Vikings. True to her roots, Scottish-born Australian cookbook writer Margaret Fulton decreed salt was essential for a proper porridge.

Gruel to be kind

Gruel is a thin porridge, which was served in English workhouses in the 19th century. Oliver Twist pleads “Please Sir, I want some more” in Charles Dickens’ second novel. The writer’s description led to gruel being thought of as unappetising.

Yet, gruel also features as a nutritious food in many 19th century cookbooks. In A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes (1852), Queen Victoria’s chef Charles Elmé Francatelli recommends restorative gruel made with oats or barley.

The 1893 edition of Mrs Beeton’s Every-day Cookery and Housekeeping Book boils just one tablespoon of oats in a pint of water to make a “dainty” dish for the ill. Mrs Beeton notes this digestible liquid can be flavoured with lemon peel or a little grated nutmeg. She notes some invalids will appreciate the addition of a good measure of sherry or port.

Gruel, glorious gruel. Oliver asked for more in the 1968 film. IMDB

Porridge time

The consumption of porridge in British jails led to the 1950s slang “doing porridge” for serving a custodial sentence. This, in turn, suggested the name of the classic 1970s British comedy starring Ronnie Barker.

Today, around the world, oats are grown for animal feed and human consumption. Although some recent reports have highlighted the possible presence of pesticides and weedkillers in widely marketed oat products, these have been refuted by producers.

In the late 1990s, savoury oaten porridge made gastronomic headlines with Heston Blumenthal’s Snail Porridge from his Michelin-starred Fat Duck restaurant. The dish of oats cooked in a stock flavoured with ham and snails, served with more snails and garlic butter and topped with a fennel salad, became one of his signature dishes.

Not all oats are equal. Melissa Di Rocco/Unsplash, CC BY

Choosing, and cooking with, oats

The most commonly available oat varieties are “rolled”, “quick” (or “quick cooking”) and “instant”.

The below recipes below use rolled oats. These are oat kernels that are steamed, then rolled.

Quick cooking oats have been steamed for longer, rolled more thinly and/or chopped into smaller pieces. Another way to reduce the cooking time is to soak rolled oats before boiling them.

Instant oats are more highly processed, so that they can be prepared by just adding boiling water or heating briefly in the microwave.

As rolled oats can be eaten raw (as in natural muesli), they are very forgiving in terms of cookery.

1. Traditional porridge

Mix 1 cup of rolled oats with 3 cups of cold water in a saucepan. Add a pinch of salt.

Bring to the boil, and then turn the heat down. Simmer gently for about 20 minutes, stirring more as it thickens. If too thick, loosen with a splash more boiling water. If too thin, boil a couple more minutes.

Top with golden syrup or brown sugar and serve with cold milk.

Variations:

using cow’s milk (or other varieties) instead of, or mixed with, the cooking water
fruit (apple, bananas, fresh or frozen berries are especially good) and seeds or nuts can be stirred into the cooked porridge or used as a topping
honey and maple syrup, and plain or flavoured yogurt, are also good toppings

2. Microwave porridge

Follow the proportions above. Depending on the microwave’s wattage, cook (covered) on high for around 4 to 5 minutes, stirring halfway.

Care needs to be taken to use a tall enough bowl so that the porridge does not boil over.

3. Savoury porridge

Oats are cooked as above, using salted water or vegetable or chicken stock, and treated as any other kind of soft grain (like polenta or risotto), with vegetables and other ingredients added before serving.

Savoury oats with toast. Shreyak Singh/Unsplash, CC BY

Variations:

stir in tasty cheese and top with sautéed mushrooms or capsicums, and a fried or poached egg
top with sliced avocado, and then drizzle with tahini and lemon juice
stir in shredded spinach, top with chopped fresh tomatoes and chilli, and drizzle with garlic-infused olive oil
ground black pepper or hot Sriracha sauce goes well with all of these.

– ref. A nice warm bowl of porridge: 3 ways plus a potted history – https://theconversation.com/a-nice-warm-bowl-of-porridge-3-ways-plus-a-potted-history-137007

Keith Rankin Chart Analysis – Covid19: Deaths and Cases to the end of May 2020

By Keith Rankin -

May 31, 2020

Analysis by Keith Rankin.

Deaths: UK now worse than Italy; USA still catching up. Chart by Keith Rankin.

The large western economies account for by far the most covid19 deaths in the world. Even Germany, with a covid19 death incidence of 100 per million is well above the world average to date of 50 deaths per million people.

Of these large countries, only the United States looks likely to overtake another; by the end of June, United States covid19 deaths could be on a par with those of France.

It would be most truthful to say that the covid19 epicentre is the North Atlantic rather than North America; NATO if you will. (While Latin America is catching up, it has 77 reported covid19 deaths per million people, well short of the 320 in the USA and 570 in the UK.)

The recent growth for the United States – shown by the slope of its line – appears to be very similar to the growth of the world in general. Both US and World covid19 death incidences have increased by about 50 percent in May. It is not clear that the United States will slow down ahead of the rest of the world.

Deaths: Belgium still has the highest death toll in the world (excl. San Marino). Chart by Keith Rankin.

Belgium leads the world in covid19 deaths with 820 per million (though tiny San Marino has 1,240 deaths per million; 32 deaths in a country with about the same population as Pukekohe).

This chart shows countries of interest with populations below 60 million. Of these countries Spain is second worst. While the statistics for Spain seem to show some of the dead having recovered, in reality some deaths have been reclassified. Nevertheless, there were many deaths in Spain in March and April when testing rates were too low; so the official number is an undercount.

The undercount in the Netherlands appears to be greater, though. This appears to be due to both very low testing rates (even lower than Sweden), and a practice of encouraging nonagenarians to die at home, untested and uncounted.

Meanwhile, Sweden’s and Canada’s deaths keep growing. While Swedish authorities seem happy to let the disease take its natural course, Canada – though with lower overall numbers than Sweden to date – seems to be struggling the most to stem the tide of deaths. Its total covid19 deaths have doubled during May, whereas New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and China have had only tiny numbers compared to previous months.

Cases: Ireland has been on same track as USA. Chart by Keith Rankin.

For recovering countries – generally the countries with high testing rates – the spotlight goes back on identified cases, rather than deaths. In the Anglo-Celtic countries, case growth is particularly low in New Zealand and to a lesser extent in Australia, the other four countries still have a long way to go to start flatlining in the chart.

Ireland is worth a mention here. Its timeline for both cases and deaths almost exactly follows that of the United States. So, while its known case incidence has been higher than the United Kingdom, its death rate per capita has been lower. The other good news for Ireland is that its growth of cases appears to have stabilised, unlike the United Kingdom, United States or Canada. This appears to be due to a higher testing rate in Ireland than the United Kingdom, United States and Canada. Canada and the United States have had the lowest testing rates of the Anglo-Celtic countries, and show the fewest signs of control over the pandemic disease.

As Minneapolis burns, Trump’s presidency is sinking deeper into crisis. And yet, he may still be re-elected

By The Conversation -

May 31, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy J. Lynch, Associate Professor in American Politics, University of Melbourne

Violence has erupted across several US cities after the death of a black man, George Floyd, who was shown on video gasping for breath as a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck. The unrest poses serious challenges for President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden as each man readies his campaign for the November 3 election.

If the coronavirus had not already posed a threat to civil discourse in the US, the latest flashpoint in American racial politics makes this presidential campaign potentially one of the most incendiary in history.

COVID-19 and Minneapolis may very well form the nexus within which the 2020 campaign will unfold. Trump’s critics have assailed his handling of both and questioned whether he can effectively lead the country in a moment of crisis.

And yet, he may not be any more vulnerable heading into the election.

A presidency in crisis?

As the incumbent, Trump certainly faces the most immediate challenges. Not since Franklin Roosevelt in the second world war has a US president presided over the deaths of so many Americans from a single cause.

The Axis powers and COVID-19 are not analogous, but any presidency is judged by its capacity to respond to enemies like these. With pandemic deaths now surpassing 100,000, Trump’s fortunes will be inexorably tied to this staggering (and still rising) figure.

Worse, the Minneapolis protests are showing how an already precarious social fabric has been frayed by the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Americans have not come together to fight the virus. Rather, they have allowed a public health disaster to deepen divisions along racial, economic, sectional and ideological lines.

Trump has, of course, often sought to gain from such divisions. But the magnitude and severity of the twin crises he is now facing will make this very difficult. By numerous measures, his is a presidency in crisis.

And yet.

Trump, a ferocious campaigner, will try to find ways to use both tragedies to his advantage and, importantly, makes things worse for his challenger.

For starters, Trump did not cause coronavirus. And he will continue to insist that his great geo-strategic adversary, the Chinese Communist Party, did.

And his is not the first presidency to be marked by the conflagration of several US cities.

Before Minneapolis, Detroit (1967), Los Angeles (1992) and Ferguson, Missouri (2014) were all the scenes of angry protests and riots over racial tensions that still haven’t healed.

And in the 19th century, 750,000 Americans were killed in a civil war that was fought over whether the enslavement of African-Americans was constitutional.

Trump may not have healed racial tensions in the US during his presidency. But, like coronavirus, he did not cause them.

How Trump can blame Democrats for Minneapolis

Not unhappily for Trump, Minneapolis is a largely Democratic city in a reliably blue state. He will campaign now on the failure of Democratic state leaders to answer the needs of black voters.

Trump will claim that decades of Democratic policies in Minnesota – including the eight years of the Obama administration – have caused Minneapolis to be one of the most racially unequal cities in the nation.

In 2016, Trump famously asked African-Americans whether Democratic leaders have done anything to improve their lives.

What do you have to lose by trying something new, like Trump?

He will repeat this mantra in the coming months.

It also certainly helps that his support among Republican voters has never wavered, no matter how shocking his behaviour.

He has enjoyed a stable 80% approval rating with GOP voters throughout the coronavirus crisis. This has helped keep his approval rating among all voters steady as the pandemic has worsened, hovering between 40 and 50%.

These are not terrible numbers. Yes, Trump’s leadership has contributed to a series of disasters. But if the polls are correct, he has so far avoided the kinds of catastrophe that could imperil his chances of re-election.

Why this moment is challenging for Biden

Biden should be able to make a good case to the American people at this moment that he is the more effective leader.

But this has not yet been reflected in polls, most of which continue to give the Democrat only a lukewarm advantage over Trump in the election.

The other problem is that the Democratic party remains discordant. And Biden has not yet shown a capacity to heal it.

Race has also long been a source of division within Biden’s party. Southern Democrats, for instance, were the key agents of slavery in the 19th century and the segregation that followed it into the 20th.

After the 1960s, Democrats sought to make themselves the natural home of African-American voters as the Republican party courted disaffected white Southern voters. The Democrats largely succeeded on that front – the party routinely gets around 85-90% of black votes in presidential elections.

The challenge for Biden now is how to retain African-American loyalty to his party, while evading responsibility for the socio-economic failures of Democratic policies in cities like Minneapolis.

He is also a white northerner (from Delaware). Between 1964 and 2008, only three Democrats were elected president. All of them were southerners.

To compensate, Biden has had to rely on racial politics to separate himself from his primary challenger – Bernie Sanders struggled to channel black aspirations – and from Republicans. And this has, at times, caused him to court controversy.

In 2012, he warned African-Americans that then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney would put them “all back in chains”. And just over a week ago, he angered black voters by suggesting those who would support Trump in the election “ain’t black”.

Biden is far better than Trump on racial issues and should be able to use the current crises to present himself as a more natural “consoler-in-chief”, but instead, he has appeared somewhat flatfooted and derided for being racially patronising.

The opportunities COVID-19 and the Minneapolis unrest might afford his campaign remain elusive.

The protests over George Floyd’s death swiftly spread across the country. ETIENNE LAURENT/EPA

There is reason for hope

America enters the final months of the 2020 campaign in a state of despair and disrepair. The choice is between an opportunistic incumbent and a tin-eared challenger.

But the US has faced serious challenges before – and emerged stronger. Neither the civil war in the 19th century or the Spanish flu pandemic in the early 20th halted the extraordinary growth in power that followed both.

Moreover, the US constitution remains intact and federalism has undergone something of a rebirth since the start of the pandemic. And there is a new generation of younger, more diverse, national leaders being forged in the fire of crisis to help lead the recovery.

– ref. As Minneapolis burns, Trump’s presidency is sinking deeper into crisis. And yet, he may still be re-elected – https://theconversation.com/as-minneapolis-burns-trumps-presidency-is-sinking-deeper-into-crisis-and-yet-he-may-still-be-re-elected-139739

Nicaragua battles COVID-19 and a Disinformation Campaign

By Evening Report -

May 31, 2020

Source: Council on Hemispheric Affairs – Analysis-Reportage

Support this progressive voice and be a part of it. Donate to COHA today. Click here

By John Perry
From Masaya, Nicaragua

Every country in the world is trying to balance its fight against the virus with the need to have a functioning economy, and there is plenty of debate about what the balance should be. The world’s poorer countries face the toughest challenge, because a high proportion of their populations engage in a daily struggle to earn enough to eat, whether in small businesses or the informal economy. In Nicaragua, around 80% of people make their living in this way.^[1]

But there are two more problems uniquely affecting Nicaragua in tackling the pandemic. One is that its economy and social life had already been attacked only two years ago when a right-wing coup attempt closed much of the country down for nearly three months. Although the economy is recovering, it is inevitably weaker than it was prior to April 2018. Moreover, continuing US sanctions deprive Nicaragua of help towards its anti-poverty programs and also block much of the assistance other Central American countries are able to access, including medical supplies.

The second problem is that the opposition, thwarted in their coup attempt, have seized the COVID-19 epidemic as a new weapon with which to attack the government. Whereas in the US and Europe opposition political parties have generally combined criticism of their political rivals with overall support for their country’s efforts to defeat the epidemic, the Nicaraguan opposition has been not simply negative but contemptuous. Opposition spokespeople have poured scorn on the government’s efforts and encouraged the international media to accuse it of negligence or even that it is in denial about the epidemic.^[2] Worse still, they have deliberately sown fear and suspicion among the Nicaraguan population, so that many people are not only scared of the virus but even of using the public health services that are there to help protect them from its effects.

This is the background to an unusual step taken by Nicaragua’s Sandinista government on May 25: it published a 75-page “white paper” describing its strategy to tackle COVID-19. Much of the strategy was already in place as early as January this year, but in the paper the different elements are set down clearly and the reasons for taking them are explained in detail.

The strategy to tackle COVID-19

Government recognition of the importance of confronting the virus was made clear at a press conference in mid-January, two months before Nicaragua even detected its first virus case, which was a passenger arriving at the international airport. Then on January 31, a day after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a “public health emergency”, Nicaragua created a special commission to deal with the virus threat. By February 9 it had issued a joint protocol with the Pan-American Health Organization (the Americas branch of the WHO), setting out its strategy. At this early stage of the crisis, few countries outside Asia had done anything similar.

Nicaragua: progresive social policies and outcomes

Importantly, the White Paper makes clear that the real work had started a decade earlier. Since 2007 when the current Sandinista government took office, it has been making significant investments in the public health service, increasing the number of doctors from 2,715 to 6,045, building 18 new hospitals, opening dozens of new health centers and creating new vaccination programs. By 2018, Nicaragua was spending 21% of its government budget on health, one of the highest proportions among less-developed countries.^[3] Compared with 2006, infant mortality in 2019 had fallen by more than half; deaths in childbirth had fallen from 92.8 for every 1,000 live births to 29.9 over the same time period.^[4]

Given this base, the government’s strategy to fight COVID-19 enabled it to designate 19 hospitals as specialist centers to receive patients; one, the Hospital Alemán Nicaragüense in Managua, has been dedicated entirely to dealing with respiratory infections during the outbreak. Among other resources, at the start of the crisis these hospitals counted with 562 intensive care beds and 449 ventilators (this last was similar to Costa Rica’s 450 ventilators, whereas neighboring Honduras and El Salvador had fewer than 200 each, for bigger populations).^[5]

Strong public measures against the virus

The government also set about strengthening the defenses against the epidemic within the community. It intensified its vaccination program, so as to reduce the level of other respiratory diseases such as influenza and pneumonia that would make the fight against COVID-19 more difficult by using similar health resources. It trained 158,000 health brigadistas who have now carried out more than 4.6 million house-to-house visits, dispensing advice about the virus. It set up a free telephone helpline, which in its first month’s operation had 110,000 callers.^[6] Schools, buses and markets are being regularly disinfected. Public buildings have safeguards to limit transmission of the virus and there has been general public education both through the brigadista visits and through the media.

A key part of the strategy has been to train the 9,000 people operating at the 19 points of entry to the country in dealing with visitors during the crisis. This has enabled some 42,000 travellers arriving in Nicaragua to be asked to self-isolate for 21 days, during which they receive follow-up visits and phone calls from officials to monitor their state of health and detect possible new cases of transmission.^[7] Internationally, many countries set up such systems much later than Nicaragua and, in the UK for example, so-called “track and trace” arrangements will not be in place until later in June. The Nicaraguan government deliberately did not close its borders as it wanted returning travellers to use official crossing points, and it deployed the army to track down the many people who have made unofficial crossings, evading health controls.

Conservative NGO’s financed by the US make up data about COVID-19

As the White Paper concedes, there have been many criticisms of Nicaragua’s approach. These have far exceeded what the country should reasonably expect, given that it intensified its preparations as soon as the global emergency was officially recognised in January and kept the numbers of cases to double figures until early May. The reason for the heavy criticism is, of course, political.

One example is the way the official reports of numbers of cases and numbers of deaths are challenged on a daily basis. This is not simply a matter of questioning the accuracy of official figures, but an attempt to completely deny their legitimacy. A so-called “Citizens’ Observatory” has been set up, consisting of anonymous “experts,” who create their own figures which come from “civil society, networks, digital activists and affected families” and are “verified by the citizenry.” These are carried in official-looking twice-weekly reports, which say in small print that they are not government publications but which are treated by much of the media, including the international press, as if they have more credibility than official sources.^[8] France 24 describes the body as “a prominent Nicaraguan NGO” even though it has no registered status and has only existed for a few weeks.^[9]

Since it started in March it has produced vastly inflated figures. For example, when on May 26 the health ministry, MINSA, reported 759 proven cases of COVID-19, the “Observatory” was reporting over 2,600 cases with a further 2,000 as “suspicious.” Right-wing NGOs and media channels have produced even worse forecasts. A report by the notorious media channel 100% Noticias on April 2 predicted that 23,000 Nicaraguans would have died from the virus by early May.^[10] The BBC carried a report which included a forecast by local NGO Funides that by June there would be at least 120,000 virus cases and 650 deaths. While the BBC cast doubt on the Nicaraguan government figures, it reproduced the Funides figures without questioning them.^[11] Funides does not work in the health sector and in 2018 it received over $120,000 from the US-government supported agency, the National Endowment for Democracy, to promote “democracy” in Nicaragua.^[12]

Other unfounded criticisms regarding Nicaragua’s pandemic situation

Another criticism has been to challenge Nicaragua’s approach of keeping the economy and daily life moving and not requiring the kinds of “lockdown” that have taken place in neighbouring countries and to varying degrees in the US and Europe. Ignoring the obvious need for a balanced judgment to be made that aims to avoid what the White Paper calls an economic “catastrophe,” critics have implied the need for more drastic measures without explaining how the majority of ordinary Nicaraguans will make a living if these are put into practice. The experience of adjoining countries’ lockdown strategies has been extremely mixed, as COHA has already shown.^[13]

In recent weeks, criticisms of the lockdown measures in adjoining El Salvador^[14] and Honduras have intensified.^[15] While Costa Rica’s lockdown policy appears to have been more successful, it has come at the cost of severely affecting relations with every other Central American country, when it shut down its borders to commercial traffic giving no notice and causing both enormous queues and considerable economic hardship.^[16] From nearby Colombia, The Guardian reports that “that strict quarantine measures have done little to flatten the curve [of numbers of virus cases],” even while the same newspaper repeatedly criticizes Nicaragua’s failure to adopt a lockdown policy.^[17]

Proponents of lockdown for poor countries such as Nicaragua have also ignored the many criticisms of such policies. For example, the eminent epidemiologist Professor Sunetra Gupta, of Oxford University, describes lockdown as a “luxury” only available to the middle classes in developed economies.^[18] Many other experts agree with this view, as do international NGOs such as Oxfam.^[19]

But the worst attacks have been to accuse the government either of gross negligence, of having no strategy to confront the epidemic or even of deliberately wanting people to die. These have been detailed and sophisticated. For example, the government is alleged to be opposed to using facemasks, though in fact, it has been promoting their use. “Reliable sources” assert that hospitals are full, and incapable of helping prospective patients. False allegations have been made that victims of the virus are being secretly buried in communal graves (illustrated with photographs shown to have been taken in Ecuador).^[20]

Inevitably, as COHA reported on April 17,^[21] these criticisms have been picked up and amplified by the international media. If anything, their coverage is even worse now than it was in early April. According to the BBC on April 20, for example, the Nicaraguan government “ignored messages from public health experts.”^[22] In the UK, The Guardian has three times compared President Ortega with the right-wing President Bolsonaro in Brazil (who has cynically dismissed the seriousness of the virus), most recently on May 10.^[23]

Propaganda that puts people in danger

The propaganda of course does have an important effect on international opinion about Nicaragua and – perhaps to a lesser extent – on opinion in Nicaragua itself. More importantly, however, it is clear that the aim of producing fear and even panic about the epidemic has partly succeeded, as it is confirmed by the experience of the Jubilee House Community in Ciudad Sandino.

Jubilee House’s Coordinator, Becca Mohally Renk, says that their staff have direct experience of the impact of the opposition propaganda on patients who come to the community run clinic. They have spoken with people whose family members have COVID-19 symptoms, and many are not only afraid to take them to an official MINSA (Health Ministry) clinic, they even fear calling the government’s special hotline number to report the case. They have been told that MINSA doesn’t have tests and isn’t really attending patients, so they don’t see a lot of point in bothering to report their case. But they’ve also heard that MINSA will come and take away their family member and they won’t see them again. With so many fake stories of secret burials and false accounts of MINSA hiding bodies and losing bodies, people don’t want to go to the hospital.

So, as a direct result of the propaganda, some people are effectively hiding cases from MINSA and making contact tracing impossible, possibly putting themselves and family members who are infected with COVID-19 in danger if they worsen suddenly and don’t go to the hospital in time out of fear. In Masaya, this author knows personally of a death which might have been avoided if the victim had gone to MINSA. Interviews with satisfied patients leaving the Masaya hospital after recovering from the virus, posted on social media locally, may to some extent help to counteract these false rumors.

The opposition’s response to the White Paper

Will the opposition give up its negative campaign now that it is even clearer than before what the government’s strategy is about? Of course not. It has already dismissed the white paper as “a confession of the enormous error which the government committed” in its approach to the epidemic.^[24] It accuses the government of putting Nicaraguans at risk by promoting the theory of “herd immunity,” when this term (inmunidad del rebaño in Spanish) does not appear in the document. It criticizes the White Paper’s citing of experience in Sweden, yet the available data show that Sweden’s avoidance of a lockdown has in most respects resulted in a better response to the epidemic than those in the US, UK, Spain or Italy.^[25]

What does the opposition advocate instead? Spokespeople such as Carlos Tünnermann, coordinator of the opposition Civic Alliance (described by news agency EFE as “one of Nicaragua’s most prestigious intellectuals”),^[26] stop short of actually calling for a lockdown yet imply strongly that one is needed. Why do they want one? It may be because it would recommence the destruction of Nicaragua’s economy that they attempted in 2018, and also erode popular support for Daniel Ortega’s government. Why do they not actively call for a lockdown themselves? It may be because they can see the reality of its disastrous effects in El Salvador and Honduras, and they know full well that some of their key political allies in the United States want lockdowns to be rescinded as soon as possible.

The authorities’ efforts are being complemented by the behaviour of the great majority of people and businesses in Nicaragua who are following the Health Ministry recommendations. In general, people are actually doing more to protect themselves, as well as workers and customers, by wearing masks, ensuring they keep physical distance and applying systematic hygiene measures. As a result of this combined national effort against the virus, the white paper is able to show that, so far, mortality in Nicaragua is very clearly remaining at levels below those of the previous five years.

Overall mortality in Nicaragua for January 1^st to May 15^th each year, 2015-2020 ^[27]

The outlook

For the moment it seems clear that Nicaragua is now well into the phase of community transmission of the virus. At this point trying to estimate the number of cases precisely is impossible because, as a WHO report indicates, data through March 2020 suggests “80% of infections are mild or asymptomatic.” ^[28]Nicaragua’s health authorities are focused on identifying patients with symptoms and ensuring they get the treatment they need while also monitoring those patients’ contacts and ensuring they isolate appropriately, a task made vastly more difficult by the opposition’s propaganda.

Nevertheless, the authorities’ efforts are being complemented by the great majority of people and businesses in Nicaragua following the Health Ministry recommendations. In general, Nicaraguans are actually doing more to protect themselves, as well as workers and customers, by wearing masks and ensuring they keep physical distance and applying systematic hygiene measures. As a result of this combined national effort against the virus, overall mortality in Nicaragua has – so far – very clearly remained at levels below those of the previous five years (see chart). Of course, the system now begins to face a huge test and the next 2-3 months are expected to be crucial.

[Credit Photo: “Members of the 300-strong sanitation squad who work for the Managua city council”, from https://www.el19digital.com/]

End notes

[1] “AL PUEBLO DE NICARAGUA Y AL MUNDO INFORME SOBRE EL COVID-19 Y UNA ESTRATEGIA SINGULAR – LIBRO BLANCO” p 3. https://www.el19digital.com/app/webroot/tinymce/source/2020/00-Mayo/25%20MAYO/AL%20PUEBLO%20DE%20NICARAGUA%20Y%20AL%20MUNDO-%20INFORME%20SOBRE%20EL%20COVID-19.pdf. An English translation, “To the People of Nicaragua and to the World: COVID-19, A Singular Strategy, White Book” is available at http://www.tortillaconsal.com/tortilla/node/9402. All references to the White Paper refer to the original Spanish edition page numbers, hereafter cited as “White Paper”.

[2] See “Nicaraguan Opposition Misrepresents Government Response to COVID-19,” http://www.coha.org/nicaraguan-right-wing-opposition-misrepresents-government-response-to-the-covid-19-pandemic/

[3] Data from https://datosmacro.expansion.com/estado/gasto/salud

[4] See http://www.tortillaconsal.com/tortilla/node/9402

[5] Costa Rica and other Central American countries have since been able to acquire more, given their stronger economies and freedom from US sanctions. See “Costa Rica tendrá 700 ventiladores para atender pacientes críticos por Covid-19,” https://www.teletica.com/252364_costa-rica-tendra-700-ventiladores-para-atender-pacientes-criticos-por-covid-19

[6] See White Paper, pp 27-29.

[7] White Paper, p 5.

[8] The reports from the “Observatory” are published on Twitter, Facebook and at its sophisticated website https://observatorioni.org/

[9] “Under-fire Nicaragua reports significant rise in COVID-19 cases,” https://www.france24.com/en/20200526-under-fire-nicaragua-reports-significant-rise-in-covid-19-cases

[10] These and other rumours and predictions have been collated in a video by Juventud Presidente, “Falsas matemáticas sobre el Covid-19 en Nicaragua,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMJZK5U9VUo

[11] “5 insólitas cosas que ocurren en Nicaragua mientras los expertos advierten de la “grave” falta de medidas ante la pandemia,” https://www.bbc.com/mundo/52530594

[12] See https://www.ned.org/region/latin-america-and-caribbean/nicaragua-2018/

[13] “COVID-19 as Pretext for Repression in the Northern Triangle,” http://www.coha.org/covid-19-as-pretext-for-repression-in-the-northern-triangle/

[14] On El Salvador, see for example, CNN News (May 21) “¿Salvador o autoritario? El presidente ‘millennial’ de El Salvador desafía a las cortes y al Congreso en la respuesta al coronavirus,” https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2020/05/21/salvador-o-autoritario-el-presidente-millennial-de-el-salvador-desafia-a-las-cortes-y-al-congreso-en-la-respuesta-al-coronavirus/; and earlier in COHA “ Bukele y uso político de pandemia en El Salvador: entre la ilegalidad y la violación de DDHH,” http://www.coha.org/bukele-y-uso-politico-de-pandemia-en-el-salvador-entre-la-ilegalidad-y-la-violacion-de-ddhh/

[15] On Honduras, see for example, “Del Mitch al golpe y de la pandemia al autoritarismo contra los derechos humanos,” https://defensoresenlinea.com/informe-2-del-mitch-al-golpe-y-de-la-pandemia-al-autoritarismo-contra-los-derechos-humanos/

[16] “Nicaragua-Costa Rica Coronavirus Dispute Stalls Hundreds of Trucks at Border,” https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-05-22/nicaragua-costa-rica-coronavirus-dispute-stalls-hundreds-of-trucks-at-border

[17] “Colombian designers prepare cardboard hospital beds that double as coffins,” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/27/colombia-coronavirus-cardboard-hospital-beds-coffins

[18] See the interview on May 21 by Unherd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKh6kJ-RSMI&feature=youtu.be

[19] “Half a billion people could be pushed into poverty by coronavirus, warns Oxfam,” https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/half-billion-people-could-be-pushed-poverty-coronavirus-warns-oxfam

[20] Examples are given in videos by Juventud Presidente, see https://www.juventudpresidente.com.ni/coronavirus-y-noticias-falsas-en-nicaragua/; and https://www.juventudpresidente.com.ni/las-falsas-noticias-sobre-el-covid-19-en-nicaragua/

[21] “Nicaraguan Opposition Misrepresents Government Response to COVID-19,” http://www.coha.org/nicaraguan-right-wing-opposition-misrepresents-government-response-to-the-covid-19-pandemic/

[22] “Coronavirus in Latin America: How bad could it get?” https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-latin-america-52349439/coronavirus-in-latin-america-how-bad-could-it-get

[23] “Bolsonaro attends floating barbecue as Brazil’s Covid-19 toll tops 10,000,” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/10/bolsonaro-attends-floating-barbeque-as-brazils-covid-19-toll-tops-10000

[24] “Libro Blanco sobre COVID-19 aviva señalamientos contra Ortega en Nicaragua,” https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20200527/481430490140/libro-blanco-sobre-covid-19-aviva-senalamientos-contra-ortega-en-nicaragua.html

[25] See comparisons between Sweden and other countries at https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?country=~SWE

[26] See above (https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20200527/481430490140/libro-blanco-sobre-covid-19-aviva-senalamientos-contra-ortega-en-nicaragua.html)

[27] White Paper, p 18.

[28] “Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) Situation Report – 46” March 6, 2020. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200306-sitrep-46-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=96b04adf_2

Jakarta Six activists for Papua freedom convicted of treason set free

By Asia Pacific Report -

May 30, 2020

By Amanda Siddharta in Jakarta

Six activists charged with treason in Jakarta for organising a protest rally for independence last August outside the presidential palace have been freed from prison.

Five of the activists known as the Jakarta Six – Paulus Suryanta Ginting, Ambrosius Mulait, Charles Kosay, and Dano Anes Tabuni, along with the only woman in the group, Arina Elopere – were freed this past week.

Issay Wenda, the sixth person, was released April 28. He had been sentenced to eight months in prison, a month less than the others.

At the August 28 rally, a banned Morning Star independence flag was raised as activists protested over incident that occurred against Papuans earlier that month in Surabaya in East Java.

The Morning Star flag is a symbol of independence for West Papua.

More than 40 students taken
In mid-August, Indonesian authorities stormed a university dormitory in Surabaya, where Papuan students live, concerning allegations someone desecrated the Indonesian flag in the building and threw it into a sewer.

– Partner –

Police fired tear gas and took 43 students into custody, while an angry mob that had gathered outside the dormitory chanted, “Kick out Papua” and used racial slurs to describe the students.

The incident triggered nationwide protests and galvanised the pro-independence movement. The Ministry of Communication and Information responded by blocking the internet in Papua.

After that happened, some Papuans burned the office of Telkom Indonesia in Jayapura, the capital of Papua.

Ginting, the spokesperson for the Indonesian People’s Front for West Papua (FRI-WP), said their indictment was unfair.

“None of us has the initiative; it never crossed our minds that we want to commit treason. We were only protesting; it was a standard rally to make a statement.

“The only difference there was that flag on August 28. I assumed it was the initiative from the people at the rally,” he told Voice of America.

‘No intentions of treason’
Michael Hilman, a member of the legal team representing the activists, said that the facts and evidence presented in court proved they were only protesting because of the incident in Surabaya.

“There were no intentions of treason, or to attack the head of state, there was no violence whatsoever. But the judge’s decision did not take into account the facts,” he said in a statement.

Five of the six were supposed to be released three weeks earlier under a new decree by the Indonesian Ministry of Justice and Human Rights.

The decree initiated an assimilation program for prisoners who have served two-thirds of their prison sentences to be released early because of the covid-19 pandemic.

Ginting said they signed the release documents on May 11 and had been tested for the coronavirus, which causes the covid-19 disease. At the last minute, they were told they could not be granted an early release because they were charged of treason.

“We suspect political pressure or alleged abuse of power by the authorities,” Hilman said.

The Directorate General of Corrections at the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights has not responded to VOA’s requests for comments.

Repression in Papua ‘getting worse’
Indonesia annexed the region of West Papua in 1969, after some of the population was forced to vote in favor of joining Indonesia. Since then, the area has become a hot spot of conflict with the government’s crackdown of independence movements.

Veronica Koman, a human rights lawyer, said violations and impunity still occur in Papua.

“The repression in Papua is getting worse, because there’s a record of arrest in 2016. There were 5136 arrests; that’s already during Jokowi’s regime,” she said, referring to President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.

The president made a promise to prioritise infrastructure development in Papua. But the president has never addressed the alleged human rights violations.

Koman said if the conflict in Papua was not resolved, it would be a ticking time bomb ahead of a violent uprising.

“In a couple of years, there could be a (violent) incident. And then they’d ask, ‘Why did it happen?’ or ‘Who was the provocateur.’ Well, you’re making them (the Papuans) victims repeatedly and robbing them of their dignity,” she said.

Meanwhile, Ginting said he would continue to speak out about the problems in Papua, but he acknowledged there was little he can do during the pandemic.

He said the arrests had created momentum for people to start a discussion on Papua.

“I think there are more people who are now curious. They want to find out what exactly is happening in Papua. A lot more people will be more open-minded,” he said.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

‘Stay home, stay safe, be kind’: What NZ can teach the world about covid-19

By Asia Pacific Report -

May 30, 2020

New Zealand implemented one of the earliest lockdowns and has largely succeeded in eliminating the coronavirus under the leadership of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Some of the country’s success has been attributed to her leadership, trust in science, and clear communication during the crisis. We get an update from Michael Baker, professor of public health at the University of Otago. He is an epidemiologist and a member of the New Zealand Ministry of Health’s Technical Advisory Group. Dr Baker has been advising the government on its response to the covid-19 pandemic. Their slogan is “Stay home, stay safe, and be kind.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we turn to New Zealand, which implemented one of the earliest lockdowns in response to the pandemic, has largely succeeded in eliminating the coronavirus, after the number of infections peaked in April. There was just a single confirmed covid-19 case reported in New Zealand last week [and there have been no new cases in the past seven days]. This comes as a 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck the capital Wellington on Monday while Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was in the middle of a live TV interview.

PRIME MINISTER JACINDA ARDERN: We’re just having a bit of an earthquake here, Ryan. Quite a — quite a decent shake here, but if you see things moving behind me. The beehive moves a little more than most. Yep, no, it’s just stopped.

AMY GOODMAN: Starting last week, Prime Minister Ardern began transitioning New Zealand, a Pacific nation that’s home to more than 5 million people, from lockdown level 3 to level 2, allowing most shops, restaurants, schools and workplaces to reopen. Some of the country’s success has been attributed to Ardern’s leadership, trust in science, and clear communication during the crisis. Instead of launching a war, she urged people to unite against covid-19, and often calls the country, quote, “our team of 5 million.” In March, after putting her 21-month-old daughter to bed, Ardern hosted a Facebook Live session from her couch as New Zealanders submitted questions.

PRIME MINISTER JACINDA ARDERN: Excuse the casual attire. It can be messy business putting toddlers to bed, so I’m not in my work clothes. …

– Partner –

But some of the key things that I’ve been asked about are things like, you know, “Can we go for a walk?” Penny, you’ve asked — you’ve got four children. Can you walk with all of them, or should you just take two at a time? You can walk with the people that you will be with for the next month, the people that you’re living with. You can walk with them. They’re your — the people that will be in your life consistently over this period of time, and you can walk with them. But if, when you’re walking, you pass by someone, keep your — keep your distance. Keep two meters between everyone. I imagine New Zealanders are going to be doing a lot of long-distance waving while we’re out and about.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Jacinda Ardern in March. On Sunday, the prime minister thanked her nation for staying home during the covid-19 pandemic to break the chain of transmission and save lives.

PRIME MINISTER JACINDA ARDERN: Thank you for staying home and saving lives. Together, we have kept the virus under control and played our part to avoid the widespread devastation we’ve seen overseas. But I know it’s at times been really tough. So thank you for all the sacrifices you’ve made over the past few months. From the children who missed out on precious time with their grandparents to the families who have had to say goodbye to loved ones from afar, New Zealanders have given up a lot to keep each other safe.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we go to Wellington, New Zealand, where we’re joined by Dr Michael Baker, professor of public health at the University of Otago. He is an epidemiologist, a member of the New Zealand Ministry of Health’s Technical Advisory Group. He has been advising Prime Minister Ardern on the response to covid-19.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Thank you for staying up so late. I’m holding The New York Times. Front page of this weekend, “US Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss.” The whole front page lists hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of names. We have something — under 5 percent of the population, but more than a quarter of the deaths in the world. Can you talk about what New Zealand can teach not only the United States, Brazil and other far more populous countries, but what you recognised early on and what you did, Dr Baker?

MICHAEL BAKER: Well, greetings from Wellington. It’s a great pleasure to be on your programme.

I think there are several lessons when you look across the globe at how different countries have responded, but I think one of the main messages is to respond decisively and have that combination of good science and good leadership. And countries that have succeeded have done this.

And in the case of New Zealand, we had the same pandemic plan as many other countries, which was a good plan, but it was for a different virus. It was for influenza. And by late February, we realized this was more like a SARS virus, so we had to change our direction very rapidly.

And I think across the Western world, there was this strange idea of complacent exceptionalism, that somehow the virus might behave differently when it hit the Western world compared with how it was in Asia. But, in fact, we looked to Asia for examples of a good approach, and — for example, the way China contained the virus, and other Asian countries were managing it — we realised that elimination was possible, so we changed direction very quickly.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr Baker, this whole issue of, in most of the advanced West, the focus has been on flattening the curve or mitigating the virus. Could you talk about that discussion that went on in those early days about trying to eliminate it completely?

MICHAEL BAKER: Yeah. Well, that’s exactly right. I mean, the approach for dealing with influenza pandemics is a mitigation one. You cannot contain it. So, basically, the wave is going to wash over you, and the strategy is all about, as you say, flattening the curve, reducing demand on the healthcare system and not overwhelming it, trying to protect the most vulnerable. So, we are very familiar with those approaches.

But when we looked at the success of mainland China, and also Taiwan, in particular, with actually preventing the virus, stopping it at the borders, and also doing contact tracing to stamp out cases, we changed tack very quickly. And so, you do things in a different order, if you realise that. You actually throw everything at the pandemic early on. So, at the point that we had a hundred cases, no fatalities, around the 23rd of March, a decision was made to go for this elimination approach.

And that meant putting the whole country into a very intense lockdown for the best part of six weeks. And that did three things. It basically stamped out chains of transmission, because the whole country was effectively in home quarantine. It also enabled us to build up a lot of capabilities that we really didn’t have at that point. And that was to do a lot of testing, a lot of contact tracing, and also improve our board of quarantine. And the third thing it did, it basically just explained to the whole country what physical distancing was all about, because we had never experienced a pandemic before. We were barely affected by SARS. And so, at the end of that — it’s a pretty harsh approach, but at the end of that, there was very little virus being transmitted in New Zealand.

So, we’re now coming out of lockdown by degrees. And it’s very different from coming out of lockdown overseas, because we’re trying to come down into a virus-free New Zealand. And the evidence now, based on a huge amount of testing that we’re doing, is that there is not circulating virus in New Zealand. We’re just getting the very tail end of some of the outbreaks.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about some of the particularities of New Zealand, number one, of being an island nation, to what degree that helped in your being able to stamp out the virus? And also, the role of your healthcare system, to what degree that made it easier or more difficult to deal with the pandemic?

MICHAEL BAKER: Yeah. Well, being an island, it’s much easier to manage your borders. And really, that’s the number one thing you have to do. But, actually, some countries with huge borders, like mainland China — in fact, Vietnam, Mongolia — appear to be succeeding very well with the same elimination approach. So, it doesn’t — you don’t have to be an island. And, of course, many Pacific islands have taken an even more extreme approach. They’ve just, if you like, lifted the drawbridge entirely and have excluded the virus. So, it’s not a necessity to be an island.

The second point about the healthcare system, I think it helps to have a socialized health system, because, obviously, you can deliver testing more easily. You can manage your hospitals more effectively. And so I think that’s helped in Australia, New Zealand and, I guess, also in some Asian countries that have a highly centralised healthcare system.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about what you see the US has done wrong? I mean, it’s just astounding the richest country in the world is the epicenter of this pandemic. And if you can also talk about the racial disparities that we’ve seen, particularly African Americans, far greater death toll than their population in the United States should be, very disproportionate? What happened in New Zealand with the Māori, with the Indigenous population, with low-income New Zealanders? Most importantly, what do you think the US is doing wrong?

MICHAEL BAKER: Yeah, well, firstly, looking at the inequalities, unfortunately, that seems to be a feature of pandemics and infectious disease in general, is they magnify social inequalities. And with our current government, inequalities is one of the central driving concerns with the healthcare system and with the pandemic response. So equity has been a major driver. It was also one of the reasons we have put, obviously, a huge amount of resources into the elimination approach, because the most pro-equity thing we can do is to keep the virus out. And that is the situation now.

When I look at the United States, obviously, I’m very disappointed — or more than disappointed, because it is a tragic situation. And usually for leadership we look to the US, particularly the Centers for Disease Control, we look to the UK, Public Health England, and with this — and also the World Health Organisation — and, unfortunately, I think there was a severe error of judgment in assisting this pandemic, because there was a period when it was containable, but the advice was not to shut borders, and there was a complacent attitude. So, I think that’s the number one problem, is that our major health agencies in the Western world have really let us down — and, I think, governments, as well — because this was an entirely preventable global catastrophe. So I think that’s the number one requirement, is that science and leadership have to work together and recognise these threats and manage them accordingly.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And also, could you talk about the issue of the legitimacy of leadership in terms of being able to effectuate these kinds of severe or stringent policies? Obviously, in China, they had to call out the military to completely isolate Wuhan, but in New Zealand you didn’t really have to deal with any kind of a major enforcement, per se. Could you talk about that in the few seconds we have left?

MICHAEL BAKER: Yeah, I think really empathetic leadership, as we’ve seen in New Zealand, helps. But, actually, Australia has got a different style of government, and they’ve also succeeded. But really, the best-performing country on Earth has actually been Taiwan, I think, because they acted very early. They didn’t need a lockdown. And that was because they had a very strong public health agency, and they started managing their borders in January. And they did everything right. So, I think they’ve had a model response.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Baker, we’re going to have to leave it there, but we’re going to continue with a post-show and post it online at democracynow.org, from New Zealand. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Be safe.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

James Tapp: Confronting Pākehā Privilege as a white male student

By Asia Pacific Report -

May 30, 2020

It’s only been a year and half since I started university, but sometimes that’s enough time to realise more about the world than you could ever imagine. For me, the biggest thing, the one thing intertwined into every part of my life, is privilege.

I’m a white male, and if society loves anything, it’s straight white males. It was only when I left my all-boys high school that I became aware of the licence that my physicality held. It seemed so normal to me at the time, so much so that I never had the tendency to question or reflect on my own privilege.

But in my day to day life, I continued winning the lottery.

I think an important place to start on a topic like this is representation. Not just the statistics around what percentage of the population is Pākehā, Māori, Pasifika, Asian and Middle Eastern, along the many other ethnic backgrounds in Aotearoa, but also what we, as individuals represent, as well as how we present society.

Last year we saw Statistics New Zealand release a report that reflected NZ diversity in the form of a 112-person village. The village was composed of 17 individuals having a Māori ethnic background, 70 with European, 15 Asian, 8 Pacifica, and 2 from the rest of the world.

Of course, this representation is not going to be the same across all areas of society, but it could be a hell of a lot better.

– Partner –

When it comes to making change, for me it is in my career choices. I want to represent my country, whether it’s at an embassy, working as a journalist or even a business leader. Yet I remind myself that if New Zealand society is going to have good representation across the board, it probably shouldn’t be me. Because there’s 1001 white men in business suits already ‘representing’ New Zealand.

How many cared about Ihumātao?
You’ve got to ask, how many of them cared about Ihumātao, and if they were representing that struggle? Representation in New Zealand is always going to be difficult, especially in areas such as Auckland and Wellington which are melting pots of culture with so much to represent.

So, as students going into the workforce,remember you bring a new perspective, which also comes with great power. It is vital to keep both your privileges in check and that of your peers, while also putting in the effort to make sure diversity is celebrated.

While that is all about under representation, which is not amazing, the statistics around over representation are far more shocking. In 2019, 51.8 percent of the prison population was Māori, while they only make up 14.6 percent of the population.

Since the English arrived in New Zealand, anyone who they considered different has been on the backfoot, with a lack of acknowledgement of minority and indigenous ideology and way of life.

In saying this, it is important to remember these are not the only populations within Aotearoa; with our country being exposed to globalisation we have seen an influx of diversity and culture. One of these major ethnic groups is the Asian population, which includes a number of ethnicities, such as Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Sri Lankan, Singaporean and Malaysian among so many more.

The Chinese population particularly have a stronger representation in New Zealand in good light as well as not so good. With history in gold mining in Arrowtown, having the longest running produce stores in the country, as well as running so many other small businesses, it is truly saddening to see xenophobia still so present in New Zealand when they are part of the backbone that our country depends on.

With the Asian population expected to rise above 1 million by 2038, we will need to be able to embrace this past by eating sushi for lunch and going to the lantern festival, instead realising terms such as “token Asian” are outdated and inaccurate which instead facilitate casual racism.

Pride in being multicultural but …?
New Zealand may pride itself on being multicultural and accepting, but all it takes is a quick scroll down a New Zealand Herald article about welfare issues to see Pākehā Privilege. And many of you, including myself, realise these people are our grandparents or maybe even our parents.

If they’re as bad as my grandmother, they’ll say they can’t understand someone on the phone who has an accent which isn’t from a country where English is their first language. Racism is still very much a problem in New Zealand, whether it is ingrained into our history due to the land wars, or it’s taking clothing of traditional significance and incorporating it into everyday life without recognition (kimonos as dressing gowns, for example). These everyday events may seem harmless at the time, however research has shown these can slowly but surely build up to oppression, discrimination and violence without recognition and intervention.

This is how events such as the Christchurch attacks happen. While they weren’t an accurate representation of the Pākehā population, just imagine if he had been of any other ethnicity. Imagine what would have been different in the media. Imagine what my grandparents would have said. This can all go unchecked, and that’s what unrecognised white privilege can look like.

I think it’s also important to point out Pākehā Privilege is part of New Zealand culture, whether we like it or not, and because it’s part of daily life for many, it goes unrecognised as culture. And it’s not as simple as saying to someone “hey this is your culture, also guess what, it’s done a lot of damage.”

Culture among white people is thriving, but because of the dominance of Western society, we just don’t see it. Hence, we get the “white people have no culture” comments, but we also get ones about Karen’s and typical middle-class white dad jokes, and whether you like it or not, that’s part of it.

If society, particularly in New Zealand, is going to progress, we need to recognise where Pākehā stand in relation to the rest of New Zealand and why. But as many things go, small things at a young age will go far.

What would things look like if we looked past just Pākehā and Māori culture at school, but also a number of others which are now prominent in Aotearoa? What if we saw more incorporation of Māori schools of thought into business on a managerial level? What if this also applied to the government with a greater recognition of Te Tiriti o Waitangi?

We operate in systems that are westernised
We currently operate in systems that are westernised, because that was version 1.0 that was brought to Aotearoa by colonists. But with so much more here now, what is there to stop us from growing and expanding and reaching 2.0?

I’ve covered a miniscule amount of information surrounding society in New Zealand, but if there’s anything I want you to take away from reading this, it’s that if you are Pākehā, or even just have white skin, recognise your privilege on a constant basis, and use it to help others.

I’ve been given a lot of opportunities while I’ve been at university, and while I’ve worked hard, I still think about how other factors may have played a part. And while this has focused on Pākehā Privilege, think about what other privileges you may have and how they play a part in your life.

Talk with those who you consider “other” instead of the same, find out where people’s viewpoints stand and why. You never know, you might learn a thing or two.

James Tapp is a Bachelor of Communication Studies and Bachelor of Business conjoint student at Auckland University of Technology, majoring in international business and advertising creativity. He is also producer of the Pacific Media Centre’s Southern Cross radio programme on 95bFM. This article was first published in the AUT student publication Debate and is republished here with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Keith Rankin Chart Analysis – Covid19: Deaths and Cases in the last week of May 2020

By Keith Rankin -

May 30, 2020

Analysis by Keith Rankin.

Sweden still has worst count of deaths per person. Chart by Keith Rankin.

Sweden has lost 400 of its ten million people to Covid 19 in the week to 28 May. And there is little sign, yet, of a significant slowdown in deaths. Sweden’s weekly death rate has been this high for the last eight weeks; ie since the beginning of April. It would be like New Zealand losing at least 200 people to Covid19 every week for two months. The media should be showing pictures of rows of coffins in Stockholm; as the did for Italy and Spain, and now do for Brazil just about every day.

The other usual suspects in Europe and North America continue to feature strongly in the recent deaths’ chart. This disease is very stubborn.

The other obvious feature is Latin America, with Brazil now in second place for reported covid19 deaths per person. Indeed, with low rates of testing, it is likely that Brazil’s deaths from covid 19 are greater than reported. While seven Latin American countries feature in the death chart for this week, it is interesting that Argentina and Uruguay do not. These two countries have been successful, so far, in trying circumstances, to keep their infection rates low. Not so Chile, which has a population of 20 million and now more total reported cases of covid19 than China.

This underreporting of deaths is likely to be true of Sweden as well as Brazil, because Sweden’s testing rate was also lower than its Scandinavian neighbours. In other Scandinavian countries, there has been a clear fall in non-covid19 deaths; a fall that does not show up in Sweden. In light of the experiences of Norway and Denmark, it seems likely that some of Sweden’s non-covid19 deaths are in fact due to covid19.

In Africa, only Djibouti features; that is almost certainly due to its close links with France.

Qatar is still easily the country with the most new infections. Chart by Keith Rankin.

Qatar is now second in the world – to San Marino – for reported covid19 infections. It is easily the worst in the world for the month of May; Ramadan month this year. While five other Arabian countries are in the top 20 for recent infections, of these only Kuwait has a high death rate so far.

Chile is the country with the most rapid growth of cases, and which will most likely supplant Sweden in the deaths chart that I expect to post in three week’s time. (Though I expect Peru and Brazil will be up there with Chile, and maybe Russia and Armenia as well.)

Singapore continues to have many new cases, reflecting its similarity in many ways to Arabian countries such at the UAE (United Arab Emirates).

The French empire – outside of the Pacific – still shows. This chart includes French Guiana and Gabon as well as Mayotte (not showing due to its population less than 300,000) and Gabon.

The Dominican Republic is also a new entrant to this table, with new cases occurring at about the same rate as the United Kingdom; the first independent Caribbean country to show. Hopefully, this does not indicate a coming wave of new cases in the West Indies.

Digital-only local newspapers will struggle to serve the communities that need them most

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chrisanthi Giotis, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Communication, University of Technology Sydney

This week News Corp Australia announced the end of the print editions of 112 suburban and regional mastheads – about one-fifth of all of Australia’s local newspapers. Of those, 36 will close and 76 become purely online publications.

Getting the chop entirely are small regional newspapers such as the Herbert Valley Express in far north Queensland (with a circulation of less than 3,000). Those going digital include free suburban papers such as Sydney’s Manly Daily, established in 1906. (Until as recently as 2017 it came out five times a week. Since 2018 is has been published twice a week.)

Whether the online-only papers can survive remains to be seen. But our research at the Centre for Media Transition suggests it will be hard for them to match what local print editions offered communities.

Losing readers and advertisers

Like print media in general, local newspapers have been squeezed by readers and advertisers moving online. Most of the revenue, even for those with a cover price, has come from advertising. This has been eroded by the likes of Google and Facebook as well as localised classified sites such as Gumtree.

While this has has happened at slower pace than the loss of the “rivers of gold” for metropolitan newspapers, the “desertification” of local news has progressed steadily. In the decade to 2018, 106 local and regional newspapers closed in Australia, leaving 21 local government areas – 16 in regional areas – without a local newspaper.

Those that have survived have seen their staff slashed, with reporters expected to produce more “content” at the cost of doing the serious reporting that made local newspapers so valuable to their communities.

Local media ‘keystones’

As Danish researcher Rasmus Kleis Nielsen notes in Local Journalism: The decline of newspapers and the rise of digital media (IB Taurus, 2016), local newspapers have been the “keystone” of “local news ecosystems”.

No other local media comes close to the local coverage they provide. “Most of the many stories about local politics produced by the local paper never appear anywhere else,” says Nielsen. Local radio and television have tended to piggyback on their work.

Without this reporting, local democracy suffers. Research in the United States shows local papers are essential to keep local government accountable.

Local news doesn’t scale

Given declining revenue for traditional print, and the cost of printing, moving to digital-only platforms was perhaps inevitable.

But the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the move by killing off advertising from local businesses such as restaurants and pubs. In April News Corp suspended the print runs of 60 local papers. Just three – the Wentworth Courier, Mosman Daily and North Shore Times, serving Sydney’s most affluent suburbs – will resume, thanks to their lucrative property advertising.

Making the rest viable as digital-only local news services is going to be tricky for two reasons.

The first is to do with how online advertising works. The second is how readers in these areas relate to the news, and their willingness to pay for online news.

A key characteristic of the historical readership and advertising markets for local newspaper is their “bounded” nature. But the defining characteristics of online news and advertising is “scaleability”.

Once all newspapers could largely dictate prices to advertisers. This was particularly the case with local papers, often the only game in town. But the game has changed. What they can charge for online advertising is a fraction of what they once could for print.

Most metro newspapers responded with plans to grow their readership by providing their content free online. The idea was that more readers would help maintain them as an attractive advertising platform.

This has generally not proved the winning strategy they had hoped. So papers from The Age to The Daily Telegraph have been moving to paywalls, enticing their print buyers to online subscriptions.

Unwillingness to pay

Our research suggests doing the same with non-metropolitan newspapers is likely to be harder. Readers in rural and regional areas are less willing than those in cities to pay for online news services.

As part of our report Regional News Media: State of Play published in 2019, we surveyed 266 people living in regional and rural areas, demographically representative of the population of country Australia.

Just 14% indicated willingness to pay for news online, with 49% saying they would not (and 37% unsure).

The News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra has found similar reluctance to pay. The results of its Digital News Report Australia 2019 show just 12% of regional news consumers had paid for online news, compared with 16% of urban news consumers. More detailed research produced for our report shows the difference is starkest for subscriptions.

Poorest communities hurt the most

That unwillingness to pay for online content may change if it’s the only way to get local news. Attitudes to online subscriptions are shifting, and people do value local news. Research commissioned for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Digital Platforms Inquiry found 71% of the population rated it as important as national news for social participation.

But the portents aren’t great for quality local news coverage – particularly in regional areas. The likelihood is further desertification of the local news landscape, with poorer communities most affected.

This is confirmed by US research that shows the people with the least access to local news are often “the poorest, least educated and most isolated”.

As Matthew Hindman of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy has noted: “Even the clearest local digital success stories employ only a few reporters – far less than the number laid off from the papers in their own cities.

“Worrisome, too, is the fact they have found the most traction in the affluent, social-capital rich communities that need them least.”

– ref. Digital-only local newspapers will struggle to serve the communities that need them most – https://theconversation.com/digital-only-local-newspapers-will-struggle-to-serve-the-communities-that-need-them-most-139649

Scott Morrison strengthens his policy power, enshrining national cabinet and giving it “laser-like” focus on jobs

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

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

Scott Morrison has won support for a major restructure of federal-state architecture which scraps the Council of Australian Governments, enshrines the “national cabinet” permanently, and pares down a plethora of ancillary ministerial bodies.

The Prime Minister is shaping the ongoing national cabinet around his government’s central priority of jobs, and strengthening the government’s grip on Commonwealth-state relations.

“The national cabinet will be driven by a singular agenda, and that is to create jobs,” Morrison said on Friday.

This would be its “laser-like” mission as the country came out of the COVID crisis and went into the years ahead. The national cabinet would “drive the reform process” between federal and state governments “to drive jobs.”

It would oversee ministerial cabinet subcommittees in key areas, such as skills, energy, housing, infrastructure, population, migration and transportation and “SScoty.”

The changes, agreed at Friday’s national cabinet meeting, follow the success of that body since it was set up to deal with the pandemic.

“By any measure, national cabinet has proven to be a much more effective body for taking decisions in the national interest than the COAG structure,” Morrison said.

Although like COAG the national cabinet includes federal and state leaders, it has not been hampered by so much bureaucracy. Whether what’s regarded as excessive bureaucracy can be prevented from accumulating when there’s not a crisis remains to be seen.

Nor is it clear whether partisan federal-state politicking, which has been missing at national cabinet despite some sharp disagreements, will get back to previous levels in normal times.

The national cabinet is bound by cabinet confidentiality, which likely will work to the federal government’s advantage.

It will continue to meet regularly – fortnightly at the moment and later monthly – and “initial reform areas” will be agreed by it.

But, unlike COAG, it won’t meeting in person but by “telepresence”. Morrison said the virtual meetings during the pandemic had worked incredibly well.

It will draw on a wider range of experts than just public servants.

Federal and state treasurers, who already meet regularly, will become a council of federal financial relations (CFFR). They will take responsibility for all funding agreements including national partnership agreements, and look to consolidating some of them.

The reshaped model cuts down the access of local government, the representative of which has been a permanent participant in COAG.

In the new system, once a year the national cabinet, the CFFR and the Australian Local Government Association will meet in person as the national federation reform council. This will discuss federation reform and “priority national federation issues such as Closing the Gap and women’s safety.”

Closing the Gap and women’s safety will also be on the agenda of national cabinet throughout the year.

Some 20 ministerial councils, which currently range from the regional ministerial forum to the ministerial forum on vehicle emissions, are to be consolidated. Another nine ministerial regulatory councils, presently ranging from energy to consumer affairs, are also to be reduced in number and streamlined; they are to focus on areas of key responsibilities.

Morrison said: “It’s important that ministers at state and federal level talk to each other but they don’t have to do it in such a bureaucratic form with a whole bunch of paperwork attached to it.

“They need to talk to each other, share ideas, but the congestion-busting process we’re engaged on here is simplifying that. They come together to solve problems, deal with issues and move on. They should talk to each other because they find value in it, not because of the requirements of some sort of bureaucratic process”.

– ref. Scott Morrison strengthens his policy power, enshrining national cabinet and giving it “laser-like” focus on jobs – https://theconversation.com/scott-morrison-strengthens-his-policy-power-enshrining-national-cabinet-and-giving-it-laser-like-focus-on-jobs-139678

Trump’s Twitter tantrum may wreck the internet

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Douglas, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Western Australia

US President Donald Trump, who tweeted more than 11,000 times in the first two years of his presidency, is very upset with Twitter.

Earlier this week Trump tweeted complaints about mail-in ballots, alleging voter fraud – a familiar Trump falsehood. Twitter attached a label to two of his tweets with links to sources that fact–checked the tweets, showing Trump’s claims were unsubstantiated.

Trump retaliated with the power of the presidency. On May 28 he made an “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship”. The order focuses on an important piece of legislation: section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996.

What is section 230?

Section 230 has been described as “the bedrock of the internet”.

It affects companies that host content on the internet. It provides in part:

(2) Civil liability. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of

(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).

This means that, generally, the companies behind Google, Facebook, Twitter and other “internet intermediaries” are not liable for the content on their platforms.

For example, if something defamatory is written by a Twitter user, the company Twitter Inc will enjoy a shield from liability in the United States even if the author does not.

Trump’s executive order

Within the US legal system, an executive order is a “signed, written, and published directive from the President of the United States that manages operations of the federal government”. It is not legislation. Under the Constitution of the United States, Congress – the equivalent of our Parliament – has the power to make legislation.

Trump’s executive order claims to protect free speech by narrowing the protection section 230 provides for social media companies.

The text of the order includes the following:

It is the policy of the United States that such a provider [who does not act in “good faith”, but stifles viewpoints with which they disagree] should properly lose the limited liability shield of subparagraph (c)(2)(A) and be exposed to liability like any traditional editor and publisher that is not an online provider …

To advance [this] policy … all executive departments and agencies should ensure that their application of section 230 (c) properly reflects the narrow purpose of the section and take all appropriate actions in this regard.

The order attempts to do a lot of other things too. For example, it calls for the creation of new regulations concerning section 230, and what “taken in good faith” means.

The reaction

Trump’s action has some support. Republican senator Marco Rubio said if social media companies “have now decided to exercise an editorial role like a publisher, then they should no longer be shielded from liability and treated as publishers under the law”.

Critics argue the order threatens, rather than protects, freedom of speech, thus threatening the internet itself.

The status of this order within the American legal system is an issue for American constitutional lawyers. Experts were quick to suggest the order is unconstitutional; it seems contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the US Constitution (which partly inspired Australia’s Constitution).

Harvard Law School constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe has described the order as “totally absurd and legally illiterate”.

That may be so, but the constitutionality of the order is an issue for the US judiciary. Many judges in the United States were appointed by Trump or his ideological allies.

Even if the order is legally illiterate, it should not be assumed it will lack force.

What this means for Australia

Section 230 is part of US law. It is not in force in Australia. But its effects are felt around the globe.

Social media companies who would otherwise feel safe under section 230 may be more likely to remove content when threatened with legal action.

The order might cause these companies to change their internal policies and practices. If that happens, policy changes could be implemented at a global level.

Compare, for example, what happened when the European Union introduced its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Countless companies in Australia had to ensure they were meeting European standards. US-based tech companies such as Facebook changed their privacy policies and disclosures globally – they did not want to meet two different privacy standards.

If section 230 is diminished, it could also impact Australian litigation by providing another target for people who are hurt by damaging content on social media, or accessible by internet search. When your neighbour defames you on Facebook, for example, you can sue both the neighbour and Facebook.

That was already the law in Australia. But with a toothless section 230, if you win, the judgement could be enforceable in the US.

Currently, suing certain American tech companies is not always a good idea. Even if you win, you may not be able to enforce the Australian judgement overseas. Tech companies are aware of this.

In 2017 litigation, Twitter did not even bother sending anyone to respond to litigation in the Supreme Court of New South Wales involving leaks of confidential information by tweet. When tech companies like Google have responded to Aussie litigation, it might be understood as a weird brand of corporate social responsibility: a way of keeping up appearances in an economy that makes them money.

A big day for ‘social media and fairness’?

When Trump made his order, he called it a big day for “fairness”. This is standard Trump fare. But it should not be dismissed outright.

As our own Australian Competition and Consumer Commission recognised last year in its Digital Platforms Inquiry, companies such as Twitter have enormous market power. Their exercise of that power does not always benefit society.

In recent years, social media has advanced the goals of terrorists and undermined democracy. So if social media companies can be held legally liable for some of what they cause, it may do some good.

As for Twitter, the inclusion of the fact check links was a good thing. It’s not like they deleted Trump’s tweets. Also, they’re a private company, and Trump is not compelled to use Twitter.

We should support Twitter’s recognition of its moral responsibility for the dissemination of information (and misinformation), while still leaving room for free speech.

Trump’s executive order is legally illiterate spite, but it should prompt us to consider how free we want the internet to be. And we should take that issue more seriously than we take Trump’s order.

– ref. Trump’s Twitter tantrum may wreck the internet – https://theconversation.com/trumps-twitter-tantrum-may-wreck-the-internet-139660

Government to repay 470,000 unlawful robodebts in what might be Australia’s biggest-ever financial backdown

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Terry Carney, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Sydney

In a near-complete capitulation, the government will refund every alleged overpayment it has collected from welfare recipients under the discredited “robodebt” system of income averaging.

Unveiling the automated system in mid-2016 then treasurer Scott Morrison and social services minister Christian Porter promised more “accurate and appropriate income testing”.

They were going to work with the prime minister’s Digital Transformation Office to “cut red tape and ensure that mistakes are minimised”.

The man who headed Digital Transformation Office at the time later described what happened as “cataclysmic”.

Three quarters of a billion to be paid back

Almost half a million Australians received letters from Centrelink telling them they had been overpaid because the income their employer had reported to the Tax Office was more than the income they had reported to Centrelink.

Unless they explained why within 21 days, they would have an assessment made against them and be hit by a 10% recovery fee.

Many paid up, in part because the alleged overpayments went back six years or more, and the Centrelink website had only asked them to keep payslips for six months.

Hundreds of thousands of these assessments appear to have been wrong.

Rather than using the recipients’ actual in income in the fortnights for which benefits had been paid, Centrelink calculated an average fortnightly income over a longer period which often included fortnights they were in paid employment and not receiving Centrelink benefits.

November backdown

In November 2019 a week before it was due to defend a test case brought by a 33-year-old local government worker, and after press reports that its own lawyers had told it such collections were unlawful, the government conceded all points and abandoned income averaging.

A court order declared that the debt notice was not validly issued because the decision-maker could not have been satisfied that the debt was owed.

At the time the minister for government services Stuart Robert described the decision not to proceed with income averaging as “a refinement” that would affect a “small cohort”.

On Friday, ahead of the hearing of a larger class action, Mr Robert announced that the government would refund everything collected under the scheme, whether it was calculated using partial or whole income averaging.

The refunds will be paid to all 470,000 Australians who have had debts calculated using income averaging, whether they had paid up voluntarily or not.

Now the half a million repayments

Included in the refunds will be interest charged and collection fees charged, at an estimated total cost of A$721 million.

What the Government has not agreed to is damages for harm and suffering of supposed debtors, which were sought by the class action. Although liability for damages is more difficult to establish, the class action is unlikely to abandon the attempt to obtain compensation.

The harm suffered by many of those caught up by the Government’s illegal and immoral robodebt scheme is an injustice still to be rectified.

– ref. Government to repay 470,000 unlawful robodebts in what might be Australia’s biggest-ever financial backdown – https://theconversation.com/government-to-repay-470-000-unlawful-robodebts-in-what-might-be-australias-biggest-ever-financial-backdown-139668

Jokowi deploys army, police to enforce Indonesia’s coronavirus ‘new normal’

By Asia Pacific Report -

May 29, 2020

By Marchio Irfan Gorbiano in Jakarta

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has announced that the Indonesian Military (TNI) and National Police will be deployed to guard crowded places in preparation for the so-called “new normal”.

During a visit to the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle MRT station with TNI commander Air Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto, National Police chief General Idham Azis and Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan on Tuesday, Jokowi said security forces would help to ensure that residents abided by physical distancing rules.

“Starting today, TNI and police personnel will be deployed in crowded places to make sure society continues to abide by the health protocols,” he told a media conference after the visit, adding that the personnel would be deployed in four provinces and 25 regencies and cities.

Jokowi said the basic reproduction number (R₀) of Covid-19 had fallen below one in several provinces, indicating a decline in the transmission rate in those areas, reports The Jakarta Post.

Tjahjanto said there were approximately 1800 places that would be guarded by TNI and police personnel, including shopping malls, traditional markets, tourism spots and other places with high traffic.

– Partner –

“What we will do is ensure that health protocols are carried out with discipline. Firstly, we will ensure that everyone is wearing face masks. Secondly, everyone has to maintain a safe distance. And third, we will prepare places to wash hands or provide hand sanitiser,” he said.

Last week, Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan decided to prolong large-scale social restrictions (PSBB) in the city for the third time.

They will now last until June 4.

Complying with protocols
At the press conference, Baswedan said that the administration’s decision to stop or continue PSBB after that date would depend on how well Jakarta people complied with the protocols over the next two weeks.

“These two weeks are the two weeks that will determine whether this will be the last period of PSBB or whether there will be another extension of PSBB,” he said.

On Saturday, Health Minister Terawan Agus Putranto issued new health protocols for workplaces to usher in the “new normal”.

According to latest count, Indonesia had 24,538 confirmed Covid-19 cases with 1496 deaths as of today.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

High Court ruling on ‘Palace letters’ case paves way to learn more about The Dismissal – and Australia’s Constitution

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anne Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Sydney

The High Court has ruled that Sir John Kerr’s correspondence with the queen comprises “Commonwealth records”. This means access to them is now in Australian hands and can no longer be vetoed by the private secretary to the queen.

This correspondence, which includes Kerr’s briefings to the queen on the political crisis prior to the dismissal of the Whitlam government on November 11 1975, and his explanation to her afterwards of why he exercised this power, have so far been kept from public view.

The High Court’s decision opens the possibility that we will finally see the last pieces of factual evidence about The Dismissal – revealing the concerns and reasoning of the governor-general, as events occurred, without the gloss of hindsight.

It could even allow this festering wound in our political history to be healed, once all the information has been revealed. But it depends now on what the National Archives does next.

How were these letters treated until now?

Until now, the National Archives has claimed all correspondence it holds between governors-general and the queen, even when written in their official capacities, is “personal” and not a “Commonwealth record”.

This means there was no legal obligation on the National Archives to provide public access to these letters. Instead, the National Archives had stated it could only release these documents in accordance with the conditions placed on them by the person who lodged them with the National Archives.

But it let those conditions be changed on the instructions of the queen in 1991 so that her private secretary and the secretary of the governor-general held a veto over the release of any such correspondence.

In the case brought by academic Jenny Hocking against the National Archives, the High Court held by a majority of six to one that the letters between Sir John Kerr and the queen were created, received and held as institutional documents by the “official establishment of the Governor-General” before being transferred to the National Archives by the official secretary to the governor-general in his official capacity. This level of official control over them was enough to make them “Commonwealth records”, even if the governor-general still held ownership rights over them (which the majority said it did not need to decide).

In their joint judgment, Chief Justice Kiefel and Justices Bell, Gageler and Keane said they could not see how the correspondence could be described, however “loosely”, as “private or personal records of the Governor-General”.

They said it could not be supposed that Kerr could have taken the correspondence from the governor-general’s official establishment and destroyed or sold it.

Justice Gordon thought even if Kerr did have property rights in the original documents, he gave up any claim to them when they were deposited with the National Archives. Justice Edelman agreed the correspondence between the governor-general and the queen was “created or received officially and kept institutionally”.

Only Justice Nettle concluded these letters were personal communications between Kerr and the Queen, and were not Commonwealth records.

Does this mean we get to see the letters now?

The court did not order that the letters be publicly released. Instead, it ordered the director-general of the National Archives reconsider Jenny Hocking’s request for access to the correspondence held by the archives, treating them as Commonwealth records.

Section 31 of the Archives Act 1983 requires the National Archives to give public access to any Commonwealth record that it holds that is within the open access period and is not an “exempt record”.

The correspondence between Kerr and the queen has been in the “open access period” since 2006/2007. The only question that remains is whether the director-general will now claim that the correspondence is comprised of “exempt records”.

Section 33 of the Act lists a number of exemptions. These include documents that could reasonably be expected to cause damage to international relations, or where disclosure of matters in the record would constitute a breach of confidence.

The damage that might be caused by the release of documents necessarily diminishes over time. So even if these exemptions are claimed, consideration would have to be given to whether they remain applicable, given the age of the documents.

The director-general of the National Archives responded to the High Court’s decision by stating the “National Archives is a pro-disclosure organisation” that operates on the basis of making records publicly available “unless there is a specific and compelling need to withhold it”.

It will be interesting to see what “compelling” needs it might identify.

Are there any wider implications of the decision?

The High Court’s decision will also affect the release of correspondence by other governors-general. The release of Lord Casey’s correspondence with the Queen was recently blocked by Buckingham Palace, which stated it would refuse access to any correspondence with the queen until at least five years after her death, and then only if the private secretary to the new monarch agrees. That veto has now been destroyed by the High Court.

So not only is Kerr’s correspondence with the queen liable to be opened, but also the correspondence by all other governors-general with the queen, when it is in the “open access period” and subject to any exemption.

That may mean we get a better idea of how the roles of the governor-general and the queen operate under our Constitution, which would be a good thing.

– ref. High Court ruling on ‘Palace letters’ case paves way to learn more about The Dismissal – and our Constitution – https://theconversation.com/high-court-ruling-on-palace-letters-case-paves-way-to-learn-more-about-the-dismissal-and-our-constitution-139391

Whoever invents a coronavirus vaccine will control the patent – and, importantly, who gets to use it

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Natalie Stoianoff, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney

With research laboratories around the world racing to develop a coronavirus vaccine, a unique challenge has emerged: how to balance intellectual property rights with serving the public good.

Questions of patent protection and access to those patents has prompted an international group of scientists and lawyers to establish the Open COVID Pledge.

This movement calls on organisations to freely make available their existing patents and copyrights associated with vaccine research to create an open patent pool to solve a global problem.

The EU is leading the charge to create such a pool by drafting a resolution at the World Health Organisation. The US, UK and a few others have been opposed to this idea.

For now, however, there are very few pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporations participating in the pledge, raising questions over whether the initiative will work.

Instead, universities, publicly funded research institutes and pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporations are working on vaccine research through international consortia or public-private partnerships.

If one group does develop a viable vaccine, this raises other questions that will soon need to be addressed:

who is funding the research, and who has the rights to any patents coming out of it?
can governments compel the owners of those patents to license other manufacturers to make the vaccines or medicines?

What are patent rights and why are they important?

Patent rights are a form of intellectual property rights. They provide creators of new inventions, like novel vaccines and medicines, with a limited-term monopoly over those inventions in the marketplace to help recover the costs of research and development.

In other words, patents are an incentive to invent or innovate.

Patents are granted by individual nations, but don’t apply across borders. To gain global protection, an inventor needs to apply for patents in every country – something that could be critical when it comes to vaccines. The Patent Cooperation Treaty helps to streamline the process, but it is still expensive and time-consuming.

The limited-term monopoly on the market is balanced by the requirement that patent holders share information about their inventions in a register to make it available for anyone to use after the patent protection expires. The term of a standard patent is usually 20 years.

During the patent period, patent holders have exclusive rights to manufacture and sell their inventions. Or, they can choose to license the technology to others to manufacture and sell to the public.

Such licences include a specified time limit and geographical area to exploit the patent. In return, the patent holder receives royalties or licence fees, or both.

So, the race to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 is not just about saving lives during a pandemic, it’s also about owning the patent rights. This gives the owner control over the manufacturing and distribution of the vaccine in the countries where the patent rights are granted.

Who is currently researching a coronavirus vaccine?

The race currently includes universities, publicly funded research institutes and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, some working in partnership with government institutions.

The company that just announced early positive results on a vaccine is Moderna, a biotech company based in the US, which is working with the National Institutes of Health. A number of other developers are also doing human trials globally, including many in China.

When private companies and government institutions partner on developing a vaccine, it may result in joint ownership of a patent. This gives each owner the right to manufacture the vaccine, but only together they can license the manufacturing to third parties.

What about the rights of nations?

Even if patent ownership is in the hands of private companies, the state may still have the right to use them for its own purposes or in the case of emergencies. Many countries have specific laws to facilitate these arrangements.

In the US, the Bayh-Dole Act 1980 ensures the government retains sufficient rights to use patents resulting from federally supported research.

Under these rights, the government can be granted a free license to use the patent itself or the right to arrange for a third party to use the patent on its behalf.

In cases where the patent holder of a publicly funded invention refuses to licence it to third parties, the Bayh-Dole Act gives the government “march-in” rights.

Under specific guidelines, this means a forced licence can be granted to a third party on reasonable terms. This includes in cases when the “action is necessary to alleviate health or safety needs” or to ensure the patented invention is actually manufactured within a reasonable time.

In the case of COVID-19 research, this means the US government could order a corporation or university that invents a vaccine with federal funding to license the patent to others to make it.

In Australia, the government can exploit the patented inventions of others under right of “crown use”. In these cases, the patent holder is entitled to financial compensation from the government.

Like most other members of the World Trade Organisation, Australia also has compulsory licensing rules in its patent law that force inventors to license their patents to third parties on reasonable terms in specific circumstances.

In reality, though, such compulsory licences are under-utilised in countries like Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Japan, and rarely granted, if at all.

Working together for the common good

This brings us to the Open COVID Pledge, which is designed to make the relevant intellectual property freely available under an open licence.

Such open-access licensing has been used in the publishing industry for years, for example with Creative Commons publications online, and in the technology industry through open-source licences.

If more of the public-private partnerships working on a coronavirus vaccine do sign up to the pledge, perhaps it will be one of the positives to come out of the pandemic. It could allow open-access licences for lifesaving technologies to become accepted practice.

– ref. Whoever invents a coronavirus vaccine will control the patent – and, importantly, who gets to use it – https://theconversation.com/whoever-invents-a-coronavirus-vaccine-will-control-the-patent-and-importantly-who-gets-to-use-it-138121

VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on JobKeeper, JobMaker, and Eden-Monaro

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

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

Michelle Grattan talks with Professor Caroline Fisher (remotely) about the week in politics, including the treasury’s miscalculation on JobKeeper, the prime minister’s promise to “make the boat go faster”, and the limitations of the coronavirus debate in Eden-Monaro.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on JobKeeper, JobMaker, and Eden-Monaro – https://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-jobkeeper-jobmaker-and-eden-monaro-139664

Really Australia, it’s not that hard: 10 reasons why renewable energy is the future

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Blakers, Professor of Engineering, Australian National University

Australia’s latest greenhouse gas figures released today show national emissions fell slightly last year. This was by no means an economy-wide effort – solar and wind energy did most of the heavy lifting.

Emissions fell 0.9% last year compared to 2018. The rapid deployment of solar and wind is slashing emissions in the electricity sector, offsetting increases from all other sectors combined.

Renewables (solar, wind and hydro) now comprise 26% of the mix in the National Electricity Market. In 2023, renewables will likely pass black coal to become the largest electricity source.

In an ideal world, all sectors of the economy – transport, agriculture, manufacturing and others – would pull in the same direction to cut emissions. But hearteningly, these figures show the huge potential for renewables.

Here are 10 reasons why renewable energy makes perfect sense for Australia.

Australia leads the world in rooftop solar installations. David Mariuz/AAP

1. It can readily eliminate fossil fuels

About 15 gigawatts of solar and wind farms will probably start operating over 2018-2021. That’s on top of more than 2 gigawatts of rooftop solar to be added each year.

It averages out at about 6 gigawatts of additional solar and wind power annually. Research from the Australian National University, which is under review, shows the rate only has to double to about 12 gigawatts to eliminate fossil fuels by 2050, including from electricity, transport, heating and industry.

Fossil fuel mining and use causes 85% of total national emissions – and doubling the renewables deployment rate would eliminate this.

The task becomes more than achievable when you consider the continual fall in renewables prices, which helped treble solar and wind deployment between 2017 and 2020.

2. Solar is already king

Solar is the top global energy technology in terms of new generation capacity added each year, with wind energy in second spot. Solar and wind energy are already huge industries globally, and employ 27,000 people in Australia – a doubling in just three years.

3. Solar and wind are getting cheaper

Solar and wind electricity in Australia already costs less than it would from new coal and gas plants.

The price is headed for A$30 per megawatt hour in 2030. This undercuts most existing gas and coal stations and competes with gas for industrial heating.

Renewable electricity is becoming cheaper than coal-fired power. Petr Josek/Reuters

4. Stable renewable electricity is not hard

Balancing renewables is a straightforward exercise using existing technology. The current high voltage transmission network must be strengthened so projects in regional areas can deliver renewable electricity into cities. And if wind and sun is not plentiful in one region, a stronger transmission network can deliver electricity from elsewhere. Electricity storage such as pumped hydro and batteries can also smooth out supplies.

5. There’s enough land

To eliminate all fossil fuel use, Australia would need about 60 square metres of solar panel per person, and one wind turbine per 2,000 people. Panels on rooftops take up no land, and wind turbines use very little. If global energy consumption per person increased drastically to reach Australian levels, solar farms on just 0.1% of Earth’s surface could meet this demand.

6. Raw materials won’t run out

A solar panel needs silicon, a glass cover, plastic, an aluminium panel frame, copper and aluminium electrical conductors and small amounts of other common materials. These materials are what our world is made of. Recycling panel materials at the end of their life adds only slightly to larger existing recycling streams.

Solar panel materials are relatively easy to obtain. Tim Winbourne/Reuters

7. Nearly every country has good sun or wind

Three-quarters of the global population lives in the planet’s sunbelt (lower than 35 degrees of latitude). This includes most developing countries, where most of the growth in energy consumption and greenhouse emissions is occurring.

8. We will never go to war over sunshine

Solar and wind power make energy systems much more robust in the face of a pandemic, disasters or war. They are difficult to misuse in any significant way for military, terrorist or criminal activities. And it is hard to destroy billions of solar panels spread over millions of square kilometres.

9. Solar accidents and pollution are small

Solar panel accidents pale in comparison to spilled radioactive material (like Fukushima or Chernobyl), an oil disaster (like BP’s Deepwater Horizon), or a coal mine fire (like Hazelwood in Victoria). Wind and solar electricity eliminates oil imports, oil-related warfare, fracking for gas, strip mining for coal, smokestacks, car exhausts and smog.

10. Payback time is short

For a sunny country like Australia, the time required to recover the energy invested in panel manufacture is less than two years, compared with a panel lifetime of 30 years. And when the world is solar powered, the energy required to produce more panels is non-polluting.

Renewable energy can do they heavy lifting on emissions reduction. Vincent West/Reuters

The future is bright

While COVID-19 triggered a significant fall in global emissions so far this year, they may bounce back. But if solar and wind deployment stay at current levels, Australia is tracking towards meeting its Paris target.

The Reserve Bank of Australia says investment in renewables may moderate in the near term, but “over the longer term, the transition towards renewable energy generation is expected to continue”.

But there are hurdles. In the short term, more transmission infrastructure is needed. Electrifying transport (with electric vehicles) and urban heating (with electric heat pumps) is straightforward. More difficult is eliminating fossil fuels from industries such as steel and fertilisers. This is a task for the 2030s.

But it’s clear that to get to net-zero carbon emissions by mid century, solar and wind are far and away Australia’s best option.

– ref. Really Australia, it’s not that hard: 10 reasons why renewable energy is the future – https://theconversation.com/really-australia-its-not-that-hard-10-reasons-why-renewable-energy-is-the-future-130459

After a storm, microplastics in Sydney’s Cooks River increased 40 fold

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Hitchcock, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Canberra

Each year the ocean is inundated with 4.8 to 12.7 million tonnes of plastic washed in from land. A big proportion of this plastic is between 0.001 to 5 millimetres, and called “microplastic”.

But what happens during a storm, when lashings of rain funnel even more water from urban land into waterways? To date, no one has studied just how important storm events may be in polluting waterways with microplastics.

So to find out, I studied my local waterway in Sydney, the Cooks River estuary. I headed out daily to measure how many microplastics were in the water, before, during, and after a major storm event in October, 2018.

The results, published on Wednesday, were startling. Microplastic particles in the river had increased more than 40 fold from the storm.

Particles of plastic found in rivers. They may be tiny, but they’re devastating to wildlife in waterways. Author provided

To inner west Sydneysiders, the Cooks River is known to be particularly polluted. But it’s largely similar to many urban catchments around the world.

If the relationship between storm events and microplastic I found in the Cooks River holds for other urban rivers, then the concentrations of microplastics we’re exposing aquatic animals to is far higher than previously thought.

14 million plastic particles

They may be tiny, but microplastics are a major concern for aquatic life and food webs. Animals such as small fish and zooplankton directly consume the particles, and ingesting microplastics has the potential to slow growth, interfere with reproduction, and cause death.

Determining exactly how much microplastic enters rivers during storms required the rather unglamorous task of standing in the rain to collect water samples, while watching streams of unwanted debris float by (highlights included a fire extinguisher, a two-piece suit, and a litany of tennis balls).

Back in the laboratory, a multi-stage process is used to separate microplastics. This includes floating, filtering, and using strong chemical solutions to dissolve non-plastic items, before identification and counting with specialised microscopes.

Litter caught in a trap in Cooks River. These traps aren’t effective at catching microplastic. Author provided

In the days before the October 2018 storm, there were 0.4 particles of microplastic per litre of water in the Cooks River. That jumped to 17.4 microplastics per litre after the storm.

Overall, that number averages to a total of 13.8 million microplastic particles floating around in the Cooks River estuary in the days after the storm.

In other urban waterways around the world scientists have found similarly high numbers of microplastic.

For example in China’s Pearl River, microplastic averages 19.9 particles per litre. In the Mississippi River in the US, microplastic ranges from 28 to 60 particles per litre.

Where do microplastics come from?

We know runoff during storms is one of the main ways pollutants such as sediments and heavy metals end up in waterways. But not much is known about how microplastic gets there.

However think about your street. Wherever you see litter, there are also probably microplastics you cannot see that will eventually work their way into waterways when it rains.

Many other sources of microplastics are less obvious. Car tyres, for example, which typically contain more plastic than rubber, are a major source of microplastics in our waterways. When your tyres lose tread over time, microscopic tyre fragments are left on roads.

Did you know your car tyres can be a major source of microplastic pollution? Shutterstock

Microplastics may even build up on roads and rooftops from atmospheric deposition. Everyday, lightweight microplastics such as microfibres from synthetic clothing are carried in the wind, settling and accumulating before they’re washed into rivers and streams.

What’s more, during storms wastewater systems may overflow, contaminating waterways. Along with sewage, this can include high concentrations of synthetic microfibers from household washing machines.

And in regional areas, microplastics may be washing in from agricultural soils. Sewage sludge is often applied to soils as it is rich in nutrients, but the same sludge is also rich in microplastics.

What can be done?

There are many ways to mitigate the negative effects of stormwater on waterways.

Screens, traps, and booms can be fitted to outlets and rivers and catch large pieces of litter such as bottles and packaging. But how useful these approaches are for microplastics is unknown.

Raingardens and retention ponds are used to catch and slow stormwater down, allowing pollutants to drop to bottom rather than being transported into rivers. Artificial wetlands work in similar ways, diverting stormwater to allow natural processes to remove toxins from the water.

Almost 14 million plastic particles were floating in Cooks River after a storm two years ago. Shutterstock

But while mitigating the effects of stormwater carrying microplastics is important, the only way we’ll truly stop this pollution is to reduce our reliance on plastic. We must develop policies to reduce and regulate how much plastic material is produced and sold.

Plastic is ubiquitous, and its production around the world hasn’t slowed, reaching 359 million tonnes each year. Many countries now have or plan to introduce laws regulating the sale or production of some items such as plastic bags, single-use plastics and microbeads in cleaning products.

In Australia, most state governments have committed to banning plastic bags, but there are still no laws banning the use of microplastics in cleaning or cosmetic products, or single-use plastics.

We’ve made a good start, but we’ll need deeper changes to what we produce and consume to stem the tide of microplastics in our waterways.

– ref. After a storm, microplastics in Sydney’s Cooks River increased 40 fold – https://theconversation.com/after-a-storm-microplastics-in-sydneys-cooks-river-increased-40-fold-139043

Politics with Michelle Grattan: Treasurer Josh Frydenberg on saving Australia’s tourism and construction industries

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

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

As Australia slowly emerges from isolation, the nation’s economy is reopening, and even looking rather better than expected. But Australia still faces grim months ahead as unemployment numbers grow and the true extent of business survival rates emerge.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg described the economic data as sobering when he recently gave an update to parliament. In this podcast, Frydenberg says there would be greater reason for optimism, especially for the tourism sector, if states were more willing open their borders.

“Now we need to see those state borders opened, whether it’s in Queensland or Western Australia, South Australia or Tasmania,” he says.

The Northern Territory will begin easing its border restrictions from June 15, scrapping mandatory quarantine for interstate arrivals. But both the Queensland and Western Australian governments say they will likely keep the measures in place for several months. Tasmania’s premier too is standing firm on his decision to keep the state’s borders closed.

Frydenberg says the government has reacted to COVID-19 “in an unprecedented way in terms of the scale and the size of our response” but reiterates that “the measures are temporary and targeted. And we want people to get back to work as soon as possible”.

However he acknowledges the housing construction and tourism sectors are in need of particular support.

On housing, “we recognise that there may be contracts in place to July or August, which is going to see the pipeline continue to then, but then we’re going to see probably a steady fall after that. And that’s the gap that we need to try to fill with particular measures.”

“It’s a watching brief, but certainly both areas are a focus for the government.”

Frydenberg also indicates that after the June review of the JobKeeper payment, some people could get less money than they are receiving now.

“There are a few issues we need to look at, including some workers within the JobKeeper programme getting paid more than they normally would otherwise get.”

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

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Joel Carrett/AAP

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Treasurer Josh Frydenberg on saving Australia’s tourism and construction industries – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-treasurer-josh-frydenberg-on-saving-australias-tourism-and-construction-industries-139656

The coronavirus pandemic is boosting the big tech transformation to warp speed

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zac Rogers, Research Lead, Jeff Bleich Centre for the US Alliance in Digital Technology, Security, and Governance, Flinders University

The coronavirus pandemic has sped up changes that were already happening across society, from remote learning and work to e-health, supply chains and logistics, policing, welfare and beyond. Big tech companies have not hesitated to make the most of the crisis.

In New York for example, former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is leading a panel tasked with transforming the city after the pandemic, “focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband”. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has also been called in, to help create “a smarter education system”.

The government, health, education and defence sectors have long been prime targets for “digital disruption”. The American business expert Scott Galloway and others have argued they are irresistible pools of demand for the big tech firms.

As author and activist Naomi Klein writes, changes in these and other areas of our lives are about to see “a warp-speed acceleration”.

All these transformations will follow a similar model: using automated platforms to gather and analyse data via online surveillance, then using it to predict and intervene in human behaviour.

The control revolution

The changes now under way are the latest phase of a socio-technical transformation that sociologist James Beniger, writing in the 1980s, called a “control revolution”. This revolution began with the use of electronic systems for information gathering and communication to facilitate mass production and distribution of goods in the 19th century.

After World War II the revolution accelerated as governments and industry began to embrace cybernetics, the scientific study of control and communication. Even before COVID-19, we were already in the “reflexive phase” of the control revolution, in which big data and predictive technologies have been turned to the goal of automating human behaviour.

The next phase is what we might call the “uberisation of everything”: replacing existing institutions and processes of government with computational code, in the same way Uber replaced government-regulated taxi systems with a smartphone app.

Information economics

Beginning in the 1940s, the work of information theory pioneer Claude Shannon had a deep effect on economists, who saw analogies between signals in electrical circuits and many systems in society. Chief among these new information economists was Leonid Hurwicz, winner of a 2007 Nobel Prize for his work on “mechanism design theory”.

Information theorist Claude Shannon also conducted early experiments in artificial intelligence, including the creation of a maze-solving mechanical mouse. Bell Labs

Economists have pursued analogies between human and mechanical systems ever since, in part because they lend themselves to modelling, calculation and prediction.

These analogies helped usher in a new economic orthodoxy formed around the ideas of F.A. Hayek, who believed the problem of allocating resources in society was best understood in terms of information processing.

By the 1960s, Hayek had come to view thinking individuals as almost superfluous to the operation of the economy. A better way to allocate resources was to leave decisions to “the market”, which he saw as an omniscient information processor.

Putting information-processing first turned economics on its head. The economic historians Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah argue economists moved from “ensuring markets give people what they want” to insisting they can make markets produce “any desired outcome regardless of what people want”.

By the 1990s this orthodoxy was triumphant across much of the world. By the late 2000s it was so deeply enmeshed that even the global financial crisis – a market failure of catastrophic proportions – could not dislodge it.

Market society

This orthodoxy holds that if information markets make for efficient resource allocation, it makes sense to put them in charge. We’ve seen many kinds of decisions turned over to automated data-driven markets, designed as auctions.

Online advertising illustrates how this works. First, the data generated by each visitor to a page is gathered, analysed and categorised, with each category acquiring a predictive probability of a given behaviour: buying a given product or service.

Then an automated auction occurs at speed as a web page is loading, matching these behavioural probabilities with clients’ products and services. The goal is to “nudge” the user’s behaviour. As Douglas Rushkoff explains, someone in a category that is 80% likely to do a certain thing might be manipulated up to 85% or 90% if they are shown the right ad.

This model is being scaled up to treat society as a whole as a vast signalling device. All human behaviour can be taken as a bid in an invisible auction that aims to optimise resource allocation.

To gather the bids, however, the market needs ever greater awareness of human behaviour. That means total surveillance is here to stay, and will get more intense and pervasive.

Growing surveillance combined with algorithmic interventions in human behaviour constrain our choices to an ever greater extent. Being nudged from an 80% to an 85% chance of doing something might seem innocuous, but that diminishing 20% of unpredictability is the site of human creativity, learning, discovery and choice. Becoming more predictable also means becoming more fragile.

Videoconferencing has boomed in schools and workplaces, with software like Zoom and Microsoft teams reporting enormous increases in usership. Lukas Koch / AAP

In praise of obscurity

The pandemic has pushed many of us into doing even more by digital means, hitting fast-forward on the growth of surveillance and algorithmic influence, bringing more and more human behaviour into the realm of statistical probability and manipulation.

Concerns about total surveillance are often couched as discussions of privacy, but now is the time to think about the importance of obscurity. Obscurity moves beyond questions of privacy and anonymity to the issue, as Matthew Crawford identifies, of our “qualitative experience of institutional authority”. Obscurity is a buffer zone – a space to be an unobserved, uncategorised, unoptimised human – from which a citizen can enact her democratic rights.

The onrush of digitisation caused by the pandemic may have a positive effect, if the body politic senses the urgency of coming to terms with the widening gap between fast-moving technology and its institutions.

The algorithmic market, left to its optimisation function, may well eventually come to see obscurity an act of economic terrorism. Such an approach cannot form the basis of institutional authority in a democracy. It’s time to address the real implications of digital technology.

– ref. The coronavirus pandemic is boosting the big tech transformation to warp speed – https://theconversation.com/the-coronavirus-pandemic-is-boosting-the-big-tech-transformation-to-warp-speed-138537

There is no specific crime of catfishing. But is it illegal?

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marilyn McMahon, Deputy Dean, School of Law, Deakin University

Twenty-year-old Sydney woman Renae Marsden died by suicide after she was the victim of an elaborate catfishing scam.

A recent coronial investigation into her 2013 death found no offence had been committed by the perpetrator, revealing the difficulties of dealing with this new and emerging phenomenon.

While we wait for law reform in this area, we think police and prosecutors could make better use of our existing laws to deal with these sorts of behaviours.

What is catfishing?

“Catfishing” occurs when a person creates a fake profile on social media in order to deceive someone else and abuse them, take their money or otherwise manipulate and control them.

While statistics about the prevalence of catfishing are elusive, popular dating sites such as eHarmony and the Australian government’s eSafety Commission offer advice about spotting catfishers.

Catfishing is also the subject of an MTV reality series, major Hollywood films, and psychological research on why people do it.

Dangerous, damaging but not a specific crime

There is no specific crime of catfishing in Australia. But there are many different behaviours involved in catfishing, which can come under various existing offences.

One of these is financial fraud. In 2018, a Canberra woman pleaded guilty to 10 fraud offences after she created an elaborate and false online profile on a dating website. She befriended at least ten men online, then lied to them about having cancer and other illnesses and asked them to help her pay for treatment. She obtained more than $300,000.

Catfishers create fake online profiles to deceive others. www.shutterstock.com

Another crime associated with catfishing is stalking. In 2019, a Victorian woman was convicted of stalking and sentenced to two years and eight months jail after she created a Facebook page where she pretended to be Australian actor Lincoln Lewis. This case is currently subject to an appeal.

The grey area of psychological and emotional abuse

When catfishing doesn’t involve fraud or threats, but involves psychological and emotional manipulation, it can be more difficult to obtain convictions.

One of the most notorious cases occurred more than a decade ago in the United States. Missouri mother Lori Drew catfished a teenager she believed had been unkind to her daughter.

With the help of her daughter and young employee, Drew created a fake MySpace profile as a teenage boy and contacted the 13-year-old victim. Online flirting took place until the relationship was abruptly ended. The victim was told that “the world would be a better place without her”. Later that day, she killed herself.

Because the harm suffered by the victim was not physical but psychological, and had been perpetrated online, prosecutors had trouble identifying an appropriate criminal charge.

Eventually, Drew was charged with computer fraud and found guilty. But the conviction was overturned in 2009 when an appeal court concluded the legislation was never meant to capture this type of behaviour.

Renae Marsden’s case

The harm done to Marsden was also psychological and emotional. She was deliberately deceived and psychologically manipulated through the creation of a fake online identity by one of her oldest female friends.

Marsden thought she had met a man online who would become her husband. For almost two years, they exchanged thousands of text and Facebook messages. Marsden ended an engagement to another man so that she could be with the man she met online. They planned their wedding.

When he abruptly ended the relationship, Marsden ended her life.

The coroner described the conduct of Marsden’s catfisher as “appalling” and an “extreme betrayal”, but found that no offence had been committed. She observed:

Where ‘catfishing’ is without threat or intimidation or is not for monetary gain, then the conduct appears to be committed with the intent to coerce and control someone for the purpose of a wish fulfilment or some other gratification. Though such conduct may cause the recipient mental and or physical harm because it is not conduct committed with the necessary intent it falls outside the parameters of a known State criminal offence.

Existing laws like manslaughter could apply

We disagree with the coroner’s conclusion. We think that existing state criminal offences might capture some of this behaviour.

In particular, deliberately deceptive and psychologically manipulative online conduct, resulting in the death of a victim by suicide, could potentially make a perpetrator liable for manslaughter.

This is because a perpetrator who commits the offence of recklessly causing grievous bodily harm (which may include psychological harm), in circumstances where a reasonable person would realise this exposed the victim to an appreciable risk of serious injury, could be liable for the crime of “manslaughter by unlawful and dangerous act”.

Such prosecutions can and should be contemplated as an appropriate response to the serious wrongdoing that has occurred.

Where to from here?

Marsden’s parents are pushing for catfishing to be made illegal.

Teresa and Mark Marsden want catfishing to be made illegal. Dean Lewis/AAP

The coroner chose not to recommend a specific offence of catfishing, noting:

there are complex matters which were not canvassed at the inquest which need to be taken into account before any coronial recommendation involving the introduction of criminal legislation.

But the report did recommend a closer look at making “coercive control” an offence.

Coercive control involves a wide range of controlling behaviours and could potentially criminalise the sort of psychologically and emotionally abusive conduct Marsden experienced.

It is also on the political agenda. In March, New South Wales Attorney-General Mark Speakman announced he would consult on possible new “coercive control” laws.

We note, however, that the coercive control discussion is happening in the context of domestic violence. Whether prospective new laws can or should extend to catfishing will require careful consideration and drafting.

While we wait for a new offence, we should also ensure that we make use of the laws we already have to protect people from the devastating damage that can be done by catfishing.

– ref. There is no specific crime of catfishing. But is it illegal? – https://theconversation.com/there-is-no-specific-crime-of-catfishing-but-is-it-illegal-139217

Newsletter: New Zealand Politics Daily – May 29 2020

By Bryce Edwards -

May 29, 2020

New-Zealand-Parliament — New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.

Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.

Today’s content

Fresh water reforms, environment, conservation
Richard Harman (Politik): Swimming together; the coalition agrees on freshwater reforms
Collette Devlin (Stuff): NZ First claims win as Government softens freshwater reforms
Russel Death (Spinoff): Even China’s waterways are better protected than New Zealand’s
Jamie Morton (Herald): New Govt water reforms miss mark on nitrogen pollution, advocates say
Science Media Centre: Action for Healthy Waterways – Expert Reaction
Amber-Leigh Woolf (Stuff): Explainer: $700m to make waterways clean again
No Right Turn: Chickening out on clean rivers
Anna Bracewell-Worrall (Newshub): Govt’s $700 million waterway reform brings mixed reviews
Newstalk ZB: What farmers think of Government’s freshwater reforms
Brent Edwards (NBR): Questions asked about regional councils implementing new freshwater policies (paywalled)
Gavin Evans (BusinessDesk): More time for farmers, councils in govt water reforms (paywalled)c
Molly Houseman (ODT): Freshwater plans meet with approval
Brent Edwards (NBR): Government confirms plan to clean up waterways but makes concessions (paywalled)
Charlie Dreaver (RNZ): Government pushes ahead with landmark freshwater reform
Marc Daalder (Newsroom): Govt promises clean waterways with final freshwater plan
RNZ: Government sticks to strict waterways rules, adds $700m for jobs
Anna Whyte (1News): Govt reveals $700m plan to improve New Zealand’s waterways, stave off risk to ‘clean, green reputation’
Collette Devlin (Stuff): Government pumps $700m into cleaning up waterways
Jenée Tibshraeny (Interest): Finalised freshwater reforms half as costly as those proposed last year
Alex Braae (Spinoff): Te Mana O te Wai: What’s in the government’s new freshwater cleanup package?
Steven Walton (Stuff): $700m ‘long-term’ waterways package could restore swimming at Lake Ellesmere
—————
Charlie Mitchell (Stuff): A push for new coal mines amid ‘alarming’ fast-tracking of infrastructure
Olivia Wannan (Stuff): High-carbon ‘shovel-ready’ projects should be denied – Commission
RNZ: After the Virus: The Environment
Jessica Desmond (Guardian): New Zealand’s new plan to save our seabirds is strong on rhetoric but light on action
Michael Neilson (Herald): Hauraki Gulf recreational crayfish take slashed in half – scientists say not enough
Chloe Ranford: Social distance rules see 360 tonnes of Marlborough’s recycling diverted to landfill
RNZ: Auckland drought ‘a wake up call’ for water supply
RNZ: Offshore wind farm proponents warned surf breaks will be protected

National Party
Peter Dunne (Newsroom): Only one thing matters
Brent Edwards (NBR): Missteps mark Todd Muller’s first week as National Party leader (paywalled)
Simon Wilson (Herald): The big thing we’ve learned about Todd Muller (paywalled)
Kate Hawkesby (Newstalk ZB): Bridges must be licking his chops after Muller’s performance
Rosemary McLeod (Stuff): Todd Muller: If the cap fits, hide it
Newstalk ZB: Do the National Party have an ‘intelligence unit’ for the election?
1News: ‘Don’t just look at the colour of people’s skin’ – Bennett defends National’s largely white front bench
1News: ‘Politics is brutal and it’s public’ – Paula Bennett opens up about demotion
Zane Small (Newshub): Winston Peters mocks National MPs for ‘fighting from the backbenches’ against new leaders Todd Muller, Nikki Kaye
Michael Neilson (Herald): Māori Party co-leader John Tamihere says National ‘pushing Māori’ away, but not ruling out working with them
RNZ: National says ‘no talk’ of cutting benefits
Vita Molyneux (Newshub): National MP Maureen Pugh blasted for ‘misleading’ economic statistics comparing Greece and New Zealand
Mike Tweed (Whanganui Chronicle): Whanganui MP Harete Hipango picks up Māori Crown Relations portfolio
Mike Tweed (Whanganui Chronicle): TVNZ pulls episode after Whanganui MP Harete Hipango hits out at ‘insult’ (paywalled)

Parliament, election
Audrey Young (Herald): The best and the worst – rating our MPs under Covid 19 Coronavirus crisis (paywalled)
Peter Dunne: This is shaping up to be New Zealand’s most dramatic and unusual election ever
Herald: James Shaw: A coalition with National ‘not up to leadership’
Herald: Former Opposition leaders explain why the leader of the Opposition is the hardest job in politics (paywalled)

Trans-Tasman, Pacific bubble, Alert levels
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Stuff): Opinion: Time to cool the hype on the trans-Tasman bubble
Melissa Chan-Green (Newshub): ‘We are not safe enough for you’: Epidemiologists weigh in on safety of trans-Tasman bubble
Rachel Sadler (Newshub): Trans-Tasman bubble ‘realistic’ by September – Jacinda Ardern
Yvette McCullough (RNZ): Travel between NZ and Australia could start in September
Julie Iles (NBR): Deputy PM: trans-Tasman bubble ‘can’t wait’ for every state (paywalled)
Derek Cheng (Herald): Winston Peters says a transtasman bubble can safely be done now
Alan Kenyon (1News): Winston Peters says he’d like to see trans-Tasman bubble implemented ‘yesterday’ when pressed in Parliament
Stuff: Jacinda Ardern says trans-Tasman bubble could open in September, but Winston Peters wanted it open yesterday
Calida Stuart-Menteath (NBR): No ‘health passport’ likely for trans-Tasman travel bubble, Ak Airport chief says (paywalled)
RNZ: NZ health chief says Pacific bubble risks could be managed
Derek Cheng (Herald): Jacinda Ardern’s wriggle room on moving to alert level 1 early
John Weekes (Stuff): NZ could be declared free of Covid-19 in 21 days
Brittney Deguara (Stuff): Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern compares notes with ‘early movers’ Singapore, Australia, Denmark

Health
Phil Pennington (RNZ): Health Ministry ‘considering options’ to increase funding
Andre Chumko and Bridie Witton (Stuff): Covid-19 will make health inequality worse, experts say
Nicholas Jones (Herald): Testing gaps at virus-hit St Margaret’s rest home risked ‘catastrophe’
Amelia Wade (Herald): How were healthcare workers infected with Covid-19 at work? The Ministry of Health doesn’t know
Rowan Quinn (RNZ): Unions challenge WorkSafe on Covid-19 infections at Waitākere Hospital
Rowan Quinn (RNZ): Review highlights need for cohesive national contact tracing system
Bruce Munro (ODT): WHO about to call for mass masking – Otago academic
Bridie Witton(Stuff): Covid-19 cancer surgery delay meant Wellington man had chemotherapy
Susan Botting: Saturday catch-up surgery to clear Northland DHB’s 900-strong backlog
Newstalk ZB: Māori waiting for elective surgery prioritised on waiting lists
Rukuwai Tipene-Allen (Māori TV): Māori nurses call for immediate intervention over racial attacks
Mackenzie Smith (RNZ): Advertising Standards Authority to fast-track takedown of misleading Covid-19 ads
Susan Strongman (RNZ): NZ man selling bleach ‘cure’ slammed by scientists

Wage subsidy
Ben Strang (RNZ): Wage subsidy auditing figures only collected quarterly – MSD
Isaac Davison (Herald): Private school pays back some of wage subsidy – but should it be paying back the lot? (paywalled)
Susan Edmunds (Stuff): Delivery firms say online shopping rush no goldmine, as Mainfreight repays subsidy
Jamie Gray (Herald): NZ dairy start-up Happy Valley repays wage subsidy (paywalled)

Economy, employment
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Stuff): That light isn’t the one at the end of the tunnel, bank economists warn
Hamish Rutherford (Herald): Worse than the GFC already, labour market may enter ‘second wave’ of job losses
RNZ: Business confidence rises, but remains bleak
Zane Small (Newshub): Job numbers plummet by 37,500 in April as COVID-19 economic impact cripples businesses
RNZ: Job numbers dropped by record 37,500 in April, Stats NZ says
1News: NZ lost a record 37,500 jobs last month amid the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown
Jarrod Haar (Stuff): A four-day work week could be the shot in the arm tourism needs
RNZ: Covid-19 debt levels: ‘It’s really about having a job’
Brent Edwards (NBR): Banks are flush and part of post-Covid solution, says RBNZ (paywalled)
Jenny Ruth (BusinessDesk): RBNZ’s awkward about-face on bank capital and stress tests (paywalled)
Jamie Ensor (Newshub): What countries have done to support the unemployed during the COVID-19 crisis
1News: Overwhelming majority of Kiwis want to continue working from home, study suggests
RNZ: Most want to continue working from home… at least sometimes

Recovery
Jamie Morton (Herald): What will NZ’s ‘new normal’ look like? (paywalled)
Brian Fallow (Herald): Back to normal isn’t enough (paywalled)
RNZ: The Detail: Changing our lives in a post-Covid world

Immigration, migrant workers
Tess Brunton (RNZ): Immigration NZ to send workers to Queenstown to help migrant workers and employers
Matthew Mckew (ODT): Help centre for workers who have lost jobs
Katarina Williams (Stuff): Tens of thousands of offshore visa applications stalled
Dileepa Fonseka (Newsroom): ‘Mayhem’ for locked out migrants
Zane Small (Newshub): Golriz Ghahraman hits back at ‘baseless assertion’ Manus Island refugee Behrouz Boochani won political favour

Housing
Alan Kenyon (1News): Housing Minister passes responsibility for long delayed Wellington Kiwibuild development onto developer
Eva Corlett (RNZ): House buyers now in financial strife risk losing deposits

Internet
Marc Daalder (Newsroom): Heads butt over new bill’s internet powers
RNZ: Proposed legal framework on objectionable content filter ‘a step too far’ – InternetNZ
Thomas Manch (Stuff): Government introduces law which could erect a firewall around New Zealand, concerning Internet NZ

Arts and culture funding
Derek Cheng (Herald): Jacinda Ardern unveils bailout for Te Papa
1News: Jacinda Ardern announces where $95 million for arts and culture sector will go
Zane Small (Newshub): Jacinda Ardern unveils lifeline of more than $57m for artists, museums and heritage services hit by COVID-19
RNZ: Govt announces multi-million dollar funding boost to help arts sector recover post-Covid

Transport
1News: Air NZ should refund customers’ money for flights cancelled because of Covid-19 – Consumer NZ
John Weekes (Stuff): Air NZ’s 777-200ER fleet may never fly again due to the impact of Covid-19
Georgina Campbell (Herald): Transmission Gully: ‘Stuck cleaning up expensive legal mess’
Amy Williams (RNZ): Animal behaviour’ in ferry queue sparks police complaints
1News: Auckland public transport to be discounted by 30 per cent during off-peak hours

Local government
Logan Savory (Southland Times): Mayor Tim Shadbolt says he no longer trusts his deputy Toni Biddle
Luisa Girao (ODT): Invercargill council revamped
Damian George (Stuff): Wellington City Council pulls paper proposing 2026 reopening date for central library
Amber-Leigh Woolf and Andre Chumko (Stuff): Days after Wellington sorts its waste, a sewerage pipe bursts outside police station
Hamish Cardwell (RNZ): German engineers ‘unsung heroes’ of sewage pipeline
John Lewis (ODT): DCC spends $145,000 on new campaign: ‘Dunedin, A Pretty Good Plan D’

Business
Jo Moir (RNZ):Commercial property tenants still waiting for Covid-19 relief
Susan Edmunds (Stuff): ANZ asks contractors to take a pay cut
Eric Crampton (Newsroom): Smooth the path for business to adapt
Dita De Boni (NBR): Public sector boards almost half full of women (paywalled)

Education
1News: ‘We are delighted’ – Teacher aides pay deal will bring security and decrease anxiety, union says
Karl Goddard (Stuff): The New Zealand Teaching Council is tone deaf and must go
Luisa Girao (ODT): Quarantine students in Queenstown plan backed
Eleisha Foon (RNZ): Teacher calls for schools to teach race issues following student’s blackface social media post
Herald: Westlake Girls High School under fire over response to blackface social media post by student

Media
Shane Taurima (RNZ): Māori media must lead and inspire innovative change required for survival
Dita De Boni (NBR): Bauer mags sell-off process thought to be reaching key milestone (paywalled)

Christchurch mosque shootings
David Williams (Newsroom): Agencies pull back from terror victims
AAP: Christchurch mosque attack gunman’s sentencing delayed, court eyes international video screenings

Other
Thomas Manch (Stuff): More than 200,000 children may face hardship, children’s commissioner says
Jessica Tyson (Māori TV): Arming police damaging for relationship with Māori – Moana Jackson
Pat Baskett (Newsroom): The real price of eating pork
Steven Moe (Stuff): Charities are essential, yet often forgotten
Anna Whyte (1News): Foreign investment rules tightened amid Covid-19 fallout
Daisy Hudson (ODT): Police should not have allowed gang tangi, Nats say
Luisa Girao (ODT): Steady progress with ouvea removal
RNZ: Tourism will return to growth eventually – Tourism NZ modelling
1News: Tower Insurance cuts 108 jobs in order to secure ‘sustainable future’ for business
RNZ: Christchurch events company cuts permanent workforce by 60 percent
Lana Andelane (Newshub): Auckland cafe’s sign telling employees to speak English ‘taken out of context’ – race relations commissioner
1News: Covid-19 lockdown bear hunt commemorated with special NZ Post stamps
Debrin Foxcroft (Stuff): Commission warns electronics retailer Becextech over fair trade breaches
ODT Editorial: Universal super transcends pandemic

Could taking hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus be more harmful than helpful?

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew McLachlan, Head of School and Dean of Pharmacy, University of Sydney

A paper published in The Lancet has cast fresh controversy on the use of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for COVID-19.

The study’s authors reported they were “unable to confirm a benefit” of using the drug, while also finding COVID-19 patients in hospital treated with hydroxychloroquine were more likely to die or suffer life-threatening heart rhythm complications.

The publication prompted the World Health Organisation to suspend its testing of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, while a similar Australian trial has paused recruitment.

A bit of background

Hydroxychloroquine has been used since the 1940s to treat malaria, but has been making headlines as a potential treatment for COVID-19. US President Donald Trump recently declared he was taking it daily, while Australian businessman and politician Clive Palmer pledged to create a national stockpile of the drug.

The drug alters the human immune system (it’s an immunomodulator, not an immunosuppressant) and has an important role in helping people with rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

It does have a range of serious possible side-effects, including eye damage and altered heart rhythm, which require monitoring.

We don’t know the patients in this study died because they took hydroxychloroquine. Shutterstock

Laboratory studies suggest hydroxychloroquine may disrupt replication of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. It’s also possible hydroxychloroquine could reduce “cytokine storm” – the catastrophic immune system overreaction that happens in some people with severe COVID-19.

A huge global effort is underway to investigate whether hydroxychloroquine is safe and effective for preventing or treating COVID-19, especially to improve recovery and reduce the risk of death. Previous studies have been inconclusive as they were anecdotal, observational or small randomised trials.

Doubts about hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness have been increasing, with a large observational study from New York showing it had no benefit in treating people with COVID-19.

The new Lancet study, published last week, has found it could increase the risk of death among COVID-19 patients in hospital. But there’s more to the story.

What did the new study do?

The Lancet study collected real-world data on more than 96,000 hospitalised patients with COVID-19 from more than 600 hospitals across six continents.

About 15,000 patients were treated with hydroxychloroquine (or a closely related drug, chloroquine) alone or in combination with an antibiotic.

Using a global registry the researchers investigated the safety of these treatments. They looked at whether people died in hospital, as well as the risk of developing life-threatening heart rhythm problems (called ventricular arrhythmias).

What did the study find?

Treatment with hydroxychloroquine was associated with increased rates of death in people with COVID-19, even after the researchers adjusted for other factors (age, other health conditions, suppressed immune system, smoking, and severity of the COVID-19 infection) that might increase the risk of death.

About 18% of people who received hydroxychloroquine died in hospital, compared with 9% of people with COVID-19 who did not receive these treatments. The risk of death was even higher (24%) in people receiving hydroxychloroquine in combination with either of the antibiotics azithromycin or clarithromycin.

Hydroxychloroquine (6%) and chloroquine (4%) treatment was also associated with more cases of dangerous heart rhythm problems when compared with untreated people with COVID-19 (0.3%).

Any evidence of benefit, while not the focus of this study, was unclear.

How can we interpret the results?

This was an observational study, so it can only explore the association between treatments and death – rather than telling us hydroxychloroquine caused these patients to die.

It is unclear why the death rate for patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine was double that of those who weren’t, as the cause of death was not reported in this study.

Importantly, the study cannot account for all the factors that might contribute to death in these hospitalised patients and how these factors interact with each other. However, the researchers did a good job of “matching” the characteristics of people who were receiving hydroxychloroquine with those who were not receiving the drug, which makes the results more reliable.

But there may still be other factors, or medicines, that contributed to these findings. So there remains uncertainly about whether hydroxychloroquine causes, or even contributes to, the death of people with COVID-19.

While the Lancet study has seen some hydroxychloroquine trials halted, others are continuing under careful monitoring. Shutterstock

Further, it was not possible to have careful control over the hydroxychloroquine dose people received – or other medicines people might be taking such as antivirals or other medicines for heart conditions (which potentially interact in sick hospitalised patients).

The average dose of hydroxychloroquine in this study was at the upper end of the regular recommended dose range for rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. But the wide range of hydroxychloroquine (and chloroquine) doses in this study makes interpretation of the findings difficult, especially when we know harmful effects are associated with larger doses.

Broader implications

This study provides important information about the safety of hydroxychloroquine in treating vulnerable people with COVID-19 receiving hospital care.

While the implications for using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 in the community or for prevention of COVID-19 remain unclear, if nothing else this study highlights the need to carefully monitor people receiving the drug.

Some hydroxychloroquine trials are continuing, such as the very large RECOVERY trial in the UK.

This new information must be considered when balancing harm and potential benefit of these trials and will likely result in renewed safety monitoring.

We’ll need to see results from ongoing high-quality randomised controlled trials to truly know if hydroxychloroquine is effective and safe in treating or preventing COVID-19.

Further questions about what dose should be used, and which patients will benefit most, are topics under active investigation.

You should not take hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 unless you’re part of a clinical trial. – Andrew McLachlan and Ric Day

Blind peer review

This is a fair and reasonable review of the Lancet paper, its relationship to previous studies, and its impact on ongoing clinical trials.

As stated in the review the Lancet article adds to the body of knowledge, including recent substantial studies in the New England Journal of Medicine and the British Medical Journal, that hydroxychloroquine is without significant effect in treatment trials.

The high death rate is concerning but not unprecedented, given that a clinical trial in Brazil was halted because of adverse effects on the heart. However, recent media reports suggest the data may have to be revised due to misclassification of the participating hospitals. – Ian Musgrave

Research Checks interrogate newly published studies and how they’re reported in the media. The analysis is undertaken by one or more academics not involved with the study, and reviewed by another, to make sure it’s accurate.

– ref. Could taking hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus be more harmful than helpful? – https://theconversation.com/could-taking-hydroxychloroquine-for-coronavirus-be-more-harmful-than-helpful-139309

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

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jayashri Kulkarni, Professor of Psychiatry, Monash University

We’ve recently heard experts raise concerns about a looming mental health crisis, warning COVID-19’s psychological toll on Australians could be like a second wave of the pandemic.

Suicide modelling from the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre has predicted a potential 25-50% increase in the number of people taking their lives in Australia over the next five years. The researchers expect this projected increase to disproportionately affect younger people.

Any suicide is a tragedy and prevention must be a priority.

But the grim predictions from suicide modelling warrant analysis and exploration. They have significant implications for public health policy and funding decisions, as well as community concern.

The challenges of modelling in health

Models in health have to begin with questions about the basic assumptions underpinning them. They need to be built on reliable data, be clear on how they’ve dealt with uncertainty, and describe whether they are generalisable or not.

The best models for diseases are mechanistic models, not purely statistical ones. Mechanistic models are based on understanding how a system’s components interact with each other.

For example, the preferred mechanistic model for COVID-19 includes measures of actual viral infections and underlying transmission processes, plus testing how the pandemic may change under various conditions.

The complexities of mental illness mean suicide doesn’t fit neatly into a mathematical model. Shutterstock

Trying to emulate this in suicide modelling has many problems, starting with the basic assumptions. Mental illness and suicide are multifaceted, complex and fluctuating entities.

There is a spectrum from fleeting thoughts of suicide, through to planning or attempting suicide, to the final tragedy of completing suicide. These subtle but important phases are crucial to identify, intervene in and factor into a model.

But to date, existing suicide prediction tools have not been able to account for these factors, and have largely failed to generate accurate predictions.

The recent modelling takes into account social factors such as homelessness, unemployment, domestic violence and substance use as causal factors for suicide. Importantly, psychological distress, a critical causal factor, can change rapidly and is very difficult to measure.

The lack of clear, objective tests for mental illness together with the many rapidly changing social and personal factors makes it very difficult to develop a reliable mechanistic model for suicide.

Add COVID-19, and it becomes even harder

Mental health during the coronavirus pandemic is impacted by many unique and variable factors which are difficult to model with reliability.

Suddenly Australians have had to be isolated from extended family and friends, contend with disrupted work and home routines, and manage the fear of becoming ill with a virus that has claimed more than 350,000 lives around the world to date.

These factors can create temporary psychological distress of varying severity, which changes with time and is difficult to measure.

All of this is quite different to mechanistic viral disease models, which include actual, stable measures of infection with nonlinear spread. This means one infected person can spread the virus to others who subsequently spread it – an exponential rise.

While viral disease models are not perfect either, we can’t track suicide in the same way.

Some people are at higher risk

International surveys show women of all ages are experiencing significantly higher rates of anxiety and depression than men during the pandemic.

Older citizens, (with a female majority due to their greater longevity), understandably have increased fears about their health and safety if infected, as well as their financial security. So they’re at greater risk of mental ill health too.

Read more: Is isolation a feeling?

People with pre-existing mental health conditions or physical illness are also likely to be struggling more with COVID-19-related mental health problems.

These disparities create further complexities that are difficult to model.

Some people will be at higher risk of mental ill health during COVID-19. Shutterstock

We need to act

For many of us, the fear and anxiety we felt during the early stages of COVID-19 will have improved as it’s become apparent Australia has been able to avoid the enormous toll seen elsewhere.

Nonetheless, past experience of financial crises and increased unemployment, such as during the great depression, show us the suicide rate does increase at such times.

Stressors such as rising household debt, increased social isolation and loneliness are key risk factors for suicide.

While we may not be able to predict accurately how significantly deaths from suicide will rise, we do need to take action to prevent or minimise any increase in suicides in the months and years following the pandemic.

Close monitoring of the nation’s mental health through repeated targeted and well-constructed surveys will be vital to inform how we go about this.

We need all sectors of our nation to unite to face this challenge. Governments must invest wisely and in a timely manner to enhance mental health care for the whole community, paying particular attention to groups at higher risk.

Tackling this while avoiding a national panic about suicide is imperative. Raising well-meaning concerns is of course important, but placing the country on “suicide watch” is alarmist and could potentially cause more anxiety.

– ref. Predicting the pandemic’s psychological toll: why suicide modelling is so difficult – https://theconversation.com/predicting-the-pandemics-psychological-toll-why-suicide-modelling-is-so-difficult-138934

Why is there so much furore over China’s Belt and Road Initiative?

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Clarke, Associate Professor, National Security College, Australian National University

There were certainly questions asked when Victoria first signed a memorandum of understanding to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2018, but it wasn’t until the past week that the criticism reached a fever pitch.

The depth of the animosity over the deal shows the extent to which the BRI has become a faultline in the China-US competition.

And Australia, economically interdependent with China but a committed ally of the US, finds itself caught in the middle.

What is the BRI and what does China want?

There is a diverse array of projects encompassed under the BRI umbrella, focused on six main “economic corridors”.

These corridors link China to Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe by land (the “Silk Road Economic Belt”), and to Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Pacific and east Africa by sea (the “Maritime Silk Road”).

To date, China has pledged an estimated US$1 trillion in investments in “hard” and “soft” infrastructure (from ports and high-speed rail to telecommunications and cyberspace) and signed memorandums of understanding with 138 countries.

However, there is much debate about what is actually driving the project.

Some see it as a purely geopolitical gambit to break what Beijing perceives as American “encirclement” after the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia”.

Others see it as President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party’s desire to shake the Chinese economy out of its recent slowdown and resolve some of its structural maladies.

From an economic standpoint, the initiative serves multiple purposes. It allows China to redress economic imbalances between its coastal and interior provinces, find outlets for excess production capacity and internationalise the Chinese currency.

Finally, some have dismissed the Belt and Road Initiative as a “soft power” vanity project to burnish China’s international image.

Indeed, the Chinese leadership views BRI as a way of both legitimising China’s model of government and economic development to the rest of the world, and positioning China as the leader of an alternative new world order from the one authored by the US after 1945.

In reality, BRI is about all of these things.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in 2017. ROMAN PILIPEY / POOL

What are the benefits and pitfalls of BRI?

In thinking about BRI’s global and regional reception, we need to recognise there is demand for what Beijing is offering.

Its commitment of US$1 trillion is a drop in the bucket of the estimated US$26 trillion needed by Asia’s economies for infrastructure investment, but it still surpasses anything put up by other major regional players.

The “blue-dot network” announced by the US, Australia and Japan in November as a response to the BRI, for instance, was trumpeted as promoting infrastructure investment that is “open and inclusive, transparent, economically viable”.

But the initiative is not an infrastructure funding mechanism itself. Rather, it merely certifies projects that “demonstrate and uphold global infrastructure principles”.

While this might be an admirable goal, there is a problem, as former Asian Development Bank executive director Peter McCawley points out:

A road is a road, whether it is built with US or Chinese money. At present, it seems that the Chinese are prepared to fund the construction of infrastructure in Asia, while the US is not.

Concerns about the nature of Chinese investments under BRI are valid. Many BRI projects are financed through Chinese public financial institutions such as the Export-Import Bank of China that enjoy low borrowing costs and interest rates.

This enables them to lend on favourable terms to Chinese companies, who can then significantly undercut foreign companies for infrastructure bids.

Another concern is that Beijing is engaging in “debt trap diplomacy” by extending excessive credit to countries that will struggle to pay it back.

The aim is then to extract political and economic concessions or physical assets, such as ports or land deals, from those countries.

Several studies have suggested the “debt trap” narrative has been exaggerated. But while a Lowy Institute report last year noted that China has not “deliberately” engaged in debt-trap diplomacy, it added

the sheer scale of China’s lending and its lack of strong institutional mechanisms to protect the debt sustainability of borrowing countries poses clear risks.

Victoria’s BRI agreement: storm in a teacup?

Beyond the economics, the Belt and Road Initiative carries clear political risks for Australia.

Australia’s attempt to balance its alliance with the US and economic interdependence with China has become even more difficult, as both have become “rude and nasty” in pursuit of their interests under Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.

Some analysts claim Victoria’s BRI agreement means Chinese firms will be

building chunks of national infrastructure, perhaps with tie-ups to Chinese state banks and other entities.

But the reality may be more prosaic. The memorandum of understanding and subsequent “framework agreement” speak of mutual commitments to “promote practical cooperation” of Chinese firms in Victorian infrastructure and Victorian firms in “China and third-party markets”.

They are also not legally binding and may be terminated by mutual agreement.

Meanwhile, Premier Daniel Andrews said this week Victoria would not agree to telecommunications projects under the BRI, a key security concern.

BRI and the great power competition

The furore over Victoria’s agreement is due to the fact there is no Australian consensus on BRI or the broader issue of our relationship with Beijing. Debate on these issues is necessary if Australia is to chart a course between two great powers gearing up for confrontation.

Unfortunately, the debate on China has become toxic.

Those who recognise the risks of engaging with China, but still advocate for closer relations, are often lambasted as “craven” or worse. Those sounding the alarm bells about Beijing’s malign intentions are accused of sowing a “China panic”.

To say this is unhelpful is an understatement.

Some talk of a new Cold War between the US and China.

Yet, as the Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad, has noted, today’s China-US competition is not a replay of the past. The conflict between the two biggest powers will not lead to bipolarity, but rather

will make it easier for others to catch up, since there are no ideological compulsions, and economic advantage counts for so much more.

Tying ourselves ever more tightly to either protagonist is imprudent, as Westad says,

The more the US and China beat each other up, the more room for manoeuvre other powers will have.

– ref. Why is there so much furore over China’s Belt and Road Initiative? – https://theconversation.com/why-is-there-so-much-furore-over-chinas-belt-and-road-initiative-139461

AJF renews call for media freedom law while welcoming Smethurst move

By Asia Pacific Report -

May 29, 2020

Pacific Media Watch

The Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom has welcomed the decision by the Australian Federal Police to drop charges against Newscorp journalist Annika Smethurst and has renewed its call for a media freedom law.

The announcement, coming more than a year after the raids, underscores the need for unambiguous protections for press freedom in Australian law, the AJF said in a statement.

The AFP were searching for evidence of the source of a story she published revealing secret plans by the government to expand the powers of the nation’s international electronic eavesdropping agency, the Australian Signals Directorate.

The raid, and a similar one the following day on the offices of the ABC, highlighted the precarious position of Australian journalists who are fulfilling their democratic duty to keep watch over our government.

It also appeared to send a message to both journalists and their sources exposing abuses of government authority – the police are prepared to come after you.

– Partner –

The AJF believes the damage the case has done to journalism, to the AFP’s reputation, and to Australia’s international standing as a champion of democratic values, could have been avoided if press freedom was clearly enshrined in our legal code.

AJF spokesperson Professor Peter Greste, the UNESCO chair in journalism and communication at the University of Queensland, said: “This decision is the right one, but the controversy would never have happened if we had a law in place that protects journalism in the public interest, while giving the security agencies the tools they need to go after genuine threats to the country.

“We can do that with a Media Freedom Act. Such an act would clearly establish the relationship between journalists holding government to account, and the security agencies trying to keep us safe.

“A Media Freedom Act would enshrine the public’s right to know, but also help the security forces from damaging the very thing they aim to protect, namely the health of one of the world’s most successful democracies.”

The AAJF first called for a Media Freedom Act in May 2019, three weeks before the raids.

Australia is ranked 21st out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2019 World Press Freedom Index.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Reconciliation Week: a time to reflect on strong Indigenous leadership and resiliency in the face of a pandemic

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bronwyn Fredericks, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous Engagement), The University of Queensland

National Reconciliation Week is a time of reflection, talking and sharing of histories, cultures and achievements. It is a time to think about our relationships as Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

This year’s theme is “In This Together”, a phrase that has taken on extra meaning as the world grapples with the coronavirus pandemic.

We have seen a range of measures to manage the spread of coronavirus in Australia, including movement restrictions, closures of government- and community-based services and border controls.

Governments have also put forward specific measures to protect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, including travel restrictions into and out of remote communities under the Biosecurity Act.

This “lock-down” has undoubtedly been essential and, to date, has prevented the pandemic from reaching remote communities. It has also been supported by the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation.

But local Indigenous communities have also shown tremendous leadership in protecting their own peoples from the virus. And perhaps ironically, the federal government has shown a willingness to listen to and engage with the expertise of the Indigenous health sector.

One of the many things this crisis has highlighted is that while disease continues to threaten Indigenous communities, Indigenous peoples have maintained their strength, tenacity and determination.

The loss of communities to pandemics

The threat of the pandemic has affected Indigenous Australians in very different ways from the general population.

For example, the collective rights and identities of Indigenous peoples are bound to place via language and territory. So there’s a fear that even if you lose a small number of a community – through an event like a pandemic – you begin to lose the people.

We’ve lost Indigenous communities to pandemics before.

For instance, Norman Tindale’s iconic 1974 map, Tribal Boundaries of Australia, includes a language group in central Australia called Jumu. The country associated with this group on the map is Mount Liebig, Papunya and Haasts Bluff (today all located in the Haasts Bluff land trust, 250km northwest of Alice Springs).

However, the map of Indigenous languages created by the Institute of Aboriginal Development 30 years later, does not include the Jumu. Rather, the language group incorporating the lands of these three communities is Pintupi-Luritja.

Though language groups and their territories are dynamic, the fate of the Jumu has remained an unresolved question.

When one of this piece’s authors, Sarah Holcombe, undertook her PhD field research in the region in the mid-1990s, many senior community members had heard of them, but said they were mirri tjuta (all dead).

Tindale, rather blithely, recorded that several years after an anthropological expedition to the region in 1932, an “epidemic killed off many of the Jumu”. Little is known about this epidemic, but it was likely influenza.

Tragically, there are many other examples of entire groups of Indigenous peoples being decimated by diseases against which they had no defences. And the threat remains ever-present with communities across Australia today, due to their socio-economic disadvantage, poorer health outcomes and other vulnerabilities.

Such was the concern as the coronavirus pandemic was worsening in late March, for instance, that Sally Scales, deputy chairperson of the APY Land Council, even suggested evacuating all the senior Anangu from the lands to hospitals in Adelaide as a pre-emptive measure.

How Indigenous communities showed strong leadership

There are obvious parallels between the “protective and restrictive laws” that Indigenous Australians were subjected to in the colonial era and current measures to contain the pandemic.

Restrictions on movement within states and across borders, as well as into and out of remote communities, seem disturbingly resonant with this ugly history. One could say Indigenous Australians are no strangers to “lock-downs”.

However, Indigenous organisations have also shown leadership in this time of crisis. These include the network of representative bodies (such as land councils) and the 143 Aboriginal-managed health services and affiliates that are members of the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation.

The Central Land Council acted early in central Australia by suspending all non-essential travel to remote communities and cancelling all mineral exploration permits.

Indigenous Australians have always had some form of agency, even if this was “passive resistance” against punitive laws. But the Indigenous response to the pandemic is driving home the importance of local-level decision-making.

Though it is early days, evidence emerging from remote communities shows just how strong and effective this local leadership has been.

In the Kimberley region, for instance, communities “locked the gates” themselves, only allowing essential services in.

The evacuation of “country-men and women” from regional towns back to remote communities, as happened in the Kimberley region, also provided opportunities to spend time with family, hunt, return to country and pass on inter-generational knowledge.

In far north Queensland, residents set up roadblocks outside their community – a move described by a local health official as being “well ahead of the rest of the country”.

And some communities in central Australia put a fuel limit of $20 at the bowser to ensure community members would not be tempted to travel too far.

Is government finally ready to listen?

There have been signs of a shift in the federal government’s approach to working with Indigenous NGOs and representative bodies, as well.

According to NACCHO CEO Pat Turner, these groups have had “purposeful engagement” with the government over how to best respond to the crisis and protect vulnerable communities.

There is hope this may provide Indigenous peak body representatives with additional authority and leverage in the new Closing the Gap agreement negotiations. And that there will be scope to push towards greater structural change and give Indigenous communities greater power to manage their own affairs.

This would be in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which seeks to protect Indigenous peoples’ rights to participate in decision-making over matters affecting them.

These are also lessons Indigenous Australians have to share, and experiences non-Indigenous people can learn and benefit from. As Reconciliation Week comes to a close, we should reflect on this and ensure we don’t go back to what was “normal”, the status quo.

– ref. Reconciliation Week: a time to reflect on strong Indigenous leadership and resiliency in the face of a pandemic – https://theconversation.com/reconciliation-week-a-time-to-reflect-on-strong-indigenous-leadership-and-resiliency-in-the-face-of-a-pandemic-139311

4 ways our streets can rescue restaurants, bars and cafes after coronavirus

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thami Croeser, Research Officer, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University

As Australia re-opens, the bars, cafes and restaurants that give life to our streets face a tough ask: stay open and stay afloat with just a fraction of the customers.

From June 1 in Victoria, for example, the limit will be 20 patrons, with 1.5 metres between tables or four square metres per patron. If that goes well, it’ll be 50 patrons from June 22 – if they can be seated the required distance apart. Many smaller businesses won’t be able to do that.

With the Jobkeeper package due to expire in September, the next couple of months is a critical window for traders to find new ways to seat patrons. Fortunately, street space can help a lot with this.

Here are four proven ways to quickly reconfigure street space. We might even find them nice enough to keep. Have your say in the poll at the end of this article.

Footpath trade

Footpath dining already gives many iconic streets their character. Even two or three tables outside a small bar in the evenings can give life to a street.

Chairs on the footpath are part of the experience of dining out in Crossley Street, Melbourne. Alpha/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Putting out tables sounds simple, but the permit process is the real hurdle. It can take weeks or months of waiting and uncertainty while a small team assesses a long list of details.

Councils could employ more assessors to fast-track the process, but there is another option. In the post-COVID environment, it may be time to trust traders and embrace more of the informality we see in cities with great street food. Councils could trial a system where dining is permitted by default in front of each establishment, subject to a few simple rules.

Traders must understand that their permits depend on not blocking thoroughfare. Disability access in particular must be maintained.

However, many footpaths are wide and quiet enough that dining tables could be up and working well in a matter of days.

Parklets

One roadside parking space in front of a café or bar might mean one or two customers – assuming they come to that business. A car park can instead become a “parklet” with space for six to eight people, while looking a lot more inviting. Put two or three parking spaces together and you’ve got a miniature dining area or a parklet.

The parklet idea came out of San Francisco. Examples from there show how diverse and successful these can be. From weirdly sculptural to classically European to high-end and polished, they all add character to the places where they spring up.

Noriega Street Parklet outside a bakery in San Francisco. Photo: Matarozzi Pelsinger Builders & Wells Campbell photography/San Francisco Planning Department/Flickr, CC BY-SA

In Melbourne, Moreland Council has one long-term parklet in Brunswick. Its simple, neat design fits plenty of patrons and includes a bit of greenery. Perth and Adelaide have examples too, but the potential seems to be mostly untapped in Australian cities.

And the benefits are significant. A recent parklet study in Perth found a 20-35% increase in local footfall, and 89% community support.

Grandview Hotel Parklet in Brunswick. Google Streetview

Again, a bit of sanctioned informality may be the best way to get parklets working quickly. Each trader could be allowed to use, say, one or two parking spaces outside their business if some simple criteria are met.

If we decide the approach is worth keeping, San Francisco shows how to go from pop-ups to something bigger and better. The city’s first parklet was a roll of astroturf, a park bench and a tree in a pot. It lasted just two hours. Now there are over 50 parklets, a “how to” manual, a clear application process and case studies of the benefits.

This parklet popped up for a day on Park(ing) Day 2009 in San Francisco. Tom Hilton/Flickr, CC BY

Road closures

Roads are wide open spaces. Put bollards at the ends of a street that doesn’t need full vehicle access, carry out tables and chairs, and you’ve got a huge new seating area. It has been done and works well.

Meyers Place (above and below right), Melbourne, is closed to through traffic and open for pedestrians and dining. Alpha/Flickr, CC BY-NC

Before full closure. Aplha/Flickr, CC BY-NC

Of course, closing a street permanently is quite a process. I worked with the community to pedestrianise a Melbourne laneway called Meyers Place. Negotiating the legalities took about 18 months. Emergency, bin collection and disability access requirements had to be met.

The restaurants can now put tables on the former road space, surrounded by trees and murals under a green wall. The thing is, we started out by closing the street for just two weeks. Businesses rolled out temporary tables and chairs, astroturf and potted plants. The lane went beserk with activity; we went from tentative support to heavy pressure for a permanent pedestrian space.

We took our inspiration from a much larger closure in Ballarat Street, Yarraville. It was also temporary and got removed, but was brought back permanently with funding from traders and overwhelming community support.

Ballarat Street, Yarraville, was transformed with strong community support. Darren Sharp/Shareable, CC BY

Parking lot conversions

Outside our inner suburbs, the areas dedicated to parking get bigger. But Copenhagen offers an example of how big an opportunity a large car park can be.

Kødbyen in Vesterbro, Copenhagen, has become a hub for fine dining, galleries and nightlife. thewavingcat/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

In the city’s former meatpacking district, you can find anything from high-end seafood to a craft beer pub that pumps heavy metal and barbecue smoke. The central car park serves as a giant dining area – when the weather’s good, chairs and benches come out and hundreds of locals turn up. This is super-simple stuff, mostly involving folding chairs and benches, plus lots of people. It’s adaptable, fun and very popular.

The concept seems to work too in Melbourne too. “Welcome to Thornbury”, a popular hub for food trucks and outdoor dining, used to be a car factory.

Welcome to Thornbury’, the former site of a car factory, is now a drive-in food truck park. Welcome to Thornbury

We can start right now (and probably should)

Community engagement with Melbourne’s new Transport Strategy 2030 indicates broad support for reallocating street space to people.

Now is the time to press ahead, because of what’s at stake – not just jobs and profits, but our collective identity and sense of place. Food and drink are a big part of city life and how we spend our time. The places we gathered with friends, nurtured romances and celebrated milestones are where memories live. Doing nothing could mean these experiences are replaced by numbing “For Lease” signs.

Luckily, taking action isn’t very risky. We can give our hospitality sector a boost right now by allowing businesses to trial a set of proven approaches. Everyone will then have a chance to experience the changes and decide what they’d like to keep.

– ref. 4 ways our streets can rescue restaurants, bars and cafes after coronavirus – https://theconversation.com/4-ways-our-streets-can-rescue-restaurants-bars-and-cafes-after-coronavirus-139302

Vital Signs: Morrison’s industrial relations peace gambit is worth a shot. Even if it fails, it’s shrewd politics

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

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

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison this week announced plans for a potential “grand bargain” on industrial relations.

Speaking at the National Press Club, he framed the issue as one of boosting economic productivity:

We must enable our businesses to earn Australia’s way out of this crisis. And that means focusing on the things that can make their businesses go faster.

Rather than directly introducing legislation into the parliament, Morrison’s plan involves creating five “working groups” of union and business advocates to look at issues from simplifying awards and the enterprise bargaining system to the treatment of casual workers and “greenfields” agreements for new enterprises.

This is shrewd politics. If the working groups find agreement, the government can push the required legislation through parliament with a claim to a mandate. And claim the credit.

If it fails, Morrison can say nothing can happen without business and workers agreeing. So the government avoids blame.

But it may also be canny economics.

Going for broker

Perhaps Morrison has realised his real power is not as an advocate but a broker.

This process might have less in common with Australia’s prices and incomes accords of the 1980s, where unions agreed to limit wage claims, than with the Dayton Accords, the peace agreement that ended the Bosnian War in 1995.

The accords between the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Hawke and Keating governments between 1983 and 1991 were a response to the wage-price spirals that plagued advanced economies in the 1970s and early 1980s.

High inflation led to large wage claims, which further fuelled inflation. The 1983 accord broke this spiral by guaranteeing wage increases every six months tied to the consumer price index. As I’ve noted previously:

Once people knew that wages weren’t going to gallop ahead of prices, there was less of a reason to raise prices, which put less pressure on wages, and so on.

The Dayton Accords (officially the: General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina) were brokered by the US administration in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995 between the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.

Booking a room

The shadow minister for industrial relations, Tony Burke, reacted to Morrison’s announcement by saying:

Let’s be clear: all the government has done so far is book a room. This is not an IR agenda – it’s a series of meetings.

Burke meant this as a criticism, but in fact it might be a virtue. It’s hard to imagine a deal on industrial relations without representatives of employers and employees agreeing. That agreement may be better served by a government acting as a broker rather than pushing its own specific agenda.

There is an emerging school of thought in economics that coordinating beliefs plays a crucial role in reaching value-enhancing deals. Having the participants believe there can be a deal might be the heart of the issue.

That was arguably the role US chief negotiator Richard Holbrooke played in the Dayton Accords, and the role federal industrial relations minister Christian Porter will need to play in this rather different setting.

Very different starting points

That said, the parties don’t agree on all that much – at least as a starting point. ACTU secretary Sally McManus has emphasised that:

We can only secure a better, stronger Australia if working people have permanent, well-paid work and the entitlements that come with it.

The head of the Business Council of Australia (BCA), Jennifer Westacott, says the issue is needing:

… a system that delivers higher productivity, letting people work more effectively, produce more and find new and innovative ways to work.

Can permanence and job security be reconciled with effectiveness and innovation in the workplace? I’m an optimist. But we shall see.

Are the representatives representative?

This possible grand bargain needs to be between employers and employees. Those at the table will be representatives of those groups – namely unions and employer groups such as the BCA and Ai Group.

A crucial question is how representative these representatives are.

As Leigh Sales observed on the ABC’s 7:30 program this week:

The vast majority of Australians aren’t members of unions, only 14% of people are. In this process, shouldn’t workers be represented by other voices that more likely speak for them?

In the private sector, union membership is even lower – about 10%.

One should ask similar questions of the BCA and Ai Group. For instance, do they represent the views of smaller businesses as faithfully as they do the big ones?

This is crucial because it affects the credibility of any potential deal, and how any benefits are spread. A cosy deal between big business and unions on greenfield construction sites is one thing. A grand bargain that helps workers not in unions and employers across the economy is quite another.

Will it work?

Morrison did frame the issue adeptly in his address. He was clear about the inputs needed to increase the economic pie:

The skilled labour businesses need to draw on, the affordable and reliable energy they need, the research and technology they can draw on and utilise, the investment capital and finance that they can access, the markets they can connect to, the economic infrastructure that supports and connects them, the amount of government regulation they must comply with, and the amount and the efficiency of the taxes they must pay.

Given all that, Australia’s industrial relations system does arguably need reform. And it won’t happen without the key players agreeing to it themselves.

Morrison’s gambit may not work, but it is certainly worth a shot.

– ref. Vital Signs: Morrison’s industrial relations peace gambit is worth a shot. Even if it fails, it’s shrewd politics – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-morrisons-industrial-relations-peace-gambit-is-worth-a-shot-even-if-it-fails-its-shrewd-politics-139459

The coronavirus has thrust human limitations into the spotlight. Will it mark the rise of automation?

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Roberts, Professor in Robotics, Queensland University of Technology

The coronavirus pandemic has caused a massive surge in global unemployment. It has also highlighted the increasingly valuable role of automation in today’s world.

Although there are some jobs machines just can’t do, COVID-19 has left us wondering about the future of work and with this, the capacity of automation to step in where humans must step back.

Automation and jobs

Discussions about the “rise of the machines” first picked up significantly in 2013, after University of Oxford researchers published a paper about the potential to automate many jobs across sectors, including many so called office jobs such as administrative support workers, telemarketers and insurance claims clerks.

But does automation directly create unemployment? The answer is complicated.

Although some automation does replace human labour, other forms of it can help create new business, or help existing businesses prosper with benefits to employees.

It also depends on whether you measure employment globally, nationally or locally. Increasing automation for one country or region may be beneficial for jobs there, but damaging to jobs elsewhere.

Robots have already replaced people in many highly repetitive manufacturing tasks in developed economies, and will likely eventually replace similar labour in the rest of the world. But in the areas of niche and advanced manufacturing, such as in making art, the manufacture of components for the aerospace industry, or even customised and unique fashion garments, the use of robots will likely create jobs.

Pandemic drivers for automation

The automation of Australia’s industries has been in the works for some time now. Australia is a world leader in adopting mining equipment automation – unsurprising given our reliance on mining exports.

Many of our mines are partially staffed from remote operation centres, where employees monitor largely automated pieces of equipment. This successful automation would have helped the mining industry deal with the effects of the pandemic.

At the Bluescope Steelworks in Wollongong, an automated transport vehicle is used to move steel sheet rolls. DEAN LEWINS/AAP

Currently, there are two major drivers for considering a wider and faster shift to automation.

The first is a desire for Australia to become more self-sufficient in supplying goods and services, with local supply chains that are less susceptible to global shocks. This would require boosting the country’s manufacturing capability, and one way to do so would be by embracing new manufacturing methods using automation and robotics.

The second driver is a need to reduce the frequency and duration of human-to-human contact (social distancing), especially as experts warn of the increasing threat of future pandemics.

Research suggests COVID-19 can spread via surfaces and human-to-human contact.

Technology provides ways to avoid this. For instance, human contact while shopping was reduced drastically long before COVID-19 with the introduction of self-checkouts. While this itself isn’t automation (since the customer still does the work themselves), it could be considered a stepping stone to Amazon’s plans to soon roll out an automated purchasing system at physical US stores.

With the “Just Walk Out” technology, customers can take items off a store’s shelf, bag them, and walk straight out. An in-store sensing system automatically detects what was taken and initiates the purchase once the customer exits the store.

Is Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology the future of in-store purchasing?

What is skilled work?

According to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s Head of Economic Analysis, Alexandra Heat, employment for jobs requiring the highest level of skills has risen from 15% in the mid-1960s, to more than 30% now.

But how do we classify “skilled” work?

Many supposedly “low-skilled” jobs are far from it if viewed from the perspective of an engineer developing an automated (or robotic) equivalent. Take cleaning – a job of paramount importance during this pandemic.

While it isn’t traditionally considered high-skill, it’s still complex as it requires manual handling and time planning, and therefore isn’t suited to automation. In fact, a general-purpose robot cleaner remains the stuff of science fiction.

Another example is fruit picking, which is also a complex task when broken down. In the coming seasons, Australia may face a shortage of fruit pickers due to international travel restrictions, and robotic fruit picking and harvesting is now a hot topic in the robotics research world.

While progress has been made on this front, not many of the prototype systems are commercially available yet. And it’s unlikely robots will solve the industry’s labour shortage problems within the next few years.

Robotics researchers are on the cusp of developing reliable and highly-skilled fruit picking robots.

The costs of transition

When trying to predict which way automation will go in Australia, the critical issue to consider is our capacity to adopt it.

As we stare down the barrel of a recession, many businesses and organisations are struggling financially.

Changing business practice to adopt automation, if done effectively, would cost time and money in the near term. While time may be available, investing scarce cash may seem too risky for some at such a precarious time.

But then again, as with many investments sometimes fortune favours the bold. And the upcoming recession may be an opportune time to majorly reinvent how products and services are delivered.

– ref. The coronavirus has thrust human limitations into the spotlight. Will it mark the rise of automation? – https://theconversation.com/the-coronavirus-has-thrust-human-limitations-into-the-spotlight-will-it-mark-the-rise-of-automation-139198

Group B strep and having a baby: what pregnant women need to know

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Dahlen, Professor of Midwifery, Associate Dean Research and HDR, Midwifery Discipline Leader, Western Sydney University

Group B streptococcal (GBS) is a common bacteria that likes to live in the human gut and migrate down the rectum, vagina and sometimes to the urinary tract. Not everyone has GBS but even if you do, you might not know it; it can cause illnesses in people of all ages and sex, but most of the time it doesn’t.

One group at particular risk of GBS, however, is newborn babies, who may pick up GBS from their mother’s vaginal tract during childbirth. For newborns, GBS is a major cause of meningitis (infection of the lining of the brain and spinal cord), sepsis (blood infection) and pneumonia (lung infection).

Most early onset GBS disease (90%) occurs in the first 24 hours and up to a week following birth. It affects around 1 in 2,000 babies. Some become very sick and, while rare, around 1 in 17,000 die of it.

Around 10-30% of pregnant women are colonised with GBS, meaning the bacteria live in or on the woman’s body without her necessarily feeling unwell.

It was once standard procedure in many Australian hospitals to administer intravenous antibiotics to such women early in labour in an effort to reduce risk to newborn babies.

However, other countries are pursing different approaches to attempt to reduce the disruption early exposure to antibiotics can cause to the newborn’s microbiome.

Two approaches to screening pregnant women for GBS

There are two approaches to GBS screening in pregnancy: universal screening and a risk-based strategy.

Universal screening involves a urine test and taking a swab of the pregnant woman’s vagina and around the anus (which women can do themselves) when they’re around 36 weeks pregnant. Under the universal approach, all women who test positive to GBS are recommended to have intravenous antibiotics during labour to reduce the risk of the baby developing a GBS infection soon after birth.

A risk-based strategy means only giving antibiotics to women who test positive to GBS and have other high risk factors such as:

the labour that starts before 37 weeks
the baby has a low birth weight
membranes (water surrounding the baby) are broken for longer than 18-24 hours
the mother has had a baby previously sick with GBS
the mother has a high temperature during labour.

So which approach delivers better outcomes? Unfortunately, it’s not yet possible to answer that question conclusively.

In the United Kingdom, Denmark, Netherlands and New Zealand universal screening is not recommended.

In the United States universal screening for GBS is recommended.

In Australia it’s up to health providers and hospitals to make a decision with women on whether to test. But this can also be very confusing.

For a newborn baby, the first super dose of microbes comes during the birth through the vagina. Shutterstock

GBS can come and go

The problem is that GBS can come and go. It may be present when a woman is screened late in pregnancy but not at the time of birth. And more than 60% of confirmed GBS sepsis (blood infection) cases in babies occur in mothers who tested negative for GBS when screened around 36 weeks.

In short: sometimes GBS testing has meant women (and their newborns) who don’t need antibiotics are getting them, while others who might benefit from antibiotics are missing out.

However, new rapid GBS screening takes around two hours to get the result, meaning women can be tested when they go into labour or their waters break. Unfortunately, these rapid tests are not yet available in all Australian hospitals.

What does the evidence say about antibiotics for GBS?

If antibiotics are given more than four hours before the birth, it prevents GBS in the baby in 91% of cases.

But antibiotics prevent GBS in babies in less than 50% of cases if given fewer than four hours before the birth.

And antibiotics during labour make no difference when it comes to reducing late-onset GBS disease (one week or more following birth).

A review of four randomised controlled trials involving 852 women found giving antibiotics to women who tested positive for GBS reduces the incidence of early onset GBS disease in babies, though not death from GBS infection or other bacterial infections.

However, there were some problems with these studies, including small numbers and poor reporting which makes these results unreliable.

This means automatically giving antibiotics to all women during labour is not supported by conclusive high-level evidence; however, it is widely recommended if GBS has been found.

As the baby passes through the vagina, it is coated in and ingests protective bacteria. Shutterstock

What about the impact of antibiotics on the microbiome?

For a newborn baby, the first super dose of microbes comes during the birth through the vagina, which contains around 200-300 bacteria.

These bacteria help seed the new baby’s microbiome, shaping its health and setting up an effective defence shield for infections.

The microbiome of the vagina changes through pregnancy. Halfway through pregnancy, hormonal shifts begin to stockpile glycogen (bacteria’s favourite food). As the bacteria turn this glycogen into lactic acid the PH level of the vagina lowers (more acid like) and this discourages harmful bacteria like GBS from growing.

As the baby passes through the vagina, it is coated in and ingests this protective bacteria (this process doesn’t occur with caesarean section). When the baby breastfeeds, they ingest components that are only found in breastmilk that feed the good bacteria and protect the baby.

Disturbance of this vulnerable early seeding of the microbiome with antibiotic use during labour and birth for GBS alter the balance of microbes in the baby’s intestines.

Several inflammatory conditions, including obesity, have also been linked to this.

Weighing all this information up means a clear recommended pathway for GBS detection and treatment still evades us.

The most important thing for new parents to know is how to look out for an unwell baby and get help quickly. Signs of GBS infection include:

temperature that’s too high or low (get a thermometer)
poor feeding
irritability
sleeping more than normal or not moving much
rapid or noisy breathing (grunting or moaning)
skin colour changes (including looking blotchy)
any significant change in behaviour that does not resolve.

The quicker the treatment, the better the outcome. Breastfeeding can’t pass GBS infection to your baby and, in fact, is really important to help protect your baby from infections.

The MothersBabies Study

Our MothersBabies Study is investigating how the microbiome affects a woman’s health before pregnancy, during pregnancy, and in the first year of their child’s life.

This study can’t be conducted without the help of the community, so please get in touch if you want to know more or are interested in being included. You just need to be living in NSW and planning to get pregnant in the next 12 months. Email mothersbabies@unsw.edu.au to register your interest or find out more.

– ref. Group B strep and having a baby: what pregnant women need to know – https://theconversation.com/group-b-strep-and-having-a-baby-what-pregnant-women-need-to-know-131893

A fire extinguisher, a suit and 14 million plastic particles: after a storm, microplastic pollution surged in the Cooks River

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Hitchcock, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Canberra

Each year the ocean is inundated with 4.8 to 12.7 million tonnes of plastic washed in from land. A big proportion of this plastic is between 0.001 to 5 millimetres, and called “microplastic”.

The results, published on Wednesday, were startling. Microplastic particles in the river had increased more than 40 fold from the storm.

To inner west Sydneysiders, the Cooks River is known to be particularly polluted. But it’s largely similar to many urban catchments around the world.

14 million plastic particles

In the days before the October 2018 storm, there were 0.4 particles of microplastic per litre of water in the Cooks River. That jumped to 17.4 microplastics per litre after the storm.

Overall, that number averages to a total of 13.8 million microplastic particles floating around in the Cooks River estuary in the days after the storm.

In other urban waterways around the world scientists have found similarly high numbers of microplastic.

For example in China’s Pearl River, microplastic averages 19.9 particles per litre. In the Mississippi River in the US, microplastic ranges from 28 to 60 particles per litre.

Where do microplastics come from?

We know runoff during storms is one of the main ways pollutants such as sediments and heavy metals end up in waterways. But not much is known about how microplastic gets there.

However think about your street. Wherever you see litter, there are also probably microplastics you cannot see that will eventually work their way into waterways when it rains.

And in regional areas, microplastics may be washing in from agricultural soils. Sewage sludge is often applied to soils as it is rich in nutrients, but the same sludge is also rich in microplastics.

What can be done?

There are many ways to mitigate the negative effects of stormwater on waterways.

Screens, traps, and booms can be fitted to outlets and rivers and catch large pieces of litter such as bottles and packaging. But how useful these approaches are for microplastics is unknown.

In Australia, most state governments have committed to banning plastic bags, but there are still no laws banning the use of microplastics in cleaning or cosmetic products, or single-use plastics.

We’ve made a good start, but we’ll need deeper changes to what we produce and consume to stem the tide of microplastics in our waterways.

– ref. A fire extinguisher, a suit and 14 million plastic particles: after a storm, microplastic pollution surged in the Cooks River – https://theconversation.com/a-fire-extinguisher-a-suit-and-14-million-plastic-particles-after-a-storm-microplastic-pollution-surged-in-the-cooks-river-139043

Friday essay: missing the commute, the spaces between places and the podcast stories in our pockets

By The Conversation -

May 29, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Malcolm Burt, Amusement academic and disruptive media researcher, CQUniversity Australia

In the not-so-distant past I commuted fairly hefty distances in a fairly garbage car. But you didn’t hear me complaining – I had an extensive library of podcasts (or “my stories” as I liked to call them) on my phone.

My ride was so basic it didn’t have a stereo that could connect to my phone, so my workaround was to place the phone in the little scooped-out area on the dash where the clock lived. I called it the “acoustic enhancement chamber” and it really did amplify the sound. Most people thought this was hilarious (and a little pathetic, I guess) but I didn’t mind. Podcasts are powerful narrative devices – they still work as transfixing storytellers in the lowest of tech situations.

We all like to fill our commutes with some sort of distraction – reading a book, making obnoxiously loud phone calls on the train, cramming in some work or study on our laptops, and of course consuming a bottomless ocean of media via our mobile devices – TV shows, movies, games, and “our stories”. During the COVID-19 lockdown, many will have missed the commute – a time just for getting there, a time when we’re between spaces and responsibilities.

Between Point A and Point B

So whatever it is we do on our commute, and however we do it – walking, running, driving, cycling, flying, training, bussing, or whichever other way you get from Point A to Point B – it’s useful to consider the commute as a space of its own.

The “interstitial time” commuting creates is actually a Point C: what sociologists like Cecile Sandten have called a “third place between home and work”.

While we may not think much about this interstitial time, what we choose to do in it affects us. It has been suggested by Shira Chess, who studied games and leisure styles, that “all of our lives are characterised by interstitial time, time that is not used for other purposes”. Geographer and academic David Bissell has underscored this:

… the journey to and from work is a strange, liminal sphere of everyday life, fizzing with all manner of events and encounters that, for good or ill, make a difference to who we are.

The commute has been pondered by creative types, either as the main focus, or as a plot device. Philosopher Alain de Botton’s 2009 book A Week At The Airport saw him become Heathrow airport’s writer in residence, where he focused on the interstitial time we grudgingly endure at airports, exploring “the stories that inhabit this strange ‘non-place’ that we are usually eager to leave”. He was so into it that he was delighted when his plane was delayed, as it meant he could spend even more time in the departure lounge.

Interstitial space may seem crowded but it affords private moments. Aditya Joshi/Unsplash, CC BY

Conversely, Jonathon Swan penned The Frustrated Commuter’s Companion: A survival guide for the bored and desperate in 2017, introducing readers to “seat etiquette” and “seat remorse” and underscoring the (often) solitary nature of commuting: “Whenever you see a fellow traveller with a copy [of his book], give them the secret sign of the commuter: ignore them completely”.

Plenty of films romanticise the usually peaceful interstitial nature of commuting, which can provide a handy contrast to the flip when things go wrong. Speed (1994) is about a normal commute gone mad, while Liam Neeson stars in 2018’s The Commuter, which is about another commute that goes even more mad.

The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004) is a film that sees the leads meet for the first time (a couple of first times, actually) in a dreamy kind of limbo train commute. Finally, there’s 2016’s The Girl On The Train, in which the main character fills her days with the commute because she’s lost her job but wants to keep up the pretence of going to work.

In Simon Webb’s 2016 book, Commuters: The History of a British Way Of Life, he describes commuting as a “reassuring routine which spelled security and safety from the spectre of poverty” -– meaning in most cases, if we are commuting, we’re doing so because we have a job to commute to.

The daily commute goes horribly wrong in Speed (1994) – but also a little bit right for Sandra Bullock. IMDB

So when we’re not being blown up for going under 50 miles an hour, the commute can be a time for us to zone out, to reflect on the day ahead, or the one just finished – and to simply “be” in a personal zone that is neither work nor home.

Though a train or a plane might not seem like a private space, we make it one by staring into the middle distance, losing our present selves in thought or remembrance, or diving into our digital storytelling devices. In so doing, we can recapture a shred of our own personal space, even if we are shoulder-to-shoulder with others.

What I, and many others, choose to do during the commute is listen to podcasts.

Listen up

Podcasts (a portmanteau that combines “iPod” with “broadcast”) are essentially episodic media delivered via a subscription feed to our devices and consumed anytime we like. These travelling companions have introduced me to a diverse cast of players: from great thinkers, to creepy killers, to kindly givers of wildly inappropriate advice.

Podcasts can be extremely short like (Quote Of The Day) or the literally titled The Shortest Podcast Ever with the curiously opaque description: “It’s brief. It’s not much. It’s a small amount”. They can be stupendously long like Hardcore History with episodes regularly running over five hours in duration – and even those are mostly single episodes in multi-part narratives.

They can be studiously factual (the New York Times podcast The Daily is the news, updated daily – but with an oft-maddening Trump focus), or deliciously speculative (Conspiracy Theories is exactly what it sounds like, but is sharply researched, with sceptical hosts).

Strangers on a train meet for the first (and not first) time.

Podcast can be about grisly crimes (Australia’s Casefile is one of the best in the inexhaustible true crime genre) or delightfully batty like Dear Joan and Jericha, in which hilariously filthy agony aunts deliver the worst advice possible.

They can track complicated long-game scams in Who the Hell is Hamish? and The Shrink Next Door, and lead you down rabbit holes, like the bizarre chapters of American history featured on The Dollop.

Some, like Dirty John, and Lore have gone on to become television series to watch at home – but never forget you heard it first on the commute.

For me, podcasts are appealing because they offer delicious and varied escapes to suit your mood, and all in the palm of your hand. You don’t even need to give them your complete attention and still they wash over you. They take you to different places, introduce you to different lives, worlds and ideas. It’s learning without reading, exploration without effort.

Like learning without reading, podcasts can transport us. Henry Be/Unsplash, CC BY

No commute, no podcasts?

Lately, we have almost universally been doing little or no commuting. What happens to that in between space? And what about our listening habits?

Some research shows a drop in podcast consumption. At the beginning of the pandemic, podcast downloads fell 15-20% (COVID-19 content naturally saw a boom). Now that things are slowly easing and we are returning to our regular workspaces, podcast consumption is gradually rising again.

It’s possible we have been consuming other forms of media at home as a replacement. Certainly, our Netflix binges have been a staple of Zoom discussions (Tiger King, anyone?).

Perhaps we are so preoccupied with the practicalities of being stuck at home that we have not engaged with podcasts. Or maybe they’re simply better suited to the space in between work and home, where we’ve left domesticity behind but we aren’t quite ready to clock on. These are the times when we want to turn to the little stories in our pockets for one more private escape before the business of the day takes over, and our time and thoughts belong to someone else.

– ref. Friday essay: missing the commute, the spaces between places and the podcast stories in our pockets – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-missing-the-commute-the-spaces-between-places-and-the-podcast-stories-in-our-pockets-139222

Grattan on Friday: When Christian met Sally – the match made by a pandemic

By The Conversation -

May 28, 2020

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

It was Greg Combet, one-time ACTU secretary and former Labor minister, who got Christian Porter and Sally McManus together in the early days of the pandemic.

Recalling what happened, Porter told the Australian Financial Review he said to Combet he needed to “talk directly with people in the union movement”.

Porter knew union co-operation would be vital for the emergency measures the government would bring in. “I don’t necessarily speak their language,” the industrial relations minister told Combet.

“Greg suggested that [ACTU secretary] Sally was probably the one that I should talk to first. I … just picked up the phone two seconds after talking to Greg and spoke with her.”

From there, the Christian-Sally relationship blossomed. It can be seen now as a significant contributor to Scott Morrison’s bid, outlined this week, to seek a consensus approach to reforming the industrial relations landscape.

The personal link with McManus established, Porter convened a meeting with employer and union representatives on March 10, which opened with a briefing by chief medical officer Brendan Murphy to give the players an understanding of the (then) looming scale of the coronavirus crisis.

This was two weeks before major sectors of the economy started shutting down.

Porter and McManus agreed to speak every working day, as special arrangements were put in place to deal with the extraordinary circumstances. Their scheduled (virtual) meetings were recently wound back to two or three times a week (with other contact as required).

While McManus opposed making changes to the Fair Work Act as part of the JobKeeper program, when the government was determined she was pragmatic. She’d earlier assisted by enlisting unions to support employer moves to vary industrial awards to help key sectors cope with the immediate challenges of the crisis.

When she had gripes Porter listened and made the odd concession. She wasn’t happy, for instance, with Porter shortening the consultation period (from seven days to 24 hours) for an enterprise agreement being changed. McManus persuaded him to build in a review after two months of the measure (which lasts six months).

One government observer says, “I think they are both a bit surprised by each other, and how willing they are to have an open and frank discussion about issues”.

After all, this is the woman the government demonised when, new in her job, McManus condoned breaking what she considered bad laws. Senior minister Peter Dutton called her a “lunatic”.

But, as the observer added, “It was a relationship born of necessity, and it’s continued because of the trust established”.

On the face of it, they’re chalk and cheese. McManus has spent her whole career in the union movement, from when she was a trainee at the ACTU (Combet was a senior officer there at the time).

Porter was bred into a Liberal family (his grandfather served as a Queensland politician, his father as a party official); he became West Australian treasurer before moving to federal parliament. He’s now attorney-general as well IR minister.

Although she’s smart and sharp, McManus’s language draws on old-style union-speak (“working people” is her mantra). Porter, a former senior state prosecutor in WA, not infrequently reverts to legalese barely intelligible to the ordinary person.

But what helped them connect is that he’s a policy wonk, and she knows what she’s talking about. And they’ve found they can talk in confidence without their conversations leaking, or (so far) being weaponised by either of them.

McManus has greased wheels during the crisis – the government hopes it can now parlay the relationship with the ACTU into assisting Morrison’s attempt to land permanent industrial relations reforms.

When you want to build on a relationship, a show of respect never goes astray. Morrison invited McManus to Kirribilli House in Sydney as he developed his idea of a compact. It was a tough face-to-face encounter over tea in fancy cups.

This week Morrison announced Porter would chair five working groups (with employers, unions and other stakeholders) to consider award simplification; enterprise agreements; casuals and fixed term employment; compliance and enforcement, and greenfield agreements for new enterprises. Their deadline is September.

Morrison says he’s bringing parties to “the table”. But he’s putting nothing on the table. He took off the table the Ensuring Integrity legislation – which was stuck in the Senate and had been “paused” during the pandemic – but only after McManus forced the issue.

Comparisons with the Hawke government’s accords with the union movement have been false. Those were formal agreements between allies, in which both sides traded specifics (wage restraint in exchange for “social wage” policies.)

Neither the government nor the ACTU would see the present process of negotiations as a partnership.

McManus is buying into the process but she must be aware of its risks. Many in her constituency would be sceptical, if not appalled. Bring a long spoon to that table, they’d say.

On the other hand, the much-shrunken union movement has changed and become more feminised in recent years, and one would expect many among its members would welcome the bid for agreement.

Anyway, McManus has to join the play to defend the unions’ interests. Given the extra authority the pandemic has given Morrison, the government would potentially be able to ride roughshod over union opposition. The Senate’s (non-Green) crossbenchers are always fickle, but the unions wouldn’t want to be banking on support there. The government’s position would be even stronger if the unions were just negative.

To see McManus driven only by that however is, on the evidence, selling her short. She accepts there are areas that should be addressed, such as flaws in the enterprise bargaining system.

The government and the ACTU have been careful to narrow the agenda to the items before the groups. Morrison doesn’t want other issues to become matters for trading. The government is focusing deliberately on “known problems” – areas it says have been bugbears for employers and employees alike. Some commentators have seen its list as heavily directed to employers’ concerns, but the issues of casuals and enforcement are core to the unions.

McManus comes to the table with a stash of chips, albeit fewer than the employers or government. These include the goodwill established, and the advantage Morrison would get (not least over Labor) if he could go to the election as the “consensus” prime minister.

If the consultation process fails to produce anything of real value, many in the government and the union movement won’t be surprised. If something positive is achieved, thank the pandemic.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: When Christian met Sally – the match made by a pandemic – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-when-christian-met-sally-the-match-made-by-a-pandemic-139562

Another savage blow to regional media spells disaster for the communities they serve

By The Conversation -

May 28, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kristy Hess, Associate Professor (Communication), Deakin University

With swift and savage force, the COVID-19 pandemic has inadvertently attacked Australia’s local news media ecology, which was already battling a weakened immune system.

As a researcher working on Australia’s largest academic study into the future of local newspapers, the phones have been running hot in recent weeks. We’ve had calls from everyday people, journalists made redundant, cadets surviving on JobKeeper, and independent news proprietors, all navigating their way through the crisis.

News Corp has announced plans to close or suspend printing operations of more than 100 suburban and small community titles. Its more successful publications, such as the Geelong Advertiser, Gold Coast Bulletin, Hobart Mercury and the iconic Northern Territory News, will remain with print and digital editions.

Other independently-owned newspapers across rural and regional Australia are still breathing: they are gasping for air, but they are breathing. They’ve either temporarily suspended operations, cut back the number of print editions or shifted to a digital-only model to “see how it goes”.

Since the COVID-19 crisis emerged, there have been two key funding schemes introduced (or re-introduced) to support news providers – the government’s $50 million Public Interest News Gathering Program and a $5 million Regional and Small Publishers Innovation Fund.

The federal government has also announced plans to force Google and Facebook to share advertising revenue with producers of quality journalism in Australia. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is now seeking views on its new draft mandatory code that will address bargaining power imbalances between Australia’s news media businesses, and Google and Facebook.

This has been met with some initial concern from the Country Press Association of Australia amid fears the modelling may only benefit big companies and not the little players that serve small towns and cities.

The Victorian government has waded in to provide more than $4 million in additional advertising support for local and regional print publications. Our preliminary research indicates Victoria leads the way with this type of support for local news. Other states, such as South Australia and New South Wales, lag behind or have announced changes to legislation that provides government authorities freedom to advertise on their own sites or via social media.

The problem is, social media sites like Facebook don’t put the interests of local communities first, whereas local news outlets do (or at least they should). Facebook has gone to great lengths to distance itself from the types of local content posted on its platform. In the local news ecology, it tends to feed from traditional local news providers or the goodwill of citizens who moderate and upload content of local importance and reap the advertising rewards. One off, $10,000 grants from social media juggernauts to local news entrepreneurs won’t fix this systemic problem.

In some local areas, business owners are offering donations or advertising support to preserve the journal of record during COVID-19. JobKeeper is keeping many cadet journalists on the payroll, and there are some keen reporters doing their bit to report on the news, even if they are not getting paid.

There’s also stories of new start-ups emerging – like Matt Dunn in Victoria’s South Gippsland region. He was made redundant by the local newspaper, which is planning to close its doors permanently. He immediately set to work developing his own digital news platform, “The Paper”.

Dunn is confident elderly residents who have little experience with technology will come on board because they will be hungry for good quality local meaningful news. It’s about the content, not the platform.

However, digital-only publications are problematic in areas of rural and regional Australia that struggle with broadband connectivity. It’s even more worrisome for those areas with ageing populations, where reading the local paper is a daily or weekly ritual to maintain a sense of connection to their community.

I’ve spoken with several elderly residents in recent weeks who are distressed about the decline of Australian Community Media’s local content and the reduction of the print edition. Without the newspaper and technological capabilities, they feel “lost”. And importantly, they can’t read the death notices, so have no idea who has died.

Perhaps that is the key for policymakers, researchers and industry in a post COVID-19 world. Big news conglomerates around the world have been accused of building a plethora of zombie newspapers that are local in name only – full of syndicated content, without really being attuned to the needs and wants of a community or helping people to develop shared social connection and purpose to place.

My hunch is zombie papers will be the first to fall.

Audiences aren’t stupid. It’s the newspapers and community individuals determined to provide news that are the heart of their communities and should survive into the future. Policymakers, researchers and industry need to be acutely aware of the types of news outlets and individuals that best provide – or are willing to provide – real, credible and meaningful local news and information for their communities in areas of Australia big and small.

They are the ones that should be at the front of the queue for any type of media vaccine.

– ref. Another savage blow to regional media spells disaster for the communities they serve – https://theconversation.com/another-savage-blow-to-regional-media-spells-disaster-for-the-communities-they-serve-139559

New Zealand government ignores expert advice in its plan to improve water quality in rivers and lakes

By The Conversation -

May 28, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael (Mike) Joy, Senior Researcher; Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

New Zealand’s government has been praised for listening to health experts in its pandemic response, but when it comes to dealing with pollution of the country’s waterways, scientific advice seems less important.

Today, the government released a long-awaited NZ$700 million package to address freshwater pollution. The new rules include higher standards around cleanliness of swimming spots, set controls for some farming practices and how much synthetic fertiliser is used, and require mandatory and enforceable farm environment plans.

But the package is flawed. It does not include any measurable limits on key nutrients (such as nitrogen and phosphorus) and the rules’ implementation is left to regional authorities. Over the 30 years they have been managing the environment, the health of lakes and rivers has continued to decline.

For full disclosure, I was part of the 18-person science technical advisory group that made the recommendations. Despite more than a year of consultation and evidence-based science, the government has deferred or ignored our advice on introducing measurable limits on nitrogen and phosphorus.

Waterways in decline

The declining state of rivers, lakes and wetlands was the most important environmental issue for 80% of New Zealanders in a recent survey. It was also an election issue in 2017, so there was a clear mandate for significant change.

But despite years of work from government appointed expert panels, including the technical advisory group I was part of, the Māori freshwater forum Kahui Wai Māori and the Freshwater Leaders groups, crucial advice was ignored.

The technical advisory group, supported by research, was unequivocal that specific nitrogen and phosphorus limits are necessary to protect the quality of people’s drinking water and the ecological health of waterways.

The proposed nutrient limits were key to achieving real change, and far from being extreme, would have brought New Zealand into line with the rest of the world. For example, in China, the limit for nitrogen in rivers is 1 milligram per litre – the same limit as our technical advisory group recommended. In New Zealand, 85% of waterways in pasture catchments (which make up half of the country’s waterways, if measured by length) now exceed nitrate limit guidelines.

Instead, Minister for the Environment David Parker decided to postpone this discussion by another year – meaning New Zealand will continue to lag other nations in having clear, enforceable nutrient limits.

This delay will inevitably result in a continued decline of water quality, with a corresponding decline in a suite of ecological, cultural, social and economic values a healthy environment could support.

The government’s package includes a cap on the use of nitrogen fertiliser. Alexey Stiop/Shutterstock

Capping use of nitrogen fertiliser

The other main policy the expert panels pushed for was a cap on the use of nitrogen fertiliser. This was indeed part of the announcement, which is a positive and important step forward. But the cap is set at 190kg per hectare per year, which is too high. This is like telling someone they should reduce smoking from three to two and a half packets a day to be healthier.

I believe claims from the dairy industry that the tightening of environmental standards for freshwater would threaten New Zealand’s economic recovery are exaggerated. They also ignore the fact clean water and a healthy environment provide the foundation for our current and future economic well-being.

And they fly in the face of modelling by the Ministry for the Environment, which shows implementation of freshwater reforms would save NZ$3.8 billion.

Excess nitrogen is not just an issue for ecosystem health. Nitrate (which forms when nitrogen combines with oxygen) in drinking water has been linked to colon cancer, which is disproportionately high in many parts of New Zealand.

The New Zealand College of Public Health Medicine and the Hawkes Bay district health board both made submissions calling for a nitrate limit in rivers and aquifers to protect people’s health – at the same level the technical advisory group recommended to protect ecosystems.

Our dependence on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser is unsustainable, and it is adding to New Zealand’s greenhouse gas footprint through nitrous oxide emissions. There is growing evidence farmers can make more profit by reducing their use of artificial fertilisers.

Continued use will only further degrade soils across productive landscapes and reduce the farming sector’s resilience in a changing climate.

The irony is that for a century, New Zealand produced milk without synthetic nitrogen fertiliser. Instead, farmers grew clover which converts nitrogen from the air. If we want to strive for better water quality for future generations, we need to front up to the unsustainable use of artificial fertiliser and seek more regenerative farming practices.

– ref. New Zealand government ignores expert advice in its plan to improve water quality in rivers and lakes – https://theconversation.com/new-zealand-government-ignores-expert-advice-in-its-plan-to-improve-water-quality-in-rivers-and-lakes-139554

Keith Rankin on Deeply Negative Interest Rates

By Keith Rankin -

May 28, 2020

Analysis by Keith Rankin.

On Project Syndicate – and in other places in recent months – orthodox US economist Kenneth Rogoff has presented the case for deeply negative interest rates. Another financial sacred cow falls; yes, interest rates can be negative, even substantially negative. It can take a while, though, for shot sacred cows to die. Keynes, in the 1930s, mortally wounded the ‘balanced budget’ bovine. And the experiences of Japan in the 1990s, and the United States in the Second Gulf War (when taxes were cut), dealt to the hallowed cow of ‘fiscal responsibility’. Yet those ghostly cattle-beasts still stalk the minds of politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists.

Interest as a Yield

Interest is a mystery to most of us. It’s actually two conceptually distinct – though related – things. Interest in nature is better referred to as ‘yield’. We may think of a herd of beef cattle. The gross yield is essentially the calves, with the net yield being the beef and leather produced, subject to the constraint that the herd is maintained over time at its usual size.

Thus, the concept of ‘yield’ is similar to the concept of ‘profit’. In a bad year for the farm, there may be a loss, for example because a natural disaster led to the death of all the calves. In that sense, the yield – or interest on capital – can be negative. Further, with this concept of interest, negative interest is unequivocally a bad thing, and the higher the interest (ie yield) the better.

When I was a boy, we had school ‘banking’, a basic saving account using the symbol of a squirrel, supposedly a creature that saves (nuts) due to an instinct of thrift. We received interest on our school savings, something those squirrels never did on their savings. The squirrels’ yields on their hoards of nuts are always negative; some of those nuts go missing or deteriorate. (For squirrels to gain a positive yield, they would have to plant most of their nuts, then wait until the new crop of nuts could be harvested.)

I also remember my mother explaining to me the difference between a ‘savings bank’ (such as the Post Office Savings Bank) and a ‘bank’ (such as the Bank of New Zealand). She said that interest was a ‘reward’ for saving money. And she said that money held in a bank account did not earn interest; actually, customers paid fees to hold their money there. But, she said, they could draw on their ‘money in the bank’ by writing cheques to other people. So I understood the ‘principle of convenience’. I cannot say that I really understood the reason for the ‘reward’, though. It was in another, later, conversation with my mother that I learned about lending; and it bothered me then – as it bothers many – to think that, if I had money in the bank, then somebody else might be spending it; hence a reward was justified. I eventually understood banking; indeed, in the days before banks became financial supermarkets. I had to study economics academically, however, before I had any real inkling about where money comes from.

My generation – and other generations – grew up to learn that interest is natural, and always positive. And we learned that the secret to wealth was restraint and compound interest. Thus, we came to see indefinite economic growth in the same way, as a process of accumulation rather than circulation. The idea that squirrels saving nuts indefinitely would become wealthy was always an illusion; likewise, economic growth as a process akin to compound interest was always an illusion.

I learned – when an adult, through financial economics – that interest can be a ‘price’, as well as a ‘yield’. (In fact, interest is two prices. One of these is the price of ‘risk’. Different borrowers have different risk profiles. Higher risk borrowers pay a higher price to borrow money. I am not particularly concerned here, however, about that price which is commonly called ‘risk premium’.) Interest is a price, that if set correctly, regulates economic life; it can facilitate growth when growth is needed, and facilitate slowth when slowth is needed. Very low interest rates penalise the pointless accumulation of money, and facilitate the circulation of money.

Interest as a Market Price

If we can imagine interest rates being three percent (as they usually were when I was a boy), and, the amount of money lenders wanted to lend being the same as the amount of money that borrowers wanted to borrow, then the ‘price of loanable funds’ would be three percent, and that market would be balanced.

If there was a shift in this ‘loanable funds’ market, with say more people wanting to borrow, then excess demand for loanable funds would require the interest rate to increase. Following that price increase, this market would establish a new balance.

What if there was a change in circumstances (other than a rise in interest rates) that caused fewer people to want to borrow money. Or caused people to repay loans more quickly? Or more people to want to lend money? Or people wanting to be repaid more slowly? Or more people wanting to relend money that has been repaid?

These situations would induce a fall in interest rates. And there is no necessary reason why that price fall should stop at zero.

However, if banks could lend money to the Reserve Bank and get one percent interest, they are unlikely to lend to anyone else unless the banks charge an interest rate above one percent. So, for the market to balance properly, the interest rate set by the Reserve Bank should reflect underlying conditions in the loanable funds market.

If underlying conditions require that the Reserve Bank set a negative ‘Official Cash Rate’, then so it should. It would mean that the Reserve Bank’s large wholesale customers – the banks and the central government – would be paid to borrow from the Reserve Bank.

Obviously, if borrowing from the Reserve Bank increased too quickly in response, the Reserve Bank would have to reset the rate back to positive or zero. But what if these customers were not sufficiently induced to borrow more by negative interest rates, then the Reserve Bank would have to ‘go more negative’; interest rates would keep dropping until balance is established in the loanable funds market.

If the interest rate (price) is set too high, there will be too little borrowing and spending, and many frustrated lenders. The result may be an economic recession. If the interest rate (price) is set too low, there will be too much borrowing and spending, and not enough people wanting to lend. The result may be some inflation.

It is worth noting that some economists in New Zealand – Eric Crampton (of the New Zealand Initiative) for one – favour negative interest rates (pure expansionary monetary policy) over an expansionary fiscal policy where governments borrow (and spend) enough to allow the interest rate to stay positive. This is the view generally favoured by economic liberals; economists and others who are sceptical of governments having too large a presence in the market economy. This scepticism is based partly on a general distrust of large government, and partly on a disbelief in the competence to bureaucrats to make the best spending decisions. Economic liberals generally see private spending as more efficient, at the margin, than government spending. (‘At the margin’ means considering ‘extra spending’ rather than ‘total spending’.)

Certainly, if governments fail to take on enough new debt this year, the case for negative interest rates will strengthen. And the case for deeply negative interest rates in countries more affected by Covid19 than New Zealand will be strong if governments in those countries run insufficiently large budget deficits.

Negative interest rates in the past

Except for the recent cases of Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and Japan, I know of no historical cases of negative nominal interest rates. But negative real interest rates have been quite common. The last time we had substantial negative real interest rates in New Zealand was from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Then, inflation rates were higher than interest rates, so saved money would buy less in the future than in the present. And repaid money could buy fewer goods and services than the money could have bought if it had been spent instead of lent.

While the capitalist world did not fall apart in the 1970s, many people felt that they were entitled to positive interest rates, without ever being able to say why. And those people instigated a revolution, called neoliberalism.

In today’s world, without inflation, negative real interest rates also mean negative nominal rates. (An interesting case, however, is Switzerland, which for a while had negative inflation and less negative interest rates, meaning that real interest rates were not negative.) Thus (unlike in the 1970s), the quoted (or ‘headline’) interest rates – at least in wholesale financial markets – would have to be negative. This is what makes some people very uneasy.

In my chart analysis of Sweden and Australia, I noted that there was a particular reason why Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland had to have negative interest rates. In order for these countries to have similar trade surpluses as their comparable countries inside the Eurozone (Germany, Netherlands and Austria), they had to avoid appreciations of their currencies. That meant they needed interest rates lower than in the Eurozone; and the Eurozone had a core wholesale rate of zero.

The Swiss Franc has been stable against the also-strong United States dollar since 2014. Many people prefer to hold money in Swiss Banks despite the negative interest they ‘receive’; to these people, it’s like paying a fee to keep their money in the best place for them; not unlike the situation my mother told me about in relation to banks in the 1960s.

Deeply Negative Interest Rates

It may well be necessary for interest rates in some countries to go deeply negative. That will mean negative retail interest rates (term deposits), and negative mortgage rates.

Imagine deposit rates and mortgage rates set at, say, minus two percent.

The situation would not be fundamentally different from that of the 1970s, when the incentive was to borrow and spend rather than to save and lend. But, the obvious new problem is that people will want to drain their interest-bearing bank accounts, as stashes of cash, and then bury this cash under the bed, or some such place.

Fortunately, the world now has an infrastructure for cashless transactions. It would not be necessary to ban cash – notes and coins – entirely, though fear of infection from paper money is probably precipitating the end of cash. While notes and coins are convenient for small day-to-day payments – especially when there are power cuts or other infrastructure failures (such as software virus pandemic) – we could still make promises (the oldest form of money ever). One benefit would be to abolish all banknotes worth more than $20, forcing the criminals with large stashes of cash to come to the bank, and explain how they acquired so many high-denomination banknotes.

Another advantage would be that, with no real alternative to electronic money, then fees charged to vendors using EFTPOS (and the like) would have to be abandoned.

The most important thing would be that we would understand that – at certain times – it is irresponsible to not spend our incomes, and that such anti-economic behaviour as money hoarding would incur a cost. It would mean that high-income frugal people would be incentivised to earn less in the market economy. There would no longer be an incentive for people to earn very high incomes, and there would be more space for today’s disadvantaged people to earn adequate incomes.

In other words, interest rates that at first sight should lead to more spending could in fact lead to sustainable living. In turn, as some people choose to earn less and lend less, then conditions would gradually come to favour a return to higher (zero or positive) interest rates.

Thinking outside the box

Even orthodox and conservative economists can think out of the box. They can apply their economics’ training to new situations, so long as they can free themselves from non-economic constraints on their thinking.

Too much of our policy chatter is conducted either by people unable to think like economists – most politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, businesspeople – or economists and financial analysts who have studied economics but whose cultural backgrounds have inhibited them from grasping the creative power that economic thinking can give them.

Substantially negative interest rates represent one very important thought experiment that well-taught students of economics can lead public discussion on.

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Bernard Hickey: Why Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr prefers negative interest rates to QE, Stuff, 12 Aug 2019

Susan Edmunds: What is a negative interest rate, and what would it mean for you? Stuff, 19 May 2010

Clancy Yeates: ‘Unthinkable’: Negative interest rates now routine around the world, Stuff, 23 Sep 2019

Kenneth Rogoff: The case for deeply negative interest rates. Think Outside, 11 May 2020

Has Australia really avoided 14,000 coronavirus deaths?

By The Conversation -

May 28, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Esterman, Professor of Biostatistics, University of South Australia

Australia’s chief medical officer Brendan Murphy told a senate inquiry earlier this week our COVID-19 public health response had avoided about 14,000 deaths.

This is in contrast to his deputy Paul Kelly, who estimated on March 16 that Australia might have 50,000-150,000 deaths, depending on the percentage of Australians infected.

Then an article by Tony Blakely from the University of Melbourne and Nick Wilson from the University of Otago on March 23 used modelling from Imperial College, London, to estimate that even with “flattening the curve”, there would likely be 25,000-55,000 deaths.

So, it’s reasonable to ask which of these estimates is correct.

It turns out this is an easy question to ask, but a complicated one to answer.

Unfortunately, just about every statistic quoted about COVID-19 either in Australia or elsewhere is either an educated guess, based on modelling, or is so full of caveats it’s difficult to interpret.

For example, even the simplest statistic, the number of new daily cases of COVID-19, depends on the diagnostic accuracy of the tests, and the number of tests undertaken.

As for COVID-19 deaths, some countries include a death in the official total if it is even likely the person died from the disease; others have not included deaths in aged care homes in their counts.

So, comparing outcomes in different countries is fraught with difficulty due to different ways of defining and calculating these statistics.

Where did the 14,000 number come from?

Murphy’s estimate of 14,000 avoided deaths came from comparing Australia to the UK. The UK has a similar health system but has had more than 268,619 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with more than 37,542 deaths.

But I am not sure this is a fair comparison.

The UK National Health Service has been struggling well before the COVID-19 pandemic, mainly due to an ageing population, difficulty in recruiting staff, higher costs, and population pressure. And even with its higher number of deaths, the UK has still not closed its borders.

A much better comparison is with Sweden, which has a good health system, but took a very different approach to Australia.

Sweden did not put into place any formal social distancing measures. Instead of lockdowns, it encouraged citizens to use common sense, work from home if possible, and not gather in crowds of more than 50 people.

Primary schools are open, as are bars and restaurants and businesses. As a result, Sweden has had more than 35,000 cases and 4,220 deaths in a population of just over 10 million.

This is much higher than neighbouring Scandinavian countries, and in fact tops Europe on a per capita basis.

If we want to compare death rates between Australia and Sweden, we need to calculate the cause-specific mortality rate. The cause-specific mortality rate for COVID-19 is the number of deaths from COVID-19 divided by the population. For Sweden, the cause-specific mortality rate for COVID-19 is 4,220 divided by 10,343,403, which is equal to 40.8 per 100,000 population.

If we now apply this to the Australian population of 25,700,995, we arrive at 10,486 expected deaths from COVID-19, assuming we had taken the same approach as Sweden.

Take away the 103 deaths we actually have, and we have saved 10,383 COVID-19 deaths as a result of our strategy.

So, our chief medical officer wasn’t really too far off the mark.

So what was behind those earlier figures?

The earlier predictions were based on the premise that a significant proportion of our population would be infected, which simply has not happened.

In fact, with just 7,139 cases, only about 0.03% of our population has been diagnosed with COVID-19, compared with the 30-60% predicted in the previous estimates.

But it’s not quite so simple

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there. No matter which way we calculate these “avoided deaths”, we also need to factor in additional likely deaths from our public health response.

The impact of our business closures and massive job losses, as well as enforced isolation, might well have increased our rates of suicide and mental illness.

At the same time, many cancer patients and those with other chronic conditions have been staying away from medical check-ups and appointments.

These might lead to more deaths. However, I doubt these people’s death certificates will mention COVID-19.

On the plus side, fewer cars on the roads will almost certainly lead to fewer motor vehicle accidents, and because of social distancing, we are already seeing a huge drop in the number of Australians diagnosed with influenza.

Does it really matter if estimates of deaths saved are a bit out? Well, it probably does to economists. They can cost the value of someone’s life, add up the value of all the lives saved, and then demonstrate we have actually saved money from the billions spent. The government would obviously like the number of deaths saved to be as high as possible to justify its strategies and expenditure.

But for the ordinary person, probably not. For us, we are simply relieved our loved ones have been spared.

– ref. Has Australia really avoided 14,000 coronavirus deaths? – https://theconversation.com/has-australia-really-avoided-14-000-coronavirus-deaths-139465