Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Renée Middlemost, Lecturer, Communication and Media, University of Wollongong

A jaunty yet dramatic piano-driven soundtrack motif; a view of the Golden Gate Bridge; a series of location shots around San Francisco. The generic title sequence of the 2003 film The Room barely hints at what follows.

The Room is a straightforward melodrama centred around a love triangle between Johnny (Tommy Wiseau, who also directs), Lisa (Juliette Danielle) and Mark (Greg Sestero). Described as “the worst movie ever made”, it continues to draw sellout crowds worldwide.

One might rightfully wonder: what is the ongoing appeal of a film dubbed “the Citizen Kane of bad films” 20 years on?

Cult audiences

Scholars have debated the key features of cult film for decades, with poor quality (narrative, aesthetic or both), quotable dialogue, word-of-mouth spread and box-office failure all cited.

Most agree an adoring audience is vital to maintaining cult status. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1972) is the most recognisable example of a cult film, distinguished not by its content but by the devotion of an audience “beyond all reason”.

The Room follows this tradition. Wiseau self-funded the film, a gigantic billboard of his face in Los Angeles, and a two-week run of screenings at the Laemmle Fairfax and Fallbrook Theatres in June 2003.

Word of mouth quickly spread among film fans, attracted by dire reviews such as “watching this film is like getting stabbed in the head”.

The poor reviews inspired new fans, who would come along and shout at the film, lip-sync the worst lines and throw spoons at the screen – a reference to the stock images of spoons that appear as decor in Johnny and Lisa’s apartment. Celebrity fans followed, with actors Kristen Bell and Paul Rudd hosting private screenings.

Fan-driven demand led to the film’s eventual release on DVD in 2005, coinciding with the launch of YouTube.

Clip compilations focusing on the film’s so-bad-it’s-good credentials allowed those unable to attend cinema screenings to consume portions of the film.

Cinemas such as The Prince Charles in London provided “viewing guides” to costume-clad audiences, instructing audience members of what to call out (or throw) when. Most attendees brought their own spoons, demonstrating the ritualisation of the active audience response.

The audience response to The Room also points to a wilful misreading of Wiseau’s intent. The cult of The Room is distinguished by the “cruelty” of laughing at “an immigrant filmmaker’s misbegotten passion project”.

But perhaps it is Wiseau who is having the last laugh.

Read more:
Violent clowns and panto dames: the origins of Rocky Horror’s Frank-N-furter

Tommy Wiseau’s World

As I have argued elsewhere, the growing profile of The Room resulted in a shift to interest in Wiseau as a cult auteur – as the long legal stoush over unauthorised documentary Room Full of Spoons (2016) demonstrates.

While early interviews with Wiseau indicate his belief in the film’s quality, over time he has reframed his authorial intent and now claims the film is a comedy.

While we can never know Wiseau’s true intent, his reframing of the film’s reception is a fascinating part of its history, which anchors the narrative of its most well-known paratext: James Franco’s The Disaster Artist (2017), a comedy that follows Sestero (Dave Franco) and his friendship with Wiseau (James Franco) during the creation of the film.

Notably, Franco as Wiseau proclaims at the film’s fictional premiere:

I’m glad you like my comedic movie – exactly how I intended. I have vision for this movie.

The enduring cult

Sestero’s book The Disaster Artist (2013) and Franco’s adaptation describes the pair’s meeting, their unconventional friendship, and Wiseau’s aspirations for Hollywood acceptance.

Rather than a cruel “takedown” or exposé, the book documents Sestero’s affection for Wiseau, and despite the reviews, his fondness for the film that ultimately made his name.

Although initially a source of friction with Wiseau, he has grown to support Sestero’s book, referring to it as “the red bible” for its red cover seen clutched in the hands of fans during signings and appearances.

The film adaptation of The Disaster Artist arguably resulted in the attainment of Wiseau’s long-held desire for Hollywood credibility, with James Franco declaring the universality of the story: “In so many ways, Tommy c’est moi”.

The Disaster Artist was widely praised, and the film and Franco went on to win Golden Globe Awards in 2018.

There, the highlight for many was Wiseau’s appearance on stage during Franco’s acceptance speech. Perhaps Hollywood dreams can come true.

A better place

As The Room turns 20, I argue it is still beloved by audiences because we love an underdog.

The Room might be a “bad film”, but it’s also about pursuing our dreams.

As Wiseau says in the film:

You can love [something] deep inside your heart and there is nothing wrong with it. If a lot of people love each other, the world would be a better place to live.

An endlessly quotable text, a mysterious creator, and a community of similarly invested viewers – what could be bad about loving that?

Read more:
What makes some art so bad that it’s good?

The Room is back in select cinemas in Australia this week.

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

– ref. ‘You can love something deep inside your heart and there is nothing wrong with it’: why we still love The Room, 20 years on – https://theconversation.com/you-can-love-something-deep-inside-your-heart-and-there-is-nothing-wrong-with-it-why-we-still-love-the-room-20-years-on-198665

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julien Louys, Deputy Director, Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University

On the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, a short valley extends south towards the looming Mount Homa. From it have emerged some of the oldest-known stone tools used to butcher large animals, as well as the oldest remains of one of our early cousins, Paranthropus – a genus we think co-existed with our direct ancestors.

Similar tool and fossil discoveries had been made before, in different places and at different times. But to find these all together in one place, as old as they are, is truly extraordinary.

In research published today in Science, we explain how findings at the Nyayanga site are changing the way experts think about carnivory among hominins – a group that includes modern humans, extinct humans, direct ancestors and close cousins.

It also raises doubt about who was really responsible for making the stone tools we’d previously attributed to Homo and closely related species.

Fossils on the Homa Peninsula

Nyayanga is a typical pastoral valley situated on the Homa Peninsula in western Kenya. This peninsula has long been known to produce various fossils. In 1996, a multidisciplinary team led by one of us (Thomas) began work on a two-million-year-old site called Kanjera South. This work produced a wealth of fossil remains from large mammals, as well as stone tools associated with our genus, Homo.

During a field season at Kanjera South, a local man named Peter Onyango who was working with the team suggested we investigate some fossils and stone tools eroding out of a valley on the shores of Lake Victoria. This new site, named Nyayanga after the nearby beach, was situated on a donkey track leading to the lake.

The first stone tools and fossils we collected were eroding out from the gully walls. Beginning in 2015, a series of excavations eventually returned a trove of 330 artefacts and 1,776 animal bone fragments from a range of species characteristic of open savannah and open woodland environments.

The bones included animals we’re familiar with today, such as giraffes, antelopes, elephants and hippos. But they also included extinct megafauna such as Eurygnathohippus, an extinct horse ancestor, Pelorvis, the giant buffalo, and Megantereon, the sabre-toothed cat.

Of particular interest were the remains of two teeth from the extinct hominin Paranthropus – nicknamed the Nutcracker Man as its large flat teeth are thought to have been used to process tough vegetable matter. These teeth, one intact and the other a fragment, were the first direct evidence of an extinct hominin on the Peninsula.

What made their recovery even more surprising were the tools we found associated with them. Alongside Paranthropus’s teeth were some stone tools belonging to a technology known as the Oldowan, characterised by three main forms: hammerstone, core, and flake.

Oldowan tools had long been associated with our own genus, Homo, and were once considered a marker for the beginnings of human modernity. While we can’t demonstrate Paranthropus actually made these tools, this species is so far the only suspect at the scene of the crime.

Early signs of butchery

So, what was a nutcracking, plant-chomping hominin using these tools for? Well it turns out in addition to processing plants – the evidence of which we could see on the tools’ edges – these lithics were also used to make hippo tartare.

We found evidence of meat cutting on the edges – but the smoking gun was the cut and percussion marks found on several hippo individuals associated with these stone tools.

Of course, this wasn’t the first time cut marks had been found on megafauna. In fact, some of the earliest evidence of megafauna butchery was reported on by our team at Kanjera South back in 2013.

However, our comprehensive dating program at Nyayanga revealed the site’s deposits to be about 2.9 million years old. This means they’re probably the oldest stone tools found to have butchered hippos and processed plant material.

Not only that, but this is about two million years before the first evidence that people used fire. This suggests raw hippo was on the menu for the hungry hominins.

Adding to that, the tooth fossils are the oldest Paranthropus remains ever found, and the associated tools are the oldest-known Oldowan tools. The second-oldest were uncovered some 1,200 kilometres away in Ethiopia, and dated to about 2.6 million years.

Read more:
Research reveals humans ventured out of Africa repeatedly as early as 400,000 years ago, to visit the rolling grasslands of Arabia

A brave old world

There’s no evidence Paranthropus was actively hunting megafauna. But it would have been competing with sabre-toothed cats, hyenas and crocodiles for access to carcasses, at the very least.

The Nyayanga deposits provide a glimpse into an ancestral world that’s possibly radically different from any we had pictured. In doing so, they’ve raised even more questions about hominin evolution.

Who were these resourceful toolmakers? How far back does carnivory go? And just how old and widespread is the innovative Oldowan toolkit? Despite more than 100 years of research on the Homa Peninsula, much remains unearthed.

Read more:
We found the oldest ever vertebrate fossil heart. It tells a 380 million-year-old story of how our bodies evolved

Julien Louys receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He was formally at Liverpool John Moores University

Thomas Plummer receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the LSB Leakey Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program. He is research associate in the Human Origins Program of the Smithsonian Institution.

– ref. We found 2.9-million-year-old stone tools used to butcher ancient hippos – but likely not by our ancestors – https://theconversation.com/we-found-2-9-million-year-old-stone-tools-used-to-butcher-ancient-hippos-but-likely-not-by-our-ancestors-199499

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Collin Bjork, Senior Lecturer, Massey University

The buzz around artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like ChatGPT is palpable. People are both optimistic and frightened by the possibilities of these tools. Clearly, these technologies will change how people write. But in terms of what people write, these technologies seem to be embracing the status quo.

In fact, the way these tools are currently built appears to homogenise writing – making everything sound the same. And writing that sounds the same is not just boring; it also perpetuates inequity.

When writing tools prioritise one way of writing over another, they reinforce existing hierarchies that unfairly position Standard American English (SAE) and the Queen’s English over other languages and ways of writing.

How does ChatGPT work?

Technologies like ChatGPT are called large language models (LLMs). LLMs provide textual responses to human commands, by using machine learning to study patterns of words in a massive archive of texts.

Crucially, however, ChatGPT does not know the meaning of words. ChatGPT generates definitions by sorting through a mountain of definitions and then collating those into a single response that suits the context of a query.

In other words, without meaning as its guide, ChatGPT responds to queries by relying on context clues, stylistic structures, writing forms, linguistic patterns and word frequency.

This functionality means that, by default, ChatGPT perpetuates dominant modes of writing and language use while sidelining less common ones.

Erasing diversity

Dominant modes of writing don’t become dominant by accident. They become dominant because one social group wants to assert power over another social group.

There is not, for example, one kind of English. There are many Englishes.

The decision to prioritise Standard American English in many US classrooms, for example, means that speakers of Black English – a language with its own grammar, lexicon and remarkable history of resistance – are penalised and shamed for writing as they speak.

Similarly, in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Queen’s English became dominant not because it’s intrinsically better than te reo Māori. Rather, European colonisers wanted to stamp out Māori culture, and writing in the Queen’s English became a key tool for furthering that objective. In the 20th century, students were regularly beaten for speaking Māori in schools.

Read more:
‘Can I see your parts list?’ What AI’s attempted chat-up lines tell us about computer-generated language

Going against the default

Supporters of ChatGPT will be quick to note that ChatGPT can read, analyse and generate content in many languages, including in Black English and te reo Māori.

But the concern is not about what ChatGPT can do.

It’s about what its default settings are. It’s about how ChatGPT is configured to treat some forms of writing as normal, typical and expected. And it’s about how ChatGPT requires a special request to generate non-normative forms of writing.

This problematic default behaviour also occurs in ChatGPT’s sister programme, Dall-E 2. This image-generating AI was asked to create an image for this article based on this prompt: “close up photo of hands typing on a laptop.” The programme created four images. All had white masculine hands.

The programme needed a more specific prompt to generate an image that included a person of colour because even the ways that AI visualises writing is dominated by white men.

Ultimately, this kind of algorithmic bias continues to make white English-speaking men the standard of writing culture, while ushering everyone else to the margins.

How did it get like this?

It’s no surprise that ChatGPT’s default functionality seems to prioritise forms of English writing developed by white people. White English-speaking men have long dominated many writing-intensive sectors, including journalism, law, politics, medicine, computer science and academia.

These white English-speaking men have collectively written billions of words, many times more than their colleagues of colour. The sheer volume of words these authors have written means that they likely constitute the majority of ChatGPT’s learning models, even though ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, doesn’t publicly reveal its source material.

So when users ask ChatGPT to generate content in any of these disciplines, the default output is written in the voice, style and language of those same white English-speaking men.

Read more:
AI and the future of work: 5 experts on what ChatGPT, DALL-E and other AI tools mean for artists and knowledge workers

Challenging the norm

Some people will say that we need defaults and standards in writing. They argue that we need to teach people to write in the Queen’s English or SAE so that people don’t miss out on jobs and promotions because they write in a different way.

But that line of thinking just means capitulating to workplace prejudice and reinforcing an unjust system through our participation in it. Instead, other scholars say we need to challenge those unfair writing standards and encourage writers to embrace the rich rhetorical possibilities in their linguistic diversity.

Educators who want to embrace linguistic diversity might be tempted to ban text-generating AI from their schools and universities.

But it’s worth remembering that writing itself is a technology that has been, and still is, used to further inequality. Literary scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville calls this “the inextricability of writing from historical and ongoing violence.”.

In response to this threat, however, Professor Somerville does not advocate abandoning writing altogether. Rather, she insists on using the tool of writing critically and creatively to resist oppression.

Taking her lead, educators might instead encourage students to develop new ways of deploying these tools to compose a more equitable future. Doing so means, as Professor Vershawn Young says in Black English

that good writin gone look and sound a bit different than some may now expect. And another real, real good result is we gone help reduce prejudice.

Read more:
ChatGPT is a data privacy nightmare. If you’ve ever posted online, you ought to be concerned

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

– ref. ChatGPT threatens language diversity. More needs to be done to protect our differences in the age of AI – https://theconversation.com/chatgpt-threatens-language-diversity-more-needs-to-be-done-to-protect-our-differences-in-the-age-of-ai-198878

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Henry Cutler, Professor and Director, Macquarie University Centre for the Health Economy, Macquarie University

Last financial year, the Australian government spent more than A$37 billion on primary care – a patient’s usual first contact with the health system when sick or injured. Every year, this spending increases.

Yet, many patients are paying more to see their GP, some cannot afford care and emergency departments are overcrowded with patients who could be treated by a GP.

Last week, the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce released its much-anticipated report on how to improve the primary health-care system. The report provided broad-brush recommendations mostly focused on delivering patient-centred care, supported by better health data and information technology.

Medicare is set for an overhaul

An important subtext of the report is to overhaul Medicare, Australia’s national public health insurance scheme. Medicare pays a proportion of costs for every Australian that receives subsidised primary care services.

There has not been a major reform to Medicare since its introduction in 1984. If successful, reforming Medicare will be the greatest change to primary care in decades.

It will help governments usher in long sought-after integrated care pathways – with patients cared for by a team of health professionals that better meet their needs, especially those with chronic conditions.

But let’s not celebrate just yet. Major funding reform is not a given. Health Minister Mark Butler concedes there’s a long road ahead, telling the ABC this week that we’re not going to fix Medicare in one budget.

Read more:
Medicare reform is off to a promising start. Now comes the hard part

A battle looms ahead

A potential battle between health providers and the Australian government looms on the horizon.

That’s because the most ferocious national health-care debates are often about how GPs should get paid. Medicare needs to pay providers based on patient health outcomes. Some providers, like GPs, may be worse off financially if they perform poorly.

That will be a hard pill to swallow. Pressure from strong lobby groups that represent primary care providers may water down reform. That runs the risk of worsening patient outcomes compared to what could be achieved.

Read more:
Patient advocate or doctors’ union? How the AMA flexes its political muscle

How did we get here?

Successive governments over the past 30 years have tried to tighten the reins on runaway Medicare spending. Most attempts have failed.

The Hawke government introduced a $2.50 co-payment in 1991, which GPs could charge to non-concessional patients when they received bulk-billed services. In 1992, Keating abolished this when he became prime minister. The Abbott government tried to introduce a $7 co-payment in 2014, but dumped the budget announcement against fierce community opposition in 2015.

The Abbott government did manage to freeze the annual increase in Medicare Benefits Schedule fees (fees doctors are paid to perform certain subsidised services) between 2015 and 2020. This led to fierce opposition from primary care providers.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) suggested this would force GPs to increase co-payments and reduce bulk billing to maintain their business returns.

While co-payments have increased, annual bulk billing rates have only declined in the past year.

Read more:
Explainer: what is Medicare and how does it work?

How should we fund primary care?

It’s clear Medicare is no longer “fit for purpose”. Some patients avoid care because they cannot afford it. Patients with higher incomes, and patients living in more affluent areas, often pay more if not bulk billed, but can access primary care easier.

Increasing Medicare rebates, as the AMA proposes will not fix those problems.

A financial incentive for providers to deliver care of little value to patients will remain. Providers will still be paid regardless of the health outcomes they achieve, and care misaligned with best practice will continue to be funded.

Read more:
Some GPs just keep their heads above water. Other doctors’ businesses are more profitable than law firms

We need a radical rethink

A complete rethink of Medicare is required to support the vision presented in the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce report. The Australian government must start now, as the health-care system adjusts to a post-pandemic world.

Reforming Medicare cannot happen in isolation. It must sit within a cohesive national vision and a ten-year plan for health-care funding reform.

Medicare reform should be accompanied by public hospital funding, private health insurance and co-payment reform – the three other major funding sources for health care – to ensure Medicare does not remain siloed while governments seek to integrate care.

An independent national health payment authority should be developed and tasked with designing and coordinating the implementation of funding reform. This would work closely with state and federal governments, primary health networks and local health networks.

It would also clarify who is responsible for which elements of funding reform and reduce the potential for duplicating efforts across states.

We need to do things differently

Australia could benefit from payment models being explored internationally. These include funding a pathway of multiple, integrated health providers – let’s say a GP working with a physio and nurse practitioner – to provide cheaper care that improves outcomes.

In such “value-based” payment models, there’s an incentive to improve health outcomes and reduce costs. Providers share the cost savings compared to what it would have cost using the current Medicare Benefits Schedule.

If we’re to reform Medicare towards paying for value, then we’ll need much more data on patient health outcomes, other factors that impact health outcomes but are outside the control of providers (such as socioeconomic factors), and data on the cost of delivering care.

That requires reforming the way data is collected and shared, and investment in better information technology infrastructure.

The government will need to work closely with providers to ensure they are equipped to manage the transition towards value-based payment models. It will also need to help providers connect and work together to coordinate different types of care.

Read more:
With the training to diagnose, test, prescribe and discharge, nurse practitioners could help rescue rural health

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

– ref. Need a bulk-billing GP? Why throwing more money at Medicare isn’t the answer – https://theconversation.com/need-a-bulk-billing-gp-why-throwing-more-money-at-medicare-isnt-the-answer-199303

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kilian Vos, Research Associate, UNSW Sydney

If you’ve been visiting the same beach for a few summers, you’ll have seen it change. While beaches look static, they’re actually one of the most dynamic regions on Earth. Winds, waves and tides stir and push sand around constantly. Storms can claw out huge volumes of sand and move it elsewhere.

On top of these changes is a hidden force – the El Niño Southern-Oscillation (ENSO) climate cycle. Our new research explores how this cycle affects beaches around the Pacific Rim. Using cutting-edge satellite technology, we tracked changes over 40 years.

What did we find? The cycle matters a great deal. While the natural ENSO Pacific climate phenomenon affects weather patterns around the world, we haven’t fully understood how it affects beaches.

The main impact? Coastal storms intensified by the ENSO cycle. Storms can rapidly strip sand from beaches to create sandbars, dump it out at sea, or replenish another beach. These changes threaten to undermine beachfront properties and roads as well as beach habitats.

For Australia, if a La Niña is predicted to arrive in the next six months, coastal communities prone to erosion should prepare for storms stripping away sand. Our recent repeat La Niñas brought large waves and heavy erosion along the New South Wales and southern Queensland coast. During this period, houses almost fell into the sea in the NSW Central Coast, while wild waves made a new passage through Bribie Island.

During El Niño, Australia’s beaches recover, while beaches from California to Chile erode.

But as climate change ramps up, the effects of these ENSO cycles may become more intense.

What did we find?

We analysed millions of satellite images, looking for changes in beach width during El Niño and La Niña periods in southeast Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Mexico, California and Japan.

Lying in the satellite data was clear evidence of cyclical change. Along southeast Australia’s coastline, beaches tended to erode during prolonged La Niña periods, while regaining sand and recovering during El Niño years.

Read more:
The wild weather of La Niña could wipe out vast stretches of Australia’s beaches and sand dunes

The reverse was true on the other side of the Pacific, around 13,000 kilometres away. From California down through Mexico to Chile and Peru, we saw beaches narrow during El Niño periods and widen out again during La Niña periods.

Why? Storms and sea levels. During El Niño events, large storms develop in the northern Pacific, sending energetic waves crashing onto the coastlines of California and Mexico — creating the perfect conditions for big wave surfing. During this period, the sea level is well above average too. Combined, bigger waves, storms and a higher baseline pillage sandy beaches. This is particularly pronounced in the eastern Pacific.

Knowing this, we can be better prepared. If you’re in Australia and the ENSO outlook suggests a La Niña is coming, it might be time for councils to replenish erosion prone beaches.

Monitoring the many moods of a beach

Monitoring coastal change has long been carried out with on-ground techniques, such as GPS equipment, quadbikes and drones. These methods require human operators, which makes them expensive and limits the area and duration of observations. That’s why we have very limited on-ground observations of beach change along much of the world’s coastline.

That’s where satellites can help. Earth observation satellites have been capturing regular images of the world’s coastlines for four decades. Now we have the tools to interrogate the satellite images and track the evolution of sandy beaches.

Read more:
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We developed the open-source tool CoastSat to automatically map the position of the shoreline on freely available satellite images, using cutting-edge image processing and machine learning techniques.

With tools like these, we can monitor coastal changes across thousands of beaches over the last 40 years. You can see how your local beach has changed on the interactive CoastSat website.

Read more:
The wild weather of La Niña could wipe out vast stretches of Australia’s beaches and sand dunes

Kilian Vos receives funding from the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

Mitchell Harley receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is the NSW Chair of the Australian Coastal Society

– ref. Millions of satellite images reveal how beaches around the Pacific vanish or replenish in El Niño and La Niña years – https://theconversation.com/millions-of-satellite-images-reveal-how-beaches-around-the-pacific-vanish-or-replenish-in-el-nino-and-la-nina-years-198505

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Page Jeffery, Lecturer in media and communications, University of Sydney

The surgeon general is the “nation’s doctor” in the United States. They are tasked with giving Americans the “best scientific information” about their health.

Late last month, the current US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, warned 13 is too young to join social media. He said it poses a risk to young people’s “self-worth and their relationships”, adding:

I, personally, based on the data I’ve seen, believe that 13 is too early […] the skewed and often distorted environment of social media often does a disservice to many of those children.

Is 13 too young? What should parents think about when it comes to their kids about social media accounts?

Why are we talking about 13?

Major social media platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, require users to be at least 13. This includes those in Australia and New Zealand.
This minimum age requirement stems from 1998 US legislation which banned the collection of children’s personal data without parental consent.

For many parents, schools and cybersafety experts, this minimum age has become something of a benchmark. Many assume it comes with the implicit assurance social media platforms are appropriate and safe for children once they turn 13. Conversely, they also assume they are unsafe for children under 13.

But this is not necessarily the case.

What does the evidence say?

Social media platforms do present some risks for young people. These include online bullying and harassment, exposure to misinformation and inappropriate content, grooming, privacy breaches and excessive use.

Stories documenting the potentially harmful effects of social media are rarely out of the news. Studies claim links between social media and poor mental health and low self-esteem.

These findings are concerning, and there is no doubt social media may negatively affect some young people’s wellbeing. However, it is not straightforward question.

While these studies might find a correlation or link between excessive social media use and poor self-esteem, for example, they rarely point to direct causation. Young people already experiencing low self-esteem and depression may use social media significantly more than others.

Read more:
Social media can be bad for youth mental health, but there are ways it can help

So why don’t we just increase the age?

Murthy acknowledges it is difficult to keep kids off their devices and social media. But he suggests parents band together,

and say you know, as a group, we’re not going to allow our kids to use social media until 16 or 17 or 18.

But any increase in the age – whether formal or informal – will not necessarily keep children safer online. Children can easily falsify their ages (many already do). And young people are good at finding creative and secretive ways of doing what they want regardless.

Why can’t parents just say no?

It is often suggested – by cyber safety experts – that parents just say no. This message has been reinforced by celebrity commentators such as British actress Kate Winslet, who recently told the BBC:

My children don’t have social media and haven’t had social media.

While these approaches may work with younger kids, older children are unlikely to simply comply. Blanket bans and restrictions not only lead to family conflict, but are also more likely to lead to children using social media without parental consent or knowledge.

This is a problem because parents play an important role in helping children navigate online spaces, including the sometimes fraught nature of peer relationships on social media.

If a child has a social media account without parental permission, they are much less likely to seek out their parents for help if they have a problem online, for fear of getting into trouble or having their device taken away.

Children also have a right to be online

Discussion about risks also tends to ignore the potential benefits of being online.

Social media is incredibly important for many young people. It keeps them connected with friends and extended family, provides a platform for creativity and self-expression, and enables civic participation and activism.

Social media also provides access to like-minded individuals and communities who may provide solidarity and support, especially for marginalised teens.

Children, particularly teenagers, also have a right to participate in online spaces, including use of social media.

The United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of the Child notes children have the right to “meaningful access to digital technologies” as a way of realising the full range of their civil, political, cultural, economic and social rights.

So, when should my child get a TikTok account?

There is no one-size-fits-all approach here. Children vary tremendously in terms of their maturity, skills, life experience and judgement.

On top of this, online risk is not equally distributed, as children who are more vulnerable offline are more vulnerable online. For example, children with with mental health problems, learning difficulties, a disability or who have problems at home are more likely to experience high-risk situations online.

In deciding whether your child is ready for a social media account, parents might consider:

• Is my child especially vulnerable to online harms?

• Does my child have the required maturity and resilience to manage potentially negative online social interactions?

• Does my child listen to advice and follow rules?

• Is my child aware of the risks, and do they have strategies for managing them?

• Will my child come to me with any problems they encounter online?

Parents might also consider their children’s offline lives, as these often carry over into online spaces. This includes what their friendships are like, their propensity for taking risks, and their ability to consider the consequences of their actions.

Start talking early

The best thing that parents can do is initiate conversations about social media and the internet early and often.

Many issues that play out on social media are extensions of young people’s existing peer relationships. Parents can talk to their children about their friends and peers, show an interest in their child’s online activities, and openly discuss their child’s rights and responsibilities online.

Some parents may wish to set reasonable expectations and rules about appropriate use of social media. Documenting these expectations through a “family technology agreement” that is negotiated democratically as a family, rather than through top-down rules, is more likely to succeed .

Read more:
How young LGBTQIA+ people used social media to thrive during COVID lockdowns

Catherine Page Jeffery received funding from the Australian Government via the Online Safety Grants Program. She is affiliated with Children and Media Australia.

– ref. Is 13 too young to have a TikTok or Instagram account? – https://theconversation.com/is-13-too-young-to-have-a-tiktok-or-instagram-account-199097

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Humphery-Jenner, Associate Professor of Finance, UNSW Sydney

The Albanese government’s efforts to address the gender pay gap are laudable. Despite all the attention given to the issue over the past decade or so, sectoral pay discrimination is very real and workplace biases persist.

But the federal government’s new tool to address the problem, the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment Bill, may not achieve much.

The amendment to the Workplace Gender Equality Act (enacted by the Gillard Labor government in 2012) requires all companies with more than 100 employees to report their “gender pay gap”.

Read more:
How the jobs summit shifted gender equality from the sidelines to the mainstream

Much like the Modern Slavery Act, the idea is that public reporting will concentrate employers’ attention on the problem, leading to greater gender equality.

But will it?

The problem is the type of data companies must report to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, which has been publishing pay-gap statistics since being established by the Workplace Gender Equality Act in 2012.

As with the other statistics the agency has published over the past decade, the new amendment requires only publishing simple aggregates:

The Agency must publish aggregate information, for each relevant employer for each reporting period, for the purpose of showing the employer’s performance and progress in achieving gender equality in relation to remuneration for the employer’s workforce”

This may seem like a positive step. But aggregate numbers – which in practice translates into reporting summary statistics – do not help us to either identify or understand the pay gap. Those aggregates also don’t help us come up with the right fixes.

To do that requires better data that enables more precise analysis for the factors affecting pay disparities.

The problem with averages

Averages are ubiquitous in statistics. They can serve a important service, such as identifying trends. I’ll even be using averages to illustrate a few points.

But their limitations should be understood. They are particularly problematic when it comes to areas of endemic inequality, such as income.

Consider a company with 101 employees, one being the founder and chief executive. The other 100 employees, split 50/50 between men and women, are all paid the same salary.

But suppose the chief executive pays himself ten times as much as the other employees. This isn’t ridiculous; the average CEO of a listed company in Australia is paid 132 times the average income. This creates a 17.6% gender pay gap.

Now consider a similar company, run by a “tech bro” who doesn’t draw a salary but does pay every single women 2% less than every man. The aggregate numbers will show no gender pay gap.

In the first case, where there’s no explicit gender discrimination, aggregate numbers can be misread as indicating there is. In the second case, actual gender discrimination is obscured.

The WGEA’s pay gap results

Poor data leads to poor analysis

The widespread use of averages often skew our sense of things. If you compare your own income to the Australian average (A$90,324 a year in 2021), the probability is you’ll feel left behind. But if you compare yourself to the median income – the income at which half the population earns more, and half less – you’ll feel much better: it’s only $62,868 a year.

Bad data leads to bad analysis, and bad policy responses.

Here’s another scenario. Consider our first company again. The CEO is concerned about the publicity from reporting a 17% gender pay gap to the agency. So he employs his wife as deputy CEO, paying her five times the rest of the staff, and cuts his own salary by half. He no longer has a gender pay gap to report.

This is progress of a kind, but not the progress needed to address the complex causes of gender pay inequality for ordinary people.

Read more:
Women are as likely as men to accept a gender pay gap if they benefit from it

How to fix this problem

So how then to improve the reporting of gender pay statistics generally?

Reporting median statistics would help mitigate the skewing problem with averages. Unless the government demands this, the agency will more than likely keeping taking the same approach as over the past decade – relying on averages.

There’s also a case for companies to report other relevant factors that could influence pay, such as qualifications, skill, tenure, seniority and productivity.

This would enable the Workplace Gender Equality Agency to provide more sophisticated analysis, breaking down the factors contributing to the figures that get the headlines.

The agency defines equal pay as “men and women performing the same work are paid the same amount”. To achieve this, it is essential to ensure apples are being compared with apples. This is only possible if we control for the factors that can influence pay, and don’t lose the necessary nuance.

Blunt data does not properly inform us about the pay gap, why it arises, nor how to solve it. This risks policy responses that focus on the wrong issues and which achieve little.

Decision-makers, both in public and private sectors, risk making bad decisions on poor-quality data. The wrong fixes could even make things worse. We will not eradicate the gender pay gap using bad statistics.

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

– ref. Australia’s new pay equality law risks failing women – unless we make this simple fix – https://theconversation.com/australias-new-pay-equality-law-risks-failing-women-unless-we-make-this-simple-fix-199587

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ebony Nilsson, Research Fellow, Australian Catholic University

The Chinese “spy balloon” shot down over the United States has brought the seemingly strange methods of surveillance and espionage into news headlines. Balloons have long been used for espionage – and not just for surveillance, as appears to be the case with this one.

In the 1950s, Soviet soldiers in East Germany often saw white balloons overhead. Rather than spying, these balloons dropped propaganda leaflets produced by US-backed groups in West Germany.

But the history of surveillance includes many operations that now appear strange or even absurd. Intelligence organisations often try creative solutions to outwit their targets. Many of these schemes remain classified. But from declassified material and the stories of former intelligence officers, we know the real world of Cold War espionage could be even stranger than fiction.

Read more:
Chinese spy balloon over the US: An aerospace expert explains how the balloons work and what they can see

Acoustic kitties and spy animals

Intelligence agencies have long used not just human agents, but animal ones too. Operation Acoustic Kitty was a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to use cats as listening devices during the 1960s. Robert Wallace (former technical services director at the CIA) and H. Keith Melton, an intelligence historian, described the operation in their book Spycraft.

The CIA came up with the idea while monitoring an unnamed head of state. Officers noticed that during this leader’s confidential meetings, cats often wandered in and out of the room. No one would suspect a cat of being a trained spy. So the CIA trained and surgically implanted cats with transmitters and microphones, to send them to listen in on people’s conversations.

It’s not clear exactly what happened to the acoustic kitties. One former officer claimed the first cat was run over when they deployed it, but others dispute this. The only available official document on the program is heavily redacted. It indicates that the project was eventually abandoned – but the cats were trained and probably deployed.

And so were many other animals: the CIA also trained ravens and pigeons, and the US Navy, Soviet intelligence, and maybe intelligence agencies in Putin’s Russia have used whales and dolphins for surveillance work.

The spy seal

Intelligence organisations were not opposed to working with animals – or with children. The US Embassy in Moscow was covered in listening devices and microphones planted by the KGB, the Soviet security agency – including in the wall plaster. But the KGB’s most lucrative embassy bug was planted in the ambassador’s study. It had been hand-delivered by a group of Soviet schoolchildren in 1945. They were unaware that they carried a listening device when they presented the ambassador with a large, wooden US Great Seal for his study.

The seal spent the next seven years on the ambassador’s wall and sound waves entered through two tiny holes under the eagle’s beak. US intelligence officers smashed the eagle open when they discovered the device in 1952. But at first they couldn’t figure it out – it had no battery or power source.

The sophisticated device transmitted information when Soviet officers in a van parked outside bombarded it with microwaves. During the Cold War, you had to beware anyone bearing gifts – even schoolkids.

ASIO in the ceiling

In Australia, surveillance sometimes involved unlikely agents too. One of the earliest surveillance targets of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was a flat in Sydney’s Kings Cross, where Soviet press representatives lived. But these press representatives also often worked for the KGB on the side.

ASIO rented the flat above the Russians and a married couple, Joan and Dudley Doherty – both ASIO officers – moved in. While they lived there, they had two children. The kids grew up padding around in slippers, learning to whisper and stay quiet, so the officers in their living room wearing giant headphones could listen to what was happening below.

But the operation almost never got started. When ASIO installed the listening device, drilling down into the ceiling of the Russians’ flat, they dislodged some plaster. After a persuasive chat with the building’s caretaker and a quick patch-up job, they were ready to go – but it was a close call.

And after two years of gathering intelligence, one of the Russians did spot the device in their ceiling. He confronted Joan Doherty about it and even tried, unsuccessfully, to enter her apartment. The operation had to be suspended for months afterwards. But it was eventually reactivated. The bug was never as useful as they hoped, but hundreds of pages of intelligence came from the Doherty’s family home into ASIO’s files.

Necessity is often the mother of invention in the world of surveillance. Intelligence agencies need to avoid detection. Officers work to outsmart their targets and collect information on what the target does and says, a process that can lead them to deploy everything from balloons to children and even cats.

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

– ref. Forget spy balloons, the world of surveillance has tried everything from schoolchildren to trained cats – https://theconversation.com/forget-spy-balloons-the-world-of-surveillance-has-tried-everything-from-schoolchildren-to-trained-cats-199300

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

The Melbourne outer suburban seat of Aston, set for a byelection after former Liberal minister Alan Tudge’s resignation, has already made its mark on history.

The Howard government was on the ropes in 2001 when Aston’s then Liberal MP, Peter Nugent, died suddenly of a heart attack. The July byelection was hard-fought but the Liberals hung on. There were other, more important, events on the road to John Howard’s November election win, but the Aston victory has gone down in the narrative as a crucial turning point.

Now Peter Dutton faces his own Aston test, which comes with risks and opportunities.

The risks for the opposition leader are obvious. Dutton’s natural stomping ground is Queensland. Victorians don’t much like him. He didn’t venture into the recent state election. A loss would be catastrophic for him.

Dutton will be relieved Josh Frydenberg doesn’t have his eye on Aston. If the former treasurer were the candidate, the media chatter from now until the byelection would be about the implications for the Liberal leadership if Frydenberg were back in the parliament.

Frydenberg’s decision is wise. Given the volatility of politics these days, he couldn’t be certain of winning and if he did, the resulting destabilisation in the Liberals would only benefit Labor. It’s better for Frydenberg to wait and re-contest Kooyong, where teal independent Monique Ryan might be vulnerable next time.

While Dutton has most on the line in Aston, the byelection (likely to be after Easter, in April) will in part give an early “real time” reading on whether cost-of-living issues are harming the Albanese government. This is despite the fact Aston, according to ABC election analyst Antony Green, is no longer the mortgage-belt seat of old.

Aston voters showed their disapproval of Tudge, Morrison and the Liberals last year with a swing of more than 7%, leaving the seat on a 2.8% margin. Green observes that one would expect it to revert to a more comfortable position on the Liberal spectrum.

But in politics perceptions matter. If Dutton secured a decent swing after a strong “cost of living” campaign it would be a morale boost for the Liberals and shine attention on the potential damage that issue – not yet hitting Labor in the polls – could do in vulnerable government seats.

Labor knows the financial squeeze on families is a slow burn. ALP national secretary Paul Erickson, in a briefing this week, told caucus members the most important issue voters want the federal government to focus on is helping households with their cost of living.

Read more:
Alan Tudge quits parliament, prompting byelection test for Peter Dutton

The Tudge resignation was the second shock of 2023’s first federal parliamentary week.

Senator Lidia Thorpe’s jump from Greens to crossbench has made the Senate much trickier for the government to manage.

The biggest loser immediately is ACT independent David Pocock. Until this week, Pocock had been Labor’s automatic port of call for the single vote it needed from the non-Green crossbench to pass legislation supported by the Greens but opposed by the Coalition.

The government and Pocock have had a cosy relationship. He’s a progressive, broadly aligned with Labor in his views.

He’s not difficult to negotiate with, although he’s wanted his political money’s worth, so has extracted some concessions in exchange for his vote. One was important. The prime minister agreed to set up a committee to report publicly before each budget on the adequacy of income support payments. Jim Chalmers will soon be wrestling with the first of those reports.

With Thorpe’s defection the government requires two non-Greens crossbenchers to secure contested legislation (although Thorpe says she will vote with the Greens on climate bills).

Pocock says the change in the Senate’s makeup “increases all of our capacity to push the government for more ambition and better outcomes on contested legislation”.

Read more:
Grattan on Friday: David Pocock has only just arrived in the Senate and now he’s negotiating with the PM

In fact, the net effect is to reduce his capacity and boost that of Tasmanian crossbencher Jacqui Lambie, who commands two votes.

Labor can’t in practical terms look to Hanson and her Senate offsider, Malcolm Roberts, or Victorian UAP senator Ralph Babet. Thorpe will likely be a challenge, and could only provide one vote anyway.

Lambie and her colleague, Tammy Tyrrell, can give the government the numbers it needs on particular pieces of legislation. From the government’s point of view, this would means just a single negotiation (as distinct from the double negotiation needed to get, say, Pocock and Thorpe).

Lambie will be delighted to be back at the centre of things. In recent months she has been overshadowed by Pocock.

But in negotiations she can be difficult, demanding and at times shrill, and is at odds with Labor on some issues, such as aspects of industrial relations. She has been questioning on the Voice. The government may try to work through the easier-going Tyrrell where it can.

Apart from legislation, the enhanced numbers give the Senate more scope for making trouble for the government. The Coalition and the seven non-Green crossbenchers now have the numbers to form an absolute majority.

Though Thorpe has dealt herself into the Senate play, there will be constraints on her. She’d presumably find it hard in ordinary circumstances to vote with the Coalition on legislation, and if she abstains, the government will be back to needing only a single extra vote to pass contested bills (cue Pocock).

Read more:
Lidia Thorpe’s defection from the Greens will make passing legislation harder for Labor

Thorpe’s defection has also increased the ability of the opposition to exert influence in the legislative process. Given the greater Senate uncertainty, the government may on occasion prefer to wrangle the Coalition than the crossbenchers.

We saw that this week when Anthony Albanese agreed to Dutton’s call to change the referendum machinery bill, so the usual pamphlet outlining the yes and no cases would be sent out.

The concession is welcome. The government’s argument that the pamphlet is unnecessary because everything is on the internet was spurious, not least became voters in remote communities, who have a special interest in the Voice, probably have poor access to the internet.

Meanwhile the Senate this week delivered the government a first significant parliamentary defeat.

In a vote that saw even the Greens deserting Labor, the Senate disallowed its removal of the requirement for superannuation funds to provide detailed information on how they spend members’ money.

The Senate vote, on a motion lodged by Lambie, was a victory for transparency – something Labor professes to support. As the late Don Chipp, founder of the long-gone Australian Democrats might have said, it was a case of the Senate, and particularly the crossbench, “keeping the bastards honest”.

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

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Aston byelection will test Peter Dutton’s ability to campaign on Victoria’s tough terrain – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-aston-byelection-will-test-peter-duttons-ability-to-campaign-on-victorias-tough-terrain-199606

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Stone, General practitioner; Associate Professor, ANU Medical School, Australian National University

The recently released Strengthening Medicare Taskforce report found more people are delaying care or attending emergency departments because they can’t get in to see a GP.

And it’s likely to get worse. General practice is shrinking rapidly, with estimates Australia will be 11,500 GPs short by 2032. This is one-third of the current GP workforce.

So why is it harder to access and afford GP care? Here are six key reasons why.

Read more:
Medicare reform is off to a promising start. Now comes the hard part

1) Patients are older and sicker

The population is ageing, and more people with multiple chronic diseases – such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease – are living longer in the community. Rates of mental illness are also rising.

This not only increases GPs’ clinical workload, it also shifts a greater load of care coordination onto the GP. This decreases the number of patients a GP can see.

GPs have also been under increasing pressure from administrative and compliance activities for Medicare, as well as paperwork for the aged care, disability, social security, health and workplace sectors.

2) General practice is no longer financially viable

GP clinics are less financially viable than they used to be. One survey of doctors found 48% of respondents said their practices were no longer financially sustainable. As a result, many are closing.

The Medicare rebate has increased much more slowly than inflation and was frozen from 2014 to 2020.

While this was a huge saving for the government, a low rebate meant the gap between the cost of care and the rebate had to be passed on to GPs and their patients.

Read more:
What is the Medicare rebate freeze and what does it mean for you?

A GP’s fee has to cover the costs of the whole practice. There are growing operating costs for insurance, rent, wages, information technology and consumables like gowns, gloves and single-use clinical equipment. When a GP bulk bills, their businesses absorb the gap between the cost of care and the Medicare rebate. The rebate is now so low (for example, the rebate for a 45 minute consultation for mental health is A$76), and costs are high, few GPs are able to afford to bulk bill patients. This means people on low incomes have trouble affording the care they need.

Women doctors in particular feel these cost pressures. Medicare rebates are lower per minute for long consultations and female GPs see more patients with mental ill-health and complex chronic disease requiring longer appointment times. This leaves women GPs earning at least 20% less than their male colleagues.

3) GPs, like other health workers, are becoming unwell

The rate of physical and mental illness among GPs is rising. The causes are complex, and include the stress of increasing workloads, vicarious trauma (the cumulative effects of exposure to traumatic events and stories), administrative overload and financial worries.

The suicide rate for female doctors is more than twice the national average, and rates of depression are high. It can be difficult for doctors to access care, particularly if they work in rural practice.

Abuse and violence is also more common, with one survey finding at least 80% of GPs saw or experienced a form of violence at their place of work.

Read more:
With so many GPs leaving the profession, how can I find a new one?

However, it is the moral distress of knowing how to help patients, but being unable to do so, that often damages their health the most.

4) Fewer junior doctors are choosing general practice

Around 40% of junior doctors used to choose general practice as a career. It is now 15%.

Junior doctors now carry more than A$100,000 in HECS debts, so it is understandable they may choose other specialties with similar lengths of training that will earn them double or triple the yearly income.

However, we suspect one of the key reasons junior doctors avoid general practice is the denigration of GPs. GPs are portrayed as greedy, unethical and incompetent.

We cannot attract young doctors to a profession that is constantly under public and political attack. Education Minister Jason Clare recognised this in teaching, saying “It’s also about respect. […] We need to stop bagging teachers and start giving them a wrap.” We need this for GPs too.

5) Rural GPs are leaving

It has always been challenging to attract GPs to country practice. Rural practice often involves a wider scope of practice, personal isolation and increased workloads with less professional support.

Rural GPs often work long hours and have on call responsibilities. Jobs, schools and services for GP families can be difficult to access.

Read more:
A burnt-out health workforce impacts patient care

Despite a growing number of programs for educating and training rural doctors, the uneven distribution of GPs may be worsening.

6) Fewer overseas-trained doctors are arriving

There is a global shortage of all health-care workers, which is expected to worsen. Supply of international medical graduates may drop as their options for work in other countries increases. Border closures during COVID have also reduced supply.

International medical graduates make up more than 50% of the rural workforce. However recent changes mean these doctors can now work in urban locations, rather than the more isolated practices in rural areas. This may worsen GP shortages in rural communities.

International medical graduates have to fund their own training and assessment. This starts with becoming registered as a doctor in Australia and then involves training as a GP. The training is long, arduous and expensive, and doctors often need additional support. There is also an ethical question of recruiting health-care workers from countries that need their services more.

While the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce supports GP care, it doesn’t identify the specific changes required to improve accessibility and affordability and requires significant structural change.

It will be months before the recommendations of the report can be translated into policy, and it may be years before radical changes can be implemented. Without addressing the GP shortage in the meantime, there may be a much smaller workforce to strengthen.

Read more:
Emergency departments are clogged and patients are waiting for hours or giving up. What’s going on?

Louise Stone is a Fellow of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine

Jennifer May is a GP and Director of the University of Newcastle Dept of Rural Health which is in receipt of Commonwealth funding under the Rural Health Multidisciplinary Funding Training Programme.She is the co chair of the Medical Workforce Advisory Reform Committee

– ref. 6 reasons why it’s so hard to see a GP – https://theconversation.com/6-reasons-why-its-so-hard-to-see-a-gp-199284

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

Former Coalition minister Alan Tudge has announced he will quit parliament, creating a byelection in the Melbourne seat of Aston.

In a statement to the House of Representives, Tudge said the decision, cemented after his father’s recent death, was necessary for his health and for his family, “amongst other reasons”.

His teenage daughters had “had to put up with things that no teenager should have to, including death threats. The most recent of which was last week. My son is a bit younger but equally I want to be a good father to him,” Tudge said. He broke down at one point during his speech.

The byelection will be a major test for opposition leader Peter Dutton, who is particularly unpopular in Victoria.

Aston, in the outer eastern suburbs of the city, was formerly a rock solid seat for the Liberals. But Tudge in the 2022 election had a two-party swing against him of more than 7%. The seat is now on a margin of 2.8%. Tudge, 51, has held it since 2010.

Former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who lost the nearby seat of Kooyong at the election to teal independent Monique Ryan, will not seek preselection for Aston. He has yet to decide whether he will contest the next election. If he does, he would run in Kooyong.

Among his posts in the Coalition government, Tudge served as human services minister, minister for citizenship and multicultural affairs, minister for cities, urban infrastructure and population, and education and youth minister. Since the election he has been shadow minister for education.

Most recently he has appeared at the royal commission on Robodebt, when he was quizzed about his involvement as human services minister in the scheme, which was found to be illegal.

He admitted in his evidence he was aware the Robodebt income averaging system “had the potential to create inaccuracies”.

During the Coalition government, Tudge was mired in scandal after his former staffer, Rachelle Miller, revealed they had had an affair. She later alleged Tudge had been emotionally, and on one occasion physically, abusive, kicking her out of bed. This led to Tudge, who denied the allegation, standing aside from the ministry in 2021.

Read more:
Tudge stands aside while claim of kicking former staffer investigated

Miller also gave evidence to the royal commission, telling how when she worked for Tudge, she placed stories with friendly media outlets containing private information about people who had publicly contested Robodebt notices they had received. She said this was to correct the record, and led to fewer stories of people speaking out.

Before Tudge made his announcement to parliament, the Minister for Government Services, Bill Shorten, denounced the illegal scheme. “The architects of Robodebt believe that the ends justified the means,” Shorten said in question time. “The only remaining question for me is, when will all of the architects at the top of the Robodebt tree take full accountability and take full culpability and responsibility for the most illegal administrative scheme run by any government in the history of the Commonwealth?”

Tudge told parliament his passion had always been in social policy, rather than the traditional Liberal focal areas of economic and national security.

“I’ve always believed that while the economy is the foundation of our society, that social policies determine whether individuals are given the opportunity and responsibility to realise their potential.”

Both Anthony Albanese and Dutton referred to the pressures on MPs families in their remarks following Tudge’s statement.

Aston saw a crucial byelection in 2001 when the Howard government, embattled at the time, held the seat. This was seen as the start of its recovery which culminated in its 2001 election win.

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

– ref. Alan Tudge quits parliament, prompting byelection test for Peter Dutton – https://theconversation.com/alan-tudge-quits-parliament-prompting-byelection-test-for-peter-dutton-199594

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Maguire, Associate Professor in Human Rights and International Law, University of Newcastle

The investigation into the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 has found “strong indications” that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorised the supply of the missiles used by separatists to shoot down the plane.

However, the joint investigative team leading the investigation said it has reached the limits of its investigation, largely due to Russia’s refusal to cooperate. At this time, it will not initiate further prosecutions.

What investigators looked at

On July 17 2014, flight MH17 was travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down over eastern Ukraine. All 298 people onboard were killed.

This atrocity shocked the international community and raised many questions of legal responsibility that are still being grappled with today.

One early response was the formation of the joint investigative team, which brought together investigators and prosecutors from five countries most affected by the tragedy – The Netherlands, Ukraine, Malaysia, Australia and Belgium. Its role was to carry out the “full, thorough and independent international investigation” called for by the UN Security Council.

The team’s work was complex and protracted, particularly as the crash site was located in a conflict zone. It was mid-2015 when the investigators gained proper access to the site in Ukraine. They subsequently questioned 200 witnesses and intercepted and analysed 3,500 conversations. The team also studied 20 weapons systems and scrutinised five billion internet pages.

Ground samples were taken in various international locations and missile launch sites were simulated in the five countries leading the investigation. Thousands of parts from the plane wreckage were examined.

The key initial finding was the plane was shot down by a missile launched by a BUK-TELAR system, located on farmland in an area of Ukraine controlled at the time by pro-Russian separatists. The investigators determined the missile and launcher were transported from Russia before the attack and returned there afterwards.

Dutch criminal prosecution

One important outcome of the team’s work was the prosecution of four separatist fighters in the Netherlands. Three of them – Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy and Leonid Kharchenko – were found guilty last year of bringing down the plane and murdering all 298 people onboard.

Prosecutors did not allege the men had pressed the launch button for the missile, but that they played significant roles in transporting, positioning and returning the missile launcher to Russia.

The men received sentences of life imprisonment and were ordered to pay more than 16 million euros (A$24.7 million) in compensation to the victims’ families. But since they were tried in absentia, it is highly unlikely any of them will face a real penalty.

Read more:
MH17 convictions pave the way for war crime prosecutions from Ukrainian invasion

Putin’s potential involvement

The report released this week by the MH17 investigation team focused on the crew members responsible for the missile launcher and those above them in the chain of command.

While the investigators uncovered considerable information about the decision-making before the plane was shot down, the evidence was insufficient to prosecute further suspects. The key problem is access to information: Russia has consistently refused to accept responsibility and has prevented the investigators from gathering evidence from Russian nationals. Russia is also accused of falsifying evidence.

Investigators believe the launcher crew were members of the 53rd brigade of the Russian military, based in Kursk. It seems likely those crew members, if they were available for questioning, could explain what their assignment was in Ukraine and why MH17 was shot down.

The team also found evidence the separatists were in touch with Russian intelligence and the Kremlin. They requested, and were granted, access to heavier air defence systems. Investigators believe Russia was actually in control of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” separatist movement in July 2014. Russia denies this.

Read more:
What legacy will Vladimir Putin leave Russia?

However, it’s Putin’s potential involvement that’s capturing the most attention.

According to investigators, there are “strong indications” Putin decided to supply the BUK-TELAR launcher to the separatists.

Intercepted phone calls served as evidence that Putin is the only person with authority to approve the provision of heavy air defence systems like the BUK-TELAR to the separatists. The team believes Putin authorised the delivery of even heavier air defence systems, but it does not have conclusive enough evidence to pursue charges.

In any case, at the moment, Putin enjoys head of state immunity.

Can Russia still be held accountable?

While the investigation is now suspended, it could be revived in the future. Investigators said they are available to receive evidence from the Russian authorities or Russian witnesses, and that further information could lead to future prosecutions.

Digna van Boetzelaer, deputy chief public prosecutor of The Netherlands, reflected on what the team has achieved to date:

The purpose of this investigation was to find out the truth, and I think we have come further than we ever imagined in 2014.

The bar for establishing individual criminal liability is high. At the moment we do not meet that bar for the persons discussed in the remaining investigation.

The findings we have uncovered about the Russian involvement up to the highest level can play an important role in proceedings where the liability of this state is at issue.

Van Boetzelaer’s last comment references other judicial actions that are still ongoing in relation to MH17.

One of these is an action launched by Ukraine and The Netherlands against Russia in the European Court of Human Rights. That court delivered an interim ruling last month that attributes some responsibility to Russia for crimes committed on Ukrainian territory.

Meanwhile, Australia and The Netherlands have launched a separate action against Russia before the International Civil Aviation Organization.

Ukraine is also pursuing an action against Russia before the International Court of Justice. It claims Russia financed terrorist acts by separatists and is responsible for gross humanitarian violations against Ukrainian civilians.

All of these actions are operating in the increasingly complex and tragic circumstances of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war there. But as Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong stressed this week, the countries impacted by the tragedy remain committed to holding Russia accountable.

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

– ref. Putin is now implicated in the downing of flight MH17 – so why is the investigation shutting down? – https://theconversation.com/putin-is-now-implicated-in-the-downing-of-flight-mh17-so-why-is-the-investigation-shutting-down-199583

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justine Bell-James, Associate Professor, TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland

Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has formally rejected mining magnate Clive Palmer’s proposed Central Queensland Coal Project. Her decision was based on the risk of damage to the Great Barrier Reef, freshwater creeks and groundwater.

The 20-year open-cut mine project would have extracted up to 10 million tonnes of metallurgical coal – used to make steel – each year.

Plibersek’s decision is significant. It’s the first time a coal mine has been refused in the two decades our federal environment law has been in place. But those hoping the decision sets a precedent for other mine proposals are likely to be disappointed.

Palmer’s mine was not refused on climate change grounds. Objectors to coal mines will still need to persuade the federal government of the link between future coal mine developments and global warming.

A rare decision indeed

Australia’s federal environment law is known as the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. It came into force in 2000 to provide federal oversight of large projects.

Under the law, proponents must refer a proposal to federal environment authorities if it’s likely to significantly impact so-called “matters of national environmental significance”. These matters include the Great Barrier Reef.

But it’s extremely rare that any development is refused under the EPBC Act. As of July last year, more than 7,000 projects had been referred to the federal government under the law, for assessment of the proposal’s impacts. Just 13 were ultimately refused.

So why did Palmer’s proposed mine cross this exceptional hurdle for refusal? Largely because of its location. The proposed site was just ten kilometres from the Great Barrier Reef world heritage area.

Explaining the decision on Wednesday, Plibersek said:

[…] risks to the Great Barrier Reef, freshwater creeks and groundwater are too great. Freshwater creeks run into the Great Barrier Reef and onto seagrass meadows that feed dugongs and provide breeding grounds for fish.

The thin end of the wedge?

Plibersek’s decision has triggered calls for the federal government to reject other fossil fuel projects.

For example, Greens environment spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young on Wednesday described Plibersek’s decision as “the thin edge of the wedge”. She went on:

There [were] 118 new coal and gas projects in the pipeline. One down, 117 to go.

From Narrabri’s double-whammy new coal and gas projects, Woodside’s North West Shelf offshore gas extension, billionaire miner Gina Rinehart’s proposed CSG expansion in the Surat Basin, or the Mount Pleasant coal project extension in the Hunter, the Minister has many projects left to rule out.

Approving more coal and gas in the midst of a climate crisis is reckless and dangerous.

However, persuading the federal minister to reject these mines will not be easy.
That’s because the law contains no explicit requirement for the minister to consider the climate change impacts of a proposal.

This certainly hasn’t stopped litigants from challenging projects on climate grounds. But to date, none have succeeded.

Other legal objections – such as one brought by the Australian Conservation Foundation against the Adani mine – have taken a different tack. They’ve sought to show the carbon emissions resulting from burning coal from a mine would harm a matter of national environmental significance.

The ACF argued the Adani mine was inconsistent with Australia’s international obligations to protect the Great Barrier Reef. But the challenge was unsuccessful.

Such arguments are difficult to run. That’s partly because they string together a number of causal links. In other words, they rest on the assumption that one action is definitively responsible for another, and so on down the chain.

Such links may be possible to show in cases such as the Palmer mine, when a development is close to the coast and its direct operation might pollute waterways. But it’s harder to show that coal from a single mine, burnt by a third party, will damage the Great Barrier Reef.

Read more:
‘This case has made legal history’: young Australians just won a human rights case against an enormous coal mine

Room for hope

Plibersek’s decision is unlikely to set a precedent for federal mine approvals.

The EPBC Act could, in theory, be strengthened to give the minister more power to reject a proposal on climate grounds. But unfortunately, the Albanese government’s promised reforms of the law fail to do so.

First, the reforms failed to include a “climate trigger” – a mechanism by which development proposals are not approved unless their climate impact has been considered.

Second, the reforms fail to make so-called “scope 3 emissions” a mandatory consideration in environmental approvals. These types of emissions are produced indirectly – such as when a company’s coal is burned for energy.

There is room for hope, however. The federal government’s Climate Change Act enshrines in law Australia’s goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. Under this policy position, the approval of large coal mines will become increasingly difficult to reconcile.

And in recent years, some state courts have been convinced by causal arguments linking mines to climate change. So future federal decisions are unlikely to be immune from further challenge.

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

What’s next for Clive Palmer?

Plibersek’s decision comes during a bad few months for Palmer. In November last year, Queensland’s Land Court recommended Palmer’s proposed Waratah coal project in Queensland also be rejected due to its likely contribution to climate change, and subsequent erosion of human rights.

Palmer can seek a judicial review of the latest decision. But success would rest on whether it could be shown Plibersek’s decision involved a legal error. These types of challenges are notoriously difficult – so there’s a good chance this proposed mine has reached the end of the road.

Read more:
Today’s disappointing federal court decision undoes 20 years of climate litigation progress in Australia

Justine Bell-James receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Environmental Science Program.

– ref. Tanya Plibersek killed off Clive Palmer’s coal mine. It’s an Australian first – but it may never happen again – https://theconversation.com/tanya-plibersek-killed-off-clive-palmers-coal-mine-its-an-australian-first-but-it-may-never-happen-again-199512

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Freya Langley, PhD Candidate, Griffith University

Australian indie-rock trio Camp Cope announced yesterday they are splitting up. They leave behind an industry forever changed by their fearless feminist activism, and a legacy of empowered young fans.

Over the past few years, the issue of the Australian music industry’s “chronic gender inequality” has gained prominence. Public call-outs, grassroots initiatives and numerous reports show the significant disadvantage women are faced with, on and off stage.

Sexual harassment, violence and discrimination are rife across the industry – for audiences and musicians alike. Its prevalence, according to academic Rosemary Hill, is “a catastrophe for women’s musical participation”.

This lack of representation is inextricably linked to broader issues of sexual harassment, abuse and discrimination. These inequalities are, of course, far greater for Aboriginal women, women of colour, and LGBTIQ+ and gender-diverse cohorts.

As the industry reckons with its #MeToo moment, Camp Cope, along with other musicians like Jaguar Jonze, have been at the forefront of hundreds of women tirelessly working for safer, more equitable conditions.

Despite music scenes having a reputation for being progressive, inclusive and tolerant, they remain male-dominated and masculine-coded spaces, and women who do participate in these spaces, as musicians, creative workers or audiences, are faced with significant systemic risks.

The findings of the 2022 Raising their Voices Report are bleak, but not surprising: pay disparity, high rates of sexual harassment, harm and bullying, and a culture that facilitates abuse and protects perpetrators.

The report emphasised that “Entrenched industry norms, culture, systems and behaviours which disadvantage and discriminate against women underpin their low representation in the music industry…” and that “..Women’s overall lack of power and influence in the music industry has broad ramifications for their experiences and treatment”

It is this culture that Camp Cope have tirelessly stood up to (often to their own personal and professional detriment), and in so doing, helped change the trajectory of an Australian music industry that has for too long been male, pale, and stale.

Who are Camp Cope?

Formed in 2015, Camp Cope is comprised of three women, Georgia “Maq” McDonald (guitar/vocals), Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich (bass) and Sarah “Thomo” Thompson (drums).

Their music is honest and heartfelt, with leading basslines and a distinctly Australian punk-rock twang. Nominated for a slew of awards, including the ARIA Best Rock Album in 2018, the group has been known as much for their outspoken resistance to sexism and discrimination in the industry as they have for their music.

Read more:
Is sexual abuse and exploitation rife in the music industry?

Camp Cope made headlines across the Australian music scene when they called out the popular Falls Festival, held across multiple locations on the East Coast of Australia, for the lack of women in the lineup while on stage.

From spearheading the #ItTakesOne campaign for increased safety at gigs and festivals, and demanding equal representation on festival lineups, to publicly calling out sexism, Camp Cope has done significant work to fight entrenched sexism in the industry, and broader society.

At least, they have raised public awareness, which has helped to prioritise women’s safety and equal participation in government cultural policy, as well as in local music scenes. At most, they have equipped a generation of fans with the strength and vocabulary to do the same.

Following the unexpected announcement of the split, obituaries poured out on Twitter from industry peers and fans expressing sadness and celebrating the profound and lasting impact Camp Cope had on the industry and their lives.

They’re just a band though, right?

Wrong. The impact of Camp Cope on their audience cannot be understated. My 2020 study on the impact of Camp Cope on young women’s idea and identity formation highlights the real and lasting significance on these participants’ lives. The response to Camp Cope’s split from fans on Twitter yesterday further demonstrates this.

Over the course of eight years and three albums, Camp Cope defined a feminist agenda for a generation of female music fans who seldom saw themselves, their stories and values articulated in the mainstream.

My research interviewed fans of Camp Cope on their experiential and emotional connection to the band. The findings show a real and lasting impact on young women’s understanding of themselves and their worlds. Through engaging with Camp Cope, fans forged and activated self and collective feminist identities, becoming empowered to challenge sexism in their everyday lives.

Camp Cope’s music imbued messages of rage, love and solidarity. Their message inspired fans to speak out against injustices, to be angry, to take up space, and to even start their own bands.

Their song The Opener became a battle cry for fans. The scathing, irony-drenched song calling out self-proclaimed progressive men in the scene who reinforce inequality through everyday sexism and only booking women as the opening act – if at all. When Camp Cope shouted, their audience shouted back in unity.

Encouragement and visibility are key to engaging and empowering other women to participate in music. Fans saw confidence, outspokenness and strength in Camp Cope and that helped them to become more confident, outspoken and strong in their own personal identities. Through shared emotional and experiential connections, fans also established collective identities, aligning themselves with Camp Cope’s feminist beliefs and feminism within the #MeToo era more broadly.

Beyond confidence and inspiration, Camp Cope represents a safe space for fans to heal from sexual harm. Songs like The Face of God assure fans that “yes, that was abuse”, and that “sexual assault was never your fault”.

Camp Cope’s split may well leave a hole in the hearts of fans, but their legacy is an industry on notice and the promise that maybe, someday soon, it will be different.

The study of Camp Cope fans’ idea and identity formation mentioned in this article was undertaken at The University of Adelaide, with Dr. Kim Barbour.

– ref. Camp Cope leaves the Australian music industry forever changed by their fearless feminist activism – https://theconversation.com/camp-cope-leaves-the-australian-music-industry-forever-changed-by-their-fearless-feminist-activism-199518

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Toby Walsh, Professor of AI at UNSW, Research Group Leader, UNSW Sydney

Today, if you want to find a good moving company, you might ask your favourite search engine – Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo perhaps – for some advice.

After wading past half a page of adverts, you get a load of links to articles on moving companies. You click on one of the links and finally read about how to pick a good ’un. But not for much longer.

In a major reveal this week, Google announced plans to add its latest AI chatbot, LaMDA, to the Google search engine. The chatbot has been called the “Bard”.

I hope William Shakespeare’s descendants sue. It’s not the job of arguably the greatest writer of the English language to answer mundane questions about how to find a good moving company. But he will.

Ask the Bard how, and he will reply almost immediately with a logical eight-step plan: starting with reading reviews and getting quotes, and ending with taking up references.

No more wading through pages of links; the answer is immediate. To add Shakespearean insult to injury, you can even ask the Bard to respond in the form of a sonnet.

Welcome to the AI race!

Microsoft responded swiftly to Google, saying it would incorporate the ChatGPT chatbot into its search engine, Bing.

It was only recently that Microsoft announced it would invest US$10 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, on top of a previous investment of a billion or more in 2022.

ChatGPT has already been added to Microsoft’s Teams software. You can expect it to turn up soon in Word, where it will write paragraphs for you. In Outlook it will compose entire emails, and in PowerPoint it will help you prepare slides for your next talk.

Not to be outdone, Chinese web giant Baidu has also sprung into action. It recently announced its latest chatbot would be released in March. Baidu’s chatbot is will be trained on 50% more parameters than ChatGPT, and will be bilingual. The company’s share price jumped 15% in response.

AI-driven search

Google, along with the other tech giants, has been using AI in search for many years already. AI algorithms, for example, order the search results Google returns.

The difference now is that instead of searching based on the words you type, these new search engines will try to “understand” your question. And instead of sending you links, they’ll try to answer the questions, too.

But new chatbot technology is far from perfect. ChatGPT sometimes just makes stuff up. Chatbots can also be tricked into saying things that are inappropriate, offensive or illegal – although researchers are working hard to reduce this.

Existential risk

For Google, this has been described by the New York Times not just as an AI race, but a race to survive.

When ChatGPT first came out late last year, alarm bells rang for the search giant. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, returned from their outside activities to oversee the response.

Advertising revenue from Google Search results contributes about three-quarters of the US$283 billion annual revenue of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

If people start using AI chatbots to answer their questions rather than Google Search, what will happen to that income?

Even if Google users stick with Google, but get their answers directly from the Bard, how will Google make money when no links are being clicked anymore?

Microsoft may see this as an opportunity for its search engine, Bing, to overtake Google. It’s not out of the question that it will. In the 1990s, before Google came out, I was very happy with AltaVista – the best search engine of the day. But I quickly jumped ship as soon as a better search experience arrived.

Will the AI race lead to cutting corners?

Google had previously not made its LaMDA chatbot available to the public due to concerns about it being misused or misunderstood. Indeed, it famously fired one of its engineers, Blake Lemoine, after he claimed LaMDA was sentient.

There are a host of risks associated with big tech’s rush to cement the future of AI search.

For one, if tech companies won’t make as much money from selling links, what new income streams will they create? Will they try to sell information gleaned from our interactions with search chatbots?

And what about people who will use these chatbots for base purposes? They may be perfect for writing personalised and persuasive messages to scam unsuspecting users – or to flood social media with conspiracy theories.

Not to mention we’ve already seen ChatGPT do a good job of answering most homework questions. For now, public schools in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, Western Australian and Tasmania have banned its use to prevent cheating – but it seems unlikely they could (or should) ban access to Google or Bing.

Read more:
Scams, deepfake porn and romance bots: advanced AI is exciting, but incredibly dangerous in criminals’ hands

A new interface

When Microsoft launched Windows, it was the start of a revolution. Rather than typing cryptic instructions, we could just point and click on a screen. That revolution continued with the launch of Apple’s iPhone – an interface that shrunk computers and the web into the palm of our hand.

Perhaps the biggest impact from AI-driven search tools will be on how we interact with the myriad ever-smarter devices in our lives. We will stop pointing, clicking and touching, and will instead start having entire conversations with our devices.

We can only speculate on what this might mean in the longer term. But, for better or worse, how we interact with computers is about to change.

Toby Walsh receives funding from the Australian Research Council in the form of a Laureate Fellowship on “Trustworthy AI”

– ref. Bard, Bing and Baidu: how big tech’s AI race will transform search – and all of computing – https://theconversation.com/bard-bing-and-baidu-how-big-techs-ai-race-will-transform-search-and-all-of-computing-199501

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Toby Walsh, Professor of AI at UNSW, Research Group Leader, UNSW Sydney

Today, if you want to find a good moving company, you might ask your favourite search engine – Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo perhaps – for some advice.

After wading past half a page of adverts, you get a load of links to articles on moving companies. You click on one of the links and finally read about how to pick a good ’un. But not for much longer.

In a major reveal this week, Google announced plans to add its latest AI chatbot, LaMDA, to the Google search engine. The chatbot has been called the “Bard”.

I hope William Shakespeare’s descendants sue. It’s not the job of arguably the greatest writer of the English language to answer mundane questions about how to find a good moving company. But he will.

Ask the Bard how, and he will reply almost immediately with a logical eight-step plan: starting with reading reviews and getting quotes, and ending with taking up references.

No more wading through pages of links; the answer is immediate. To add Shakespearean insult to injury, you can even ask the Bard to respond in the form of a sonnet.

Welcome to the AI race!

Microsoft responded swiftly to Google, saying it would incorporate the ChatGPT chatbot into its search engine, Bing.

It was only recently that Microsoft announced it would invest US$10 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, on top of a previous investment of a billion or more in 2022.

ChatGPT has already been added to Microsoft’s Teams software. You can expect it to turn up soon in Word, where it will write paragraphs for you. In Outlook it will compose entire emails, and in PowerPoint it will help you prepare slides for your next talk.

Not to be outdone, Chinese web giant Baidu has also sprung into action. It recently announced its latest chatbot would be released in March. Baidu’s chatbot is will be trained on 50% more parameters than ChatGPT, and will be bilingual. The company’s share price jumped 15% in response.

AI-driven search

Google, along with the other tech giants, has been using AI in search for many years already. AI algorithms, for example, order the search results Google returns.

The difference now is that instead of searching based on the words you type, these new search engines will try to “understand” your question. And instead of sending you links, they’ll try to answer the questions, too.

But new chatbot technology is far from perfect. ChatGPT sometimes just makes stuff up. Chatbots can also be tricked into saying things that are inappropriate, offensive or illegal – although researchers are working hard to reduce this.

Existential risk

For Google, this has been described by the New York Times not just as an AI race, but a race to survive.

When ChatGPT first came out late last year, alarm bells rang for the search giant. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, returned from their outside activities to oversee the response.

Advertising revenue from Google Search results contributes about three-quarters of the US$283 billion annual revenue of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

If people start using AI chatbots to answer their questions rather than Google Search, what will happen to that income?

Even if Google users stick with Google, but get their answers directly from the Bard, how will Google make money when no links are being clicked anymore?

Microsoft may see this as an opportunity for its search engine, Bing, to overtake Google. It’s not out of the question that it will. In the 1990s, before Google came out, I was very happy with AltaVista – the best search engine of the day. But I quickly jumped ship as soon as a better search experience arrived.

Will the AI race lead to cutting corners?

Google had previously not made its LaMDA chatbot available to the public due to concerns about it being misused or misunderstood. Indeed, it famously fired one of its engineers, Blake Lemoine, after he claimed LaMDA was sentient.

There are a host of risks associated with big tech’s rush to cement the future of AI search.

For one, if tech companies won’t make as much money from selling links, what new income streams will they create? Will they try to sell information gleaned from our interactions with search chatbots?

And what about people who will use these chatbots for base purposes? They may be perfect for writing personalised and persuasive messages to scam unsuspecting users – or to flood social media with conspiracy theories.

Not to mention we’ve already seen ChatGPT do a good job of answering most homework questions. For now, public schools in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, Western Australian and Tasmania have banned its use to prevent cheating – but it seems unlikely they could (or should) ban access to Google or Bing.

Read more:
Scams, deepfake porn and romance bots: advanced AI is exciting, but incredibly dangerous in criminals’ hands

A new interface

When Microsoft launched Windows, it was the start of a revolution. Rather than typing cryptic instructions, we could just point and click on a screen. That revolution continued with the launch of Apple’s iPhone – an interface that shrunk computers and the web into the palm of our hand.

Perhaps the biggest impact from AI-driven search tools will be on how we interact with the myriad ever-smarter devices in our lives. We will stop pointing, clicking and touching, and will instead start having entire conversations with our devices.

We can only speculate on what this might mean in the longer term. But, for better or worse, how we interact with computers is about to change.

Toby Walsh receives funding from the Australian Research Council in the form of a Laureate Fellowship on “Trustworthy AI”

– ref. The Bard, Bing and Baidu: how big tech’s AI race will transform search – and all of computing – https://theconversation.com/the-bard-bing-and-baidu-how-big-techs-ai-race-will-transform-search-and-all-of-computing-199501

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Thompson, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

The government’s decision to abandon the Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media (ANZPM) Bill came as no surprise after months of increasingly negative speculation. Officially, it stems from the prioritisation of “bread and butter issues” during a cost-of-living crisis, but it’s hard not to see this as a significant policy failure for Labour.

The bill had proposed to establish a multi-platform media entity comprising RNZ and TVNZ, with substantial public funding. The proposals were controversial, however, and generated over a thousand select committee submissions.

Key criticisms included the new entity’s governance and independence, the balance between its commercial and public charter obligations, its long-term funding and its impact on the rest of the media market.

But most of these were remediable. Revisions proposed by the Economic Development Science and Innovation committee largely addressed the concerns about political independence, and improved the provisions for under-served audiences. Questions about long-term governance and future funding could have been addressed after the entity was established.

Unfortunately, the work of the Strong Public Media Programme, which underpinned the bill, was sidelined by the pandemic (ironically while measures to support the commercial media sector were developed). Otherwise, there would have been considerably more time to make the necessary refinements before and after the bill’s first reading.

But in an election year, political polls and campaign tactics too often outweigh considered deliberation. The Labour government certainly has to take some responsibility for not articulating the potential benefits of the ANZPM model more vigorously and coherently.

Lost opportunities

Ironically, the media were part of the problem, too, especially when they had vested interests in the outcomes of the bill. Amid the cacophony of criticism, the possible merits of the ANZPM model – or consideration of the alternatives were it not to proceed – were frequently overlooked.

So what do we stand to lose? For all its faults, the ANZPM model was not just about merging TVNZ and RNZ so they would continue their existing services. It was intended to provide a framework for the future development of multi-platform public media services capable of addressing the needs of a wide range of audiences.

Read more:
FBOY Island vs public interest media: the culture clash at the heart of the TVNZ-RNZ merger

Particularly for TVNZ, the new charter represented a significant shift in its operational priorities. This was not straightforward, given it would have continued to generate commercial revenue.

But the new model recognised the gradual decline of a commercial business model based on linear schedules geared to selling mass audiences to advertisers. The question of what purpose a commercial TVNZ will serve in the long term has been left unresolved.

Politically unviable

An unprecedented NZ$109 million was earmarked for delivering a multi-platform public charter. Coupled with the reallocated component of the NZ On Air contestable fund and the existing RNZ funding, the new entity would have received around $200 million per year in public subsidies.

This investment was essential to the provision of a full range of content capable of meeting the needs of diverse communities on all platforms. Claims that such expenditure was outrageous and unjustified in a cost-of-living crisis presumed public media services are merely “nice to have” rather than a cornerstone of democracy.

Read more:
Funding public interest journalism requires creative solutions. A tax rebate for news media could work

Such assertions also ignore the fact that New Zealand has historically under-invested in its public media services. Even with the additional funding, we would still lag well behind other comparable democracies such as Denmark, Sweden or Finland.

Given that the previous TVNZ charter was undermined by inadequate funding (Treasury extracted more in dividends than the Ministry of Culture provided in charter subsidies), one might have hoped Labour would have learned a lesson: under-investing in public media will never deliver the services we need as citizens, not just as consumers.

The prime minister has indicated NZ On Air and RNZ will receive some additional funding. But the decision to ditch ANZPM makes it unlikely substantial spending on public media will be deemed politically viable by any government for the foreseeable future.

Read more:
Closures, cuts, revival and rebirth: how COVID-19 reshaped the NZ media landscape in 2020

Salvaging a solution

With two government terms of public media policy work now potentially wasted, can anything be salvaged from the wreckage? One possibility could be to use the additional RNZ/NZ On Air funding to establish a “public service publisher” model.

This could solve one of the big structural limitations in the current public media arrangements. Eligibility for the contestable NZ On Air fund currently requires a guarantee of broadcast or distribution.

Effectively, this means the commercial broadcasters and platforms act as content gatekeepers. They frequently decline proposals that carry commercial opportunity costs (children’s programs, educational content and material aimed at niche audiences being especially vulnerable).

Read more:
BBC funding: licence fee debate risks overlooking value of UK’s public broadcasters

A public service publisher model would see NZ On Air provide contestable funding for typically under-provided genres, with a guarantee of distribution on RNZ’s non-commercial platforms.

This would significantly increase the scope of local content. If one of TVNZ’s digital channels were designated non-commercial, that too could become part of a public service publisher framework (similar to the former TVNZ7).

In fact, this model has already been piloted. The temporary Joint Innovation Fund set up in 2018 saw NZ On Air and RNZ collaborate to commission and distribute a range of content. One of the spin-offs is the local democracy reporting scheme that funds journalists to report on local government and other civic issues.

This required no new legislation, no structural overhauls and relatively little funding. If the alternative is “let them watch Netflix”, then the government surely has nothing to lose.

Peter Thompson is a board member of the Better Public Media Trust.
He has previously undertaken commissioned research on behalf of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, NZ On Air and the Department of Internal Affairs.

– ref. ‘Let them watch Netflix’ – what can be salvaged from the wreckage of the failed TVNZ-RNZ merger? – https://theconversation.com/let-them-watch-netflix-what-can-be-salvaged-from-the-wreckage-of-the-failed-tvnz-rnz-merger-199502

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, University of South Australia

Beetroot is gaining popularity as a performance-enhancer for athletes and those wanting to gain a competitive advantage in running and cycling.

Some people juice beetroot, some eat it, others mix up a drink from the powdered form. But will it make a noticeable difference on how quickly we run a race or cycle up a hill?

Small benefits for some

A large systematic review in 2020 included 80 clinical trials, in which the included studies had participants randomly assigned to consume beetroot juice or not. It found consuming beetroot juice provided performance benefits for athletes.

In sports where every second or centimetre counts, this can be a significant improvement. In a 16.1 kilometre cycling time trial the gains linked to beetroot consumption were equivalent to 48 seconds.

But when the authors analysed subgroups within these studies they found beetroot juice wasn’t effective for women or elite athletes – though this could be because there were too few study participants in these groups to draw conclusions.

Another large systematic review in 2021 of 73 studies that looked at endurance athletes (who run, swim or cycle long distances) found similar results. Supplementation with beetroot (and other vegetables rich in nitrate) improved their time to exhaustion by an average of 25.3 seconds and the distance travelled by 163 metres.

This improvement was seen in recreational athletes, but not in elite athletes or sedentary people. This analysis didn’t look specifically at women.

What is it about beetroot?

Beetroots are rich in nitrate and anthocyanins. Both provide health benefits but it’s primarily the nitrates that give the performance benefits.

Once ingested, the nitrate is converted in the mouth by the local bacteria into nitrite. In the acidic conditions of the stomach, the nitrite is then converted to nitric oxide, which is absorbed into the bloodstream.

Nitric oxide dilates blood vessels, which delivers oxygen more quickly to the muscles, so energy can be burned to fuel the exercising muscles.

The result is that less energy is used for performance, which means it takes longer to tire.

Read more:
Why nitrates and nitrites in processed meats are harmful – but those in vegetables aren’t

How can I use beetroot juice?

The Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) has assessed beetroot and classified it as a Group A supplement. This means there is strong scientific evidence for use in specific situations in sport.

The AIS advises beetroot supplementation can be beneficial for exercise, training and competitive events that lasts 4–30 minutes and in team sports with intermittent exercise.

For performance benefits, the AIS advises the beetroot product (be it juice, powder or food) should have between 350–600mg of inorganic nitrate in it. Check the label. There are several concentrated juices available on the market.

Beetroot contains about 250mg per 100g of nitrate, so you need to consume at least 200g of baked beetroot to get the same effect.

To give the nitrates time to be converted to nitric oxide and absorbed into your bloodstream, you need to consume the product 2–3 hours before training or competition. You may get added benefits drinking beetroot juice for several days leading up to training or competition.

However, don’t use antibacterial products like mouthwashes, chewing gums or lollies. These will kill the bacteria in your mouth needed to convert the nitrate to nitrite.

Are there any downsides?

Your urine will turn red, and this will make it difficult to determine if you are dehydrated. Your poo may also turn red.

Some people may experience an upset stomach when consuming beetroot juice. So try drinking it while training to determine if you have any problems. You don’t want to find this out on competition day.

What about nitrate from the rest of your diet?

While it’s difficult to consume enough nitrate to boost your athletic performance directly from vegetables before an event, consuming five serves of vegetables a day will help keep the nitric oxide levels elevated in your blood.

Vegetables higher in nitrate include celery, rocket, spinach, endive, leek, parsley, kohlrabi, Chinese cabbage and celeriac. There isn’t clear evidence about the effect of cooking and storage on nitrate levels, so it’s probably best to eat them in the way you enjoy the most.

However, it’s best to avoid cured meats with added nitrate. The additive is used to stop the growth of bacteria and adds flavour and colour, but the resulting sodium nitrite can increase the risk of cancer.

While beetroot may give you a small performance boost, don’t forget to tailor the rest of your training as well. Ensure you have enough carbohydrates and protein, and that you drink enough water. You may need to consult an exercise scientist and an accredited practising sports dietitian to get the best outcome.

Read more:
Do athletes really need protein supplements?

Evangeline Mantzioris is affiliated with Alliance for Research in Nutrition, Exercise and Activity (ARENA) at the University of South Australia. Evangeline Mantzioris has received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, and has been appointed to the National Health and Medical Research Council Dietary Guideline Expert Committee.

– ref. Can beetroot really improve athletic performance? – https://theconversation.com/can-beetroot-really-improve-athletic-performance-193221

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Szymek Drobniak, DECRA Fellow, UNSW Sydney

As owners of some of the biggest brains in the animal kingdom, we humans often assume cognitive performance, task solving and social interactions were the basic ingredients that promoted the evolution of our complex brains.

Our new study, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges this intuitive assumption.

Taken together with other biological and ecological factors, cognitive and social factors lose their leading role in driving increased brain sizes. Instead, it is the amount of parental care the offspring receives that supports a larger brain.

Brains are expensive

The brain is one of the most costly organs in an animal’s body – neural activity requires large amounts of energy. The bigger the brain is, the more energy it needs to sustain itself.

Biologists have long assumed this large cost has to come with some solid benefits provided by being large-brained. Some of the proposed advantages were cognitive skills, the ability to solve difficult problems and engage in complex social interactions.

Read more:
What is it about the human brain that makes us smarter than other animals? New research gives intriguing answer

Looking at humans, great apes and other primates seemed to confirm this assumption: our large brains are routinely used in situations requiring creative solutions, and to maintain social integrity in large groups.

There is one problem with this reasoning. Large brains take a long time to grow and while they do so, they still need substantial amounts of fuel (even more than in adulthood). They are also significantly less powerful before they reach their final size and complexity. Growing animals would therefore have to “pay” for growing brains, but would not be able to use the brains’ power for a considerable time.

Bird brain investigations

To solve this apparent paradox, we decided to look away from mammals, which are traditionally used in brain research – but also have almost exclusively been studied in the context of cognition. Instead, we dived into the bird world. Birds are amazing models in many evolutionary studies: they are extremely diverse, have a wide range of lifestyles, and live in nearly all wild habitats on Earth.

Bird brain sizes are also hugely variable, ranging from relatively small-brained chickens and ostriches to some of the smartest large-brained species such as parrots and corvids.

Note that we are referring here to relative brain size. In other words, we are interested in the size of the brain in relation to the animal’s whole body. After all, it is easy to have a large brain (in absolute terms) if you are a large animal in general. Such body-size-related increases in brain size also would not necessarily lead to improved cognition.

Our analysis included more than 1,000 bird species for which we had data on brain size. We also collected many other variables that might be relevant as potential drivers of brain size: the climate each species lives in; whether it is migratory or not; how it feeds and what its main food source is.

Most importantly, for all included species, we were able to find records on how social and co-operative they were, and how much parental care they provided to their offspring.

It starts in the nest

Our analysis revealed that, in combination with all included variables, social factors were only weakly related to brain size variation in birds.

It turned out that co-operation and living in larger groups – circumstances commonly assumed to be strongly linked to large and complex brains – almost did not matter as causes of exceptional braininess.

Of all analysed species traits, only those directly linked to parental care and offspring provisioning showed strong relationships with brain size. Our data showed species that fed their young for a longer time were species with some of the biggest brains (again, relative to body size).

The development style mattered a lot, too. Birds can be easily divided into two large groups. Precocial species are those where juveniles hatch from eggs already relatively well developed (such as chickens, ducks, geese), requiring little to no feeding.

Altricial birds, in contrast, hatch severely underdeveloped. Usually their hatchlings are blind, naked and fully dependent on their parents’ care. This group includes some of the best-known bird groups we encounter every day, such as sparrows, tits, robins and finches.

Because altricial birds receive relatively more care from their parents, we predicted that they should also be able to evolve bigger brains – a pattern that we see clearly in our data.

Even if challenging from the point of view of other existing hypotheses (such as the “social brain hypothesis” mentioned earlier), our results make a lot of sense.

As said earlier, brains are huge consumers of energy. If this energy cannot be provided in the usual way (because a juvenile has an underdeveloped brain and cannot feed itself independently), it must be supplied by parental feeding.

Did human brain evolution follow the bird path?

Our results raise an interesting question – did the evolutionary history of mammalian and human brains follow the same logic? Did it depend more on parental care than on the expansion of social behaviours and co-operative interactions?

Probably yes. Evidence exists that large acceleration of human brain-size evolution was associated with increased number of caregivers and prolonged provisioning of juveniles well into their adolescence.

It also seems mammalian brain size is indeed constrained by the amount of energy mothers can transfer to their offspring until weaning. When it comes to having a large brain, it appears parental love and care come before any subsequent learning.

Read more:
Mammals’ brains: new research shows bigger doesn’t always mean smarter

Szymon Drobniak receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Science Centre, Poland. Co-authors of the paper were also supported by the Heisenberg grant from the German Research Foundation DFG (Michael Griesser) and the Max Planck Fellowship (Carel van Schaik).

– ref. New bird brain study shows evolving a big brain depends on having ‘good’ parents – https://theconversation.com/new-bird-brain-study-shows-evolving-a-big-brain-depends-on-having-good-parents-198767

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Jakubowicz, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Technology Sydney

When Warren Mundine, one of the lead “no” campaigners of the Voice to parliament, suggested that migrants be recognised in the Constitution along with Indigenous Australians, it was criticised as a diversionary and potentially destabilising intervention.

It did, however, focus momentary attention on how Australia’s culturally diverse communities were being engaged on the Voice referendum – and whether they would support it.

These communities could be crucial to the success of a referendum, given their size and breadth. Just over half of Australians were either born overseas or have at least one migrant parent. And nearly a quarter of Australians speak a language other than English at home.

Mobilising support in culturally and religiously diverse communities

The Voice campaign must capture the support of a majority of electors in a majority of states. In the referendum, there will be three possible voting choices – yes, no or an informal vote. The yes vote effectively requires an absolute majority to succeed, while the no vote can depend on unconvinced or confused voters to boost its impact.

Although the informal vote was less than 1% in the 1999 republic referendum, it can be high in multicultural communities. For example, the electorate of Fowler in western Sydney, which has large Vietnamese and Chinese populations, had an informal vote of 10.5% in last year’s federal election.

Recognising how important the multicultural vote is, the “yes” campaign has already identified several broad coalitions whose support is critical.

First is the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia (FECCA), which announced its full support of the Voice at its annual conference in late 2022.

Its chair, former Victorian state MP Carlo Carli, has been using the media to push back at Mundine’s comments, saying there is no interest in ethnic community organisations for a multicultural Voice to parliament.

FECCA is a federation of state and regional councils, each of which comprises many individual ethnic organisations. As such, it neither controls nor completely reflects the opinions of the broad masses of unaffiliated ethnic voters.

However, in the case of the Voice, these bodies may well influence how voters think – this will be tested in coming months.

While FECCA is an important body, individual ethnic community organisations have much closer relationships with the electors who will vote in the referendum. And within these smaller groups, trust in government is sometimes lacking and support for progressive causes less assured. Many of the important conversations about the Voice will also need to be in people’s native languages.

The various Chinese communities offer a good example here. They are increasingly dominated by university-educated mainland China or Hong Kong migrants. And they’ve been badly hurt by the upsurge in anti-Chinese rhetoric and harassment over the past few years of the pandemic.

Many who supported the Coalition in the 2019 federal election deserted them last year, seeing the Morrison government as the epicentre of anti-Chinese hostility. Yet, Chinese voters have not always trusted the ALP, either.

Read more:
How the 2022 federal election may finally signal an end to ‘White Australia’

This very diverse community does not have a necessary attachment to the Voice. On the one hand, many Chinese migrants may have a shared experience of racism that helps shape their attitudes. But on the other hand, some may retain a suspicion and anxiety about Indigenous people, as well.

Another coalition that matters is religious-based. The heads of various religious congregations gathered last year to decide whether a consensus on the Voice would be possible. They soon reached agreement on supporting the referendum, finding in all faiths a moral, if not religious, imperative to endorse Indigenous aspirations for recognition.

However, some of these religious leaders also actively opposed the same-sex marriage plebiscite, while some religious groups were fervently against the government’s COVID vaccine drives.

How migrants’ views of racism have changed

Mundine argued that migrants rejected the idea Australia was deeply racist – a notion the “no” campaign will try to seize on.

However, my research into the political mobilisation of ethnic communities over many years has shown that immigrant communities have a more complex relationship with the politics of race.

Some communities, for example, have questioned the ideology of integration that was reintroduced by conservative governments in recent years in response to earlier multicultural movements of the 1970s to 1990s.

COVID also disproportionately affected migrant communities. In early 2022, it was revealed that deaths from COVID were three times higher among migrants than those born in Australia. For those born in the Middle East, death rates were 13 times higher.

Immigrant communities also suffered from high incidents of racism and serious economic stress.

This caused trust in government to erode among the most badly affected groups – largely working class, non-English-speaking people, often born overseas.

And in 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement ignited similar action in Australia. Although driven by Aboriginal activism, BLM rallies also attracted many Australians with backgrounds from Africa, the Middle East, the Americas and the Pacific, in particular.

These events may have heightened the awareness in immigrant communities of the prevalence of racism in Australia. They may also have enhanced empathy for Indigenous people’s struggles, and potentially, support for the Voice.

Read more:
Building trust with migrant and refugee communities is crucial for public health measures to work

Building trust in the Voice matters for everyone

So far, the Albanese government has called for citizens to support the concept of the Voice and trust parliament to get the details sorted. Yet, research shows trust in government has declined significantly over the past year or so after being very high early in the pandemic.

So, how best to engage with multicultural communities?

The central challenge is to detach support for the Voice from the broader idea of trust in government. To do this, the “yes” campaign has to galvanise grassroots engagement by demonstrating how the Voice is important not only to Indigenous Australians, but also to every citizen from every background.

To this end, some local government initiatives, such as that in Sydney’s inner west, have been running training courses that both educate people about the Voice and enable them to become advocates in their communities.

Some service delivery groups have also committed to the Voice, such as the large Settlement Services International network.

Read more:
Amid COVID and heated debate about China, how will multicultural Australia vote in 2022?

This approach recognises that group dynamics supporting individuals to do the “right thing” can have far more impact than endorsements from distant elites. This was successfully used in Independent MP Dai Le’s campaign for parliament in the Fowler electorate in last year’s election.

Moreover, teams of advocates from diverse communities will also need to be mobilised to create narratives convincing voters of the need for a Voice. Otherwise, the trust deficit that has been so apparent in these communities may contribute to their turning away from the idea.

The “no” campaign is already aware that confusion and mistrust are useful weapons in their armoury. The “yes” campaign needs to recognise this danger and ensure multicultural communities understand how the Voice can combat wider issues of racism and discrimination to their common benefit.

Andrew Jakubowicz received funding from the Australian Research Council for studies of ethnic politics in Australia, and cyber racism. He is retired from the University of Technology Sydney and now provides consultancy services to government, community organisations and business, in areas associated with cultural and linguistic diversity.

– ref. Will multicultural Australians support the Voice? The success of the referendum may hinge on it – https://theconversation.com/will-multicultural-australians-support-the-voice-the-success-of-the-referendum-may-hinge-on-it-199304

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Anderson, Associate Head of School, Teaching and Learning (Health, Disability & Inclusion), Deakin University

This month, Victoria became the latest Australian state to ban single-use plastics, including straws. While this is a win for the environment and marine life, it will come at a price for social inclusion.

Disposable straws enable many people to safely enjoy drinks without prior planning or assistance. Sustainable alternatives to plastic are available, but these options are often unsafe or unusable for consumers with complex medical needs.

And while the new ban makes exceptions for people with medical requirements to purchase plastic straws, these items will no longer be accessible at supermarkets, bars, or restaurants without staff assistance. The ban also lacks measures to guarantee continued availability of plastic straws at these venues for people who need them.

Input from the disability community could help Australia wage an effective war against single-use plastics and combat discrimination in the process.

Read more:
Many people have a hard time swallowing. Here’s how that affects their lives

Who needs plastic straws – and why?

Doing away with straws won’t be a big deal for lots of people – but the ban will create new barriers to inclusion for people with disability. Until now, having plastic straws available in public venues has been an affordable and simple accessibility measure.

It’s easy to take the act of drinking for granted, but conditions affecting this delicate task have significant risks to health and well-being. For some people, straws can reduce choking risk by encouraging a safer posture or controlling the flow of liquid.

By using a straw, many people with disability are able to avoid spills and drink without help or specialist equipment. Straws can also provide relief from mouth ulcers or injury, and can make medications or supplemental nutrition more palatable.

The strategies used by someone who has difficulty drinking are honed through careful trial and error. While some people have found success with sustainable straw designs, none of these currently match the usefulness or safety benefits of the single-use plastic straw.

Plastic is more durable than paper and cooler than metal, allowing safe, prolonged use with hot or cold liquids. Plastic has a low allergy and sensory profile, and is safer than metal, wood or pasta when bite reflexes are present.

Finally, reusable straws require careful cleaning to avoid food-borne illness. This can make them a risky and impractical choice for people with restricted movement or fatigue to maintain independently. For these reasons, plastic straws remain simple but critical tools for many in the disability community.

Some sources say plastic straws can be put in recycling bins if they are packed together inside a bottle or container made of the same type of material. Check with your local council.

Read more:
Plastic-free campaigns don’t have to shock or shame. Shoppers are already on board

Where does the responsibility lie?

Government material encourages Victorians with disability to carry their own straw to venues, and to seek help in sourcing plastic straws if required.

When a straw is an essential tool for hydration, the weight of this responsibility for individuals is heavy. Forgetting your straw can mean missing out on social drinks, or becoming dehydrated when plans change unexpectedly. And when accessible tools require making a “special request” to venue staff, the risks of stigma and discrimination are high. As disability activist Alice Wong explains, “you never know what attitudes you’ll encounter: indifference, pity, or outright rejection”.

Discrete and affordable accessibility measures are key to Universal Design. This approach aims to make products and environments usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without adaptation.

Such measures are also enshrined in Australia’s Disability Discrimination Act. While complying with the straw ban, businesses can honour this principle by:

• stocking bendy plastic straws for those who need them
• not asking for proof of medical need. This principle also applies to patrons with service animals, mobility devices, and other access requirements
• providing and talking about plastic straws in a way that does not stigmatise the people who need them
• using simple language and pictures to tell people straws are available. Many people with a swallowing disorder also have difficulty with speech or language, so accessible communication is critical.

Read more:
There are some single-use plastics we truly need. The rest we can live without

An inclusive approach to sustainability

The war on straws, and its outsized impact on people with disability, exemplifies a broader phenomenon known as “eco-ablism”.

Eco-ablism arises when environmental policy, design, or campaigns discriminate against people with disability. It’s also seen when products like straws, disposable wipes, and pre-cut vegetables are publicly vilified, despite being critical to the health and independence of many consumers.

People with disability are not opposed to sustainability. In fact, a 2021 UK survey revealed 93% of respondents with disability were committed to minimising their environmental impacts in the home. But 17% weren’t able to make sustainable consumer choices due to poor accessibility.

The disability community is resourceful and tenacious in the face of adversity. This makes it a powerful ally and design leader in environmental causes. Inclusive environmentalism harnesses this strength, driving sustainable innovation through collaboration and co-design.

Programs such as Sustainability Through an Inclusive Lens (Canada) prove an inclusive approach can deliver powerful wins for the planet and its diverse occupants in tandem. And research consistently shows that inclusive design is good for business too.

Ultimately, for sustainable practice change that protects fundamental human rights, inclusive environmentalism is Australia’s best shot.

Darryl Sellwood needs to use plastic straws to drink due to his physical disability.

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

– ref. Banning straws might be good for the planet – but bad for people with disability or swallowing problems. What is ‘eco-ableism’? – https://theconversation.com/banning-straws-might-be-good-for-the-planet-but-bad-for-people-with-disability-or-swallowing-problems-what-is-eco-ableism-199183

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hao Tan, Associate Professor, Newcastle Business School, University of Newcastle

The fight against climate change is full of inconvenient truths. The latest? Coal is going to be harder to get rid of than we had hoped. Every victory like the rejection of Clive Palmer’s proposed Rockhampton coal mine seems to be offset by coal’s gains elsewhere.

Potsdam Institute experts this week published research suggesting we have less than 5% chance of actually ending coal use by 2050. That would make the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global heating under 1.5℃ all but impossible.

Why? Supply and demand coupled with domestic policies and priorities. While coal power is likely to drop sharply, coal use will rebound in other sectors, according to the research. Why? As some countries move to clean energy, the price of coal will fall. Once coal is cheaper, other countries or domestic sectors such as steelmaking are likely to seize the opportunity and buy more. The researchers estimate for every 100 joules of coal not burned in power plants, an extra 54 joules will be burned in other sectors, in a trend they dub “coal leakage”.

Leakage poses a new challenge, just as the world seems set to accelerate climate action. The only answer? Accelerate even faster.

Fossil fuels are extraordinarily resilient

What this study tells us is our current efforts won’t be enough – even with the current tailwinds of Europe’s gas crisis and plunging renewable costs.

In 2017, nations at the annual United Nations climate talks launched the Powering Past Coal Alliance in an effort to speed up action. But according to the Potsdam research, efforts by the 48 nations and 49 sub-national regions involved could be counterproductive.

That’s because members of this alliance haven’t taken steps to avoid the risk of rebound coal use – even elsewhere in their own economies.

Depressingly, this is part of a trend. The fossil fuel sector is proving powerfully resistant to change. The world keeps on burning more fossil fuels despite the COVID lockdown drop in 2020. Coal burning increased by 6.3% in 2021, and the International Energy Agency estimates this figure will have increased again by 1.2% in 2022 to reach a historic high.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine saw coal use soar, as Europe weaned itself off Russian gas. Germany had to delay its plans to quit coal power within 15 years and fire up coal plants again over the winter, while Japan’s reliance on coal has only grown in recent years.

In developing countries, coal is seen as a cheap, convenient and proven way to power the economy. China is far and away the world’s largest coal user – and producer. The downside has been terrible air pollution. That forced the government to force millions of households to replace coal with natural gas or electricity for heating, while supercharging its renewable sector, which now produces almost 30% of its electricity.

But as China’s economy slows and energy shortages increase, the government has backtracked and approved 300 million tonnes of new coal production capacity in 2022, on top of 220 million tons of capacity added in 2021. That’s more than all of Australia’s coal exports in 2021 (478 million tonnes).

New coal power projects have also been boosted, with 65 gigawatts of new coal power projects approved by the Chinese government in the first 11 months of 2022 – more than three times the capacity approved in 2021.

It’s no wonder coal and other fossil fuel producers are enjoying windfall profits. Australian coal exporters earned A$45 billion over 2021–22 thanks to soaring prices in the international market.

What about the huge investment in renewables?

You might read this with your heart sinking and think – wait, wasn’t 2022 the first year the world invested more than US$1 trillion (A$1.44 trillion) in clean energy? How can coal rebound while we switch to clean energy?

Yes, we’ve seen stunning and welcome growth in green energy technologies and related industries. This has been driven by government policies, corporate demand for clean energy and the ever-increasing market competitiveness of solar, wind and offshore wind.

Read more:
Tensions and war undermine climate cooperation – but there’s a silver lining

Unfortunately, what this new research tells us is that both are true. Renewables are racing ahead. But the world’s demand for energy grows and grows as nations get richer and the population grows. To phase out fossil fuels remains the hardest challenge we face. The solutions will have to be hashed out politically.

After all, we now have almost all the technologies we need to stop burning fossil fuels. (Aviation, cargo ships and steelmaking are some of the hardest sectors to clean up.)

What do we do?

Put simply, we’re almost out of time. Any delay in ending our reliance on coal and keeping those carbon-dioxide dense rocks safely stored in the ground is extremely dangerous.

Sustained political effort does work. Even though Germany had to reopen some coal plants, their reliance on coal for electricity fell from 60% in 1985 to below 30% in 2020.

To end coal means clamping down on free-riders. Australia is a good case study. The companies which own our doddering old coal stations are heading for the exit as quickly as they can. Even the newest coal power stations are expected to have shorter lifetimes than anticipated. But to date, there’s been little effort to ensure coal doesn’t simply get burned in, say, steelworks.

Internationally, developed countries should offer greater financial incentives to help developing countries switch to renewables. In 2021, rich countries offered billions to South Africa to quit coal. Last year, they made a similar offer to Indonesia. This is welcome – but we need more.

Worldwide, 770 million people still live without access to electricity. For years, China used this as a justification for funding coal plants overseas. But in 2021, President Xi Jinping announced this would end.

Moves like this are essential. We can’t simply expect markets to end the burning of coal as quickly as we need. That means we’ll need policies to do the work.

To nail down the coffin on fossil fuels, we have to embrace what economists call “creative destruction” – the ability for technologies to disrupt the old and create the new. Coal and oil ended centuries of reliance on horses for transport. Now it’s time to end our reliance on fossil fuels – to destroy the old and make room for the new.

Read more:
6 reasons 2023 could be a very good year for climate action

Hao Tan receives funding from the Australia Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project 2019-2023. He previously received fundings from the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, from Enova Community Energy Ltd, and funding from the Confucius Institute Headquarters under the “Understanding China Fellowship” in 2017.

– ref. The coal whack-a-mole: getting rid of coal power will make prices fall and demand rise elsewhere – https://theconversation.com/the-coal-whack-a-mole-getting-rid-of-coal-power-will-make-prices-fall-and-demand-rise-elsewhere-199305

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Milne, Senior Lecturer in Education, Auckland University of Technology

Until now, the New Zealand Curriculum has focused almost exclusively on the development of technical reading skills. Simply reading for pleasure hasn’t been a priority, which makes its inclusion in the draft version of a refreshed curriculum particularly welcome.

There is no question that basic reading skills are a necessary component of education. But too narrow a focus on skills alone has not served the children and young people of New Zealand well. The broader intent of Te Mātaiaho: the refreshed New Zealand Curriculum, released late in 2022 with the inclusion of reading for pleasure, is an important step towards remedying this.

If the goal of literacy education is to encourage young people to want and choose to read, then enjoyment needs to be supported and valued alongside skill. Being able to read words, reading competently for meaning, and wanting to read are not the same things.

Rates of reading for pleasure have been in decline, alongside reading achievement as measured by international assessments. So for those who realise the value of reading for pleasure, its inclusion in the draft curriculum as an essential practice is especially welcome.

Pleasure as well as skill

The presence of reading for pleasure in the curriculum will require schools and teachers to ensure it is happening. They cannot define some children as readers and others as not, or leave reading for pleasure to chance.

Our research for the Pūtoi Rito Communities of Readers initiative, and later using data from the Growing Up in NZ (GUiNZ) longitudinal study, challenges the view that reading for pleasure is a pastime for quiet, passive individuals sitting alone. Reading for pleasure is an inherently social activity.

Read more:
Kiwi kids who read for pleasure will do well in other ways – it’s everyone’s responsibility to encourage them

We have previously identified the importance of reading for pleasure and its connection to a range of better social and educational outcomes for tamariki and rangatahi, both as individuals and as members of the wider community. These include better academic performance and positive wellbeing, and more positive connections to the rest of society.

Te Mātaiaho requires children to be sharing their reading experiences with others from the beginning of schooling. By the end of year six, learners are expected to be members of communities of readers.

School leaders and teachers will therefore need to ensure sufficient time and priority is given to these activities. In the recent past, pressure to develop competent (but not necessarily motivated) readers has led to teaching focused on skill development, leaving little time for enjoyment.

Reading as social activity

To meet the new curriculum goals, teachers first need an understanding of reading for pleasure and those who engage in it – including that those who do it are active, social people in other ways.

Recent analysis of the GUiNZ data, up to and including eight years of age, has shown those more likely to read frequently outside school were also more likely to attend other organised and interest-based activities, such as arts and sports. These activities were also related to greater levels of enjoyment of reading.

Children less likely to be engaged in reading for enjoyment could also be active, but their activity was less goal-directed. A similar pattern is seen in their use of electronic devices. Children who weren’t reading for pleasure spent more time on their devices, often passively consuming media.

Those who read for enjoyment more often did spend time online, but in active engagement with online material. The overall picture is one of readers as active people engaged with the world around them, and reading for pleasure as a purposeful social activity.

Putting it into practice

The fact readers are active people should not be a surprise. We have known for some time that good reading is goal-directed and strategic. Studies that have looked at individual reading styles and dispositions have identified that good readers are not focused on decoding text, compared with those focused on mastering the process of reading itself.

Read more:
After a year of digital learning and virtual teaching, let’s hear it for the joy of real books

Early reading instruction therefore needs to avoid sucking the fun out of reading. It should focus on developing readers who value and enjoy reading, with all the personal and societal benefits that go with it.

For those in social groups (often boys) where active pursuits such as sports are valued more highly, a view of reading as something for quiet passive individuals is particularly problematic. The evidence shows that reading should be portrayed as part of an active lifestyle, not an alternative to it.

Teaching styles that privilege skills and don’t actively promote the enjoyment of reading for its own sake have been called “pedagogies of poverty”. They are often used where learners are facing challenges with reading, yet further alienate those children from the enjoyment of reading.

Given the inclusion of reading for pleasure in Te Mātaiaho, those approaches will not meet the demands of the refreshed curriculum. It’s important, too, that the explicit inclusion of reading for pleasure doesn’t become a missed opportunity. This happened in the UK, where teaching did not change to match a curriculum that included reading for pleasure.

The Ministry of Education needs to be mindful of this risk as it develops a common practice model that will map and guide the teaching of reading laid out in Te Mātaiaho. The progress made so far must not be lost or diminished at this crucial stage.

John Milne receives funding from the Ministry of Social Development and the National Library of New Zealand.

Celeste Harrington receives funding from the Ministry of Social Development and the National Library of New Zealand.

Jayne Jackson receives funding from the Ministry of Social Development and the National Library of New Zealand.

Ruth Boyask receives funding from Ministry of Social Development and National Library of New Zealand.

– ref. Learning to read for pleasure is a serious matter – NZ schools should embrace a new curriculum – https://theconversation.com/learning-to-read-for-pleasure-is-a-serious-matter-nz-schools-should-embrace-a-new-curriculum-198664

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Bushell, PhD Candidate and Research Associate, Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies, University of Sydney

Melburnians know Myki, Sydneysiders know Opal. These two electronic ticketing systems for public transport may be streets ahead of what they replaced, but are now decidedly old-fashioned compared with systems elsewhere in the world.

In the Netherlands you can buy a single card and use it on public transport anywhere in the country. In Japan you can buy a card to travel on the majority of public transport options.

Why can’t Australian public transport work the same, starting with Myki and Opal?

These two systems cover about 40% of Australia’s population. Melbourne and Sydney are the two cities most visited by international and domestic tourists, and travel between the two cities is one of the world’s busiest routes.

Research shows the easier it is to use public transport, such as through integrated ticketing, the more people will use it. It stands to reason more travellers will use public transport if they can use the card they already have in their wallet or purse. Few Australians hold more than the card from their home city.

Upgrading Opal and Myki

Now is the time to do something about this, before NSW and Victoria spend hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading (and reduplicating) Opal and Myki.

The NSW government committed almost A$570 million in its last budget to upgrade Opal. The Victorian government is looking at options to upgrade Myki and will sign a new contract with an operator this year. The current contract is worth about $100 million a year. How much it will commit to upgrading the system is still unknown, but it is reasonable to assume it’s comparable to NSW.

You can only imagine the duplication happening in these parallel processes.

Moving to a system as in the Netherlands and Japan is not without its challenges. It means overcoming the same constitutional arrangements and state-based cultures that once led to incompatible rail gauges, and why we have state-based driver’s licences and vehicle registrations.

But the potential benefits of national integrated ticketing include lower ticketing costs and ease of transport access, leading to better service provision, cheaper fares and overall greater public transport use.

Implementing account-based systems

Both NSW and Victorian governments are touting the benefits of moving from their wallet-based systems to what are known as “account-based systems”.

Instead of buying a standalone card (which you or anyone else can use), account-based systems tie your card (or credit card, or “tappable” device) to your travel account. You can pay using a credit card in some cities in Australia (Melbourne isn’t one of them – one reason for the Myki upgrade) but they are just a payment mechanism, without other benefits.

Account-based ticketing brings with it a far more powerful back-end system upgrade, providing better fare and payment flexibility and data collection.

Most importantly it can enable greater integration between transport operators. Data collected on how and when people use public transport enables operators to better plan and integrate services. For travellers combining several transport legs, it could mean cheaper fares. For operators in the system, it could open new ways of working together to make better journeys for passengers. This greater collaboration may also lead to benefits we can’t yet predict.

Yet there appears to be no attempt to discuss collaboration across state lines.

Read more:
Victorians won’t miss myki, but what will ‘best practice’ transport ticketing look like?

Travellers want compatible systems

Our research, using a survey of 715 people in across all capital cities (except Darwin), indicates intercity travellers would choose public transport over private car options at a ratio of about two to one, if given the option to use their home card when travelling in another city.

It may be argued public transport in Australia is very different to the Netherlands or Japan, notably in terms of population densities. But similar single account systems are also under development in New Zealand, Britain and California.

So how do we get a common system?

Constitutional arrangements are not insurmountable. And while there are differences between Australia’s cities, they are not so wildly different that ticketing needs differ. The basics of tapping on and off for most trips are the same. Fares are programmable.

The greater challenge will be in overcoming the institutional inertia of state-based bureaucracies.

The first step is for the states (and territories) to talk to one another and develop a common understanding of the benefits of collaboration. Starting with NSW and Victoria makes sense, though it is also worth starting a conversation about a national system.

The challenge will be for states to look past their immediate self-interest, and for transport ministers to agree on the same policy directions.

But this is all quite possible. They’ve done it before, as evidenced by the fact you can now get a train from Melbourne to Sydney without needing to change at the border. Though that did require some federal intervention.

James Bushell is affiliated with the University of Sydney.

He received a PhD scholarship which was in part funded by Metro Trains Melbourne.

– ref. What if Opal and Myki became one? It’d help more of us than you’d think – https://theconversation.com/what-if-opal-and-myki-became-one-itd-help-more-of-us-than-youd-think-197684

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Whitley, PhD Candidate, Flinders University

In the video game turned HBO adaptation The Last of Us, human survivors must contend with hordes of zombie-like “infected” called “clickers” in a battle for survival. Now, the show itself is facing a similar problem: disgruntled fans of the adapted video game are using the simple act of “clicking” to sabotage the show’s success.

The Last of Us has become the latest in a growing number of media franchises to fall victim to the nefarious fan practice of “review bombing”. On the surface, it seems an unlikely target. So why did it attract the ire of its own fans?

Spoilers ahead for The Last of Us episode three.

The third episode of HBO’s adaptation of the popular video game was met with near-universal critical acclaim when it was released, with particular praise reserved for its moving depiction of the relationship between Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett). Although minor characters in the game, The Last of Us devoted much of its feature-length episode to developing Bill and Frank’s romance through a collection of intimate moments spanning their first meeting to their joint suicide.

The result was lauded as “magical” and “masterful” television.

Elsewhere on the internet, however, angry fans were mobilising to ensure their voices were heard through an increasingly common practice called review bombing.

What is review bombing?

Review bombing occurs when scores of like-minded internet users flock to aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic to leave low ratings and negative reviews. Often, these attacks are coordinated, and one person may use multiple accounts to further skew numbers.

Similar tactics are also used to organise mass disliking or downvoting on sites like YouTube. Up until 2021, the most disliked video on YouTube was a dubious honour bestowed upon all manner of content, including overly catchy children’s songs, Justin Bieber’s divisive song Baby, and controversial movie trailers that often featured women or underrepresented groups in major roles, as in Ghostbusters: Answer the Call.

Review bombing has its roots in online fan communities. When the internet was first rolled out for general public use, fans were some of the first to carve out special spaces dedicated to sharing knowledge about their favourite media objects. Where it was once hoped that these communities could be havens for marginalised groups who felt underrepresented or pushed out of their favourite media franchises, the anonymity of the internet has emboldened particular factions to voice their opinions through increasingly intense methods.

Sometimes, this can have somewhat constructive results. An allegedly fan-driven campaign demanding the release of Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League was successful in getting the movie released on HBO Max in 2021.

At other times, however, it has manifested in practices like review bombing. While there is nothing nefarious in itself about leaving a critical review when you haven’t enjoyed a show or film, review bombing generally doesn’t come from a desire to meaningfully engage with art.

It most commonly occurs when longtime fans feel that their ownership of their favourite media franchise has been wrested away from them to soothe the political sensibilities of a more “sensitive”, “PC” or “woke” contemporary audience.

Often, users have not even seen the media they’re reviewing. If they have, their objections are generally based on a perception that their favourite franchise or character has been fundamentally tampered with rather than a particular creative choice.

Read more:
The Rings of Power is suffering a racist backlash for casting actors of colour – but Tolkien’s work has always attracted white supremacists

The power of review bombing

There’s also a strategic element to this practice. Even if a show or film has excellent critical reviews – which is often the case with media targeted by review bombers – it is hoped that the drastically low audience score will deter potential viewers. This, in turn, will presumably affect the show’s audience numbers or the film’s box office returns.

At the very least, scores of negative reviews will serve as a PR nightmare for streamers and studios trying to get their content to break through an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

To this end, industry has started to intervene. In 2019, Rotten Tomatoes made it impossible for users to post audience reviews before a film’s release date in an effort to curb review bombing.

Who and what gets review bombed?

Review bombing is often targeted at media aimed at and made by women, people of colour, and the LGBTIQ+ community. It is no coincidence that despite being praised for its faithful adaptation of the game, a gay love story has made The Last of Us a target.

It also most often happens to media with large and dedicated fan bases. The Lord of the Rings spin-off Rings of Power was review bombed because it dared to cast black actors as elves and other mythical creatures, causing Amazon Prime to temporarily suspend user-generated reviews on its site. Marvel’s She-Hulk: Attorney At Law series, which was directed, written and produced by women, was similarly targeted.

It’s tempting to dismiss review bombing as a desperate act that occurs in an echo chamber and ultimately has no effect. However, its significance is clear – particularly in an increasingly online world. Ultimately, it serves as another obstacle for marginalised artists and reinforces longstanding hierarchies of power in the industry.

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

– ref. Review bombing is about power, politics and revenge – but it’s not about art – https://theconversation.com/review-bombing-is-about-power-politics-and-revenge-but-its-not-about-art-199005

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sathana Dushyanthen, Academic Specialist & Lecturer in Cancer Sciences & Digital Health| Superstar of STEM| Science Communicator, The University of Melbourne

Australians aged 18 and over will be eligible for a COVID booster from February 20 if they have not had a vaccine dose or infection in the past six months.

This means people aged 18–29 who have had all eligible doses will be able to get their fourth dose and those over 30 will be able to get their fifth dose. Children aged 5–17 will be eligible for a booster if they have an underlying health condition but boosters will not be rolled out to other children at this stage.

Across Australia 72.4% of the population over 16 years of age is fully vaccinated, meaning they have had least three doses of the original vaccine. But a recent poll found fewer people were willing to get a booster dose.

So why get a booster?

Read more:
Millions of Australians still haven’t had their COVID boosters. What message could convince them now?

COVID is still circulating in the community

Over the last week, 18,590 cases of COVID were reported across Australia, an average of 2,656 cases per day. However not everyone tests for COVID or reports positive results, so the true number of cases is likely much higher.

The number of COVID hospitalisations and ICU cases has decreased compared to the previous week, to 1,838 and 53 cases respectively. Across aged care, there are roughly 198 cases this week.

While these numbers seem low, Australia also reported 226 COVID deaths in the last week of January 2023.

As winter approaches and we head inside into indoor spaces with poor circulation, we set up a perfect incubator for the virus and are likely to see case numbers rise.

You need to keep topping up your COVID immunity

Protection against COVID wanes over time. So, how many doses you have had seems to matter less than how long ago your last shot was.

Booster doses help strengthen immunity against COVID. They lower the risk of infection, severe disease and hospitalisation. However, immunity wanes at approximately four to five months after vaccination.

In an observational study from the United States, vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation within five months of receiving the booster mRNA COVID vaccine dose was 79% during BA.1/BA.2 and 60% during the BA.4/BA.5 period. This decreased to 41% and 29% five months after vaccination.

It is still possible to contract and spread COVID after a booster dose, but breakthrough infections are often less serious.

I’ve already had COVID, so why get a booster?

The majority of Australians have had COVID at least once. By the end of August 2022, two-thirds of adults had previously been infected.

New research shows “hybrid” immunity, resulting from vaccination and contracting COVID, can provide partial protection against reinfection for up to eight months.

Read more:
How long does protective immunity against COVID-19 last after infection or vaccination? Two immunologists explain

Hybrid immunity provides 97.4% protection against severe disease or hospitalisation for six to 12 months after an infection and vaccination.

However, immunity acquired by booster vaccination alone seems to fade somewhat faster.

Does it matter what vaccine you get?

Currently, there are a few vaccines available in Australia. These include: Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax and AstraZeneca.

Pfizer and Moderna both have bivalent vaccines against the original strain and BA.1. These are available for use as a booster, with four million doses currently available and another ten million arriving this month.

Pfizer and Moderna have had their BA.4/BA.5 version provisionally approved, however, they’re not yet available in Australia.

All available vaccines are anticipated to provide some benefit. However, Omicron-specific mRNA booster vaccines are preferred, as it seems to provide slightly better protection against severe disease than boosters using the original formulation.

Whichever vaccine you get, a booster will help protect you against severe disease symptoms, hospitalisations and reduce your chances of long COVID. It will also help to protect others around, especially if they are older, immunocompromised or from a vulnerable population.

When should I get it?

The date of your last COVID vaccine is on your COVID digital certificate accessed via Medicare or My Health Record.

If you decide to get a booster, it takes approximately 14 days for immunity to kick in. Antibody levels begin to drop after three months, before declining more steeply after four to six months.

While COVID is different to the seasonal flu, rates of COVID have previously increased over winter. There have even been reports of double infection, “flurona”.

The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) particularly recommends anyone at risk of severe illness from COVID – people aged 65 years and above, or younger adults who have underlying medical conditions, disability or complex health needs – should get a 2023 booster dose.

How will I feel afterwards?

Vaccine side effects are common, such as pain and swelling at the injection site, fatigue, headache, joint or muscle pain and fever or chills. These subside within one to two days.

Read more:
Do COVID boosters cause more or fewer side effects? How quickly does protection wane? Your questions answered

A few rare adverse side effects have been reported, such as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (blood clotting disorder), myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle), anaphylaxis (allergic reaction), Guillain-Barré syndrome (immune system attacks nerves) and immune thrombocytopenia (low clotting disorder).

While these are rare events, it is important to know about them.

You can book your COVID booster now through the Vaccines Clinic Finder or SMS “Hey EVA” (Easy Vaccine Access) to 0481 611 382, a simple callback service to book COVID vaccines.

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

– ref. Haven’t had COVID or a vaccine dose in the past six months? Consider getting a booster – https://theconversation.com/havent-had-covid-or-a-vaccine-dose-in-the-past-six-months-consider-getting-a-booster-199096

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Flood, Professor of Sociology, Queensland University of Technology

Some 1.6 million women (17%) and 548,000 men (6.1%) in Australia aged 15 or older have experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or previous cohabiting partner. This means significant proportions of the population in Australia have perpetrated domestic or sexual violence.

There are no national Australian data on people’s perpetration of domestic or sexual violence. While we have good data on violence victimisation, we know far less about violence perpetration.

The State of Knowledge Report on Violence Perpetration, released today, reviews the current data and research on who perpetrates domestic, family, and sexual violence, how, and why, in order to enhance national efforts to end this violence. Here’s what it found.

Data from victims and police

One of the consistent findings from victimisation data, legal system data, and survey self-reports is that most violence is perpetrated by men.

Among all people in Australia who have suffered violence, nearly all have experienced violence from a male perpetrator (95% of male victims and 94% of female victims). Around one quarter of all victims have experienced violence from a female perpetrator (28% of male victims and 24% of female victims).

The vast majority of perpetrators of homicide in Australia – 87% – are male. Three-quarters (75%) of all victims of domestic violence reported the perpetrator as male and 25% reported the perpetrator as female. Among all victims of sexual violence aged 15 or older, six times as many people reported violence by a male perpetrator as by a female perpetrator.

As most victims do not formally report to authorities, police and legal data are limited sources of information on perpetration. Police data tend to capture only the most severe cases, legal definitions vary across Australia, and existing data are shaped by the over-policing of First Nations and ethnic minority communities.

Self-report data

Another stream of data comes from surveys in which people report on their own use of violent behaviours. A key issue here is that most self-reported data on domestic violence relies only on asking individuals if they or their partners have ever committed any violent acts from a specified list (slapping, kicking, punching, and so on).

Popular measures such as the Conflict Tactics Scale do not also ask about severity, frequency, impact (injury or fear), intent, whether the acts were in self-defence, or their history and context. They omit sexual violence, stalking, other violent acts, and violence after separation.

Much self-reported data on domestic violence do not measure the pattern of power and control exerted by an individual over their intimate partner or former partner, although many researchers and advocates see this as defining domestic violence.

Studies of domestic violence that use the Conflict Tactics Scales or other similar, acts-based measures tend to find males and females perpetrate aggression against intimate partners at similar rates, or in some instances that women report higher rates of perpetration than men.

Such studies also often find substantial proportions of people have used at least one type of aggression or abuse against a partner. For example, in a US study among university students, 18% of men and 34% of women reported perpetrating physical aggression towards their partners and 98% of both men and women reported perpetrating psychological aggression.

Apparent findings that men and women are using domestic violence at similar rates must be interpreted with caution, for four reasons.

First, most studies are just “counting the blows”, measuring any use of a set list of violent acts. They may lead to false positives or over-reporting, including of harmless and innocuous behaviours.

Second, there is evidence men are less likely than women to report their own use of violence.

Third, women’s violence is more often in self-defence than men’s.

And fourth, even where overall rates of the use of various violent acts are similar among males and females, males’ use of violence typically is more frequent, severe, fear-inducing, injurious, and harmful than females’ use of violence.

Gender contrasts in rates of perpetration are far stronger for sexual violence. Boys and young men have significantly higher rates of sexual violence perpetration than girls and young women, as documented in reviews of studies among teenagers and young people.

Significant numbers of males have perpetrated sexual violence. For example, close to one-third (29%) of men at universities in the USA and Canada reported having perpetrated sexual violence. In a multi-country self-report study in the Asia-Pacific, proportions of men reporting they had perpetrated some form of rape against a woman or girl ranged from 10% to 62%.

Read more:
Pregnant women are at increased risk of domestic violence in all cultural groups

Perpetrators in society

People’s use of violence often starts young. Substantial proportions of adolescents perpetrate dating violence against their intimate partners and ex-partners. US studies find the average age of first perpetration of sexual violence by males is 16.

Few perpetrators are held to account for their crimes. The vast majority of perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence do not ever come to the attention of police or legal systems.

Perpetration is driven by risk factors at the individual, relationship, and community levels. Prevention efforts must address childhood exposure to domestic and family violence, violent and sexist norms, peers’ condoning of violence, community disadvantage, and other factors.

We need to know far more about perpetrators and perpetration. We need national data on the extent and character of people’s use of domestic and sexual violence. We need well-designed methods that capture the character, breadth, severity, impact, and contexts of violence perpetration. We need research on female and LGBT perpetrators and on diverse forms of violence. We need to know more about the risk and protective factors that either feed into perpetration or protect against it.

Without this information we do not know where best to target interventions against perpetration effectively, when to intervene early, and whether Australia’s efforts to reduce the use of violence are making progress.

Read more:
Women who suffer domestic violence fare much worse financially after separating from their partner: new data

Michael Flood has received funding from the Australia Research Council, Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute Foundation, Jesuit Social Services, Victorian Government, and Victorian Health Promotion Foundation.

Chay Brown receives funding from ANROWS and the Australian National University.

Lula Dembele received payment from QUT (who was sponsored by PwC) as co-author of the report this article references. Lula is affiliated with the Independent Collective of Survivors. Lula is sole director of Accountability Matters Project Pty Ltd, lived experience consultant for ANROWS, lived experience advisor for the Department of Health and the Department of Social Services, and works for the Women’s Trauma Recovery Centre, as Director Lived Expertise, Government Relations, and Advocacy.

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

– ref. Who is perpetrating domestic, sexual and family violence? – https://theconversation.com/who-is-perpetrating-domestic-sexual-and-family-violence-192606

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justin O’Connor, Professor of Cultural Economy, University of South Australia

Federal Labor is engaged in urgent reform, making up for the “lost decade” under the Coalition. The Voice, industrial relations, climate change, universities, health, Asian-Pacific diplomacy, research and development are all undergoing significant policy review. We can now add the new National Cultural Policy, dubbed Revive.

The reference points since the launch of the policy have been Whitlam and Keating, both for their reforming energies and their love of the arts. But it is worth putting this into an international context.

Australia’s lack of a cultural policy was often seen as a throwback to some philistine past, provoking a toe-curling culture cringe at the thought of how this might look overseas. But the Coalition was in fact adopting a right-wing politics that began with the mid-1990s US Republican Party, then picked up in the United Kingdom, across the European Union and beyond.

If party lines in culture were string quartets versus some pop-modernism combo, the new conservative dispensation was happy to reject art.

In doing this they could pose as populists, setting the huddled masses of the suburbs against the metropolitan elites.

Read more:
‘Arts are meant to be at the heart of our life’: what the new national cultural policy could mean for Australia – if it all comes together

A creative nation

Labor’s new cultural policy harks back to the ill-fated 2013 Creative Australia and to 1994’s fondly remembered Creative Nation.

Creative Nation set an international benchmark for a new kind of cultural policy thinking, embracing commercial popular culture alongside the arts. This combination was seized upon by UK New Labour for its creative industries rebranding in 1998.

Flagging by the time Conservatives got back into power in 2010, the whole idea was briefly revived after Brexit.

The head of the UK Arts Council, Peter Bazalgette, got creative industries inserted into Theresa May’s 2017 industrial policy, and the British Council actively courted China as a growth non-EU market. “Getting Brexit done” and the pandemic put an end to all this.

In 2013, still in the post-financial crisis doldrums, Creative Australia was a policy wonk document with little to set the blood racing.

Revive addresses a cultural sector that feels battered and unloved with grace and aplomb. The arts are essential to a democratic society, and they are for everyone.

First Nations First is the most significant new addition, marking where we have moved even in a decade.

There is money, not transformative but significant, and a set of new agencies. The absence of economic justification stands out, as does the way creative industries has dropped out of the big picture rhetoric.

A story for every place, not jobs and growth.

This too reflects a global trend. Jim Chalmers’ essay in The Monthly placed the nation squarely at the heart of a post-neoliberal world.

Investment in health, education and social services, along with the green transition, will require a more active, even entrepreneurial state.

This is of a piece with the post-pandemic centre-left, from US President Joe Biden and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, to UK Labour leader Keir Starmer and the German Greens.

In Europe these “green new deals” have come with promises of greater funding for culture, other than in those with a strong right-wing contingent such as Italy, Sweden and many former Eastern bloc countries. In the austerity-headed UK cultural funding is set to be cut, while the US is talking about rejoining UNESCO.

Read more:
Humanising capitalism: Jim Chalmers designs a new version of an old Labor project

Facing inequalities

In September 2022 UNESCO, the UN’s lead body on culture, held a cultural policy conference in Mexico City. They saw a world marked by:

climate change and biodiversity loss, armed conflicts, natural hazards, uncontrolled urbanisation, unsustainable development patterns, as well as the erosion of democratic societies – [leading] to an increase in poverty, inequalities in the exercise of rights and a growing divide in access to digital technologies.

This is no longer the exciting, globalised marketplace in which a dynamic creative economy was going to float all boats. The new vision was “culture as a global public good” and for the UN to pursue a cultural goal in addition to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015.

The next steps for UNESCO are not clear. “Global public goods” can mean a commitment to a revived and robust public culture, or to the kind of state-led investment in skills, infrastructure and accessible finance that has underpinned the global creative industries policy script for two decades.

Revive’s visionary talk is about art and storytelling, connection to country and culture, but the rebranded Australia Council, Creative Australia, is straight out of the neoliberal playbook.

Creative Australia has an expanded remit to engage with the commercial and philanthropic sector, just as Chalmers sees an expanded social services delivered by ethically motivated “impact investors”. The grounds on which this enlargement will take place are not addressed, although chief executive Mark Collette was very enthusiastic about creative industries in the post-launch Australia Council seminar.

The first step

The cultural sector long abandoned the utopian promise of creative hubs and Macbook-driven start-ups.

Rather than creative entrepreneurship, workers in the sector are now talking about co-operatives, unionisation, gig worker platforms and other forms of collective organising. The pandemic radically shifted debates on the social function of culture and the welfare of artists in East Asia.

The new Centre for Arts and Entertainment Workplaces looks set to be a site of contest, as the reality of exploitation in both the subsidised and commercial sector is given a new visibility.

The curtain has been drawn on neoliberalism but, as economist John Quiggin made us all aware, its zombie form still lives on.

Revive is the first step into a new global landscape for which we barely have a language. This has to come not from government but from those working in the cultural sector itself.

Read more:
Pay, safety and welfare: how the new Centre for Arts and Entertainment Workplaces can strengthen the arts sector

Justin O’Connor receives funding from the Australia Research Council

– ref. A story for every place, not jobs and growth: Revive reflects global trends in policy – cultural and otherwise – https://theconversation.com/a-story-for-every-place-not-jobs-and-growth-revive-reflects-global-trends-in-policy-cultural-and-otherwise-198871

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julia Talbot-Jones, Senior lecturer, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

As New Zealand’s new Prime Minister Chris Hipkins embarks on reprioritising policies to focus on “bread and butter issues”, the details of the contentious Three Waters reforms remain unclear.

The reforms represent a radical reshaping of water, wastewater and stormwater management, with the aim of building a new integrated system across New Zealand. The legislation passed in December last year, but the PM has promised a “reset”.

Whatever the final details, a study conducted by Motu Economic and Public Policy Research highlights the need for improved environmental reporting to help deliver urban water supply security.

Our research aims to answer the question of whether water metering and pricing have any impact on water consumption in Aotearoa New Zealand. This should be a straightforward question to answer. But our data collection process has exposed gaps that obscure public accountability and limit the potential for evidence-based policy.

No central database to collate data

Data on urban freshwater use is not easily accessible in Aotearoa New Zealand. There is no central database or governing authority that collates information about demand and supply.

Instead, freshwater is managed by local authorities which have a range of processes and frameworks for collecting information on water consumption within their jurisdiction.

Data can be obtained (by researchers or the public) through requests under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act (LGOIMA). This process involves asking councils for information they may have on file, but that isn’t accessible to the public.

Councils have 20 working days to respond and can either provide the information, request an amendment or extension, or refuse the request if it is perceived as beyond their capacity. Councils can also demand a fee be paid to collate the information if it is poorly organised and difficult to gather.

Read more:
Auckland floods: even stormwater reform won’t be enough – we need a ‘sponge city’ to avoid future disasters

Disappointing dearth of water information

Our data collection process involved issuing LGOIMA requests to 67 local and district councils across the country. The information requested included monthly consumption and production data that could then be adjusted for seasonal variation, particularly droughts or floods.

We asked councils to provide records that went as far back as possible. We also asked for any records of leaks and institutional information such as whether meters were used or what pricing models (flat pricing or volumetric pricing) were in place and when these mechanisms were introduced.

The information we received was disappointing and points to a lack of public accountability.

Read more:
With the Three Waters reforms under fire, let’s not forget that safe and affordable water is a human right

Of the 67 local and district councils approached, 88% were unable to provide us with data that met our request. Most provided information that was spotty, inconsistent, aggregated and only went back two years.

Seven councils refused to fill our request, citing limited capacity. Nine said they could provide the information at a fee, with some charging several thousands of dollars.

There were only eight councils which did provide us with full records, some tracing back to the 1980s. This shows comprehensive data collection by local authorities is possible, whether meters are in place or not. But if high-quality data is largely absent, this raises questions about how we can design policy to ensure it delivers benefits for communities and the environment.

How to close the data gap

Evidence-based or evidence-informed policy is the gold standard of policy making. If decision makers are unable to access data, it reduces their capacity to make policy recommendations likely to deliver welfare improvements for the communities they serve.

Despite its clean and green image, Aotearoa New Zealand has a poor history of environmental reporting, monitoring and enforcement. If decision makers don’t have an up-to-date understanding of what is happening in the environment, any management systems they design are unlikely to be very successful.

With the ongoing reform of drinking water, wastewater and stormwater services, we need to think critically about ways to improve institutional design to help address some of the data gaps that pervade Aotearoa New Zealand’s freshwater records.

We suggest local authorities should be provided with a data-collection template that is comparable across regions and over time. If the management of drinking water, wastewater and stormwater is centralised as part of the Three Waters reforms, developing consistent approaches to data gathering, storage and dissemination across the four proposed government entities should be a priority.

Data – facts, records or measures – are fundamental to initiating any research, validating models, estimating trends and monitoring changes over time. There should be no mismanagement or financial barriers to consistent collection and access.

As pressures on freshwater resources increase, access to basic data is critical to ensure Aotearoa New Zealand can deliver urban water security for all.

Julia Talbot-Jones is an Affiliate of Motu Economic and Public Policy Research. The research referred to in this article is funded by the Aotearoa Foundation.

Thomas Benison is a Research Analyst at Motu Economic and Public Policy Research. The research referred to in this article is funded by the Aotearoa Foundation.

– ref. It’s near impossible to get good data on water use in New Zealand. This raises questions about public accountability – https://theconversation.com/its-near-impossible-to-get-good-data-on-water-use-in-new-zealand-this-raises-questions-about-public-accountability-198983

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bill Madden, Adjunct Professor, Australian Centre for Health Law Research, School of Law, Queensland University of Technology

This week’s ABC Four Corners investigation revealed the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra), or tribunals determining such complaints, allowed a number of doctors sanctioned for sexual misconduct to resume practising.

The ABC suggests almost 500 practitioners from a range of health professions, many of whom are doctors, have come to Ahpra’s attention for “boundary violations” since 2010. Boundary violations is the generic term for health practitioner sexual behaviour problems, the most serious of which is sexual assault of a patient.

According to the ABC, about one-third of the 500 practitioners remain registered with Ahpra or have been returned to the register.

Health Minister Mark Butler has ordered a rapid review of whether recommendations from previous reviews have been properly implemented. He told the ABC:

If that framework is falling short of protecting patient safety, then Australians rightly expect governments at all levels to work to strengthen it.

So what is the framework? What reforms have been recommended previously? And what needs to happen now to protect patients?

Read more:
Who is our health regulator, AHPRA, and does it operate effectively?

Breaching doctors’ code of conduct

The Medical Board of Australia, which governs doctors, has a code of conduct. It tells doctors that good medical practice involves never using your professional position to establish or pursue a sexual, exploitative or other inappropriate relationship with anybody under your care. This includes those close to the patient, such as their carer, guardian, spouse or the parent of a child patient.

Even if a patient consents to sexual contact, the power imbalance between the patient and the health professional nevertheless means the sexual contact is probably inappropriate. More detail appears in guidelines specific to sexual boundaries between doctors and patients.

Similar ethical guidance appears in the United Kindom and New Zealand.

What happens if a clinician assaults a patient?

Mandatory reporting rules mean health professionals have an obligation to report sexual misconduct by their peers, generally to Ahpra. Failure to do so may itself be unsatisfactory professional conduct.

Of course, a patient may make a direct complaint of sexual misconduct to Ahpra or to local health-care complaints organisations.

Immediate action can be taken by Ahpra (or other bodies in New South Wales and Queensland) pending proceedings being brought against health practitioners in various tribunals across Australia.

Those proceedings will determine if a boundary violation occurred and provide for an appropriate response, which may prevent the health practitioner from practising or may impose lesser constraints, such as mentoring or education.

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

Patients may also report sexual assault (or other offences such as possession of child abuse materials) to the police, which may lead to criminal prosecution and possible imprisonment. Convicted health practitioners may then not be able to obtain clearance for working with children, making it very difficult if not impossible to continue work as a doctor or other health practitioner.

Patients suffering injury (usually mental harm) can seek compensation by suing the health practitioner and, in some cases, their hospital or clinic.

Patients rarely sue Ahpra for failing to take prompt and appropriate regulatory steps. There is perhaps only one reported case involving Ahpra, which settled before a hearing.

What’s going wrong?

Incidents of health professionals sexually assaulting patients are of course deeply concerning. But whether anything is “going wrong” with the current regulatory system may be debated.

Patients in different states have access to different information about health practitioners – this could be improved. Patients and doctors have also reportedly complained that the processes of Ahpra, the tribunals or the courts can take “too long”.

Whether permitting some health practitioners to return to practice after boundary violations is appropriate requires careful scrutiny of the history of the complaint.

And as mentioned in the ABC program, health practitioners, patients and Ahrpa could well benefit from more research about what is and is not working to protect patients.

How can we better protect patients?

Ahpra, which only come into existence in 2010, has taken steps to improve how it responds to boundary violation complaints.

In 2016, the Medical Board of Australia and Ahpra commissioned an independent review into the use of chaperones to protect patients. The aim of a chaperone is to have an independent person present to supervise a doctor. Unfortunately the review reported chaperones did not adequately protect patients:

Chaperone conditions are not wholly effective to prevent patients being exposed to harm and, in some cases, sexually assaulted. Their use is largely confined to private medical practice. The system relies on inadequately informed and trained chaperones, many in a conflicted situation by being employed by the practitioner they are to observe and report on.

Chaperones are still used today in some circumstances, but probably less often.

A National Health Practitioner Ombudsman has been established to investigate complaints and make recommendations to improve the regulation of Australia’s health practitioners. Its work is probably not well known, but it does publish its reports and submissions.

Ahpra has also recently invited feedback from health practitioners, employers and members of the public on the future uses of the data it collects and stores. It sought views on publishing additional information about health practitioners and their practice on the public register. The feedback process finished only recently, so we do not yet know what the outcome will be.

For boundary violation cases, there may be an argument for more transparency. This would include information about the constraints imposed on health practitioners remaining publicly visible on the Ahpra public register permanently, even if the practitioner’s period of suspension, supervision, or the like, eventually lapses.

Read more:
A doctor’s sexual advances towards a patient are never ok, even if ‘consensual’

Perhaps transparency of information is an area for attention more broadly. The ABC reported that only in NSW is information made publicly available when suspended health practitioners apply to return to practice. Arguably, this should be rolled out to the other Australian jurisdictions.

If patient protection cannot be confidently maintained, especially with “repeat offender” health practitioners, we may see calls for a “one strike and you are out” provision. This would mean health practitioners found to have serious or multiple boundary violations may never be permitted to return to practice.

This would be a serious step, but further research on the operation of the current system may assist in assessing the merit of that type of law reform.

Bill Madden is a lawyer in private practice.

– ref. How can the health regulator better protect patients from sexual misconduct? – https://theconversation.com/how-can-the-health-regulator-better-protect-patients-from-sexual-misconduct-199173