…supports the well-being of students and school communities through the provision of pastoral care services.
However, the idea a chaplain should be responsible for students’ well-being has prompted some people to react with outrage. The assumption has been that chaplains have no place in secular schools; that chaplains may be trying to indoctrinate students into their faith and, unlike school counsellors, have no formal training in supporting student well-being.
But there are several misconceptions in this view. Not all chaplains are religious, and Australia’s chaplaincy program actually prohibits preaching or religious practice.
What is a chaplain?
The word chaplain comes from Latin word for “cloak”. The story goes that Saint Martin met a man begging in the rain without a cloak. Martin ripped his cloak in half to share with the man, seeing both his need and the man’s as equal.
While pastoral care originated from Christian philosophy, it is now widely used in non-religious organisations. It means ensuring the personal development of the student and, in particular, their general and moral welfare.
It is also important to note a chaplain’s role is not that of a psychologist. Chaplains run self-esteem programs, host breakfast clubs, and chat about daily friendship issues. Psychologists do not do this.
Psychologists assess and treat mental health issues, and learning and achievement problems. They provide counselling, and manage risk (such as for self-harm or suicide). Chaplains should not be doing any of these tasks.
Every week, Australia’s school chaplains have an estimated 28,264 informal conversations with students. While chaplains can have these chats, a psychologist cannot without consent from parents. In these moments, chaplains can provide pastoral care to encourage effective coping, friendship skills and resilience without having to go through an official process.
A chaplain does not replace a psychologist; they complement them.
Despite the lessening of religion in the chaplain’s role, to gain employment as a chaplain in Australian schools in some states and territories, one must be endorsed by a religious affiliation. This excludes those who may be qualified (such as a youth worker or social worker) but not religious.
The Australian Capital Territory and Victoria have brought in changes to this model as they state it is discriminatory and undermines the secular nature of schools. Victoria has advocated for atheist chaplains.
take advantage of their privileged position to proselytise, evangelise or advocate for a particular religious view or belief
conduct religious services or ceremonies or lead students or staff in religious observances unless agreed to by the principal if working in a government school deliver special religious instruction if working in a government school.
Are chaplains in schools effective?
In a government evaluation, the National School Chaplaincy Program was considered to be effective in dealing with family relationships, bullying and harassment, loneliness, and grief and loss.
In the same evaluation, 80% of principals and 60% of parents believed the program to be extremely effective in fostering a sense of purpose and self-esteem, peer relationships, social inclusion and self-image.
However, the chaplaincy program was perceived as less effective when dealing with issues of alcohol and drug abuse, sexuality, self-harm and suicide, and racism. Many parents and principals felt “unsure” if chaplains helped in these areas.
This is where roles are confused and issues occur. Chaplains are not specifically trained in these areas and should not be engaged in these services. These are areas for psychologists.
It is vital to have adults in schools with whom young people can connect to share their concerns and worries. Chaplains fulfil that role effectively. The historical religious basis and the current need for endorsement from an affiliate church can distract some from the role they perform.
Long-term planning has delivered mass transit systems to cater for high-patronage, hub-and-spoke transport systems. Unfortunately, this has left many city residents without basic access to public transport services. And we could never have planned for the impacts of COVID-19.
Our previous plans were based on the best available data at the time. Today, these plans must be critically reviewed using new data that properly represent the world and our transport needs as they are now.
The work-from-home transition is well under way. Our current transport networks (except for roads, which have rebounded to traffic equal to or above pre-pandemic levels in some cities) are operating far below previous levels, even allowing for social distancing. This may not be the best time to break ground on major infrastructure projects planned under previous assumptions of population and demand growth.
2: Disadvantaged populations lack access to opportunities.
Public transport is key to enabling everyone in a population to be a productive member of society. Many disadvantaged groups cannot drive or afford car ownership. However, they also lack access to public transport, particularly in the outer suburbs.
Unfortunately, coronavirus impacts will hit the disadvantaged the hardest. If we want everyone to be able to participate in the economic recovery, we need to promote basic levels of access regardless of an individual’s circumstance.
Migration bans will greatly reduce short-term growth. Current projections show a population up to 4% smaller in 2040 than it would have been in a non-COVID world. This will further decrease demand for urban transit services as well as demand across many sectors of our society. These trends are important because much of our planning is based around these population growth metrics.
However, our suburbs still lack basic public transport services. If we want to increase patronage, we need to bring services to more people by improving coverage of our sprawling, low-density cities.
Over 80% of the population of our biggest cities live in the outer and middle suburbs, yet this massive majority have limited to no basic public transport service. Across our five largest cities, Infrastructure Australia reports, “public transport disadvantage in outer suburbs is significant”.
Job creation will be an important aspect of economic recovery. Yet too often we look to large construction projects as the answer. There is plenty of other job-creating work to be done in our communities.
We could, for example, increase the miserly funding for our piecemeal walking and cycling networks.
We could also expand on-demand services to suburban and rural residents who lack basic public transport access. On-demand transit does not follow fixed routes or timetables. Riders book a trip for a cost similar to a bus fare.
Bridj is one of the operators that is expanding on-demand services in Sydney and other cities.Bridj Transit Systems/Facebook
A focus on localised investment in the many neglected communities across the country will deliver major benefits. Money already committed to large projects that are under way represents sunk costs that may be too deep to renegotiate. However, future plans using public funds must be re-examined.
Investments should target disadvantaged groups and broaden access to transport networks, encouraging new potential users. For many, assistance in gaining access to the necessities of life will be invaluable during the coming economic recovery. Guaranteed access to groceries, medical services, work opportunities and recreational activities must not be reserved for the elite.
We need better localised public transport and we need it for the majority of citizens, not just those who live in the inner suburbs of our capital cities. Most regional populations lack even rudimentary public transport coverage at reasonable frequency.
Increasing services in these areas will create valuable jobs that will stick around, unlike large one-off construction projects. The money will stay local, going into the pockets of operators who live and work in their own community.
While our long-term planning is not to blame for our current situation, we need to develop for the future, not the past. The financial costs of building and maintaining our current infrastructure are not going away. However, we can no longer refuse to invest in many of our underserved communities.
It is time to ensure everyone, regardless of their income or where they grow up, has the basic services they need to be a productive member of society.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carla Liuzzo, Sessional Lecturer, School of Business, School of Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg mocked the idea of a “well-being budget” as “laughable” back in February. He’s got less reason to laugh now.
According to an Essential Research poll last week, 78% of Australians agree the pandemic has exposed flaws in the economy and there is an opportunity to explore new ways to run things. A well-being budget might be just the ticket.
In February, Frydenberg dismissed a well-being budget as “just another word for Labor’s higher taxes and more debt”, after the shadow treasurer, Jim Chalmers, committed the heresy of saying gross domestic product was, on its own, a deficient economic measure, and countenanced “a version of New Zealand’s well-being budget, which redefines what success means in terms of economic outcomes”.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg enjoying himself during Question Time in the House of Representatives on Thursday, February 27 2020.Mick Tsikas/AAP
Frydenberg joked about Chalmers being “fresh from his ashram deep in the Himalayas, barefoot, robes flowing, incense burning, beads in one hand, well-being budget in the other”.
But now, with the federal government changing its tune on many things, such as debt, it might be a good time for Frydenberg to change his mind on this.
Well-being measures, for one thing, could greatly assist the Australian government in budgeting to improve mental health and prevent suicides – things Frydenberg said in his budget speech are national priorities.
It’s impossible to address the nation’s mental crisis just through the blunt tools of economic growth and money for band-aid services. If a bigger income was the main means to mental well-being, after all, James Packer would be happier.
Mental health is a complex problem, with complicated causes, requiring a sophisticated response. To do that, developing measurements of well-being can only help.
There is no universal definition of well-being economics, but essentially it is an economic perspective that acknowledges gross domestic product – the monetary value of all goods and services produced by a country in a given period – as an all-too narrow metric for building a prosperous, sustainable, human-centred economy.
GDP is useful, as Chalmers acknowledged in his February speech:
It does still provide a powerful insight into the current state of the economy, and is useful for historical comparisons. […]
More broadly, growth matters to the jobs and opportunities created in our society. A healthy, growing economy can make people more comfortable with farsighted social and economic policy changes as well.
But GDP does not, as Chalmers said, paint the whole picture. He quoted Robert Kennedy, who said GDP measured everything “except that which makes life worthwhile”; and Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz: “If we measure the wrong thing, we will do the wrong thing.” So his point was hardly fringe.
Indeed even the architect of GDP as an economic measure, economist Simon Kuznets, warned against putting too much emphasis on it, and of the dangers of it subverting the normally “valuable capacity of the human mind to simplify a complex situation in a compact characterisation”.
The main difference of The Wellbeing Budget to previous budgets was how it allocated resources to five priority areas: mental health; child well-being; Māori and Pasifika well-being; productivity; and environmental sustainability.
The traditional budget process tends to consider priorities on a yearly basis. This guides governments to put more money into short-term goals and less into initiatives with long-term returns. To overcome this bias, New Zealand’s Treasury created an assessment framework that considers the merits of projects according to 60 different measurements (covering economic, social and environmental impacts).
The intention is to ensure the budget doesn’t neglect to invest in long-term initiatives that can prevent problems, rather than being caught in a cycle of pumping money into alleviating the symptoms short-term.
New Zealand’s Wellbeing Budget, published May 30 2019.Boris Jancic/AAP
In mental health this means more emphasis on policies that keep people well, rather than on providing help only once they are very unwell – the type of “defensive spending” dominating the Australian government’s priorities in mental health in last week’s budget.
The Australian Capital Territory’s Labor government has already replicated New Zealand’s model in its own Wellbeing Framework.
In February Chalmers indicated a desire for federal Labor to take a well-being budget to the next election.
ALP leader Anthony Albanese’s response to the federal budget on Thursday night gave few signals the Labor Party will do so. Though he criticised the government’s short-term GDP growth focus, the word “well-being” did not pass his lips.
But popular opinion suggests both parties should be putting well-being measures on the agenda. Already more than 30 countries measure “life satisfaction”. Support for well-being economics should transcend party lines, as it does in countries such as Britain.
If the Australian government is to “build back better”, it’s hard to see how a well-being budget could possibly hurt.
The 2020 federal budget has allocated A$53 million towards Australian screen production.
The funding comes attached to policy reforms harmonising incentives across film and television production and removing requirements for films to play in cinemas.
Arts minister Paul Fletcher argues “the old approach of treating film and television differently no longer makes sense” and “simplifying regulations” will encourage creators to develop higher production value content for international streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.
But producers fear this will spell the end for Australian-made films and feature documentaries in cinemas.
Responding to the policy changes, film producer and distributor Sue Maslin AO tells me:
This announcement brings an end to producers like myself continuing to invest our time, money, blood, sweat and tears in developing features and forces us to focus on digital platforms in an unregulated environment where to date there has been negligible commissioning by streamers and no sustainable business model emerge.
Such a clear preference for eyeballs aimed at televisions and computer screens overlooks the importance films in the cinema have for sustaining a robust Australian screen industry.
From script to screen
Feature films are expensive to make and difficult to finance.
Under the existing model, feature films with an Australian spend of at least $500,000 qualify for a 40% rebate, while television and online content receive 20%.
The new budget measures harmonise the offset for all productions at 30%. This means feature producers will be forced to find an additional 10% of their total budget to get their films made. Additionally, all productions must now spend at least $1 million in Australia to be eligible.
Feature film funding comes from a variety of sources. State and federal production grants and the producer offset account for roughly half of a typical budget.
The remaining finance comes from local distributors, international sales agents, television license fees and a shrinking pool of private investment.
With lower subsidies, projects will look to co-produce in countries with more generous rebates.Dirt Music/Wildgaze Films
With a rebate of just 30%, finance will become harder to access.
Foreign co-producers will look towards countries like Canada or the UK with more generous incentives and, with longform content such as drama series now eligible for the same rebates, broadcasters will have even less incentive to license feature-length content.
Diminishing confidence in the value of films within the Australian market further impacts the willingness of distributors to invest.
The government claims “the explosion of streaming video services” will address these shortfalls. But streaming video on demand services have shown little interest in picking up Australian content. Only 1.7% of content on Netflix is Australian, and the platform has fewer than 20 Australian films in its catalogue.
Feature documentaries will be hardest hit by changes to the producer offset. Currently, each hour of documentary content produced in Australia costs, on average, less than $500,000 to make.
With these changes, Australian documentary films will find it harder to raise funding.The Australian Dream/GoodThing Productions
With the doubling of the qualifying Australian production expenditure requirement to $1 million, the vast majority of documentary films will be excluded from any offset eligibility.
Combined with the removal of documentary sub-quotas from broadcast content requirements, this signals a dim future for high-quality Australian documentary filmmaking.
Funding is only part of the problem. The other part is getting films seen.
Fletcher argues the changes are about “getting [Australian] content seen by as many people as possible and selling as well as possible.” Online is seen as the key to this.
Opportunities do exist for some filmmakers here, with films like Netflix’s I Am Mother (2019) or Stan’s Relic (2020) capturing attention.
The Australian-produced I Am Mother found a global audience on Netflix.
But there is a risk Australian films will struggle to cut through in a crowded digital market.
The theatrical release of a film is about more than just bums on seats. It raises awareness about films through word of mouth and marketing material. Film festivals play a role too, generating buzz around programmed films and amplifying this buzz further for those that win awards.
Removing the requirement for a cinema release could see feature films disappear from the big screen. But, more importantly, it could also make films harder to find at home.
While streaming services reach growing audiences, the discoverability of Australian films within and across these online platforms remains a challenge, particularly when sufficient content is not there to be discovered. Without the interest generated by a cinema release, how will local stories stand out?
This is a challenge that Australian film will now need to face. With the Government’s measures set to take effect in 2021, Sue Maslin warns:
As for going to the movies to see films like The Dressmaker, Last Cab to Darwin, Ride Like a Girl, Breath, The Sapphires, Animal Kingdom … forget it. Get used to the small screen experience, everyone.
Dash cameras have been installed in Papua New Guinea police vehicles to monitor the activities of drivers and officers using them.
Police Minister Bryan Kramer has stressed the importance of using vehicles for work purposes only and not to transport family members or for drinking sprees.
“The days of misusing [police] vehicles are gone,” he said.
“You will be monitored through the dash cams on each of the vehicles and the GPS tracker installed in each of the vehicles.
“Gone are the days of hiding from every complaint laid against you.
“You cannot hide what you are doing.
“It [will be] recorded and accessed by the CCTV operators and the police station commander.”
Waigani police station opening Kramer attended the opening of the renovated K4.6 million (NZ$2 million) Waigani police station by Prime Minister James Marape last week.
He said there had been reports of some officers using police vehicles for sex, drinking, and transporting women or family members which were an abuse.
Police dash cameras installed to monitor the activities of drivers and officers using the vehicles. Image: Kennedy Bani/The National
The station was also declared a “station of excellence”.
Kramer said all officers at the station would be wearing the same colour uniforms and have their name tags displayed all the time.
“This is what we want for accountability and transparency,” he said.
The Pacific Media Centre republishes The National articles with permission.
The topic of this talk is about the lies told about Palestine by the pro-Israeli lobby. That might sound a bit downbeat and negative but I can assure you it is not.
I hope tonight you will go away feeling positive, clear headed and uplifted because we are on the right side of history and we are winning.
It was 72 years ago when at its very formation Israel delegitimised itself with brutal, blatantly racist, colonial policies towards Palestinians. But because Israel was and is important for Western imperialist powers as a beachhead in the oil-rich Middle East – the liberation of Palestinians has been held up.
And part of that hold-up has been a string of lies told about Palestine and Palestinians by the pro-Israeli lobby. We are going to unravel some of those lies.
Before we talk about the lies, let us celebrate the fact that the tide is turning in the Western world in support of Palestinian human rights. We are winning the debate – around the world and here in Aotearoa-New Zealand.
Internationally the pro-Palestinian campaigns are stronger. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is having important wins locally and internationally. (BDS is a Palestinian-led movement which was launched in 2005 to uphold the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity).
More Jewish voices, both young and old, are speaking out here and around the world and nasty smears of anti-semitism directed against Palestinian solidarity activists are being called out for what they are. Even members of the US congress who show strong support for Palestinian rights are winning their seats again when once the pro-Israeli lobby in the US would have been able to oust them.
Nothing illustrates the changes in thinking better than the key findings from a recent survey of Jewish Americans by the right-wing thinktank, The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which was released in July. There were three main findings:
One quarter of American Jews express intensely critical ideas about Israel and Zionism, including that Israel is racist, colonial and apartheid.
More than that, 31 percent, would vote for Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar regardless of Israel lobby smears of the two congresswomen as antisemitic. “I would vote Democract”. Image: PSNA
Despite the efforts of Israel lobby organisations to blame the left for antisemitism, American Jews don’t buy it. 51 percent see the right wing as the source of most antisemitism, while only 1 percent see the left wing as primarily responsible for anti-semitism. (12 percent blame left and right equally).
The right wing seen as the source of most antisemitism. Image: PSNA
Things are changing. Israel’s narrative as the only peace-loving, democratic state in the Middle East surrounded by hostile Arab neighbours has been falling apart for years. It’s a narrative on life-support because the Israeli narrative contradicts what people see as the reality of Israeli actions and policies on the ground in the Middle East.
It is failing so badly that the Israeli lobby has resorted to trying to make it illegal to campaign in favour of Palestinian human rights. They have tried, partially successfully, to have BDS declared illegal in some European countries and in various US states.
Their main defence strategy for Israeli policies are bogus claims of anti-semitism which they throw around like confetti against supporters of Palestinian human rights. The latest effort has been to introduce a new definition of anti-semitism which tries to link criticism of Israel with anti-semitism.
All this effort to weaken criticism of Israel underlines the absolute important of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement – because BDS is Israel’s Achilles heel – their weak point and because of that, it’s the single most important strategy we have to build solidarity with Palestine and put pressure on Israel.
Most important game is BDS
Let’s be clear: for the international solidarity movement the most important game in town is BDS.
This was neatly summed up by Nobel Peace prize winner and South African Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, when talking about Israeli government policies – “we should name it apartheid and boycott”.
Tutu also pointed the way when he talked about the importance of international solidarity to bring change for Palestinians:
“We could not have achieved our democracy without the help of people around the world, who through… non-violent means, such as boycotts and disinvestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the apartheid regime.”
Israel is terrified of BDS. The more successful we become in campaigning for BDS, the more desperate the pro-Israeli lobby will become to label us as anti-semitic. Let me put it another way: If we are NOT being attacked with false claims of anti-semitism by the increasingly desperate pro-Israeli lobby then we are not doing our job.
It’s important to say here that we must not downplay anti-semitism in the world – there is plenty of it and it is hideous. We all know it when we see it. I and many others at this talk tonight have joined public protests against anti-semitism for example when Jewish graves in the Symonds Street cemetery have been daubed with swastikas.
We abhor racism in all its forms whether it is anti-semitism, Islamophobia, white supremacy, anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab racism, anti-Māori or anti-Pasifika racism. We don’t tolerate it on our social media pages and we condemn it wherever it occurs.
That’s been a long introduction – so let’s look at the most important lies told about Palestine by the pro-Israeli lobby.
Most important lies
Lie No 1: The Middle East is complicated…
This map shows some of the 600 red dots which each represent a Palestinian village which was “depopulated” (aka ethnic cleansing) in 1948.
Lie No 2: The land was “sparsely populated” …
And they knew. In 1897 the rabbis of Vienna sent a fact-finding mission to Palestine, they famously reported back that the bride “was beautiful but married to another man”. But the implication of this wry remark — that the pro-Israeli lobby should look elsewhere was ignored.
As I said earlier, spurious claims of anti-semitism have become common in defending Israeli policies. They are a critically important part of the pro-Israeli strategy to distract from its racist policies towards Palestinians.
Former Israeli Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni spelt this tactic out very clearly when she appeared on a Democracy Now interview in 2002. She was asked why critics of Israel were often labelled anti-semitic. She said:
“Well, it’s a trick, we always
use it.”
The Shulamit quote on Democracy Now.
That’s a remarkably frank description of Israeli strategy and we see it played out around the world and here in Aotearoa.
Lie No 3: The “indigenous” people.Lie No 4: A sanctuary needed.Lie No 5: Israel is “not an apartheid state” …Lie No 6: Palestinians “hate Jews” …Lie No 7: Israeli leaders have “treated Palestinians with respect” …Lie No 8: Israel “wants peace” …Lie No 9: The world is “picking on Israel” …Lie No 10: Israel is “not in breach of international law” …Lie No 11: Palestinian resistance is “terrorism” …
The Israeli lobby in New Zealand
So how do we see the Israeli lobby working in New Zealand?
The pro-Israeli lobby does its most despicable work behind closed doors with news editors, journalists, cartoonists, members of parliament, senior public servants, government ministers etc. These people are intensely pressured whenever they speak out against Israel’s brutal military occupation and apartheid policies towards Palestinians.
Our own cartoonist Malcolm Evans dared to illustrate Israel as an apartheid state and lost his job at the Herald as a result. [The Wakim address audience gave Malcolm Evans a standing ovation].
The pro-Israeli lobby does not want the Palestinian struggle in our newspapers and general media. The lobby applies pressure so these groups and individuals will “silence themselves” – in other words to self-censor – knowing if they report things unfavourable to Israel or take sides with the Palestinians they risk being called out publicly as being anti-semitic.
The pro-Israeli lobby acts like a mafia protection racket for racism and brutality, using bullying and political thuggery to constrain criticism of Israel and to stifle Palestinian voices.
Despite all this, Israel is losing. It has a serious image problem. They are spending many millions on propaganda campaigns and as I said earlier have resorted to trying to make campaigning for BDS a criminal offence in European countries and several states in the US.
Millions has been spent developing propaganda strategies – using the same public relations companies used by the likes of the tobacco industry, the private healthcare industry and pharmaceutical companies in the US.
Here are some of their propaganda manuals produced over the years:
Israeli propaganda website links.
And propaganda they are. Also, Israel is deeply frustrated at spending 20 times more on propaganda but support for Palestinians keeps climbing.
Peddling lies about Palestine is a challenge for the Palestine Solidarity movement. One of our roles is to counter these lies by:
Power imbalance overwhelming
What are we calling for? We are NOT calling for negotiations – if we have the US and Israel on one side of the table and Palestinian representatives on the other.
The power imbalance is overwhelming. It cannot possibly lead to a just settlement.
We are calling for BDS, as we did against South African apartheid, to require Israel to follow international law and United Nations resolutions.
BDS campaigns aiming at specific international targets such as:
PUMA (supports Israeli soccer teams in the occupied Palestinian land – and is the main sponsor of the Silver Ferns);
Hewlett Packard (involved in providing technology which is used for surveillance and to oppress Palestinians living under military occupation;
Divestment from the Superfund and Kiwisaver providers from the 112 companies identified by the UN Human Rights Council as being complicit in supporting illegal settlement building on Palestinian land.
I am more of an activist than a speaker so I want to finish with what we can do together to develop and build the Palestinian struggle here in Aotearoa. You are an important part of this movement and each and every one of you can take action.
We are on the right side of history and we are winning.
Ka whawhai tonu matou! Ake Ake Ake
This article is a shorter version extracted from Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa president John Minto’s fourth David Wakim Memorial Lecture at the Columba Centre, Ponsonby, on 8 October 2020. This commentary is republished with permission.
A new Fiji magazine published by a New Zealand-based media collective made its debut this weekend to mark Fiji’s 50th Independence Day anniversary.
The first monthly edition of Fiji Dynamics was launched yesterday, 10th October 2020 – Fiji Day.
The editorial team is made up of senior Fiji journalists and media personalities who now live and work in Aotearoa-New Zealand.
Fiji Dynamics aims to help inspire and further enhance the rich diversity of New Zealand’s multicultural communities.
One of the organisers, Rachael Mario, from the Whānau Community Centre, is delighted at having a place for community groups to share their stories.
“By promoting our views, identity and culture, ths magazine will unite our communities, and help inspire our youth,” she said.
“The new magazine reflects and defines the Fiji community. With this being Fiji’s 50th anniversary of independence, and also Fijian Language week, it makes this even more special.”
One of the articles published in this inaugural edition, was this reflection below by Professor Steven Ratuva, director of the Macmillan Brown Pacific Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury:
REFLECTIONS FOR THE PAST 50 YEARS: FIJI’S CHALLENGES AND HOPES
By Professor Steven Ratuva
Professor Steven Ratuva … reflections of a half a century. Image: PMC
I vividly remember that memorable day, 10 October 2970, as a young village boy attending Yale Dustrict School in Kadavu, when the British flag was lowered for the last time and the new sky blue Fijian flag with its colourful design was hoisted amid the cheers and tears.
It was a moment of youthful hope and optimism, and now 50 years later, I am reminiscing and reflecting on a journey so full of intrigue and challenges as well as resilience and hope.
Governments and constitutions have come and gone, either through democratic elections or illegal use of force, but Fiji as a collective of ordinary people living their ordinary lives, remain the cornerstone of hope in a country scarred by ethno-political tension, economic inequality, contestation of power by competing groups and abuse of authority by leaders.
Since independence, Fiji underwent a multicultural experiment under Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, which saw two main contending forces, communal nationalism (ethnic and cultural groups demanding attention) and civic nationalism (unity and common identity) competing for supremacy in syncretic and complex ways.
Fiji Dynamics … the first cover. Image: PMC screenshot
There were moments of contractions and accommodation taking place simultaneously and by and large there was a sense of equilibrium until the first coup in 1987 when communal nationalism expressed itself in a seriously violent way with the help of the military.
This was repeated in 2000. While the 2006 coup was meant to reverse the trend using the fallacious “clean-up” narrative, it merely entrenched an ethno-business and political patronage under the tutelage of an all-powerful despotic clique.
The neoliberal reforms which followed have led to the dysfunction of the civil service, accumulation of crippling debt, nepotism and the formation of an ethnic clique system operating under the guise of “merit” and “de-ethnicisation”, which undermines the spirit of multiculturalism, equity and diversity.
Despite these setbacks, the sense of shared resilience and collective benevolence of the people is a reason why we have not had an ethnic civil war as we have seen in Rwanda, Solomon Islands, Bosnia and Sudan.
By officially passing the controversial Omnibus Law on Job Creation this week, Indonesia’s House of Representatives (DPR), has triggered widespread protests and accusations of “betrayal”, reports CNN Indonesia.
The House passed the law in a plenary session on Monday and accelerated the scheduled ratification – which had been planned for Thursday, October 8 – on the grounds that the number of covid-19 cases was continuing to rise.
Trade unions, which had initially planned to hold protests, were blocked in the regions.
Attempts to hold demonstrations were also banned on the grounds of the corona virus pandemic. Workers were planning to hold a continuous three day strike.
Meanwhile, the hashtag #MosiTidakPercaya (Motion of No Confidence) appeared on social media, which became the most popular trending topic on Twitter in Indonesia.
The motion declared that the people no longer have confidence in the DPR (House of Representatives) and the government after enacting the Omnibus Law, which was ridden with controversy.
Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) executive director Nur Hidayati claimed that the ordinary people’s trust in the DPR and the government has further declined following the enactment of the law.
Climax of state betrayal Hidayati said that what was done by the DPR was the climax of the state’s betrayal of the people’s wishes.
“The enactment of the Draft Omnibus Law on Job Creation represents the climax of the state’s betrayal of the rights of workers, farmers, traditional communities, women and the environment as well as future generations”, Hidayati told CNN Indonesia.
Hidayati said that opposition by various social organisations did not prevent the DPR and the government from continuing the deliberations on the draft law. The DPR and the government did not even care about the protests by social groups.
According to Hidayati, this reflects a step back for Indonesian democracy.
“The enactment of the Draft Omnibus Law was an evil conspiracy of a legislative process which ignored human rights and the environment,” she said.
Hidayati herself noted that there are several crucial stipulations in the Omnibus Law on the environment.
Several of these related to the abolition of environmental requirements as a precondition for the issuance of business licenses, a reduction in absolute and criminal liability for corporations and the extension of contracts in forestry and mining.
Perpetuate environmental damage Hidayati said that the law will further perpetuate the domination of capital and accelerate environmental damage. In addition to this, said Hidayati, the Omnibus Law will reduce and even abolish public participation in issuing permits for businesses and seeking redress in the courts.
“Walhi itself has explicitly handed down a motion of no confidence. The enactment of the Draft Omnibus Law was an unconstitutional and undemocratic act which must be resisted as strongly as possible,” she said.
Speaking separately, Forum of Concerned Citizens for Indonesia’s Parliament (Formappi) researcher Lucius Karus believes that the alleged need to speed up enactment of the law was fabricated.
Karus said that the people’s representatives should have postponed the deliberations and the enactment of the law during the covid-19 pandemic rather than rushing it into law.
“This looks as if they took advantage of corona as a shield to deceive the public,” Karus said.
Karus ibelieves that it is odd that the DPR used the covid-19 pandemic as grounds to bring the plenary meeting forward to enact the law and that from the start the House has taken advantage of the pandemic to smooth the way for quick deliberations on the law.
According to Karus, the DPR manipulated and deceived social groups opposing the Omnibus Law by accelerating the enactment.
Deceiving social groups “The DPR’s pattern of deceiving social groups during the Omnibus Law’s deliberations was used right from the start,” he said.
On the other hand, said Karus, the Omnibus Law represented a special mission for the government and the DPR. According to Karus, the government and the DPR had already agreed on the contents of the draft law since the draft was first sent to the DPR back in February.
Karus said that the deliberations on the law over the last month were only to seek legitimacy for a law – which from the start – was a mission for the government and its coalition partners in parliament.
“Actually, behind all this the DPR the government could in fact be seen to have succeeded in distancing the public from discussions on the substance of the draft law,” said Karus.
Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI) researcher Wasisto Raharjo Jati believes that the public’s trust in the DPR and the President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo had not taken a hit across the board.
According to Jati, only among labour groups, activists, informal workers and the private sector has the level of trust begun to fade.
“I think this is because they are in the position of the largest economic contributors where they dominate 61-70 percent [of economic activity],” said Jati.
Nevertheless, said Jati, opposition to the Omnibus Law did not reflect the majority of society because there were still social groups which considered Widodo’s policies to be superior and important to accelerating Indonesia’s economic growth.
“Especially because of Indonesia’s position as a member of the G-20,” said Jati.
At precisely 10am 50 years ago today, Fiji gained its independence from Britain when HRH, the Prince of Wales, handed our founding Prime Minister, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, the formal instruments of independence and the Fijian flag.
Our noble banner blue – was hoisted for the first time over Suva’s Albert Park.
It’s hard to convey the sense of excitement that gripped the entire nation at the time. Fiji was united as never before as the jockeying for influence that had marked the pre-independence negotiations was set aside and the nation set its eyes on the future.
Yet there is plenty of evidence of that excitement in the films that were taken at the time (it was before the video age ) and they are well worth watching.
The first begins with the government’s official Independence Day film Independence for Fiji 1970 that was made by the Australian Government Film Unit.
Independence for Fiji 1970 – Part one
As someone who was caught up in the excitement myself, I remember seeing it when it was first released and it is a strange feeling to view it again half a century later.
It’s treatment of Fiji and the event itself has an element of the cliche and in retrospect, aspects of it are decidedly quaint.
Captures the elation But it nonetheless faithfully captures the sense of elation and anticipation that gripped the nation on that brilliant sunny morning 50 years ago today.
The film begins with the lowering of the Union Flag for the last time on the previous evening after 96 years of British rule.
It’s been striking to read in the Fijian media this week the recollections of some of those who were there that they felt a deep sense of loss when the “Union Jack” came down.
Colonial rule in many other places was unhappy but to a far lesser extent in Fiji. Most people, in fact, had a great affection for Britain, the Queen and the Union Flag.
The formal end to almost a century of British rule triggered deep emotions among many people, coupled with pride that we were now an independent nation making our own way in the world.
It has been one hell of a journey with a great deal of happiness as well as success, and Fiji as a nation is demonstrably still a work in progress. But this is how it all began.
Grubsheet Feejee is the blogsite of Graham Davis, an award-winning journalist turned communications consultant who was the Fiji government’s principal communications adviser for six years from 2012 to 2018 and continued to work on Fiji’s global climate and oceans campaign up until the end of the decade. Other articles here.
The proportion of Earth’s surface designated as “protected” has expanded over the past decade. But new findings show these areas have failed to improve the state of the environment, casting doubt on government commitments to biodiversity conservation.
Our global research published in Nature yesterday found between 2010 and 2019, protected areas expanded from covering 14.1% to 15.3% of global land and freshwater environments (excluding Antarctica), and from 2.9% to 7.5% of marine environments.
However, 78% of known threatened species and more than half of all ecoregions on land and sea remain without adequate protection. In Australia, we found nearly half of land-based ecoregions and threatened species have inadequate protections.
“Adequate” protection is different for individual species, but typically requires 10-100% of a species’ geographic range to be under some form of protection.
The Coalition government’s federal budget allocated A$233.4 million to six Commonwealth-run national parks — but most will be spent on tourism infrastructure upgrades. What’s needed is more staff and equipment to restore, enrich and maintain natural ecosystems, and to secure our most iconic natural places.
The best and worst performing countries
Our global assessment examined how nations are tracking a decade after committing to UN targets for area-based conservation: at least 17% of land and 10% of ocean must be protected by 2020.
Best-performing countries include Botswana, Hungary and Thailand. Botswana’s protected area estate adequately covers 86% of its ecoregions and 83% of its threatened species.
Chobe National Park in Botswana covers 1,170,000 hectares of savannah, woodland and marsh ecosystems. It was designated in 1968.Sean Maxwell, Author provided
The worst performing countries — such as Indonesia, Canada and Madagascar — have a long way to go to meet these targets. For example, only 3% of Canada’s ocean waters are under formal protection.
But there are alarming and consistent problems with management. Globally, as much as 90% of marine protected areas have inadequate or below optimum on-site staff capacity. On land, some 47% of protected areas suffer from inadequate staff and budget resources. And the global budget shortfall for protected areas likely exceeds the multi-billion dollar mark.
Threatened species in Australia
Australia’s protected area estate is not immune to these management shortfalls. Between 1997 and 2014, there were more than 1,500 legal changes in Australia that eased restrictions, reduced boundaries or eliminated legal protections in protected areas.
Our research also showed less than 1% of the geographic ranges of the orange-bellied frog (Geocrinia vitellina), carpentarian dunnart (Sminthopsis butleri) and upriver orange mangrove (Bruguiera sexangula) — all threatened species — are protected.
Many of Australia’s savanna ecoregions also have poor levels of protection, including the Mitchell grass downs (less than 3% of its range is protected), Brigalow tropical savanna (less than 5% protected) and southeast Australian temperate savannas (less than 4% protected).
But it’s not all bad news. We found around 36% of Australia’s oceans are protected and 76% of our marine ecoregions have adequate protection.
Protected areas cover 19% of Australia’s land and 36% of its oceans.Sean Maxwell, Author provided
Previous studies also suggest protected areas governed by Indigenous Australians and local communities effectively reduce deforestation pressure and support similar numbers of species to those inside nationally designated protected areas.
How should funds be used?
Protecting our wild places will not come cheap. One estimate suggests an effective global land-based protected area network would cost US$76 billion annually.
This level of investment would ensure each protected area has sufficient staff, resources and equipment to conserve local species and ecosystems. The spending is justified, given the direct value generated by visits to protected areas around the world is valued at US$600 billion per year.
In Australia, effective conservation typically requires mimicking land and sea use practices that were in place before Europeans arrived, which involves actively managing disturbances such as fire and invasive species.
Funds should also be used to track the biodiversity outcomes of protected areas to make sure they’re meeting their objectives.
Most of the A$329.2 million allocated is set aside for tourism infrastructure in protected areas.AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
Beyond budgets, national governments around the world must be more ambitious when negotiating the next round of international environmental targets, due in mid-2021. These negotiations will define national conservation agendas for the next decade.
Governments must adopt policies that make biodiversity conservation a greater part of broader land and sea management plans. They can, for example, embrace new models for land and sea stewardship that reward good behaviour by farmers, developers and miners.
Budget breakdown
In Australia, most national parks are funded and run by state governments. The federal government, through Parks Australia, is responsible for Kakadu, Uluru-Kata Tjuta, Christmas Island, Pulu Keeling, Booderee and Norfolk Island.
The Commonwealth also plays a key role in funding and managing Australia’s 16 natural World Heritage sites, including K’gari and the Ningaloo Coast.
Of the A$329.2 million allocated in the budget to protect iconic places, A$233.4 million (71%) is set aside for tourism infrastructure in non-World Heritage national parks in Australia.
We calculate this provides about A$18,000 for every hectare of Booderee National Park and national parks on Christmas Island, Norfork Island and Pulu Keeling. Most of this will likely be spent on improving visitor amenities or ensuring nearby businesses can stay open, rather than directed to measures such as invasive species control or fire management.
Australia’s 16 natural World Heritage sites will receive just A$33.5 million — less than the $40.6 million promised to maintain and restore historical sites across Sydney Harbour.
Australia’s 16 natural World Heritage sites will receive just A$33.5 million.Shutterstock
A further $23.6 million was promised for compliance, enforcement and monitoring activities across Australia’s marine parks. Enforcing no-take marine protected areas improves species populations and biomass, but this funding boost is grossly inadequate. It equates to just 1 cent for every hectare of Commonwealth-run marine parks.
It’s hard to see how these measures will prevent further ecosystem degradation or species extinctions, when conservation of Australia’s biodiversity heavily relies on protected areas.
In response to this article, a spokesperson for federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley said investment in protecting national parks went beyond infrastructure spending, however infrastructure did assist people to “access parks in a responsible manner”.
Ley’s spokesperson said protecting biodiversity was “a core aspect of park operations” and included eradicating invasive species, and interaction with the National Environmental Science Program and the office of the threatened species commissioner.
In addition to national parks, Australia “also has the world’s largest network of Indigenous protected areas, which the government is already in the process of expanding,” the spokesperson said.
In a special “The Week in Politics”, Michelle Grattan discusses the 2020 budget with Professor Robert Tanton, of the University of Canberra’s National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling.
The pair discuss the modelling of NATSEM in light of this year’s budget, the efficacy of tax cuts for individuals and tax breaks for businesses, as well as the debt and deficit forecasts, and Labor’s budget reply.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laurien Beane, Course Coordinator, Queensland Undergraduate Early Childhood, Australian Catholic University
Social distancing during COVID-19 has seen a radical upheaval to the way we work and socialise.
But what are the implications for young children? Many children have been uprooted from their places of education and care, and may struggle to understand why their routine has been disrupted.
If you’re a parent, particularly in Victoria, you may be wondering whether this period — a significant amount of time relative to the life of a young child — might affect your child’s social development.
The good news is, with less of the day-to-day rush, many young children have probably benefited from extra socialisation at home with their families.
Looking through a theoretical lens
We can explore the ways COVID-19 might affect children’s social development by considering three theories in psychology.
1. Supporting the individual child (attachment theory)
It’s important for young children to develop strong and secure “attachments” with parents and caregivers. These emotional and physical bonds support children’s social development.
Psychologists have shown very young children who develop strong and secure attachments become more independent, have more successful social relationships, perform better at school, and experience less anxiety compared with children who didn’t have strong and secure attachments.
Where the extra time children have spent with parents and caregivers during COVID-19 has been in a supportive environment, this may help the development of these attachments.
2. Supporting the child in the family (family systems theory)
Beyond parents and caregivers, it’s important for children to develop secure attachments within the whole family.
For young children, research shows these connections with family members can lead to improved social development, while fostering the child’s ability to develop their own identity as part of a family unit.
Young children might have spent more time with siblings and other family members during lockdown, possibly developing deeper connections with them.
3. Supporting the child in the community (sociocultural theory)
Sociocultural theory considers social interaction to underpin the ways children learn, allowing them to make meaning from the world around them.
While learning can and does take place between children and adults, there’s lots of research showing all children benefit from socialising with peers of the same age.
Evidence also indicates children learn to respond to social situations in social environments. This could be in early learning settings, on the playground, or with their families.
Young children may have developed stronger connections with siblings and other family members during lockdown.Shutterstock
COVID-19 has curtailed many interactions children would regularly have in early learning and social contexts. But at the same time, it’s created opportunities for other meaningful interactions such as at home with family.
Day-to-day life with family, or socially distanced interactions within the community, still provide great opportunities for social development.
We can’t know for sure what toll this pandemic will take on children’s social development.
But it’s important to remember children are always learning wherever they may be, and whoever they may be with. So try to focus on the benefits you’ve gained spending time with your child at home.
COVID-19 has brought tough times for many Australian families. We know added financial pressures can adversely affect family life, and may be compounded during lockdown by a lack of external support.
This doesn’t mean all children in families experiencing socioeconomic hardship during COVID-19 will necessarily face challenges in their social development. It’s more complex that that. However, some might.
Other risk factors for social competence may have also been heightened during the pandemic. These include family conflict, anxiety or illness (of the child or the parent), and trauma, such as exposure to stressful events, grief, or loss.
Children who already live in vulnerable situations may have become even more vulnerable during this time.
More time with family won’t always be a positive.Shutterstock
Getting back to ‘normal’
Alongside risk factors, a range of protective factors may reduce the impacts of adversity on a child.
We should think about providing young children with extra support, helping them regulate their emotions, fostering warm relationships, promoting resilience and encouraging problem solving, and facilitating social contact within the COVID-19 social distancing norms, such as video chats.
As children begin the transition back to early childhood education and care, some “clinginess” is natural.
Having a distressed child at drop-off time can be confronting. But trust in their capacity to regulate their emotions when you leave, and their ability to rediscover relationships with their educators, carers and friends. They should soon readjust.
To support smooth transitions back into early childhood education and care, talk positively with your child about the people they’re going to see, such as teachers and their friends, and encourage them to ask any questions they may have.
If you’re worried about how the lockdown has affected your child, you can always speak to your child’s educator, the centre director, or your GP about connecting with services designed to support you and your child.
to steer enrolments towards courses with good employment prospects
to ready the higher education system for the “Costello baby boom” students, the big birth cohort who will reach university age in the mid-2020s.
Unfortunately, achieving these goals is a much less certain outcome of this package than years of disruption for universities and decades of debt for some students. Three design flaws in Job-ready Graduates put it at high risk of not achieving its own objectives.
Students aim to be ‘job-ready’ without fee incentives
To influence student course choices, Job-ready Graduates radically changes how student contributions are priced.
Current student contributions are roughly based on earnings prospects. Law and medical graduates on average earn high incomes, placing them in the highest student contribution band. They pay A$11,115 a year. Arts graduates tend to earn less, putting them in the cheapest band of A$6,684 a year.
Job-ready Graduates discards the link between student contribution and earnings prospects. Instead, its student contributions aim to encourage or discourage enrolments, to improve graduate job prospects or to meet other “national priorities”.
Arts courses are not a government national priority, so the student contribution for arts will more than double to A$14,500 a year. An eccentric exception is made for English and foreign languages, which will have student contributions of A$3,950, despite worse employment outcomes than other humanities fields. Law and business courses are not government priorities either and so go up from A$11,115 a year to A$14,500.
Revenue from the extra student contribution for non-priority courses will be spent cutting student charges in other courses. Student contributions for teaching and nursing courses will drop from A$6,684 in 2020 to A$3,950 in 2021. In science, engineering and IT, the amount students pay will be cut from A$9,527 a year to A$7,950.
Yet, despite shuffling billions of dollars in charges between students in the next few years, Job-ready Graduates will probably not significantly alter student course choices.
The main drivers of course choices are student interests and job prospects. Prospective students can have more than one interest, and several courses may match their interests. But few students – less than 5% according to a first-year student survey – enrol in courses without interest in the field being a major factor. Fewer years spent repaying HELP debt cannot compensate for years of boredom in an uninteresting course and career.
The prospect of a smaller eventual HECS debt is unlikely to persuade many students to pursue courses and careers that don’t interest them.ESB Professional/Shutterstock
Generally, university applications move with labour market trends without any policy intervention from government. Employment and salary prospects after graduation already provide a financial incentive for students to prioritise their interests in a “job-ready” way.
If university applicants are missing opportunities that might suit them, careers advice is a much cheaper way of pointing these out than reducing student contributions.
Job-ready Graduates assumes universities will respond to changed patterns of student demand by providing extra student places. University enrolments typically move in the same direction as student applications. But in key disciplines Job-ready Graduates reduces the financial incentive universities have to meet student demand.
Courses with likely employment growth in coming years, including teaching, nursing, allied health and engineering, will have less total funding per student under Job-ready Graduates than the current system.
Yet universities are more likely to respond to financial incentives than students. Students can defer paying their student contributions through the HELP loan scheme, which reduces their price sensitivity. Universities have to meet all their costs each year. In the midst of a financial crisis, universities will examine their revenues and expenditures more closely than ever.
Student places are more likely to grow in non-priority fields
The Job-ready Graduates strategy for increasing student places also suffers from mismatches between policy intent and likely outcomes.
Job-ready Graduates cuts the average student subsidy, called a Commonwealth contribution. This means that, on average, universities need to deliver more student places for each A$1 million they receive from the government.
If this cut was consistent across all disciplines it would probably achieve its objective. But the government has increased rather than decreased Commonwealth contributions in several priority fields, to compensate universities for lower student contributions.
As a result, in these priority fields universities need to deliver fewer places per A$1 million in government subsidy. For example, under current Commonwealth contributions universities need to deliver 91 IT places to earn A$1 million. Under Job-ready Graduates, they only need deliver 75 IT places.
If universities need to deliver fewer places in priority fields per A$1 million in government subsidy that’s not a great incentive to increase places.goodluz/Shutterstock
By contrast, arts, law and business courses get lower Commonwealth contributions under Job-ready Graduates than the current system. As a consequence, universities can deliver many more student places per A$1 million in government subsidy. In law and business, student places per A$1 million will grow from 447 to 990.
The policy goal of increasing student places will succeed to the extent that the policy goal of moving enrolments to priority fields fails.
Collateral damage is near certain
These three design flaws — changes to student contributions that won’t change student preferences, overall funding rates that weaken university incentives, and Commonwealth contributions that limit enrolment growth in some courses — create serious doubt about whether Job-ready Graduates will achieve its stated goals. We can, however, be near certain of serious collateral damage.
Arts, law and business graduates will leave university with student debts of A$40,000 to A$50,000. Many arts graduates have relatively low incomes and will take decades to repay their HELP loans.
The cuts to overall funding rates will reduce university capacity to combine teaching and research, especially in science and engineering. It will add to the already significant fall in university research expenditure caused by a decline in international students.
A future education minister is going to have to fix these problems. But before that happens, Job-ready Graduates, coming in on top of the international student crisis, guarantees several turbulent years for Australian universities.
Over the last month, I enjoyed watching Origins on TV1. Very ambitiously, it looked at the origins of Tangata Whenua, going all the way back to the origins of humanity in Africa.
Nevertheless, the final episode in particular bothered me. It presented a somewhat uncritical view of the ‘Express Train from Taiwan to Polynesia’ view which points to China as the pre-Taiwan homeland of Māori, and that the diaspora from China was comparatively recent (ie within the last 10,000 years).
To me, this ‘Taiwan model’ seems to have the same problems as the long-discredited Thor Heyerdahl ‘Kon Tiki’ model which postulated that the primitive but noble savages of Polynesia came from a civilised continental population source; in the one case South America, in the other case China. Both hypotheses were formulated by people with Eurocentric views of the diaspora of civilisations, and both emphasise the historical rapidity of the process from source (eg China) to final destinations (eg Aotearoa).
The other problem with the final episode of Origins was the suggestion that, because there is evidence of all forms of humanity and pre-humanity having existed in Ethiopia, then all of these forms of humanity must have evolved in or near modern-day Ethiopia.
Human Origins
From the history of primates, there is little doubt that the first pre-humans evolved in Africa. However, it is not now believed that apes first evolved in Africa. Rather – as Tim Flannery shows in Europe, a Natural History – apes, indeed bipedal apes, originated in Europe over ten million tears ago. They subsequently migrated to Africa and died out in Europe.
Where modern humans first evolved is not clear, because they most likely at some stage become extinct in their evolutionary home. The evidence seems to show, however, that the present world’s population of homo sapiens was largely or entirely populated from modern South Africa. This fits the idea that most humans were wiped out by a catastrophic event; the supervolcanic eruption of Lake Toba in modern Sumatra 75,000 years ago is an obvious candidate. Such an event could have left a population of humans in Southern Africa as the only (or principal) viable population of our species on Earth.
We might note that modern dystopian and science fiction stories frequently postulate the near-extinction of humanity. In my lifetime the idea of a ‘nuclear winter’ (caused by an asteroid collision if not by a nuclear holocaust) has been the main such catastrophe. This century, the ideas of climate or pandemic catastrophes are gaining traction for obvious reasons. In all of these cataclysmic scenarios, Aotearoa New Zealand has appeared to the wider world as a possible ark or bolthole for humanity, and subsequent human restoration. Indeed Aotearoans have milked that idea to the rest of the world: clean, green, temperate, and far away.
If, in a few centuries time, Aotearoa was to be the repopulation reservoir for the rest of the world, and was thousands of years later investigated by archaeologists and paleo-anthropologists, some would conclude that humanity had evolved in Aotearoa. Others would find archaeological connections to Europe; though their ideas would be rejected by many on the grounds that Europe is much too far away to have been a possible source population for Aotearoa. The academic consensus would probably settle on modern humans as being a South Pacific species.
In today’s world, probably over 60 percent of people live at altitudes of less than 100 metres above sea level. And a similarly large (or larger) percentage of people live in places that are especially vulnerable to earthquakes, volcanoes or alluvial flooding. There are good economic reasons why people live in these places which are subject to high natural risk. Past demographic catastrophes will have followed these natural forms – earthquakes, eruptions, floods – although warfare and pandemics have also taken large human tolls.
Principles of Evolution
Evolution happens, cultural and biological. Indeed most people who believe in a specific cultural creation story do accept that, subsequent to creation, people have evolved; ie changed and diversified.
The principle drivers of evolutionary change are death and isolation. It is most likely that new forms of human – or other lesser but substantial changes such as the development of new language clusters – arise from populations being separated for a long time, and for some populations to die, creating new spaces for non-extinct populations to occupy. The places therefore in which most evolutionary change is most likely to have taken place were those places most subject to natural disasters, including disasters such as the beginnings and ends of ice ages. In particular, it was at the ends of ice ages that sea levels increased (and increased substantially), quite rapidly in historical time. Rising sea levels created both death and isolation.
Africa is probably the most naturally stable part of the world. While Africa therefore becomes a good candidate for slow evolution – the small changes that accumulate over long time spans – it is a poor candidate for fast evolution. Aftrica is the part of the world least subject to the catastrophic vagaries of nature mentioned above. So, in the bigger story of humanity, Africa makes a great ark – a reservioir from which global repopulation may take place – but a poor site for the origins of the faster more dramatic forms of evolutionary change which are essential to the human story.
Māori Origins
For Pākehā, origins as Pākehā are simple. We are European. Most are of Anglo-Celtic European origin.
Māori on the other hand are Austronesian, Polynesian Austronesian. So where or what is Austronesia?
The core Austronesian territories today are Indonesia, Philippines and Malaysia. Their languages are the present languages of those territories, just as Italian, Spanish and French are the principal modern variants of Latin.
Ancient Austronesia includes the lands of those three countries, plus Taiwan, and most probably Japan. (Possibly the placenames Fuji, Fujian and Fiji all have the same meaning, as places defining the sometime periphery of Austronesia. We may think of Japan much as we think of Britain; the ‘British’ people now live on the western fringe of that island, as Welsh. Similarly, the Ainu people now live in Japan’s northern fringe.) Just as Aotearoa, Australia, and the United States (and others) are regarded today as peripheral neo-Europe, so Polynesia, Micronesia, Island Melanesia and Madagascar are today peripheral neo-Austronesia.
Austronesia means ‘southern islands’, with the reference point being Asia. But this is misleading. 15,000 years ago during the Ice Age, Austronesia was an Asian subcontinent, Sundaland; comparable to India or Europe. The seas of modern Indonesia are shallow, for the most part less than 100 metres deep.
Austronesia was a prehistorical place, comparable with Europe, India, and China as prehistorical places. Further, if we consider an ice-age world, Austronesia was probably the most densely populated part of that world. A large proportion of its land had an altitude of less than 100 metres, making it much like northern Europe today. Further, ancient Austronesia was on the Pacific ring of fire, making it vulnerable to earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic explosions. It had all of the elements required to propel rapid evolutionary change.
After the year 15,000 BP (before present), the last Ice Age ended, not as a slow process of climate change but in three rapid leaps: about 14,000 then 11,000 then 8,000 year ago. Austronesia became, in stages, a drowned subcontinent made up mainly of islands. This context represents the perfect environment for the evolution of sophisticated marine technology and culture. Austronesia is a much more obvious place than China as an incubator for maritime technology. Taiwan should be understood, prehistorically, as connected to Austronesia rather than to China, with the likelihood that, during the ice age, Austronesian people settled from Taiwan along what is now the Chinese coast.
Māori are Austronesian, and Austronesians (like Europeans in later millennia) visited distant parts of the world (eg South America) and colonised some of these (eg Madagascar). In the case of the Polynesian and Micronesian islands, Austronesians were their first peoples.
Both the Polynesian and Madagascan ventures were comparatively recent examples of Austronesian voyaging, and therefore well known. But earlier lesser known adventures made these possible; just as European oceanic venturing from the 15th century was made possible by the Portuguese firstly learning to sail to and from the Azores, Canary Islands, and Madeira. (Other important early oceanic maritime zones were the western Indian Ocean and the Baltic and North Seas. While some have called the Polynesians the Vikings of the South, as James Belich noted, it would have been more accurate to have called the Scandinavian Vikings the Polynesians of the North.)
We can understand the early development of Austronesian maritime culture as having been due to the post ice-age flooding of their lowlands, leaving archipelagos of nearby islands in their place. The development of oceanic skills will have arisen as sea levels raised further, and will have enabled those with the best skills – probably in modern Philippines – to sail to and from islands such as Guam and the Northern Marianas. Thus, the Marianas Islands are almost certainly critical to the evolution of South Pacific oceanic voyaging and settlement. The analogies here are between the Philippines and Portugal, and between Guam and the Azore Islands.
Conclusion
Aotearoa New Zealand has its human origins in Austronesia, of which Taiwan was a part. It is most likely that the critical maritime culture that enabled Austronesians to become the world’s first global maritime explorers was developed in Austronesia through the millennia of stop-go global warming (ie between 15,000 and 7,000 years ago), and probably not in Taiwan specifically.
Further, at least in the late years of the most recent Ice Age, the Austronesian subcontinent was surely the most sophisticated human culture that the world had, till then, ever hosted. Most likely there was a cultural spread from Austronesia to India and later to Europe. After all, the Austronesian languages are closer in form to the languages of Indo-Europe than to Chinese.
He announced Labor’s plan to increase the maximum childcare subsidy from 85% to 90% and remove the annual cap on subsidies for families earning more than A$189,390 per year. This means families earning up to $80,001 would have their subsidy increased by 5% and most families earning more would have their subsidy increased slightly.
Removing the cap would benefit families on middle and high incomes. It currently limits childcare subsidy payments to $10,560 per child per year, for families with a combined income between $189,390 and $353,680.
When the cap is reached for each child, but the family still needs to use childcare, they now pay 100% of the childcare fees in excess of the cap. This acts as a big deterrent to increased parental workforce participation.
For families where both parents work full time, or almost full time, Labor’s proposed measure would result in thousands of dollars saved per year. For parents needing or wanting to work more, and increase their childcare hours, Labor’s plan could make this affordable.
The biggest news is the 90% universal subsidy
The biggest news in Labor’s plan is a longer-term shift to a 90% subsidy for all Australian families. Currently, families with a combined income between $174,390 and $253,680 receive a 50% subsidy. Families earning between $253,680 and $343,680 are subsidised between 20% and 50%.
These families would experience a significant reduction in fees, with exact amounts depending on the amount of childcare they use.
While Labor’s plan comes with a $6.2 billion price tag over four years, the McKell Institute estimates the subsidy boost would deliver a return on investment of at least 100%. This means all the money invested in the childcare measures would return into the economy via increased workforce participation and family spending.
Earlier Grattan Institute analysis also estimated high return on investment from increases to childcare subsidies that get more families working.
If Labor win the next election, the scheme could be in place by as early as July 2022. This is major economic reform that could dramatically increase affordability of childcare in Australia.
The plan is also focused on affordability over quality. The benefits for children from early childhood education and care depend on services being good quality, and providing play-based learning programs led by skilled educators. Close to one in five early childhood services still do not meet quality standards, and vulnerable communities are more likely to be served by lower quality services. This means children who should benefit most from quality early learning are more likely to miss out.
Labor’s plan also doesn’t address systemic problems such as poor pay and conditions for early childhood educators, who are among the worst paid in the country, and who are critical to the delivery of high quality early education.
Early childhood teachers are among the worst paid in the country.Shutterstock
How does this compare with the Coalition’s plan?
So far, the Coalition has put in place three rescue packages to keep providers financially viable during the pandemic, and able to support children’s development and well-being as well as parents’ workforce participation.
While many have argued for temporary or permanent continuation of fee-free care, the Australian government has held fast with its intention to “snap back” to pre-COVID childcare arrangements, with some modifications for parents who’ve lost income or their jobs.
A broad group of supporters — including unions, business groups, children’s and women’s advocates — saw this week’s budget as a missed opportunity to build a more sustainable plan for early childhood services. Many now understand how vital increased access to childcare could be in supporting Australian families (and particularly women) to make a strong recovery from the shocks of 2020.
The Greens’ economic recovery plan has a strong focus on growing the care economy, and includes a commitment to continue fee-free childcare permanently. They advocate major reform towards a system similar to Sweden’s “Educare” model, which provide 525 hours per year for free from three years of age, and the design of which was driven by gender equality principles.
A brief stint of free childcare, where parent fees were suspended and covered by the federal government, gave many a taste of what a different funding model could mean for Australian families, and for the economy.
The events of 2020 have caused many of us to question old assumptions, and to value things we previously took for granted.
Many Australians — regardless or where they live or their politics — are now realising early childhood services are actually a critical piece of social and economic infrastructure. They’re the scaffolding that supports parents to contribute to our society and economy in meaningful ways, and provides children with the early education they need to get the best start.
Source: Council on Hemispheric Affairs – Analysis-Reportage
By Peter M. Tase From Asunción, Paraguay
Landlocked, hit by wildfires, engulfed in a prolonged rainfall shortage and drought, and with its people succumbed into malnourishment, the Republic of Paraguay under the leadership of Mario Abdo Benítez is confronted with an overwhelming number of middle income families that have miserably slipped into extreme poverty. The government has garnered a negative image in the region and throughout the world as a consequence of the corrupt justice system with discredited Supreme Court Judges, violations of human rights and chaoticexecution of Paraguay’s foreign policy. President Abdo Benítez has shown poor leadership as his administration scrambled to implement a clumsy strategy that has fallen woefully short in its duty to accomplish equal employment opportunities, improve public works, fight corruption and keep his campaign promises for economic growth and encourage a transparent judiciary.[1]
Horrible crime against two girls
On September 2nd, 2020, Lilian Mariana Villalba and María Carmen Villalba, of Argentinean nationality, were both 11 years old when killed by members of Paraguay’s Joined Task Force (Fuerza de Tarea Conjunta, or FTC in Spanish) in Yby Yaú (northern Paraguay).[2] Once again the FTC, a military division of Paraguayan Armed Forces, has shown a total fiasco in its pursuit of bringing members of self-declared Paraguayan People’s Army (EPP) before justice. According to various sources, the two girls were captured alive, tortured, executed, and were allegedly dressed in a military uniform after being killed.[3]
Due to these atrocious acts, the Regional Office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has requested President Abdo Benitez’s Government to urgently investigate the killing of the two Argentinian girls.[4]
These reckless acts, committed by FTC, have caused a deeply ingrained crisis in Asuncion’s bilateral relations with Buenos Aires. Various members of the Argentine National Congress, at the Chamber of Deputies, have requested a thorough forensic investigation of the two victims, while the Paraguayan president ordered the girls’ immediate interring right after their chilling execution.[5]
A notorious political kidnapping
On Wednesday, September 9th, 2020, Óscar Denis, 74 years old, former vice-president of Paraguay (2012-2013), was kidnapped, together with his driver Adelio Mendoza[6], by the EPP rebel group. Denis is allegedly believed to be dead as he was an insulin dependent and suffered from heart disease. Óscar Denis was kidnapped while working in his farm, located six miles from Yby Yaú, the site where the two Argentinian girls were killed. On Monday September 14th, Adelio Mendoza was liberated by his abductors.[7]
The current physical state of Denis –still abducted– is kept under a mysterious veil of silence, while President Abdo is hushing political corridors because the former VPs apparent and highlypubliciseddeath could have grave political consequences for his presidency.[8]
High Judges involved in corruption
Benitez’s foreign policy implementation and Paraguay’s deteriorated image abroad are also affected by a high level of corruption in the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ). Its president Alberto Joaquín Martínez Simón has recently been alleged to be involved in a weapons’ trafficking scheme[9]; and Minister Federico Alberto González Franco, the president’s international affairs adviser is accused of trying to cover up the killing of the two Argentinian girls.
Martínez Simón is a member of an infamous masonic lodge named GranLogiaSimbólica del Paraguay, heavily exercising impunity in favor of his members, while illegally persecuting and purging highly qualified attorneys such as Dr. Jimmy Alberto Pàez Giret and other lawyers with high integrity, trained in Germany and the United States.[10]
Strategy against Venezuelan government
Venezuela is another sad chapter in Paraguay’s Foreign Policy; on January 10th, 2019 President Mario Abdo Benítez announced the termination of diplomatic relations with Venezuela and ordered the closure of the Paraguayan Embassy in Caracas.[11] These actions were taken immediately after President Nicolás Maduro was elected for a new term in May 2018.[12]
Later on Abdo Benítez (April 30th, 2019), called upon “the brave people of Venezuela to rise and defend democracy”, part of a deep political irony since more than four hundred thousand Paraguayan citizens have fallen into poverty in just 2 years.[13]
Acute poverty is not being addressed
Various international economists have argued that Abdo Benítez’s administration hampers the development of a sustainable democracy, allowing for corruption to proliferate. For over two years the Paraguayan President has not shown any proclivity to reduce poverty levels in his country. This reflects a disturbing logic of Foreign Policy tenets and is only focused on amassing personal wealth at the detriment of his countrymen, as several media reports demonstrate. While Benítez heavily criticizes Venezuela, Asunción today is in a dire condition[14] as it pertains to a deteriorated public order,[15]abysmallevelsofpoverty, organized crime[16] presence and deteriorated urban infrastructure, poorly structured residential neighborhoods or favella type homes, and a massivelycrowded prison system. Asunción’s poverty stricken Chacaritaneighborhood can even be appreciated from the office windows of the Paraguayan head of state. Under these circumstances there is rising doubt about whether President Abdo Benítez will be able to complete his constitutional mandate anticipated to end in August 2023.[17] President Abdo Benítez is surrounded by corrupt members in the Council of Ministers and his weak leadership was openly displayed over the period of May – August 2019, in mishandling the ITAIPU Binacional treaty with the Government of Brazil; an imbroglio that almost caused him the presidency.[18] On this occasion President Benítez is alleged to have secretly allowed his close associates to conduct a murky energy sale deal pertaining to the fifty percent of electrical energy surplus produced by ITAIPU that belongs to Paraguay, a disingenuous bilateral negotiation valued at USD300 million, that is sold annually to the Brazilian industrial market for dirt cheap in exchange of underhand tactics and briberies that would solely benefit a few of his cronies. In July 2019, President Abdo Benítez was saved from an overwhelming political impeachment by his long time political adversary and predecessor Horacio Manuel Cartes Jara,[19] currently the leader of Honor Colorado Movement within the Colorado Party (ANR). Meanwhile Benítez has yet almost three years to govern his country and his life saving vests are becoming ever more scarce[20] as in recent months his cronies[21] have succumbed to new corruptionscandals and are testing[22] the patience of the Paraguayan people and certainly Paraguay’s national legislators are almost fed up.[23]
Peter Tase is a writer and foreign affairs scholar focused on Latin American countries, Europe and the Southern Caucasus region. More Information about Mr. Tase can be found hereand here.
[Credit Photo: President of Paraguay, Mario Abdo Benítez, meeting with Donald Trump in 2019. Open license, White House]
When New Zealand Health Minister Chris Hipkins recently quipped that the Green Party is “to some extent the conscience of the Labour Party” he was not simply referring to polls suggesting Labour may need the Greens’ support to form a government.
Hipkins was also suggesting Green policies help keep Labour honest on environmental and social issues. So, what difference has the Green Party really made to New Zealand’s political debate?
Drawing on a study of 57 million words spoken in Parliament between 2003 and 2016, our analysis shows the presence of a Green party has changed the political conversation on economics and environment.
In the recent Newshub leaders’ debate, both Jacinda Ardern and Judith Collins agreed that “growing the economy” was the best way to respond to the economic crisis driven by covid-19.
Their responses varied only on traditional left-right lines. Ardern argued that raising incomes and investing in training would grow the economy. Collins suggested economic growth should be advanced by increasing consumer spending through temporary tax cuts.
By contrast, Green parties in New Zealand and elsewhere have long questioned the impact of relentless growth on the natural resources of a finite planet.
Green thinking is informed by ecological economics, which aims to achieve more sustainable forms of collective prosperity that meet social needs within the planet’s limits.
The language of economic growth The impact of this radically different view can be observed in New Zealand parliamentary debates. When MPs from National and Labour used the word “economy” they commonly talked about it in the context of “growth” (“grow”/“growing”/“growth”).
“Labour’s conscience” … Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw sign the confidence and supply agreement that brought the Greens into coalition in 2017. Image: The Conversation/Getty
On average, National MPs said “growth” once every four mentions of “economy”. Labour MPs said “growth” once every six mentions.
Green MPs used “growth” once every 20 mentions of “economy”. When they did mention growth it was primarily to question the idea and to present alternative ideas about a sustainable economy.
Our analysis of the most recent parliamentary term (2017-2020) is ongoing. However, while Labour has recently introduced “well-being” into discussions of the economy, it is striking how the covid crisis has reinvigorated the party’s traditional focus on growth economics.
The research also shows Green MPs mention “economy” primarily in relation to the environment, climate change, sustainability and people, rather than in relation to growth. Their distinct focus is on the connections between the economic system and the environment.
Not just an environmental party: Green MPs Marama Davidson, Chlöe Swarbrick and Jan Logie arrive at Ihumātao in Auckland to support protesters occupying disputed Māori land. Image: The Conversation/Getty
From Labour to the Greens Despite criticism that the Greens have not focused enough on “environmental” concerns, Green MPs used words related to environment, climate and conservation more frequently than Labour or National MPs over the 13-year study period.
For example, after controlling for the number of words spoken by each party’s MPs in parliament, Green MPs mentioned “climate change” four times more than National or Labour MPs.
This represents something of an historical shift. Atmospheric warming and CO₂ were first talked about in parliament by Labour MP Fraser Coleman in 1979. And Labour’s Geoffrey Palmer was the first prime minister to place climate change on parliament’s agenda.
But it has been the Greens who have maintained the momentum, using their speaking opportunities in the House to hold governments to account, including progressing legislation on the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act 2019.
Making women’s voices heard The Green Party has also made a difference to who speaks. By institutionalising gender balance in their leadership and party organisation, and in the way they select their party list for each election, the Greens have consistently elected a higher proportion of female MPs than the other parties.
Historically, female Green MPs have contributed significantly to debates and policy action on inequality, child poverty, Treaty of Waitangi issues, gender equality and action on domestic violence.
This is significant. Analysis of political language globally, particularly on social media, has shown that politicians who identify as women and people of colour are subject to far higher rates of verbal abuse than their male counterparts. This is also the experience of female MPs in New Zealand, including women representing the Greens.
‘Quantity of life or quality of life?’ A 1972 election ad from the Values Party, political ancestor of the Greens.
A history of disruption Minority parties often struggle to maintain their identity in coalition arrangements with larger parties, but the Greens have retained a unique position in New Zealand.
In 1972, the Values Party became the first “green” party to contest a national election anywhere in the world. Former Values activists, including the first Green Party co-leaders Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, were later successful in taking the Greens into Parliament.
The language of green politics in New Zealand and the questioning of growth can be traced back to these origins. Language and words are significant as vehicles for articulating new ideas and provoking transformative action.
Linguistic analysis therefore shows how influential the Green Party has been in presenting alternatives to the idea that economic growth based on unlimited use of New Zealand’s natural resources is a sustainable option.
If Chris Hipkins is correct and the Greens are Labour’s conscience, it is because they have effectively disrupted a historical near-consensus among the major parties that economic growth is the only driver of prosperity.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan Harris Rimmer, Professor and Director of the Policy Innovation Hub, Griffith Business School, Griffith University
Many Australians have an ambivalent relationship with the state and don’t take its politics that seriously.
But after Queensland “lost” the federal election for Labor last year, there are good reasons to care about the state election on October 31.
With the campaign now officially underway, this isn’t just another state poll, either. We outline five reasons why voters — and those beyond Queensland — should be paying close attention.
1. Quexit was misguided
Despite widespread predictions the Labor Party would win the May 2019 federal election, the Coalition had a “miracle” victory, thanks – in part – to Queensland.
“How good’s Queensland?” Prime Minister Scott Morrison exclaimed on election night, with Liberal supporters chanting, “Queensland, Queensland” in reply.
But on social media, those disappointed with the election result wanted to cut Queensland loose from the rest of the country. A “Quexit” hashtag started to trend.
The whole episode proved we need a better understanding of the needs and interests of all Australians.
Without checking Queensland’s temperature, we miss vital information that has a bearing on the whole country. For those watching along at home: you need to win Queensland to win federally.
2. There is more than one Queensland
To understand Queensland, we need to understand its diversity. This is the only state to have the majority of residents in rural or regional areas. So, it is not just about what happens in Brisbane.
As one example, Queensland’s largest electorate, Gregory, covers about 460,000 square kilometres. So even within regional areas, the interests and issues are different.
Griffith University experts on the seats to watch in the 2020 Queensland election.
Queensland is also a state that experiences frequent natural disasters. This, coupled with economic reliance on beef, gold, sugar, coal and gas industries, can place disparate Queensland communities on the edge.
While the Northern Territory went to the polls in late August and the ACT will vote on October 17, Queensland’s will be the most significant election in Australia since the start of COVID-19.
This will give us several clues about the impact coronavirus will have on campaigns and voting, which could affect future elections in Australia.
We are expecting postal votes will be significant in the October 31 decision, with an estimated 600,000 Queenslanders predicted to vote this way. Many people are also expected to pre-poll to avoid the crowds.
COVID-19 has led to concerns about election day sausage sizzles.Julian Smith/AAP
This has significant ramifications on the campaign itself. When will political parties release their major policies, if huge chunks of the population have already voted well before polling day? With so many postal votes, will we have a result on election night?
We are also set to see a drop in door-knock campaigning, less reliance on paper how-to-vote cards and question marks over the election day democracy sausage. What will this do to people’s engagement with the voting process?
The COVID crisis also means attention is essentially focused on Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and her challenger, LNP leader Deb Frecklington. This will increase the “presidential” nature of the contest, exacerbating an increasing trend in Australian elections.
It is also worth noting, this is the first contest between two female leaders at a state or federal election in Australian history.
4. What are the minor parties up to?
The preferences of three minor parties — Katter’s Australian Party, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and North Queensland First — are set to play an important role in battleground North Queensland seats.
With predictions of a hung parliament and the importance of preference flows, we should be keeping a close eye on their campaigns.
The role of Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party looks less certain.
Palmer’s Mineralogy company donated almost $84 million to the United Australia Party campaign in the last federal election. This was the biggest individual spending spree in Australian political history, resulting in a very visible campaign, without winning any seats.
However, Palmer still had an impact, with his anti-Labor campaigning perhaps partly responsible for swinging votes away from the ALP.
In this year’s state election, Palmer will be restricted by new electoral spending caps. But it’s the pattern of spending that is really interesting.
Clive Palmer’s election spending will be capped this time around.Dave Hunt/ AAP
Throughout the Queensland middle — the dry belts of land west of the Great Dividing range out to the fringes of the Channel Country — populist campaign messages dominate via bright billboards.
Their message may be simple — like the “Simon says” equivalent “Clive says… give Labor THE BOOT” — but they are also targeted. In many cases, they are the only messaging (and real political attention) these regions receive.
5. Tough questions that go beyond Queensland
Queensland is dealing with its fair share of local issues. But it is also grappling with policy questions that resonate around the country.
These include how to recover from the COVID recession and how to capture young voters who have been hit hard by the economic downturn.
Queensland also needs to transform its tourism industry in the face of both public health and environmental challenges.
And it needs to tackle climate change and transform “fossil” industries into new opportunities for employees and businesses.
Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch changed lives. Published 50 years ago in October 1970, it exists in the popular imagination as a kind of shorthand for that world-historic moment when women said they’d had enough.
The Female Eunuch told women the project of emancipation had stalled. Freedom would not be wrested from a process of reform, by “genteel, middle-class women” sitting on committees or signing petitions. To grasp their freedom, “ungenteel” women would need to “call for revolution”, “disrupt society” and “unseat God”.
Indeed, “marriage, the family, private property, and the state” were in the firing line.
Greer urged women to think beyond the stereotype patriarchal society had created for them, which limited their capacity to act. She likened the situation of the 1970s woman to that of a bird “made for captivity”.
“The cage door had been opened but the canary had refused to fly out,” Greer wrote. “The conclusion was that the cage door ought never to have been opened because canaries are made for captivity; the suggestion of an alternative had only confused and saddened them.”
Women, she wrote, needed to “discover that they have a will”.
Through the book’s five chapters — “Body”, “Soul”, “Love”, “Hate” and “Revolution” — Greer gradually built her famous motif of women as “eunuchs” or castrates, robbed of their natural energy. She wrote that in accepting this castrated or false identity, women had allowed the destruction of their instinct, inclination, will and capacity.
Greer’s book told women — in a hopeful way — that things could be otherwise. It told them to demand a better education, to pool their childcare arrangements, to share a better washing machine or other labour-saving appliance with women in the street. It told women to challenge men’s ownership of the means of production and consumer capitalism’s ownership of the soul.
Smashing sexual shibboleths
Greer famously drew attention to deeply entrenched cultural constructs that linked sex to shame and disgust, calling out the hypocrisy of a society that blamed women for men’s misogyny. “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” she wrote. “The man regards her as a receptacle into which he has emptied his sperm, a kind of human spittoon.”
These sexual shibboleths, she wrote, must be smashed. This was the point behind Greer’s widely discussed calls to go around bra-less and wear no underpants. Own your body, she urged women, its tastes and smells, including — most memorably — your menstrual blood.
“I must confess to a thrill of shock when one of the ladies to whom this book is dedicated told me that she had tasted her own menstrual blood on the penis of her lover,” Greer wrote. And yet, there are “no horrors presented in that blood, no poisons”.
Greer said women must question everything they had been taught about sex, love, romance, their bodies and their rights. Freedom was theirs, but they had to take it. Action was not just collective but individual too. Agency was everything. Grab any missile, break any rule. Do it now.
In this way, The Female Eunuch spoke to, and challenged, women directly. It asked, in its famous end line, “What will you do?”
Too few discussions of Greer’s work fully appreciate its intellectual origins in the libertarian ideas of the Sydney Push. Greer was born in Melbourne, educated by Irish nuns in a convent school, and yearned for a world beyond her own home, which was, she says, singularly bereft of books.
She moved to Sydney to study and fell in with a tearaway group of left libertarians known as the Push, a Bohemian movement with its origins in philosopher John Anderson’s Freethought Society.
In Greer’s time, the Push included soon to be luminaries such as Clive James, Richard Neville — editor of Oz magazine and a doyen of the underground culture that gathered around it in London — and Lillian Roxon, “the abundant, the golden, the eloquent, the well and badly loved”, who became the New York-based correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, author of the Rock Encyclopedia, and is one of five women to whom The Female Eunuch is dedicated.
Issue 19 of OZ magazine in the UK, early 1969, showing Germaine Greer and Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.Wikimedia Commons
The “Sydney line” espoused by the Push featured a heady mix of libertarianism and rule-smashing, anarcho-socialism. It preached “free love” and “opposition to authority”, encouraging members to live “freely” in an attitude of “permanent protest”.
Members of the Push pondered the “futility of revolutions” but nonetheless turned out for protests. The movement gave rise to seminal works of Australian feminism from Greer’s to Eva Cox’s and Wendy Bacon’s.
The formative influence of the Push led Greer to mount her social critique from the standpoint of “liberation feminism”, which she differentiated from so-called “equality feminism”. Equality was dismissed as a conservative aim, because it confers an illusion of power that merely re-entrenches the status quo.
Meaningful change — true “liberation” — required something more radical. Liberty could be terrifying. It was something not even men possessed. “The first significant discovery we shall make as we rocket along our female road to freedom is that men are not free,” wrote Greer, “and they will seek to make this an argument why nobody should be free”.
Media event
Intellectual discussions of The Female Eunuch often focus on the book’s appearance as a media event, and on Greer as a celebrity. It is a rich line of cultural inquiry, but occasionally leads critics to sell her work short, as flippant and ephemeral.
The book was commissioned by Sonny Mehta, who met Greer at a cafe in Soho on March 17 1969, when he was editor at MacGibbon and Kee. Mehta had an unerring eye for words, and an astonishing capacity to connect authors to an audience. He went on to become one of the most influential publishers of the late 20th century.
Cover of the first Paladin paperback edition of The Female Eunuch (1970).Wikimedia Commons
The Female Eunuch launched in London, but it was the extensive publicity campaign preceding the book’s entry into the American market that shaped its Anglophone reception. Its US publisher, McGraw Hill, outlayed a then extraordinary US$25,000 on promotion, including full-page advertisements in national newspapers.
During her 1971 book tour of the US, Greer appeared on television and radio. The New York Times called The Female Eunuch “the best feminist book so far”.
Always the controversialist, Greer gave interviews to magazines such as Esquire and Playboy. She trounced Normal Mailer in a New York debate, and often spoke back to journalists. “What kind of a question is that?” she would ask them.
In The Female Eunuch, Greer first signalled her often misinterpreted theories around rape and sexual consent. Greer has argued the idea of consent as it is written into law automatically positions women as subordinate and inferior. This sets up a situation that makes it almost impossible for a rape victim to get justice, as a perpetrator will only ever need to establish an element of doubt that consent was absent, by arguing that the victim had “given up” or “given in” or “hadn’t fought hard enough”.
The law, she argues, is a reflection of the wider misogyny diffuse in our culture, and is written in men’s interest. In more recent times, Greer has been accused of underplaying the seriousness of sexual assault and its impact on women.
In the 1970s, Greer openly discussed sexual violence and reproductive politics on prime-time TV, on talk shows like Dick Cavett’s, which Greer guest hosted for two nights. The results were explosive.
The Greer archives, housed at the University of Melbourne, contains thousands of letters that demonstrate the impact of Greer’s work and The Female Eunuch in particular. One female television viewer wrote about Greer’s talkshow appearance, “You could see minds and attitudes changing right on stage”.
She added, “Life magazine claims your appeal is that you ‘like men’. I claim that your appeal is that your intellect is welded to a very handsome ability to communicate”.
Of course, not everybody agreed. A reader of McCall’s magazine called a book extract from The Female Eunuch published in its pages “the most revolting ideas I’ve read in a woman’s magazine”.
Germaine Greer poses on Park Ave in New York City, 1971.Marty Lederhandler/AP
Making the personal political
Greer became known — and still is — equally for her personality as for her ideas. This was perhaps inevitable because Greer had – and still has – a mesmerising capacity to make the personal political, and to play with the cultural gap between news and social norms.
Her work communicated her ideas on a mass scale and translated what were then the utterly unfamiliar ideals of feminism into everyday aspirations.
In the 1970s, The Female Eunch was dismissed with faint praise and even subject to panicked attacks from some feminists who saw the book as taking up too much space. In “The Selling of Germaine Greer”, published in The Nation, Claudia Dreifus argued that Greer was “shallow, anti-woman, regressive, three steps backwards” and “not the feminist leader she is advertised to be”.
In Australia, Beatrice Faust called Greer a “political bonehead”. Others appeared disconcerted by her dazzling polemics or dismayed — or simply uncomprehending — of the book’s left libertarian intellectual origins and its blunt insistence that before liberation can be achieved, women need to free themselves from the stereotypes that shackle them personally and sexually, as well as politically.
Today Greer’s work — and her legacy — remains divisive. Writers Mary Beard and Rachel Cusk have stood by the book, while others, including Naomi Wolf and Mary Spongberg, have been vocally critical of the author and her subsequent works. In 2010, Greer was vigorously attacked by playwright Louis Nowra in an infamous essay published in the The Monthly.
I first read The Female Eunuch at the age of 12, taking the age-spotted copy from my mother’s bookshelf. I read it again — this time from cover to cover — at 23. The Female Eunuch has never been out of print since it was published.
What still jumps out of the book’s pages is the strength and power of an author’s voice that speaks to its reader so directly.
The voice — like the author — is dazzling, erudite, anti-authoritarian, reliably contrarian, recklessly courageous, full of wit and great encouragement for unconventional ideas, tactics and behaviours, and utterly fearless in her search for social justice.
All this is why the marvellous “Germaine” exists for her reader on first name terms.
Review: Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (Penguin Random House, 2020)
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, Richard Flanagan’s eighth novel, is one of a slew of novels one expects to emerge from the shadow of the 2019–2020 bushfire season that darkened the skies of eastern Australia for weeks on end, scorching forests from Byron Bay to Kangaroo Island.
A rolling incineration of large swathes of the continent, the sky itself seemed to have been on fire, from the uncanny pink-disk sun of smoke-choked Sydney in November and December to the apocalyptic scenes at Mallacoota on New Year’s Eve.
In Flanagan’s novel the collapse of the planet’s ecosystems happens in the background. The story itself is mainly occupied with something which must be trivial by comparison: the dying of 87-year-old Francie in a Hobart hospital.
Francie’s three children have come together to deal with the demands of the situation. While Anna and Terzo have long left Tasmania behind them (or so they thought) for high-flying careers on the mainland, Tommy has remained. Tommy is a failed artist and speaks with a stutter that appeared when a fourth child, Ronnie, died by suicide following abuse suffered at a Marist boys’ school.
The novel mainly follows Anna. A successful architect living in Sydney, she reluctantly answers Tommy’s call to return to Tasmania when their mother’s health turns for the worse. The novel traces the breaking down of all the things Anna has put up to convince herself she was no longer in that place.
In the face of a scarred country, Anna must return home and face the scars of her family.Photoholgic/Unsplash
What place? Not Tasmania, but the invisible, traumatic centre of family life — all the failures, evasions, dirty compromises swept under the carpet only to reappear with surprising exactitude each Christmas.
While Succession, with its ageing mogul patriarch Logan Roy, is loosely based on the Murdoch dynasty, it does not really depend on a media empire at stake. Its heart is the tawdry machinations of the infantilised children as they jockey for advantage, trying to win the game of imaginary approval driving sibling rivalry.
In The Living Sea of Waking Dreams it is a matriarch rather than a patriarch slowly, messily and unevenly passing out of the world. Yet, while Logan Roy is a monster and Francie a saint, the effect in the adult children is exactly the same.
The brilliance of Flanagan’s story and the deep power of this novel is in our witnessing of the end of the world. The death of Francie opens up a black hole in the family drawing Anna, Terzo and Tommy into its implacable singularity.
What does it mean to face personal grief when the world is ending?Charles G/Unsplash
At the same time as this family’s little world is collapsing, the world itself is in its own end times. Ash rains down from the sky and one ecological catastrophe after another interrupts Anna’s social media feed. This conjunction presents a new form of what is called the pathetic fallacy, in which we project the world of our inner emotions and moods onto the natural world.
A sullen sky, a bright morning, a funereal forest — some basic animism in us takes the world to be the sounding board of our affects. It is a symptom of the Anthropocene these affinities have become planetary.
Is Flanagan’s novel an ecological novel? The luxury of choosing has now all but gone.
We no longer have to turn our minds to an ecology forcing itself into our lungs and washing up on our every shore. The novel has a dimension of allegory, but it is no longer clear which direction it is flowing.
Our missing parts
The pathetic fallacy was thought to serve the psychic needs of people by offering them a consoling mirror in the natural world, but what if its true point was to turn our subjective misery into ethical environmental action?
Certainly, the moribund Francie seems an emblem of a dying maternal nature. The ever greater efforts her children expend on keeping her alive evoke the desperate rear-guard actions to prevent this or that catastrophe.
The children attempt ever greater efforts to keep their mother with them.National Cancer Institute/Unsplash
But the novel’s most persuasive ploy is not based on the redeployment of sympathy. At regular intervals, Anna realises she is missing a body part. It begins with a missing finger. Later her knee, then a breast, an eye. Others, too, start to lose body parts.
These “vanishings”, as they come to be known, are entirely painless and seem to go almost unnoticed. It is as if, we are told, they have simply been photoshopped away.
The uncanny part is not the loss of the limb, but the fact the phenomenon is going unremarked. This is what extinction feels like. Something is gone that was once there. We are briefly confused, but then we reassemble the picture and push on.
He’s certainly no shoo-in, however. There are already multiple candidates, the pandemic will make campaigning complicated, and Australian’s record on climate change might be a negative.
But he’ll have strong government support and, given his meticulous organisational skills and network of contacts abroad, nothing will be left undone.
Finance minister throughout the Coalition’s term, Cormann is respected across the political spectrum, which has made him effective as the government’s “wrangler” of the difficult characters in the Senate.
His dour image conceals a lighter side, seen in Wednesday’s cameo appearance on the ABC’s “Mad as Hell” as he parried with his “spokesman” Darius Horsham, a long-running character on the show.
Cormann’s October 30 parliamentary exit – the timing determined by the OECD’s process – is a significant loss for the government. But Scott Morrison was determined not to let it become a disruption.
Morrison has filled Cormann’s shoes even before his minister has stepped out of them, announcing Simon Birmingham will take over the finance portfolio and Senate leadership when Cormann goes.
The PM said he’d make no other changes at that time, but there’ll be a reshuffle at year’s end.
Birmingham will then shed his trade ministry, and Morrison will have the opportunity to make other alterations to his team. With aged care set to be a mega issue after the royal commission reports in February, one thing he should do is put a heavyweight into that portfolio and elevate it to cabinet.
Thursday’s small shuffle was a side show in the major play of the week, which saw a budget with a deficit of $213.7 billion this financial year that gambles on being large enough to get the country marching to recovery.
It will take months to judge whether the government has pitched its budget well (and that’s assuming no new seismic setbacks), but it is satisfied with the immediate reception. Income tax cuts are likely to be popular even if their critics argue other measures would be better. Business can only welcome the massive incentives to invest, although many enterprises won’t survive to take advantage of them.
Labor has given its support to the huge tax concessions for business in Josh Frydenberg’s second budget.
There’s a sharp contrast with the company tax cuts in then treasurer Scott Morrison’s first budget, which embroiled the Turnbull government in a debilitating fight from 2016 to 2018. Even Cormann couldn’t wrangle the big business tranche of those through the Senate; it was abandoned in the final week of Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership.
The budget has come under fire on various fronts – for example, the wage subsidy for younger workers carries the risk of being rorted, and there’s criticism about the lack of assistance for older workers.
Nevertheless, it has been a difficult budget for the opposition to savage, given Labor is endorsing its core elements of income tax cuts and business concessions.
But one fertile area for the opposition has been the lack of specific assistance for women, many of whom have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic. They’re often in casual jobs, and in highly vulnerable sectors (although Frydenberg pointed out women have been strongly represented in the restored jobs). Women have also carried a disproportionate load of home schooling.
Albanese tapped into this area of government vulnerability when he delivered his Thursday night budget reply.
The opposition leader had several imperatives to meet as he went into that speech. To produce some policy flesh. To set up an ideological difference with the government. To cut through to the public.
With possibly only a little over a year before an election, the opposition is under pressure to start rolling out detailed policies. Albanese’s promises to make child care more affordable (at a cost $6.4 billion) and modernise the energy grid (a $20 billion investment) were substantial commitments.
The child care policy will appeal to women in particular. The pandemic has made families, but especially women, even more aware how important child care is for them – the brief period of it being free only increased the appetite for a better system – and the budget didn’t respond.
The proposals Albanese put forward to boost skills and local manufacturing highlighted Labor’s message that it believes in using government as a driver of change, through prescriptions, procurement policy and other means.
Albanese proposes mandating that a certain proportion of workers on major government-funded projects should be apprentices and trainees. He even suggests this could be extended to government-funded sectors such as aged care – how practical that would be is debatable.
There wasn’t a detailed social housing policy but Albanese flagged Labor would invest substantially in this area – that’s spending favoured by many economists as well as necessary to improve lives.
While Albanese is at pains to argue he’d mobilise the power of government, Morrison has muddied this political water.
The budget might be heavily private-sector oriented (and from that vantage point, seen as ideological), but Morrison is also interventionist when it suits him. His so-called gas led recovery, and his identification of designated sectors in his manufacturing policy are examples.
In terms of the imperatives he was trying to meet, Albanese did produce some policy flesh but of the announcements, probably only the child care initiative is likely to general “cut through”.
But the danger for Albanese is that come the next election, if Morrison sees child care as a political weak spot, he’s likely to address it.
In his stress on child care and social housing, Albanese made his point that Labor had different priorities to the government’s. And we got the message about putting government in the driver’s seat.
But the picture of what an Albanese government would actually look like wasn’t clear – as it can’t be, because that remains a work-in-progress.
Nor did we get any comprehensive idea of how, if this had been a Jim Chalmer’s budget, Labor would be tackling the immediate crisis differently.
Albanese’s problem was that circumstances demanded too much of him in his budget reply. He had a fair crack at meeting those demands, but he couldn’t change the perception that the pandemic has made the opposition one of its victims.
Last Sunday, 53 percent voted against independence in the second of three possible referendums – three percent less than in 2018.
The FLNKS spokesman, Victor Tutugoro, said his side now had the “wind in its sails”, describing last Sunday’s result as a victory which indicated the direction that the country must take.
Under the terms of the Noumea Accord, a third of the members of New Caledonia’s 54-seat Congress is needed to request the next referendum six months after the last plebiscite.
Tutugoro said the FLNKS believed it had convinced people beyond its traditional electorate, with non-Kanak voices now supporting its cause.
But the FLNKS has warned it will only engage in discussions on the basis of its political project of achieving full sovereignty and independence.
French citizens seek electoral rolls boost An organisation of French citizens without full voting rights in New Caledonia has called for a rally to coincide with a visit to Noumea by French Overseas Minister Sebastien Lecornu.
The group, One Heart One Vote, wants an estimated 41,000 residents to be registered on all electoral rolls.
They can only vote in municipal elections and French elections, but not in provincial elections and independence referendums which are restricted to indigenous Kanaks and those who arrived and registered in New Caledonia before 1998.
One Heart One Vote called for a rally outside the French High Commission on Saturday next week and requested to be received by Lecornu.
The restrictions were enshrined in a French organic law in 1999 to shore up the representation of the indigenous Kanak population.
This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.
Anthony Albanese has promised an ambitious $20 billion plan to modernise Australia’s electricity grid, and extra spending of $6.2 billion over four years for more affordable child care in a budget reply that emphasises the role of government.
In another initiative, Albanese said a Labor government would have a plan to promote local manufacturing and skills that would boost the nation’s productivity.
The Labor leader claimed the recession in Australia would be “deeper and longer” because of Tuesday’s budget, which he said left behind women and people over 35.
Albanese is casting Labor’s alternative as using the power of government to drive economic activity and reform, setting this up an ideological difference with the Morrison government.
“Government has the power to break down barriers of disadvantage, to change lives for the better,” he said.
His childcare initiative homes in on criticism that the present system is costly and inadequate for families, with nothing extra done in the budget.
“Right around Australia, instead of childcare supporting families, where both parents want to work, the costs – and the tax system – actively discourage this,” he said.
Too often “it’s working mums who cop the worst of it”.
“For millions of working women, it’s not worth working more than three days a week.”
This deprived working women of opportunities and cost workplaces years of experience, knowledge and skills.
He said a Labor government would, from July 1 2022 remove the annual cap on the childcare subsidy, which would eliminate the disincentive to work more hours. The current cap is $10,560.
It would also increase the maximum childcare subsidy to 90%, cutting costs for 97% of families in the system. Labor would increase the subsidy rates and taper them for every family earning under $530,000.
Under the changes 97% of families in the system would save between $600 and $2900 annually, with no family worse off.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission would be told to design a price regulation mechanism that made sure all the funds the government spent went through to savings for families.
“This is real reform. It will be women’s workforce participation, boost productivity, and get Australia working again.
“Building a childcare system that works for families will turbo charge productivity in workplaces, delivering a much-needed boost in economic growth of up to $4 billion a year.”
Labor’s long term goal would be to investigate moving to a 90% subsidy for childcare for every family.
The Productivity Commission would be asked to report on this in Labor’s first term.
Outlining his program for “powering the nation”, Albanese said Australia’s present electricity network was designed for a different century – “a time when solar panels ran pocket calculators, not the one in four households which have rooftop solar”.
“The current network takes no account of the rise of renewables as the cheapest new energy source, and doesn’t help link these new sources up to the national grid.”
Labor would set up a new Rewiring The Nationl Corporation, to rebuild and modernise the grid.
The Australian Energy Market Operator had already identified projects that were needed, Albanese said.
“The planning work is done. Rebuilding the grid will create thousands of jobs – particularly in regional Australia – and deliver up to $40 billion in benefits,” he said.
“Fixing transmission is technology neutral and will allow the market to drive least cost, new energy production.”
The “Future Made in Australia” initiative would be driven by the power of Commonwealth spending.
There would be an “Australian Skills Guarantee” which would provide opportunities for apprentices and trainees on major Commonwealth projects.
“On every major work site receiving federal spending, one out of ten workers employed will be an apprentice, a trainee, or cadet,” he said.
“We will also consider how this principle can be extended to federal government subsidised sectors like aged care, disability care and childcare, in cooperation with providers.”
A Labor government would bring in rules in defence spending “to maximise local content and create local jobs”.
It would also have a national rail manufacturing plan, providing leadership to the states and working with industry to maximise opportunities to build trains in Australia.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Stone, General practitioner; Clinical Associate Professor, ANU Medical School, Australian National University
The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in more anxiety and depression, raised rates of bipolar disorder and other psychoses, and left many Australians stricken with grief. And we will, devastatingly, lose more Australians to suicide.
Meanwhile, many people are facing job losses, financial hardship, isolation and some are suffering long-term symptoms of COVID-19 or other chronic illnesses.
At first glance, it’s fitting the 2020-21 federal budget, unveiled on Tuesday, includes A$7 million for mental health organisations Beyond Blue, Headspace, Kids Helpline and Lifeline.
Look more closely, however, and some concerning patterns emerge. The commitment to mental health is channelled through these services, which provide a narrow spectrum of care. These organisations favour people who are resourced, resourceful, literate in English, urban, and have more easily treated conditions than those with complex or multiple chronic illnesses. In fact the people with the deepest need tend to receive the least care.
These services aren’t suited for those with complex needs
People with mental illnesses aren’t all the same. Mental health concerns range from grief and loss, to chronic severe schizophrenia, to depression and anxiety, and many of these conditions overlap. Many people have also survived considerable trauma, and this has a deep and lasting impact on their health and well-being. Others live with disability, homelessness, chronic pain, domestic violence and poverty.
Professor Ian Hickie, who was a founding director of Headspace, says:
The Headspace model was never set up to deal with more complex presentations, people with impairments already established, those who had complex mixes of anxiety, depression and substance misuse.
As clinicians with a particular interest in mental health, we are wary of the “single illness fallacy” — one person, one illness — that underpins many of Australia’s current mental health policies. People with ongoing or serious mental illnesses almost always suffer other physical conditions which compound their mental illness, and die decades earlier than the average Australian. They deserve support.
The federal budget included $7 million for support services like Beyond Blue, and over $100 million to double the number of Medicare-subsidised mental health sessions to 20.Lukas Coch/AAP
Patients describe being too complex or not complex enough for services, and a little like Goldilocks they have difficulty finding a service that is “just right” for their needs.
All people with mental distress and illness should be able to access mental health care. In theory, this is the basis of the federal government’s Better Access program, which allows people to access ten Medicare-subsided sessions per year with a psychologist or psychiatrist. It’s a useful initiative, but only for those who can afford the co-payments and live in areas where psychologists are available.
The budget’s commitment to extend the program to 20 sessions, at a cost of more than A$100 million, is welcome. But it doesn’t ensure equity. It also puts considerable strain on the psychology profession, which is alreadyoverloaded, especially in rural areas.
Like Headspace, Better Access risks excluding people with complex conditions or unstable mental illnesses. Those who are on the margins of society, and rely on the social safety net or charity, are unlikely to use this model of care.
How do get the best value for our mental health services?
It’s hard to see the value-add of a narrow mental health response that funds a set of services which can only care for people with mild to moderate distress, while ignoring the people with the greatest disability.
The value-based care movement argues there are four elements that create value for people. Services should:
provide outcomes that matter to the person receiving the service. We need to decide whether every dollar spent on clinical treatment of mild to moderate depression and anxiety could be better spent on housing, trauma therapy, employment or other forms of social care
alleviate suffering. People should be able to form close and continuing relationships with clinicians, so their story and needs are known and trust can develop. The evidence for this relationship-based care is deep, but often services use multiple teams with health professionals who change frequently. We need to understand that continuity often matters to people and developing trust helps reduce distress
create calm, which means addressing the chaos people experience trying to access services. The experience of telling your story multiple times to multiple providers, and then finding the service won’t accept care, is traumatic and unnecessary
be cost-effective for the whole population who need mental health support, not just for the patients each service chooses to treat.
We need each of these government-funded services to report against these outcomes, including recording those people who are directed away from the services and essentially denied care.
Policies should be driven by data
We know little about the wider mental health needs of the Australian population. Our most recent national mental health survey was back in 2007. We know a lot about patients who present to services, but little about patients who don’t.
The largest providers of mental health care in the country, GPs, are invisible in the budget. Their patients, who have no other option for mental health care because they are too poor, too rural, too unwell or not unwell enough, are invisible in policy. Our only data from GPs is billing and prescribing data; hardly sufficient to understand the unmet needs of the Australian population.
If we are to meet the needs of all Australians, not just those who can access and afford care, we need more data. Offering simplistic solutions to complex problems means there are larger chasms for people to fall through.
Melburnians are addicted to the Victorian health department’s daily tweet of the state’s new COVID-19 cases. This figure contributes to the all-important rolling 14-day average, which alongside the number of mystery cases, tells us whether we’re on target for the next phase of reopening.
How likely is it we’ll get to the target of an average of no more than five new daily cases by October 19 and fewer than five mystery cases — the triggers for the next stage of restrictions to be lifted?
In the words of Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, it’s looking like a “line ball” decision.
Why aren’t the numbers going down?
Daily case reports have dramatically decreased from the hundreds seen only weeks ago. However, now numbers are low, any minor fluctuations are highly visible. We’re still seeing small outbreaks that seed chains of transmission, contributing to this day-by-day variation.
The recent outbreak linked to the Butcher Club at Chadstone shopping centre is a prime example, with workers transporting the virus back home across Melbourne and into regional Victoria. Essential work is a valid reason to leave home and travel beyond 5 kilometres, facilitating long-range spread. The potential for further outbreaks like this remains.
Then there are the cases in “stubborn” settings such as aged care. We have seen the potential for outbreaks in these environments, which are essentially residential settings housing large numbers of people at risk of severe outcomes.
While there have been major efforts to reduce introduction and spread of infection in these environments, rumbling chains of infection spread have proven difficult to stamp out.
At the moment, the vast majority of cases are linked, and related to spread in occupational and residential settings.
So what happens if we’re still at an average of ten cases by mid-October? By late October? Into November? Are the measures that would remain in place proportionate to these numbers, and is there good evidence those measures are needed to prevent a third wave?
It’s clear Melbourne cannot stay in lockdown indefinitely. Lockdowns are an emergency brake on widespread community transmission.
How can we safely free up society and the economy without dashing all the efforts of the past months?
The biggest challenge for containing COVID-19 is the potential for super-spreading events. Many infected people do not spread the virus. But some, the super-spreaders, infect many others. Those newly infected people then return to their own homes, schools or workplaces, each with the potential to seed new infections.
So rapid identification of super-spreading events is key. This is achieved by working backwards whenever we identify a new case — a concept known as “back tracing”.
Where resources are limited, they’re best applied to investigating where a known infection came from (as that “parent” source was clearly contagious) and following up on their close contacts as quickly as possible.
At our current low case numbers, we can also focus on who the newly identified person (the “child”, who may or may not be contagious) has subsequently been in contact with.
We also need to minimise the chance of these super-spreading events from happening in the first place. We can do this by limiting the number of people who mix together in workplaces and social situations.
Keep to your bubble
It’s also useful to distinguish between mixing with known and unknown people. It’s clear SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spreads very effectively in households, where we understandably let our guard down.
Limiting our social contacts to known, repeated people or small groups or “bubbles” reduces the overall risk and makes contact tracing easier in the event of an infection. Meeting up in outdoor settings further reduces those risks.
But socialising in public places, like restaurants, provides opportunities for mixing with unknown people. That’s why COVID-safe operating practices to limit group sizes in restaurants and cafes and minimise between-group interactions are so important. And of course there are outdoor dining options if the Melbourne weather chooses to be kind.
Hong Kong managed its “second wave” very effectively without lockdowns by reducing mass gatherings, promoting remote working and learning, introducing seating restrictions in restaurants and closing bars. All these measures were explicitly focused on reducing super-spreading risk.
No matter where we are or who we’re with, we can all reduce our individual risk of catching or spreading SARS-CoV-2. Whether or not we are staying “at home” is arguably a lot less important than how we behave when we leave.
Despite poor choices by some, Victorians’ compliance with personal behaviours to reduce infection spread are the highest in Australia and holding steady over time, helping keep the potential for transmission down.
What happens after October 19?
Thanks to early, proactive responses to COVID-19, Australia is in the fortunate position of having achieved near-elimination.
However, it is inevitable SARS-CoV-2 infections will continue to be imported, particularly as we look to reconnect with the wider world.
As a global community, we will be living with and adapting to this virus and its impacts for years to come. We need a view beyond the next fortnight to find sustainable ways to live, work and respond.
Lockdowns have served us well. Australia has avoided catastrophe. But it is not lockdown or bust. We have other alternatives.
Facebook has announced a ban on groups and pages identified with the rapidly growing QAnon conspiracy movement, which will cover both Facebook itself and the Facebook-owned Instagram.
QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory that alleges, among other things, that US President Donald Trump is battling Satan-worshipping paedophiles and a global child sex-trafficking ring run by Democrats. While the movement began in the US, it has begun to attract followers in other countries, including Australia.
Facebook’s ban escalates a policy announced in August that aimed to ban QAnon groups promoting violence, and comes as the social media giant attempts to slow the spread of disinformation on its platform in the lead-up to the US presidential election on November 3.
Twitter also banned “so-called ‘QAnon’ activity” in July. After Facebook’s latest move, some QAnon adherents were quick to claim the ban itself was more evidence of a cover-up.
Facebook’s action raises important questions. Will it work? Will taking down these pages stop the spread of “potentially dangerous” ideas?
There is some evidence it will. In 2015, Facebook blocked accounts and deleted posts associated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Thereafter, the group’s propaganda did not seem to pop up as often elsewhere online (although it has not disappeared entirely).
However, if groups are banned from Facebook or other platforms, they may still find ways to propagate material. This can create a “black market” of ideas out of public view, where any idea, no matter how objectionable, can go completely unchecked.
Should social media suppress ‘dangerous’ ideas?
Another question is whether Facebook should be banning “potentially dangerous” groups and pages, and therefore ideas, from its platforms. This is a harder question to answer.
Platforms such as Facebook sit in a grey area in relation to freedom of expression. Banning somebody from a platform does not infringe on their legal right to express themselves — it just means they will have to do it elsewhere.
However, Facebook and other platforms such as Instagram and Twitter are among the main avenues for public expression, and are used not only by everyday individuals but also large organisations and even elected representatives. So the removal of certain groups or ideas should be at least concerning. This is particularly true for those like QAnon which do not directly call for violence (though the group has been linked to some violent incidents).
Trump has said he has heard followers of QAnon are “people who love our country”. Like other far-right groups, QAnon is ultra-nationalistic, so Trump is likely correct.
QAnon’s ultra-nationalism is important when we talk about the Facebook ban because one of the founding principles of the United States as a nation is the idea people should be free to express any idea they like, including conspiracy theories, ideas associated with religious cults and hateful propaganda.
Key texts that informed the foundation of the US, such as the introduction to The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, Areopagitica by John Milton and and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, all make similar arguments on freedom of expression.
English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued for the important of the right to free expression, especially of heretical ideas.London Stereoscopic Company – Hulton Archive
They argue that when we deny an idea the chance to be expressed, we do ourselves a disservice because we deny ourselves a chance to hear it. It is not just the right of the expresser to think and say; it is the right of the listener to hear and think.
From this point of view, ideas expressed by QAnon or any other fringe group should sharpen our ability to think critically about what we claim to know. If someone puts forward a seemingly crazy idea, they should be heard because they could be correct or hold kernels of truth to their ideas — if not, they need to be publicly refuted for the benefit of everyone.
John Stuart Mill argued “the greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy”. The heretical view is therefore the most salient of all views because in its heresy enhances our individual and collective ability for critical thinking.
No simple solutions
Do these centuries-old principles still hold in the age of social media? Platforms like Facebook appear perfectly suited to the promotion and dissemination of conspiracy theories like QAnon. In their relentless quest for our attention, the platforms take advantage of the human tendency to find salacious and infuriating articles and ideas more captivating than nuanced, balanced and factual material.
There is no simple solution or shortcut to mitigating potentially dangerous ideas. They need to be openly refuted but to do this requires time and engagement with the ideas themselves but importantly first, an ability for critical thinking.
Who will do this work? It may be an indictment on our educational systems if it can be shown that we are not producing enough critical thinkers. Perhaps this is a place to start, so we do not have to rely on Silicon Valley to tell us what crazy ideas we can read, because those ideas will find it hard to find a home to begin with.
In the meantime perhaps Facebook can use its algorithms and tremendous resources to find a way to promote critical thinking and to incentivise nuanced and balanced discourse — adding to the global discussion rather than merely subtracting.
China’s President Xi Jinping surprised the global community recently by committing his country to net-zero emissions by 2060. Prior to this announcement, the prospect of becoming “carbon neutral” barely rated a mention in China’s national policies.
China currently accounts for about 28% of global carbon emissions – double the US contribution and three times the European Union’s. Meeting the pledge will demand a deep transition of not just China’s energy system, but its entire economy.
Importantly, China’s use of coal, oil and gas must be slashed, and its industrial production stripped of emissions. This will affect demand for Australia’s exports in coming decades.
It remains to be seen whether China’s climate promise is genuine, or simply a ploy to win international favour. But it puts pressure on many other nations – not least Australia – to follow.
It remains to be seen whether China will deliver on its climate pledge.Da qing/AP
Goodbye, fossil fuels
Coal is currently used to generate about 60% of China’s electricity. Coal must be phased out for China to meet its climate target, unless technologies such as carbon-capture and storage become commercially viable.
Natural gas is increasingly used in China for heating and transport, as an alternative to coal and petrol. To achieve carbon neutrality, China must dramatically reduce its gas use.
Electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles must also come to dominate road transport – currently they account for less than 2% of the total fleet.
China must also slash the production of carbon-intensive steel, cement and chemicals, unless they can be powered by renewable electricity or zero-emissions hydrogen. One report suggests meeting the target will mean most of China’s steel is produced using recycled steel, in a process powered by renewable electricity.
Modelling in that report suggests China’s use of iron ore – and the coking coal required to process it into steel – will decrease by 75%. The implications for Australia’s mining industry would be huge; around 80% of our iron ore is exported to China.
It is critically important for Australian industries and policymakers to assess the seriousness of China’s pledge and the likelihood it will be delivered. Investment plans for large mining projects should then be reconsidered accordingly.
Conversely, China’s path towards a carbon neutral economy may open up new export opportunities for Australia, such as “green” hydrogen.
To meet its pledge, China must decarbonise its transport system.DIEGO AZUBEL/EPA
A renewables revolution
Solar and wind currently account for 10% of China’s total power generation. For China to meet the net-zero goal, renewable energy generation would have to ramp up dramatically. This is needed for two reasons: to replace the lost coal-fired power capacity, and to provide the larger electricity needs of transport and heavy industry.
Two factors are likely to reduce energy demand in China in coming years. First, energy efficiency in the building, transport and manufacturing sectors is likely to improve. Second, the economy is moving away from energy- and pollution-intensive production, towards an economy based on services and digital technologies.
It’s in China’s interests to take greater action on climate change. Developing renewable energy helps China build new “green” export industries, secure its energy supplies and improve air and water quality.
A transition to renewable energy would improve air pollution in China.Sam McNeil/AP
The global picture
It’s worth considering what factors may have motivated China’s announcement, beyond the desire to do good for the climate.
In recent years, China has been viewed with increasing hostility on the world stage, especially by Western nations. Some commentators have suggested China’s climate pledge is a bid to improve its global image.
The pledge also gives China the high ground over a major antagonist, the US, which under President Donald Trump has walked away from its international obligations on climate action. China’s pledge follows similar ones by the European Union, New Zealand, California and others. It sets an example for other developing nations to follow, and puts pressure on Australia to do the same.
The European Union has also been urging China to take stronger climate action. The fact Xi made the net-zero pledge at a United Nations meeting suggests it was largely targeted at an international, rather than Chinese, audience.
However, the international community will judge China’s pledge on how quickly it can implement specific, measurable short- and mid-term targets for net-zero emissions, and whether it has the policies in place to ensure the goal is delivered by 2060.
Much is resting on China’s next Five Year Plan – a policy blueprint created every five years to steer the economy towards various priorities. The latest plan, covering 2021–25, is being developed. It will be examined closely for measures such as phasing out coal and more ambitious targets for renewables.
Also key is whether the recent rebound of China’s carbon emissions – following a fall from 2013 to 2016 – can be reversed.
President Xi, left, has taken the high ground over the Trump-led US with its bold climate plan.AP
Wriggle room
The 2060 commitment is bold, but China may look to leave itself wriggle room in several ways.
First, Xi declared in his speech that China will “aim to” achieve carbon neutrality, leaving open the option his nation may not meet the target.
Second, the Paris Agreement states that developed nations should provide financial resources and technological support to help developing countries reduce their emissions. China may make its delivery of the pledge conditional on this support.
Third, China may seek to game the way carbon neutrality is measured – for example, by insisting it excludes carbon emissions “embodied” in imports and exports. This move is quite likely, given exports account for a significant share of China’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
So for the time being, the world is holding its applause for China’s commitment to carbon neutrality. Like every nation, China will be judged not on its climate promises, but on its delivery.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hal Pawson, Professor of Housing Research and Policy, and Associate Director, City Futures Research Centre, UNSW
Tonight Labor will deliver its alternative budget and promise that if it was in government it would be investing A$500 million in fast-tracking repairs to social housing, and urging state governments to match it dollar for dollar.
The budget itself, delivered on Tuesday, offered nothing extra for social housing, even though when polled by The Conversation and the Economic Society of Australia more of Australia’s leading economists wanted money spent on social housing than any other stimulus measure.
They are right to place it above investment allowances, wage subsidies, and tax cuts as a sure-fire way of boosting economic activity and employment.
Unlike those other measures, it has a track record.
The Rudd Government’s social housing initiative, introduced as part of the package that staved off recession during the global financial crisis, delivered 20,000 new units on time and on budget while creating 14,000 well-paying jobs.
It was the only Commonwealth public housing or community housing initiative of any size since the Howard Government effectively ended routine public home building in 1996.
Pre-tested, pre-prepared
On a per capital basis, social housing supply has halved since then.
At the same time, private rental housing has moved upmarket, making it even harder for low income Australians to find a suitable and affordable home.
The Community Housing Industry Association put forward a $7.7 billion Social Housing Acceleration and Renovation Program (SHARP) that would have delivered an extra 30,000 homes and renovated thousands more over four years.
Why, in the face of this analysis, did Treasurer Frydenberg turn the option down?
It’s hard to say, but the omission of social housing is consistent with the budget’s lukewarm attitude towards infrastructure investment more broadly.
Adding up everything the government is planning to spend on infrastructure over the next four years, the budget comes up with a total of $6.7 billion, which is rather small beer compared with the four year spending plan before the crisis, which was $4.5 billion.
Lukewarm on infrastructure generally
It’s also small when compared to the business tax and other incentives, which amount to $26.7 billion.
Kick-starting the recovery via social housing or other infrastructure would have been out of kilter with a strategy focused on creating “private sector-led growth”.
The strategy, spelled out formally in the budget papers, is to, wherever possible, support markets rather than act directly.
It’s thinking that allows the government to distinguish itself from the Rudd response to the global financial crisis in 2008.
But – unlike direct action, such as through social housing investment – the favoured approach relies heavily on assumptions about how market players (firms and consumers) react to incentives.
Those reactions might help bring about the post-pandemic snapback the most optimistic forecasts envisage.
There’s time
If not, there’s an opportunity to try again, even reluctantly. SHARP, is ready and pre-tested.
There’ll be an opportunity in the mid-year budget update, due in December (in two months time) and next year’s budget (due in seven months time).
Regardless, resumption of a routine national social homebuilding program is seriously overdue.
Australia’s housing system has become [increasingly unbalanced] – not just in the past six months, but over the past 20 years and more (https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-lays-bare-5-big-housing-system-flaws-to-be-fixed-137162). The crisis provides an opportunity to begin to fix it.
This week, newly appointed Greens senator Lidia Thorpe entered the chamber with one fist raised. In her other hand, she carried a large message stick with 441 carefully painted marks.
The lines represented each of the First Nations people who have died under police supervision since the 1991 Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody. The first Indigenous senator from Victoria, Thorpe is a Gunnai and Gunditjmara woman with a history of fighting for justice on behalf of Aboriginal people.
Last year, Alwyn Doolan, a Gooreng Gooreng and Wakka Wakka man (and co-author of this article) brought three message sticks to deliver to the Prime Minister representing Creation, Colonisation and Healing.
He carried them to Canberra all the way from Cape York, walking the long way round via Tasmania and Melbourne in a journey of over 8,500 kilometres. His intention was to submit a tribal law notice to the Australian government, to declare First Nations sovereignty, and open a new dialogue with the First Nations of this land.
These two events continue a powerful pre-Invasion tradition, when message sticks were sent between distant communities to maintain diplomatic relations.
Traditionally, the Nation sending the message would appoint an individual to serve as a messenger to travel vast distances across land or water to meet a recipient. The sticks were small enough to carry a long way. Many of the signs on the stick had fixed meanings while others were intended to be decorative.
Colours such as red ochre or white pipe-clay also added meaning, and even the type of timber had significance. Along with the message, they might also tell a story of where the messenger had come from, depicting the journey as a map.
When the messenger made contact with the intended recipient, they would deliver the message verbally, referring to the signs on the stick to both illustrate and emphasise a memorised oral statement.
Message sticks held at the British Museum, circa 1950.NLA
Messengers were often men but in some regions women were known to take on this role. If you were a messenger you had a huge responsibility for your own people, and those from other nations were obliged to recognise you as an ambassador, to look after you and guarantee a safe passage.
Message sticks could be on any topic, but what they always had in common was the fact they demanded acknowledgement and mutual respect. They were often announcements about ceremonies, such as initiations or funerals. They could also be for establishing political partnerships, requesting emergency assistance, declaring war, organising hunting, or trading vital resources.
Messengers would set out on foot, sometimes journeying for days or weeks on end. The mission was dangerous. There are over 500 First Nations within Australia and crossing into a foreign territory without permission could be punishable by death. But envoys had diplomatic immunity and their message stick was a bit like a passport in the modern sense.
In order to show peaceful intentions, they displayed the message stick clearly from a safe distance. A common technique was to hang it from the tip of a spear or to tuck it into a headband. Body paint could also be used to signal a special status.
Some past anthropologists held that only “civilised” nations could be seen to possess writing, so downplayed the value of message sticks as communication. Others saw them as precursors to alphabetic script or letters.
Message sticks have even been sent through the mail service. During the second world war, an Indigenous soldier sent a message stick home to his family through the military post, once it had been approved by a mystified government censor.
Australia’s First Nations have always been connected through shared kinship systems, histories, Dreamings, values and symbols. This is why the signs on message sticks frequently depict common points of reference with rich cultural associations — like landscapes, totemic animals, and ceremonial grounds — that wouldn’t require explanation.
Senator Thorpe took part in a traditional smoking ceremony outside Parliament House.AAP/Lukas Coch
As Indigenous people began to encounter new phenomena like ships, livestock and homesteads these were symbolised on message sticks. Individuals had signatures to guarantee the message came from them and would be addressed to the correct person.
Shared understandings helped ensure a message could be correctly interpreted, even when a messenger was not available to explain it.
In some places, white settlers learned from First Nations peoples how to make message sticks and used them to facilitate diplomatic communications with communities.
During the period of colonial dispossession, First Nations people have introduced adaptations and innovations. They began to make use of non-native timbers and took advantage of iron tools.
Message sticks also began featuring Western symbols. Alphabet letters, playing card suits and police insignias have been used sparingly. And from the middle of the 20th century, Indigenous envoys began to bring message sticks to government leaders.
Alwyn Doolan walked the entire east coast of Australia to deliver three message sticks to Canberra.
Yolŋu leaders gave Prince Charles a message stick in 2018 during his visit to Yirrkala, asking him to intervene in Treaty negotiations.
When Alwyn Doolan brought his message sticks to Scott Morrison last year — after a gruelling journey — the Prime Minister defied precedent by declining to meet with him.
During the COVID-19 crisis phase, all eyes have been on childcare, but preschool is an equally important driver of well-being and economic security for children and parents — and of economic productivity.
Preschool is jointly funded by the federal, and state and territory governments (like schools), but government funding is topped up by parent fees. Preschool includes kindergarten, preschool and pre-primary (states and territories use different names) and is delivered by a range of providers (schools, long daycare and standalone preschools).
Here’s a rundown of the budget implications for preschool, and how states, territories and families are plugging the gaps left by federal government commitments.
A minimum commitment might seem reasonable in the context of COVID-19. But it seems less reasonable when compared with secure funding for schools, and the implications of insecure funding for preschool providers.
Beyond 2025, it recommended even longer term funding arrangements. This would increase providers’ ability to plan and retain staff, encourage innovation, and reduce risk for states and territories undertaking more ambitious reforms.
The report also warned of “serious consequences” of reducing current funding levels — for children and parents, the sector and educators, and other government programs.
How does preschool funding affect families?
More than half a million Australian children were enrolled in a preschool program in 2018 (nearly 300,000 in the year before school, and the remainder in three-year-old preschool). More than 90% of children are enrolled in the year before school.
Most Australian children attend preschool the year before school.Shutterstock
Preschool isn’t free in all jurisdictions, even after substantial subsidies from the federal and state and territory governments. For three-quarters of all Australian children, parents are charged fees of up to $4 per hour, and the rest pay between $5 and $14. Depending on the provider, preschool fees can be up to $2,500 (or more) per year.
Childcare is often cheaper than sessional preschool, but preschools tend to be higher quality. Depending on parents’ income, childcare fees after subsidies can range from $1.50 to $5 per hour. This can present parents with difficult choices between quality and cost.
The budget will subsidise preschool at existing levels for another year, but how much parents contribute will depend on where they live, as well as their income. This is because some states and territories have responded to the evidence on preschool provision, and boosted local funding either across the population, or for low income families.
What are the states and territories doing?
One year of preschool in the year before a child starts school is free in some jurisdictions, and costly in others — even for community or charity-run preschools. Some states and territories have injected extra funding to expand their preschool programs from one to two years.
Victoria, NSW and Queensland have also responded to concerns about educational gaps caused by COVID-related disruption with temporary funding boosts to provide free preschool for one or more terms this year, for children starting school in 2021.
Supporting a stable, well-funded preschool system across the country — as we do with school — is an important social and economic investment.
While moves to fund preschool at higher levels in some jurisdictions will benefit local populations, it won’t do much for equity on a national scale. Equity — as well as economic recovery and productivity — must be a central policy focus as the country recovers from the ravages of COVID-19.
The government should move to longer-term funding arrangements immediately. Beyond that, it needs a plan to make preschool access more equitable across the country; investigate a fairer, needs-based funding model; increase affordability for families and improve conditions for educators.
The federal budget injection of an extra A$1 billion of new money as a one-off allocation into the Research Support Program for 2021 is welcome news for the university research community. The stated goal is to ease some of the financial pain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and loss of international student fee revenue that has cross-subsidised research. Universities have been facing research funding shortfalls of up to A$7.6 billion over five years from 2020 until 2024.
Without new funding, universities would have to manage a potential reduction of 11% in the research workforce. That put the jobs of nearly 6,000 research students and staff researchers in jeopardy.
The extra A$1 billion funding from January 2021 provides a critical stop-gap. It will help recover some of the lost research momentum. But what will happen after 2021?
Ongoing additional government support of about A$1 billion a year will be essential to at least 2024. Without such funding, institutions won’t be able to employ the world-class researchers and research students they need to remain internationally competitive.
Only with continued funding will research institutions be able to strengthen the national higher-level skills base, create knowledge and support innovation for wealth and job creation. These are the building blocks for the economic prosperity and social well-being of all Australians.
The Research Support Program mechanism being used to allocate the A$1 billion is performance-based: 47% of the funding is determined on relative research income performance and 53% on engagement income performance.
This means the strongest-performing research universities with the largest revenue losses should get the most funding. These block grants will fund essential infrastructure, such as libraries, laboratories, consumables and computing centres, and the salaries of research staff who are not supported by competitive grants and other government research grants.
Universities can expect some spillover research support from budget measures announced for other research institutions. The new funding for specific programs at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) – A$459 million over four years – and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) – $238 million over four years – presents further opportunities for research collaboration with universities.
The restoration of research and development (R&D) tax concessions to industry worth A$1.8 billion and other measures should counter declining business R&D investment. This could boost industry research partnerships with universities.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is providing funding relief for university research in 2021, as well as other budget measures that are likely to help.Lukas Coch/AAP
Six other steps to restore research
University research activities are but one component of the greatest policy and financial crises that universities have faced in living memory. All parties will require other initiatives beyond increased government funding to overcome these challenges. Here are six initiatives Australia should pursue.
1. Develop a more coherent national research policy with priorities applicable to all research sectors. This framework would benefit universities, enabling them to invest in their research strengths and to reduce under-performing programs.
2. The Australian government should acknowledge the full economic costs of research and develop a national policy for awards, grants and contracts. Failure to properly fund the real costs has been the major reason universities have had to use discretionary student fee income to cross-subsidise research. This vexed question has remained unresolved for decades in Australia. The US and the UK governments have had policies in place for many years that provide templates for Australia to follow.
3. New and emerging student markets need to be developed and existing markets restored as fast as possible in partnership with federal and state governments. Some cross-subsidisation of research from discretionary revenue will be most important for many more years.
4. Research administration costs must be reduced. There is too much bureaucracy involved in accounting for performance, and too many grant programs have low success rates.
5. Universities need to make substantial savings in spending on general operations. They also have to identify new sources of revenue growth to sustain research.
6. Universities must increase collaboration with other research sectors, including independent research institutes, government research agencies and industries, both national and international. Deeper and broader collaboration will help sustain research programs.
A rapid research sector recovery is of paramount importance. A sustainable research sector underpins job creation, economic prosperity and social well-being.
There is no more timely example of the benefits of long-term research investment than the pioneering research Australians are doing to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. This is only possible because of our world-class capacity for medical research, which has been established over several decades.
Over Ten Percent Infected in worst-affected countries. Chart by Keith Rankin.
Analysis by Keith Rankin.
This week the World Health Organisation (WHO) suggested that ten percent of the world’s population may have been infected with Covid19. While my estimates fall well short of this number for the world as a whole, they certainly show many countries with higher infection rates to date than ten percent.
The worst-infected countries are in Europe and Latin America, with the United States and the United Kingdom being well up there too.
For most countries, the estimate is calculated by multiplying the number of deaths attributed to Covid19 by 200. It means that countries – such as Netherlands – which have understated Covid19 deaths will actually have a higher percentage of the population than shown who have been infected with the SARS-Cov2 virus. France is another that has adopted conservative statistical reporting.
For other countries, dominated by more recent coronavirus exposure, the high infection estimates arise from high positivity rates arising from relatively low numbers of tests. The only African country showing in the table – Guinea – does not have many confirmed cases, but has been getting 38% positivity from the tests that have been done. It will most likely eventually come out with a lower infection rate than South Africa (9% positivity in recent tests), which I estimate as having 5.75% of its population infected.
Other countries in the chart with very high recent positivity rates (over 25%) include Argentina, Bolivia, Honduras, Costa Rica, Montenegro, Guyana and Paraguay. New Zealand’s positivity rate over the two-week period covered is 0.06%.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kyli Hedrick, Psychologist and PhD Candidate (submitted), Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne
Newly published data have revealed the number of self-harm incidents in Australia’s immigration detention centres spiked during the first seven months of this year.
While rates of self-harm among detained asylum seekers were already known to be high – in fact, 200 times higher than in the general Australian community – this recent increase has fuelled concerns by health experts that the pandemic has made them even more vulnerable to mental distress.
Protesters rallying in support of asylum seekers detained at the Kangaroo Point Central Hotel in Brisbane.Glenn Hunt/AAP
Fewer security measures do not reduce self-harm risk
Immigration detention facilities may appear to be similar, but in reality they are quite diverse. In Australia, asylum seekers are held in four main types of “closed” detention arrangements, with varying levels of security and available support:
immigration detention centres (IDC), which were designed to detain asylum seekers and those posing a risk to the Australian community, and have high security features
immigration transit accommodation (ITA), which were designed to hold detainees being transferred between facilities, those needing medical treatment or those being deported
immigration residential housing (IRH), which can hold families and generally have less stringent security features
alternative places of detention (APOD), which include hotels that have come under scrutiny during the pandemic due to the frequently overcrowded conditions.
Our findings showed self-harm rates were exceptionally high in detention arrangements such as these. On average, self-harm rates were highest among asylum seekers in ITAs (452 episodes per 1,000 people), followed by APODs (265/1,000) and IDCs (225/1,000).
What’s notable about this is self-harm rates were not lower in facilities with fewer security features and more flexible living arrangements (such as hotels), as might be expected. Making detention facilities less prison-like, but still “closed”, is thus unlikely to reduce the risk of self-harm.
By comparison, our research shows rates of self-harm among asylum seekers living in community-based settings are much lower.
Community-based options allow asylum seekers to live in homes under supervision or at a place of their choosing, while their claims for protection are being processed.
More flexible living arrangements in hotels do not prevent self-harm incidents.Michael Dodge/AAP
Policies and conditions can increase vulnerability
In our second study, we found both the frequency and methods of self-harm varied by time of day and month, as well as where asylum seekers were being processed. We also identified numerous factors associated with these variations.
Self-harm most commonly occurred from 12:00–3:59am for community-based asylum seekers, from 4:00–7:59pm for those on Manus Island and from 8:00–11:59pm for those in onshore detention.
There are a number of possible explanations for these patterns. If we take onshore detention as one example, our research shows self-harm most commonly occurs in settings where asylum seekers are mixed and subject to overcrowding.
Frequent transfers between facilities is another trigger. Such transfers often occur in the early hours of the morning – with little notice – and result in separation from family and other support systems.
The peak in self-harm incidents from 8pm to midnight, therefore, could be associated with the state of these detention facilities at this time, fear of transfer during the night and lower levels of supervision and support.
This shows how certain policies and conditions can increase asylum seekers’ vulnerability. It also explains why the ongoing lack of a governmental response to the risk of COVID-19 in immigration detention may be associated with the recent spike in self-harm.
The Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation centre, where a man who had been detained for four years died in August.James Ross/AAP
What can we do to prevent further harm?
Rising incidents of self-harm in immigration detention constitute a public health crisis and warrant urgent government attention. Here are six ways we can prevent further harm:
We can no longer pretend we do not know about the harms of immigration detention. We must use the evidence we have to protect those held in detention from further avoidable harm.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences yesterday awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their work on CRISPR, a method of genome editing.
A genome is the full set of genetic “instructions” that determine how an organism will develop. Using CRISPR, researchers can cut up DNA in an organism’s genome and edit its sequence.
CRISPR technology is a powerhouse for basic research and is also changing the world we live in. There are thousands of research papers published every year on its various applications.
Charpentier is the director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany and Doudna is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Both played a crucial role in demonstrating how CRISPR could be used to target DNA sequences of interest.
CRISPR technology is adapted from a system that is naturally present in bacteria and other unicellular organisms known as archaea.
This natural system gives bacteria a form of acquired immunity. It protects them from foreign genetic elements (such as invading viruses) and lets them “remember” these in case they reappear.
Like most advances in modern science, the discovery of CRISPR and its emergence as a key genome editing method involved efforts by many researchers, over several decades.
In 1987, Japanese molecular biologist Yoshizumi Ishino and his colleagues were the first to notice, in E. coli bacteria, unusual clusters of repeated DNA sequences interrupted by short sequences.
Spanish molecular biologist Francisco Mojica and colleagues later showed similar structures were present in other organisms and proposed to call them CRISPR: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.
In 2005, Mojica and other groups reported the short sequences (or “spacers”) interrupting the repeats were derived from other DNA belonging to viruses.
Evolutionary biologists Kira Makarova, Eugene Koonin and colleagues eventually proposed CRISPR and the associated Cas9 genes were acting as the immune mechanism. This was experimentally confirmed in 2007 by Rodolphe Barrangou and colleagues.
A programmable system
The CRISPR-associated genes, Cas9, encode a protein that “cuts” DNA. This is the active part of the defence against viruses, as it destroys the invading DNA.
In 2012, Charpentier and Doudna showed the spacers acted as markers that guided where Cas9 would make a cut in the DNA. They also showed an artificial Cas9 system could be programmed to target any DNA sequence in a lab setting.
This was a groundbreaking discovery which opened the door for CRISPR’s wider applications in research.
In 2013, for the first time, groups led by American biochemist Feng Zhang and geneticist George Church reported genome editing in human cell cultures using CRISPR-Cas9. It has since been used in countless organisms from yeast to cows, plants and corals.
Today, CRISPR is the preferred gene-editing tool for thousands of researchers.
Chemistry Nobel Prize award recipients Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier have joined the ranks of Marie Curie, Frances Arnold, Ada E. Yonath and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin.J.L. Cereijido/EPA
A technical revolution with endless applications
Humans have altered the genomes of species for thousands of years. Initially, this was through approaches such as selective breeding.
However, genetic engineering – the direct manipulation of DNA by humans outside of breeding and mutations – has only existed since the 1970s.
CRISPR-based systems fundamentally changed this field, as they allow for genomes to be edited in living organisms cheaply, with ease and with extreme precision.
CRISPR is currently making a huge impact in health. There are clinical trials on its use for blood disorders such as sickle cell disease or beta-thalassemia, for the treatment of the most common cause of inherited childhood blindness (Leber congenital amaurosis) and for cancer immunotherapy.
CRISPR also has great potential in food production. It can be used to improve crop quality, yield, disease resistance and herbicide resistance.
Used on livestock, it can lead to better disease resistance, increased animal welfare and improved productive traits – that is, animals producing more meat, milk or high-quality wool.
With great power…
A number of challenges to the technology remain, however. Some are technical, such as the risk of off-target modifications (which happen when Cas9 cuts at unintended locations in the genome).
Other problems are societal. CRISPR was famously used in one of the most controversial experiments of recent years.
Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui unsuccessfully attempted to use the technology to modify human embryos and make them resistant to HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). This led to the birth of twins Lulu and Nana.
We need a broad and inclusive discussion on the regulation of such technologies – especially given their vast applications and potential.
Trade Minister Simon Birmingham, a leader of the Liberal moderates, will become Senate leader and finance minister following the imminent retirement of Mathias Cormann.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Australia will nominate Cormann as its candidate for secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Cormann indicated in July he planned to leave parliament late this year. He has been Finance Minister throughout the Coalition government and a central figure in the preparation of its seven budgets.
Morrison said Birmingham would be sworn in as finance minister at the end of the month when Cormann retired. He would continue as minister for trade, tourism and investment.
“I am not planning on making other ministerial changes at that time,” Morrison said.
But it is expected there will be a reshuffle in the summer. With the current COVID-19 restrictions on international travel, Birmingham will be able to juggle his trade responsibilities for a time.
Employment Minister Michaelia Cash will become deputy Senate leader, a position Birmingham has held since 2018.
Birmingham has served in the Senate since 2007 and was education minister between 2015 and 2018.
Cormann, who came to Australia from Belgium in the 1990s unable to speak English, demonstrated his multilingual skills at a Thursday news conference with Morrison, giving short speeches in French and German.
His election to the OECD job is not certain, but Australia will campaign hard for him.
Morrison said this was “the most important Australian nomination for a major international body in decades”.
“Senator Cormann has already been an influential contributor in regional and global institutions, having attended every G20 Leaders’ meeting since 2014 and numerous G20 finance ministers, IMF and World Bank meetings over the period,” Morrison said.
“Over the last seven years, Senator Cormann has worked with many OECD leaders, and dozens of treasury, finance, and trade minister counterparts from developed and developing countries.”
Cormann will step down from the ministry and the Senate on October 30, before he is formally nominated for the OECD role. Nominations close at the end of October, with interviews and consultations beginning after that and an outcome expected in the first part of next year.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate C. Prickett, Director of the Roy McKenzie Centre for the Study of Families and Children, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
Despite the 2017 Labour-led government taking power with a mandate to fight Aotearoa New Zealand’s abysmally high child poverty rate, only incremental progress has been made.
The percentage of children living in poor households dropped only slightly, from 16.5% in June 2018 to 14.9% by June 2019.
That equates to approximately one in seven children (168,500) living in poverty, according to one official measure used in New Zealand and internationally: households with incomes less than 50% of the median disposable household income before housing costs (BHC).
Before COVID-19, the government was projected to be in range of its 2021 BHC poverty target. It was also projected to meet its after-housing-costs (AHC) target (a measure of poverty based on household income with standard housing cost estimates factored in).
The government’s stated reduction targets are 5% of children in poverty based on the BHC measure, and 10% using the AHC measure, by 2028. The somewhat stagnant trend lines from 2017 to 2019, however, suggest there was still a need for the “transformational” policies promised in 2017.
Even before COVID-19, reduction in child poverty was incremental, despite the Labour-led government’s ‘transformational’ ambition.GettyImages
The impact of COVID-19
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, and the government delivered some of those transformative policies in the form of both temporary and more permanent economic responses.
Families with children relying on income assistance received an income bump through temporary increases in the winter energy payment and a longer term rise in benefit payments. For those who lost jobs, the COVID-19 relief payment was far more generous than the normal Job Seeker benefit.
These changes no doubt made a difference in the day-to-day lives of low-income families. Treasury estimated this short-term safety net, coupled with the full implementation of tax credits through the families package, meant the government was still on track to meet its child poverty targets in 2021.
Unfortunately, that stagnant pre-pandemic trend line is now predicted to move upwards post-2021. The rise consists of children already in families who rely on an income support system that keeps them below the poverty threshold, and those newly in poverty due to their parents’ job or income loss.
Indeed, our research shows families with children were more likely to experience an economic shock during lockdown.
Survey respondents rated how lockdown had affected their family relationships.Author provided
Unequal distribution of economic shock
The data are based on our survey of people’s experiences during and after lockdown (March–April 2020). It highlights the disproportionate impact the economic crisis is having on families with children generally, and on low-income working families in particular.
For families with children where at least one adult was working prior to the lockdown, 51% experienced an economic shock due to someone in the household losing their job or some income. This compares with a rate 44% for the population overall.
As well as the financial hit, parents in households that experienced an economic shock reported more negative feelings during the day, such as depression, stress, and worry. Those feelings appeared to persist beyond lockdown.
While all parents reported their sense of well-being improved moderately during the first return to alert level one (July 2020), that rebound wasn’t as high for those who had experienced an economic shock during lockdown.
There was nothing random about which families were most affected: 60% of working families living below the median household income (approximately NZ$50,000 per annum) experienced an economic shock compared with 45% of families in higher income brackets ($100,000 or more).
All working parents who reported an economic shock during lockdown, regardless of household income, reported declines in how they rated their relationship with their family. For parents from lower income households, however, this drop in family well-being was deeper than for higher income families.
In short, not only were parents in low-income households more likely to experience an economic shock, that shock had a bigger impact on their family well-being.
Temporary policies should become permanent
When we look at the child poverty projections from Treasury, it’s important to place them in the context of these findings.
Families who were working and just getting by are more likely to be suffering now and potentially into the future. That applies even more to those who were already struggling before the pandemic and who may find it harder to be part of the economic recovery.
Even the more optimistic child poverty projection, which shows the percentage of children in AHC poverty returning to early 2020 levels by 2024, may be misleading.
Housing prices (and presumably rents) have continued to rise and are projected to outpace wage growth. Indeed, the statistical assumption built into the AHC poverty measure is that families spend approximately 25% of their disposable income on rent — an unrealistically small proportion of financial resources for low income families.
If there is a silver lining, it is that the government’s short-term policy responses to the pandemic, such as the COVID-19 relief payment and wage subsidy programme, gave us a glimpse of what transformative policies could look like: a responsive safety net benefit maintaining families’ financial well-being at a liveable rate.
Without more permanent change, however, those rising child poverty projections will become our sad reality.
Around 1.7 million Australians have diabetes. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are three times more likely to develop diabetes than non-Indigenous Australians.
Diabetes occurs when glucose (sugar) in your blood is not converted into energy, so its level becomes too high. Blood glucose is our main source of energy and mostly comes from the food we eat.
Diabetes can be managed, for example through lifestyle modifications, medication, or insulin. Diabetes management will be a different experience for each person, and depend on the type of diabetes they have.
But the central aim is keeping blood sugar levels within a healthy range. When they’re not, people with diabetes are at higher risk of complications, which can affect all parts of the body.
The most common complication of diabetes — globally and for Australians — is eye disease.
Diabetes-related eye disease affects more than one in three people with diabetes. When left undiagnosed and untreated, it can cause vision loss and blindness.
What causes it?
Diabetes-related eye disease can occur when there is damage to the blood vessels on the retina, a thin layer at the back of the eye. This damage limits oxygen and other nutrients reaching the eye.
Diabetes-related eye disease can occur when the blood vessels at the back of the eye become damaged.Shutterstock
The chance of developing diabetes-related eye disease is higher for some people, including those who have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or who have had diabetes for many years.
Worryingly, the study we mentioned above found people who had been living with diabetes for ten or more years were even less likely to get regular eye checks. Almost 80% of people in this group didn’t have the recommended annual eye check.
Prevention and treatment
When diabetes-related eye disease becomes more advanced, it can cause blurred or distorted vision and blindness. But we can prevent most diabetes-related vision loss before it reaches this stage.
Special cameras allow us to look at the retina and see if irregular spots or blood vessels are developing.
At this early stage the disease has no impact on a person’s vision. Once we detect it, we can provide timely treatment with laser therapy or injections.
But without regular eye checks, we might not know until it’s too late.
Strong social impact work from the government, not-for-profits and local health services is already preventing diabetes-related eye disease from developing into vision loss and blindness in many people.
2020 Australian of the Year, ophthalmologist James Muecke, cofounded the not-for-profit Sight For All and has brought attention to the issue of preventable vision loss for people with diabetes.
When one Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health-care service introduced cameras in 2008, they screened 93% of regular clients with diabetes for eye disease — a significant improvement on 16% the previous year. But we found these rates subsequently declined and by 2016, only 22% had an eye check.
We can see just having the technology in primary care is not enough. Ongoing quality improvement is integral to a successful service in the long term.
About 1.7 million Australians have diabetes.Shutterstock
What else can we do?
In the case of diabetes-related eye disease, the science supporting early detection is advancing every day. But it’s not reaching those who need it the most, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Having the technology, policy or medicine alone is not sufficient. We need to unlock the potential of communities, empowering everyone to have joint responsibility.
making screening and treatment easy to access for people with diabetes. This means addressing physical barriers, such as distance and cost, but also cultural, emotional and social barriers that might stop people from getting their eyes checked
thinking about the screening experience, including:
before: how will we motivate people to get their eyes checked, especially if they’re not experiencing any problems with their vision?
during: how can eye checks be streamlined with regular diabetes care, and how can we make the process as seamless as possible for patients?
after: how do we ensure they come back every year?
considering the experience of the diverse teams providing this care, including keeping staff well equipped, trained and motivated
investing in researching, developing and testing the non-medical components of eye care services. For example, the reminder system, the workflow of each eye check, and how the results are delivered to patients.
We must pursue ongoing improvement of eye care that involves and empowers people with diabetes, their health teams and communities to develop services, systems, new technology and policies that meet their needs.
There is potential for us to prevent blindness in more people with diabetes.
With the budget’s expected eye-watering debt and deficit numbers, the question remains whether the huge spending will be enough to fight the coronavirus slump.
Minister for Finance Mathias Cormann and Shadow Minister Katy Gallagher joined the podcast to discuss the budget’s entrails.
The government has faced criticism for benchmarking the much vaunted tax cuts against 2017-18, making them appear larger. Cormann said 2017-18 is the appropriate benchmark, and wouldn’t be drawn on giving further detail.
“The costing has been done on the basis that we’ve published it.”
Gallagher declared the budget expressed Scott Morrison’s choice to leave some people without support.
In particular, the decision to leave those on JobSeeker hanging was described by Gallagher as “frankly, just plain mean.”
Anthony Albanese will highlight the potential of spending on social housing as a job creator in his Thursday night budget reply.
He says if Labor were in government now it would be investing $500 million to fast-track repairs to social housing, and urging state governments to match the funding.
While Albanese is not putting this as a commitment for the election, he promises he will later announce a comprehensive plan a Labor government would undertake for building and repairing social housing.
Albanese and housing spokesman Jason Clare said in a statement this immediate spending would be a win-win approach, fixing homes and creating work.
Some 25% of Australia’s social housing – 100,000 homes – needed urgent maintenance, they said.
“Repairs could start almost immediately, providing work for local plumbers, chippies, sparkies, plasterers and painters as well as companies that manufacture building supplies and materials. This would also provide opportunities for apprentices.”
Albanese frequently reprises his own “back story” of being brought up in public housing as he emphasises its importance. “As someone who grew up in public housing, I know the difference it can make when you’ve got a roof over your head and a comfortable home,” he said.
Economists in a recent survey pointed to social housing as a high priority for what should be in the budget, but it did not feature.
Albanese’s budget reply, expected to contain a number of initiatives, is being keenly watched by colleagues who are frustrated at Labor’s difficulty in cutting through during COVID.
Even the budget, with its big spending, has not left the opposition a great deal of scope for major attacks.
Labor has written to the Tax Commissioner to formally indicate its support for the budget’s bringing forward and backdating to July 1 of tax cuts that were due to start in 2022.
The acceleration requires legislation but Labor’s guarantee of its passage clears the way for the Tax Office to prepare new Pay As You Go tables.
This means the tax cut will flow to workers as soon as later this month. But the backdated part will not be paid to them until the end of the financial year.
It has been pointed out the budget made the tax cuts people will get appear larger than they actually are by benchmarking them against 2017-18, so including some tax relief that has already been received.
The Australia Institute, a progressive think tank, has taken a “wraparound” advertisement in the right-leaning Australian newspaper on Thursday declaring “TAX IS GOOD”. The wraparound will be in the edition that appears in Canberra and parts of NSW.
