Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Euan Ritchie, Associate Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

Humans have long been inspired and transfixed by the Moon, and as we’re discovering, moonlight can also change the behaviour of Australian wildlife.

A collection of recently published research has illuminated how certain behaviours of animals – including potoroos, wallabies and quolls – change with variation in ambient light, phases of the Moon and cloud cover.

Read more: How big is the Moon? Let me compare …

One study found small mammals were more active on cloudy nights. Another found variation in moonlight led to differing amounts of species captured in non-lethal traps. And a study on willie wagtails found males just love singing on a full moon.

These findings are interesting from a natural history perspective. But they’ll also help ecologists and conservation scientists better locate and study nocturnal animals, and learn how artificial light pollution is likely changing where animals can live and how they behave.

Moonlit predator-prey games of hide and seek

Most of Australia’s mammals are nocturnal, and some smaller species are thought to use the cover of darkness to avoid the attention of hungry predators. However, there’s much we don’t know about such relationships, especially because it can be difficult to study these interactions in the wild.

In the relatively diverse mammal community at Mt Rothwell, Victoria, we examined how variation in ambient light affected species’ activity, and how this might influence species interactions. Mt Rothwell is a fenced conservation reserve free of feral cats and foxes, and with minimal light pollution.

Over two years, we surveyed the responses of predator and prey species to different light levels from full, half and new moon phases.

Read more: One little bandicoot can dig up an elephant’s worth of soil a year – and our ecosystem loves it

Potential prey species in our study included eastern barred and southern brown bandicoots, long-nosed potoroos, brushtailed rock-wallabies, and brushtail and common ringtail possums. Eastern and spotted-tailed quolls are their potential predators.

Just as we predicted, we found that while there does appear to be relationships between cloud cover, Moon phase and mammal activity, these interactions depend on the sizes and types of mammals involved.

Both predators and prey generally increased their activity in darker conditions. Smaller, prey species increased their activity when cloud cover was higher, and predators increased their activity during the half and new moon phases.

This suggests their deadly game of hide and seek might intensify on darker nights. And prey might have to trade off foraging time to reduce their chances of becoming the evening meal.

What happens in the wild?

It’s important to acknowledge that studies in sanctuaries such as Mt Rothwell might not always reflect well what goes on in the wild, including in areas where introduced predators, such as feral cats and red foxes, are found.

Another recent study, this time of small mammals in the wilds of Victoria’s Mallee region, sheds further light on the situation. The authors tested if variation in weather and Moon phase affected the numbers of five small mammal species – Bolam’s mouse, common dunnart, house mouse, southern ningaui, and western pygmy possum – captured in pitfall traps.

Pitfall traps are long fences small animals can’t climb over or through, so follow along the side until they fall into a bucket dug in the ground. Ecologists typically use these traps to capture and measure animals and then return them to the wild, unharmed.

Read more: Eastern quolls edge closer to extinction – but it’s not too late to save them

At more than 260 sites and over more than 50,000 trap nights, they found wind speed, temperature and moonlight influenced which species were caught and in what numbers.

For example, captures of a small native rodent, Bolam’s mouse, and carnivorous marsupial, southern ningaui, decreased with more moonlight, whereas captures of pygmy possums were higher with more moonlight.

Moonlight songbird serenades

Research from last month has shown even species normally active by day may change their behaviour and activity by night.

It’s not uncommon to hear bird song by night, including the quintessentially Aussie warbling of magpies. Using bioacoustic recorders and song detection software, these researchers show the willie wagtail – another of Australia’s most recogisable and loved birds – is also a nighttime singer, particularly during the breeding season.

While both male and female wagtails sing by day, it is the males that are most vocal by night. And it seems the males aren’t afraid of a little stage-lighting either, singing more with increasing moonlight, with performances peaking during full moons.

This work provides insight into the importance and potential role of nocturnal song for birds, such as mate attraction or territory defence, and helps us to better understand these behaviours more generally.

Moonlight affects wildlife conservation

These studies, and others, can help inform wildlife conservation, as practically speaking, ecological surveys must consider the relative brightness of nights during which work occurred.

Depending on when and where we venture out to collect information about species, and what methods we use (camera traps, spotlighting, and non-lethal trapping) we might have higher or lower chances of detecting certain species. And this might affect our insights into species and ecosystems, and how we manage them.

As dark skies become rarer in many places around the world, it also begs a big question. To what extent is all the artificial light pollution in our cities and peri-urban areas affecting wildlife and ecosystems?

Read more: Turn off the porch light: 6 easy ways to stop light pollution from harming our wildlife

Pipistrelle bats, for example, will be roughly half as active around well-lit bridges than unlit bridges. They’ll also keep further away from well-lit bridges, and fly faster when near them.

This means artificial light might reduce the amount and connectivity of habitat available to some bat species in urban areas. This, in turn could affect their populations.

Research is underway around the world, examining the conservation significance of such issues in more detail, but it’s another timely reminder of the profound ways in which we influence the environments we share with other species.

We would like to acknowledge Yvette Pauligk, who contributed to our published work at Mt Rothwell, and that the traditional custodians of this land are the Wathaurong people of the Kulin nation.

– ref. Predators, prey and moonlight singing: how phases of the Moon affect native wildlife – https://theconversation.com/predators-prey-and-moonlight-singing-how-phases-of-the-moon-affect-native-wildlife-140556

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Lucas, Senior Lecturer, Science and Technology Studies, University of Wollongong

Australian universities are in dire straits. The sudden loss of international student fees due to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent court rulings of wage theft by some of our top universities have exposed the depth of these problems.

The workforce is highly casualised. There is a sharp divide between senior management and academic and professional staff. On top of decades of declining federal funding, the sector faces up to 30,000 job losses.

Yet more than 40% of Australia’s vice-chancellors earn more than a million dollars a year. How did we get here?

Read more: Vice-chancellors’ salaries are just a symptom of what’s wrong with universities

University councils have been corporatised

Ongoing research by the Better University Governance Research Action Group at the University of Wollongong indicates that the kinds of expertise universities draw upon to govern themselves have become increasingly narrow and unaccountable.

University governing bodies in Australia are known as university councils. Over the past 15 years or so, federal and state legislation has reconstituted these councils to favour members with no tertiary experience.

Reinforcing this trend, the federal government has just appointed a CEO with no experience in tertiary education to head the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA).

It is commonly assumed vice-chancellors run Australia’s 43 universities. However, decision-making power ultimately rests with university councils. These councils appoint vice-chancellors, decide their salaries and adjudicate on their performance.

Read more: ‘Universities are not corporations’: 600 Australian academics call for change to uni governance structures

Governments engineered the change

Significant changes to university legislation over the past few decades have concentrated power in the hands of vice-chancellors. They have thereby gained much greater control over the operations and composition of university councils.

This shift in focus can be traced back to the 1989 “Dawkins reforms”. These changes institutionalised managerialism while privileging a narrow range of expertise for university management and executives.

The then federal education minister, John Dawkins, thought if the majority of all university councils were external appointments, that would best serve the interests of universities. Internal members supposedly had too much to say in the running of their universities. However, it was left to state and territory governments to determine the makeup of the councils.

Read more: Book review: The Dawkins Revolution, 25 Years On

The “Nelson reforms” of 2004 changed all that. As federal education minister, Brendan Nelson sought to refashion university councils in the image of corporate boards. Since then, the kind of experience required of council members has been greatly altered. Council members without tertiary experience now vastly outnumber those with it, and vice-chancellors have been empowered to determine many of the appointments.

While state and territory legislation differs in detail, since the mid-2000s the general trend has been consistent throughout the country.

In Victoria, university councils typically consist of 13 to 15 members. The vast majority have financial or management experience. Most include only two members elected by staff and students.

In New South Wales, university councils typically consist of 15 to 18 members. The number of staff and student representatives ranges from three to six. Here again, financial and management experience is given majority representation.

UOW: a case study

A prime example of the effect of these legislative changes can be seen in the roles and functions of the University of Wollongong (UoW) Council as stated in the UOW Act. It demonstrates that the council is mainly concerned with finance (approving and overseeing investments, borrowings and loans). It’s less focused on core activities such as the conferring of degrees and courses.

The single biggest group of UOW Council members have no professional tertiary experience. Two-thirds have a background and/or currently work in corporate finance.

Along with the vice-chancellor, whom they appoint like a CEO, this is what the majority of governing authorities at Australian universities now look like. Elected staff and students account for less than one-third of council members (normally one academic staff, one professional staff and two student representatives).

Soon after coming to power in 2011, the NSW Coalition government significantly changed the acts of all universities in the state. These changes have resulted in the problems we are identifying here.

Transparency and accountability lost

The 2012 amendments to the UOW Act, for instance, granted the UOW Council unprecedented autonomy to make financial, staffing and coursework decisions. The legislation provides for little or no external accountability or transparency to staff, students or the wider community.

For example, the Performance and Remuneration Committee (which determines the VC’s salary and performance) consists only of the chancellor, the deputy chancellor and two of the council’s external members. The council is responsible for managing its own performance, including any potential conflicts of interest for external members.

Council minutes are not publicly available. This prevents external scrutiny of council deliberations.

Staff must apply for permission to observe meetings. If approved, they are forbidden from later discussing any confidential matters raised (primarily finance-related) with anyone outside council.

As a result, it is not possible for the university community (or taxpayers) to determine the rationale for decisions involving many millions of dollars. University councils can insulate themselves from the concerns of academic and professional staff. Financial interests are then privileged over and above the university’s core responsibilities and functions of teaching, research and the maintenance of an informed and engaged citizenry.

The legislation governing university councils validates the appointment of members who lack knowledge of the tertiary sector and have little to say about academic activities. Councils whose members have little or no experience in the core functions of universities as public service organisations determine university governance.

Is it surprising, then, that building programs, casualisation and executive salaries are given higher priority than the concerns of staff and the tens of thousands of students for whom they are responsible?

We must therefore ask: is the “no tertiary experience required” approach the best we can do for Australia’s universities?

Read more: More than 70% of academics at some universities are casuals. They’re losing work and are cut out of JobKeeper

– ref. Governing universities: tertiary experience no longer required – https://theconversation.com/governing-universities-tertiary-experience-no-longer-required-145439

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

It became official on Wednesday. The Australian economy is in recession for the first time in nearly three decades.

And the drop in economic activity is unprecedented. GDP fell 7% in the June quarter. The previous biggest post-War fall in Australia was 2% in June 1974.

But Treasurer Josh Frydenberg noted that in March he was told the June quarter contraction might be 20%. In Britain it was.

Bookkeeping aside, the question that matters is how to fight this recession.

Answering it requires an understanding that it is a different type of recession to those we’ve seen before.

As I pointed out earlier this year the recessions some of us grew up with in the early 1980s and 1990s were “business cycle” recessions.

They happened because the economy overtook its inbuilt speed limit and pushed up inflation. To curb it, central banks pushed up interest rates, pushed them up too far and choked off investment and spending, sending economic activity backwards.

A recession like no other

In 2020 we face a different sort of shock.

COVID-19 has hammered economic activity, even more so in countries such as the United States where it has run out of control.

Many of the opportunities we used to have to spend money (such as airlines, theatre tickets and cafe meals) simply haven’t been there.

They’ll come back when things return to closer to normal, perhaps though the wide deployment of a vaccine.

But we might not spend as we used to.

Read more: Six graphs that explain Australia’s recession

Some people, out of work or on shorter hours won’t have the capacity to spend. Others will want to rebuild their savings.

And others who have been saving big might decide to keep doing it.

Household saving ratio

Australia’s household saving ratio surged to 19.7% in the June quarter.

It’s a peak not reached since 1974 at a time when there was much less of an age pension and superannuation, no Medicare and surging unemployment. In other words, its at a height not reached since people really needed to save.

The Bureau of Statistics says that if household income from all sources including early access to super was counted, the ratio is even higher. Its estimate of what it calls the “household experience savings ratio” is 24.8%.

That means households saved an extraordinary one in every four dollars that came through their doors in the June quarter, up from mere percentage points a few quarters earlier.

Much of it would have been what economists call precautionary saving, understandable given how much of the future is uncertain.

There’s such a thing as too much saving

But what if this extraordinarily high saving rate lasts beyond the point it is understandable, as it did in Japan.

As with Japan in the 1990s when saving soared, real interest rates are negative. We are so keen to save we don’t need a financial return.

There were signs of it worldwide, well before the pandemic. President’s Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Larry Summers referred to it as secular stagnation, a term first coined in the 1930s.

Read more: Have we just stumbled on the biggest productivity increase of the century?

Saving more than we are prepared to invest shrinks economic activity. It creates unemployment which itself creates uncertainly, prodding people to save still more than they invest.

It’s one of the reasons worldwide economic growth is low, interest rates are low, and inflation is low.

During the pandemic the government is spending more than A$100 billion on measures such as JobKeeper and JobSeeker.

If we won’t spend, out government will have to

Post pandemic it might have to keep spending big on physical and social infrastructure – things such as major projects and better aged care and health care.

If we won’t spend big again, it’ll have to. It’ll need to get the economy’s long term growth rate back up to 2%, or even the near 3% the Treasury thinks it is capable of.

It’ll require a lot.

Read more: When it comes to economic reform, the old days really were better. We checked

Australia used to have one of the lowest company tax rates in the developed world, now we have one of the highest. We tax labour income too much and consumption too little. And we have a hopelessly out of date and absurdly complex industrial relations system.

Each of those things are a handbrake on economic growth.

This is an unusual recession and an unusually deep one.

Digging our way out will require us to at first contain and defeat the virus, and then spend like Keynes and cut taxes like Friedman.

– ref. Vital Signs: How do you fight a recession without precedent? – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-how-do-you-fight-a-recession-without-precedent-145484

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University

The plight of art schools in Australia in recent decades is hardly breaking news. Shrinking budgets, staff cuts, amalgamations and reduced course offerings have plagued most of them.

Some workshop disciplines including printmaking, studio glass, ceramics and precious metalwork are no longer viable in certain art schools. Others are staffed through makeshift arrangements, with casuals and sessional staff carrying the brunt of teaching and administration.

Four years ago, Tamara Winikoff, then the Executive Director of the National Association for the Visual Arts, sounded the alarm, speaking to a number of key players in Australian art schools and observing some alarming trends.

These included job insecurity with the loss of the tenure system, fewer contract staff, the increasingly crowded marketplace for lucrative international students, and the authority of the word over the image – in other words, the pressure on artists working in academia to publish to gain university brownie points.

While Australia has a number of surviving independent art schools, most notably Sydney’s National Art School, 39 art schools now operate within universities. The largest of these is RMIT with 6537 undergraduate and postgraduate students. The smallest is Charles Darwin University with 161 students.

Read more: Why arts schools matter, not just for art’s sake but for urban renewal in Sydney and other cities

Traditionally, art schools focused on the disciplines of painting, sculpture and the graphic arts. Later, mediums associated with the crafts, such as ceramics, wood, glass, textiles, leather and precious metals, (sometimes called jewellery), were added into the mix.

More recently, photography, film and digital technologies as well as art theory were introduced. Design courses, which in the past had their own niche in the commercial sector, have also been incorporated into art schools.

The worrying trends noted by Winikoff four years ago have now accelerated with university funding cuts, the federal government’s attacks on arts and the humanities with the proposed student fee hikes and a general reassessment of the positioning of art schools within tertiary institutions. In some instances, the very existence of art schools as an independent entity is under threat.

Read more: Job-ready graduates changes loom as last straw for emerging researchers

A venerable ancestry

Art schools in Australia have a venerable ancestry and appeared relatively early in colonial life. The National Gallery Art School in Melbourne, for example, was founded in 1867 with the idea that it was a place where one could establish artistic standards and acquire the necessary skills through which to attain them.

The National Gallery Schools attracted some of Australia’s most distinguished artists as students, including Rose MacPherson (Margaret Preston), George Bell, Hugh Ramsey, Max Meldrum and Joy Hester, who were taught by the likes of Frederick McCubbin and Bernard Hall. The Gallery School merged with the Victorian College of the Arts in 1972, and in 2006 it became an affiliated college of the University of Melbourne.

Many art schools in 19th century Australia were founded around individual artists who gave art classes and these schools vanished as quickly as they were established. The Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney is an exception: founded in 1890, it continues to the present day. The Victorian Artists’ Society in Melbourne, founded in 1870, also continues to operate. Today, it still offers art tuition, although arguably it is not primarily an art school.

In the 20th century, private art schools, especially those established by Max Meldrum, George Bell and Desiderius Orban, had a greater longevity and impact than most of the other private ventures. There were a few well-established art schools in the capital cities of most Australian states and territories by the 1960s. However, as a rule, by this time, art education had become principally a state-funded activity.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the art school scene started to change quite markedly in Australia. A number of new institutions were established, many within Colleges of Advanced Education or TAFE colleges. Some offered radical and progressive alternatives to those available in traditional existing art schools.

Sydney College of the Arts, for example, was conceived in 1974 as an independent College of Advanced Education. In contrast to other Sydney art schools, its faculty, which included Tracey Moffatt, Mike Parr and Imants Tillers, adopted a more postmodernist perspective.

Then Education Minister John Dawkins’s controversial reforms to tertiary education, which began in 1988, had a huge impact on art schools in Australia in the drive to establish a unified national system. The distinction between Colleges of Advanced Education and universities was abolished. Colleges were either transformed into universities or merged with them. Most art schools lacked the scale to stand alone and were forced into unions with universities, where they lost any semblance of autonomy.

A rare exception was the National Art School in Sydney. Traditionally known as East Sydney Tech, the school traces its origins to the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts in 1843. Over many years, it has staved off attempts to be taken over or amalgamated. It remains an independent art school with ongoing funding guaranteed by the New South Wales government as a State Significant Organisation.

The West Australian artist and teacher, Paul Uhlmann, reflecting on the transition from an independent art school system to one subsumed within universities, has noted many art schools “struggle to be understood, struggle for identity and autonomy” within the framework and hierarchy of a university. “The particular languages of making through painting or graphic means are not readily understood as being valid modes of knowledge production in their own right.”

In 2018, Su Baker, a long-term chair of the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools, observed that

in the last decade we have seen art schools morph into the institutional shape of their host university and in some cases the radical destruction of many of these once active institutions.

The loss of identity within the broader university context has affected art schools on many levels. Similar strictures now apply to an art school as to the broader university community, with the requirement for many staff to have PhD qualifications, teach similar class sizes and have similar accountability and evaluation procedures for staff and students.

Operating within a university, rather than a College of Advanced Education or a TAFE, has enabled art school staff to be promoted to more senior academic ranks – with the accompanying shift in administrative responsibilities. But universities, facing economic realities, have had to make tough decisions about cutting resources.

Often, it seemed the art school suffered first when these decisions were made. For instance, workshops that traditionally required four or five members of staff were forced to make do with one or two.

One of the most public controversies was Sydney University’s 2016 decision to scrap jewellery, ceramics and glassmaking programs at the Sydney College of the Arts. Arguing they were “resource intensive mediums”, the university cut 25 of the 43 full-time equivalent positions at the school.

Ten years ago, printmaking workshops in many art schools had several teachers and technical assistants. Today, many are lucky to have more than one. Printmaking courses in etching, lithography and relief printmaking are no longer regularly available at most Australian art schools, although computer courses in design, digital printmaking and 3D printmaking are taught in some art schools.

At the Australian Print Triennial held in Mildura late in 2018, the sense of crisis in the institutional teaching of printmaking was palpable even though few were prepared to put down their observations in writing for fear of institutional retributions.

On the general sense of crisis that the arts are presently experiencing in Australia, Professor Deborah Stevenson, from Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society recently noted:

Significant cuts to arts funding; the closure of art schools; the continuing marginalisation of women in the arts; underfunding of multicultural arts; and new challenges facing Indigenous arts practice – all these issues need to be faced.

An existential threat

When Education Minister Dan Tehan announced his Job-ready Graduates Package in June 2020, proposing a massive hike in student fees for humanities and arts students, it was a major blow for the universities in general and for art schools in particular.

Most Australian universities were already in a financially weakened state following the impact of COVID-19 on their revenue streams. The Job-ready package, yet to pass parliament, will force many universities to make difficult decisions in the process of balancing the books.

Art schools, through the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools, quickly pointed out “the high value of humanities and arts subjects to our sector and to society”. It said:

Those proposed changes may have devastating consequences yet to be determined not only for the individual, but for the nation.

The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, representing art historians, art theorists and art teachers working in Australasian universities and art schools, is now actively lobbying the crossbench senators to oppose the Job-ready legislation.

Read more: An open letter to Australia’s Education Minister Dan Tehan — signed by 73 senior professors

One suspects that within some university budgets, the viability of their art schools will come into question. Are art schools viewed as an integral part of the fabric of the university or as a desirable luxury that cannot be seen as being on the same level of importance as schools of law or political science or business management? Sometimes, in university priorities, it is a question of the last in being the first one out.

There is also disquiet within some of the art schools themselves. Have art schools become too academic, too theory-based and insufficiently hands-on and technique orientated?

Do graduates from arts schools emerge with an adequate skills toolkit as well as a broader appreciation of the art making process – a creative mindset? Is there an argument for smaller workshop-based units rather than an academy-like structure of an art school? Flexible units may be more responsive to the changing nature of the arts themselves.

While the structure, teaching strategies and broader philosophies of art schools are a matter of future discussion, their current plight is an urgent matter for the present.

Art schools in Australia are facing an existential threat. Decades of inadequate funding have left many of them in a perilous state. And the present political and intellectual hostility to the creative arts from some federal and state governments is threatening their very existence. Some art schools have thrived within their tertiary host institutions, but many have not.

Chronic under-funding plus demands from competing masters in some instances has not created a fertile atmosphere to foster new talents. Although many art schools advertise their worth through lengthy lists of illustrious alumni, frequently there is much accumulated dust on these lists.

Are the schools still in a position to offer similar excellence in their education offerings as when their famous alumni were students?

If art schools are becoming a threatened species, then it becomes a collective responsibility for all of us to fight for their preservation and restoration. Art is not a luxury, but a necessity for a country like Australia.

– ref. Friday essay: amid a war on culture, are Australia’s art schools an endangered species? – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-amid-a-war-on-culture-are-australias-art-schools-an-endangered-species-144928

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

That old adage “never get between a premier and a bucket of money” has become “never get between a premier and a COVID election”.

Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, two months from polling day, has been acting with the sort of single-minded political determination and ruthlessness that Scott Morrison might identify with in more normal circumstances.

As the national accounts this week confirmed Australia is in the deepest recession since the 1930s Great Depression, the prime minister, desperate to speed the economy’s reopening, struggled to bring maximum pressure on premiers on matters over which he has no formal power.

At the start of the week, the federal government had two immediate aims for the following days: to force Victoria to provide a roadmap out of its lockdown, and to have the states at Friday’s national cabinet agree to a COVID “hotspot” definition to pave the way for borders to re-open. (At present Queensland defines all NSW and the ACT as hotspots.)

In the wake of a work-over from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews announced he’d outline a map this Sunday. How encouraging it is remains to be seen.

While several premiers have been recalcitrant about their borders, Palaszczuk has been in the Morrison government’s particular sights – as well as those of NSW’s Gladys Berejiklian.

Medical and other hardship cases, exacerbated by confusion and delays, have brought sharp attacks on the Queensland government, including from the PM. Queensland reacted by saying it would set up a unit in its health department to smooth the processes.

But Palaszczuk will campaign on keeping Queenslanders safe and in general her border toughness has served her well politically, according to polling on the issue. Her defence of it this week was defiant.

Paradoxically, Morrison finds Andrews personally easier than Palaszczuk to deal with. That’s despite the fact the Victorian government’s bungling on quarantine and inadequacies in contact tracing have caused much more damage nationally than has Queensland’s border policy. The relationship seems to endure the regular touch-ups the federal government gives Victoria. Berejiklian has also found Palaszczuk difficult.

Maybe this is a personalty thing, but it’s also likely driven by the tensions around Queensland’s imminent election. Palaszczuk is totally focused on survival.

As Morrison prepared to take the hotspot proposal to the national cabinet, the federal government wound back its ambition. The hotspot discussion was just the beginning of a process, was the official word. Morrison called Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan on Thursday morning and indicated the federal government was not seeking to take down the WA border – the feds are now saying WA is different in that it has no border towns.

By Thursday, Queensland and Western Australia had already pre-empted the meeting.

McGowan, with an election in March, declared, “We’re not going agree to bring down the border”, saying the hotspot approach was not as effective. Queensland suggested it would want to see 28 days of no community transmission before it rethought its position with NSW.

It was of no political use but the government did receive support on the issue from an unexpected source. Paul Keating, asked about borders in an interview on the ABC, said: “I basically don’t agree with border closures anywhere. It is a national economy and the economy’s going to be stronger if people can move. Unless you had big emergencies – and we had an emergency on the NSW-Victorian border which is now abated broadly I think – the case for keeping border closures … is a very poor case.”

Palaszczuk has used her border policy in a campaign to secure the AFL grand final for Brisbane, an effort that paid off this week.

The final will be at Brisbane’s Gabba ground before a crowd of 30,000 – a week before polling day.

It is not just those in Melbourne who are upset. Palaszczuk’s critics, including the federal Nationals, piled on to accuse her of according the footballers and their executives privileges in their “hub” while ordinary people suffered.

Regardless, Palaszczuk will do everything to protect this AFL triumph. Her worst nightmare would be having to cancel the crowd because of a serious COVID outbreak.

Meanwhile the federal MPs from Queensland who attended the just-ended fortnight parliamentary sitting are headed into 14 days home quarantine (at least they escape being confined in hotels).

The sitting (the first with a “virtual” component) concluded with a distinctly fractious final couple of days.

After the government gagged debate on its tertiary fees legislation in the House of Representatives, Labor engaged in retributive disruption on a range off issues. The government had wanted to ram the education legislation through this week but the Senate has forced a short inquiry, reporting later in the month.

Morrison will be glad to see the back of the parliament, which doesn’t meet again until the October 6 budget. The government secured the extension of its JobKeeper program for six months until the end of March, but the parliamentary setting gave Labor a platform to prosecute its argument that the rate should not be phased back.

Labor also used the sitting for a sustained attack over aged care, which culminated in the Senate censuring the hapless minister, Richard Colbeck. Morrison dismissed the motion by pointing out this had happened quite often to ministers over the years.

As the government hunkers down to drafting its budget, it’s hard to recall a more difficult one to frame, even in the global financial crisis.

The national accounts told us growth was a negative 7% in the June quarter (6.3% annually) but that’s a snapshot of the past. The present and the future involve real time measurements and judgements that have to be made on inadequate information. The Victorian situation is a wild card.

The scale-down of JobKeeper after September will see some struggling businesses decide their future, but the government won’t have a full picture when it signs off on the budget.

The most elusive challenge is how to generate confidence.

The national accounts showed household income actually rose in the quarter, thanks to the huge amount of government cushioning, but consumption plunged.

This is hardly surprising. Apart from shutdowns and travel restrictions reducing the opportunity to spend, when huge numbers of workers are unemployed or at risk of losing their jobs, many retirees are finding their income squeezed, and the future is unclear, people will be conservative with their money. Savings rose in the quarter.

The budget is expected to bring forward already legislated tax cuts as one incentive to get spending going – although quite a lot of this money could be saved.

Anxious to fan the weak flames of hope, Morrison this week talked repeatedly about the country reaching some sort of COVID-safe normality by Christmas. Ahead of Friday’s meeting, his message to fellow leaders was, “We need to come together, we need to ensure that we are clear with Australians, that we will seek to make Australia whole again by Christmas.”

We’ll see whether that’s optimistic. But Palaszczuk, if she is returned at the election, may become more amenable after October to southerners travelling to Queensland for the festive season. At least, that’s the theory.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Premiers facing elections play hard ball with hard borders – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-premiers-facing-elections-play-hard-ball-with-hard-borders-145563

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maria O’Sullivan, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, and Deputy Director, Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, Monash University

The Victorian government is taking a hard line against protests as it tries to get COVID-19 under control. As Premier Daniel Andrews said on Thursday,

it’s not the time to protest […] regardless of what you’re protesting about.

In this climate, several people have recently been charged with incitement in relation to “anti-lockdown” protests in the state.

So, what is incitement? And what makes it so complicated during a pandemic?

What is incitement?

The offence of “incitement” criminalises behaviour that encourages others to commit a crime before the crime takes place.

Interestingly, the incitement need not be acted on for an offence to be committed. So it is enough, in the context of say, murder, that the “inciter” encourages another person to commit murder, even if that crime does not actually take place.

Read more: Can the government, or my employer, force me to get a COVID-19 vaccine under the law?

Using the Victorian Crimes Act as an example, prosecutors must establish, beyond a reasonable doubt, that

• the accused person incited another to do something that would result in the commission of a criminal offence
• and at the time of the conduct, the accused had an intention that the offence would occur.

The meaning of “incitement” in legislation is very broad. For instance, the Victorian Crimes Act defines “incite” as to command, request, propose, advise, encourage or authorise.

What has been happening in Victoria?

This week, Victoria Police reported one man had been charged with incitement, following an alleged anti-lockdown gathering in Melbourne last weekend.

Additionally, and more controversially, a number of people have been arrested for incitement in relation to planned protests.

In a high-profile example, a pregnant woman was arrested in relation to a social media post, which allegedly encouraged people to attend a protest in Ballarat this weekend.

Three men have also been charged with incitement over allegedly coordinating a “Freedom Day” protest in Melbourne on Saturday.

These charges were also made in a different context back in April. Then, protesters staged a car convoy in Melbourne to highlight the plight of refugees. The organiser of the protest was arrested in his home under the charge of incitement, and again, before the protest had begun.

What is significant about these charges?

The application of incitement to protest is controversial for two main reasons.

Firstly, incitement is normally linked to the commission of a serious crime, such as murder or assault. The act of protest is not, of itself, a crime.

Secondly, breaching COVID restrictions is an offence under public health legislation and can lead to the issuing of a fine. But charging someone with incitement makes this an offence under the Crimes Act.

Read more: Is protesting during the pandemic an ‘essential’ right that should be protected?

This can lead to much more serious punishment – such as imprisonment and, importantly, the recording of a criminal conviction. This may have serious consequences for a person’s employment, if they have a criminal record.

The complexity of COVID

Because of the very serious nature of the charge of incitement, it has very rarely been used in relation to protest. This is because normally, protesting is not of itself a criminal offence.

In ordinary circumstances, protesting would only be considered a crime if protesters damage property, commit trespass or pose a threat to public order.

For example, climate change activists in Queensland were recently charged with a number of offences, including using a dangerous attachment device to interfere with transport infrastructure and trespassing on a railway (their convictions were thrown out on Wednesday).

Using incitement to protest under COVID is particularly complex, because the use of such a criminal charge for a breach of a public health restriction is unclear. The complication is that under a state of emergency, various “normal” activities, such as organising public gatherings and assembling in public places, are subject to a penalty.

Read more: Explainer: why is the Victorian government extending the state of emergency, and is it justified?

The application of incitement to protest during COVID is also messy as there is a significant lack of clarity about what some terms mean in Victoria’s stay at home directions. For instance, can protest be seen as an “essential” activity for the purpose of the directions? I have argued elsewhere that is should.

New territory

The use of incitement for protest under COVID poses new and complex legal questions.

These may well be tested in courts in time to come. Until then, Victorians under COVID need to look at incitement in a very different manner than before.

– ref. Protests have been criminalised under COVID. What is incitement? How is it being used in the pandemic? – https://theconversation.com/protests-have-been-criminalised-under-covid-what-is-incitement-how-is-it-being-used-in-the-pandemic-145538

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Glenn Withers, Professor of Economics, Australian National University

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s draft news media bargaining code has raised an interesting question: how to put a dollar value on news content?

Under the code, Google and Facebook would be forced to pay for Australian news published on their sites to help fund public interest journalism.

The code also proposes the establishment of a “final offer arbitration bargaining process” to negotiate the conditions of exchange between old and new media. This means the parties must bargain on the costs of publishing Australian news on the platforms, and, if an agreement cannot be reached, an arbitrator will choose the best offer.

But in a rather dramatic development, Facebook has objected strongly to this process. It says

we are left with a choice of either removing news entirely or accepting a system that lets publishers charge us for as much content as they want at a price with no clear limits. Unfortunately, no business can operate that way.

Market uncertainty in the new media landscape

To assist with a constructive bargaining process, it helps to address one fundamental part of Facebook’s position. It is worried publishers may charge as much as they want for their content. However, this doesn’t need to be the case.

The Public Interest Journalism Initiative has addressed this issue in its submission to the ACCC inquiry.

Read more: If Facebook really pulls news from its Australian sites, we’ll have a much less compelling product

We have specifically proposed greater clarity on the factors that could help determine payments within the negotiations.

As we say in the submission:

The lack of value guidance is creating significant market uncertainty — for news businesses and digital platforms alike. It also perpetuates the uneven playing field to the detriment of the news media.

The key for these “value factors” can be the appeal to the public interest. And here, this lies principally in public interest journalism: the news, public information and analysis that informs our democracy and community.

Certainly, this would benefit the news businesses and digital platforms alike, since they are both increasingly distrusted by the public. Their reputations and business positions overall would actually benefit from being seen to come together in a compact for the public good.

How to value the news

But how to put a value on this? That’s the tricky question.

PIJI proposes looking at a number of specific factors, including

• the cost of journalism

• the advertising dollars involved

• the community value placed on public interest journalism.

Each can be calculated to some degree, including even the community value.

Indeed, we have researched the value the community puts on public interest journalism. In a survey of Australians conducted in April, we found 86% of people consume media on a daily basis, with commercial TV/radio being the most popular (56% daily consumption), followed by digital social (55%) and public TV/radio (49%).

Four in five respondents rated public interest journalism as either somewhat or very important. Perhaps most relevantly, over half were willing to pay more in tax if necessary to support it.

When it comes to an actual dollar value, we used these surveys to calculate that a majority of Australians are willing to pay up to $560 million per year in additional tax to support more public interest journalism.

How did we arrive at this figure? This is my own best estimate based on the amount in additional tax our respondents said they were comfortable paying to support bringing the number of journalists back up to the level it was before the 2020 rounds of job cuts and newspaper closures came into effect.

The $560 million is the midpoint of the range of responses — some respondents said they would “definitely” pay more than that, while others said they would only “probably” do so. This is the figure where we found majority support among all of these respondents.

Read more: Local news sources are closing across Australia. We are tracking the devastation (and some reasons for hope)

So, using these data, we can suggest boundaries for pricing the news in negotiations with Facebook and Google.

The minimum would be the cost of maintaining the present level of journalism being produced in Australia (specifically, the editorial costs to news outlets).

To define the maximum cost, we can then use the $560 million per year figure that over half of Australians said they were willing to pay to support a higher level of public interest journalism. (The national public broadcasters were specifically excluded for separate decision by government.)

Of course, the large corporations on both sides will most likely dominate the bargaining process. Yet, Australians are also very concerned about local community and regional news providers, including traditional media and digital start-ups, so a public interest journalism fund must also be considered as part of this agreement or as a publicly funded supplement.

The positions of media outlets of all sizes must be taken into account, as well as the concerns of the community.

A baseline for negotiations

Further research and refinement may be needed. But, in the absence of other objective guidelines, this approach could certainly be used to set financial parameters for the first round of negotiations.

Facebook’s current position essentially means if it is required to pay for news through this system, it will block Australians from sharing news through its site or consider leaving Australia altogether.

Read more: Facebook and Google used to be the future of news. But now media companies need more strings to their bow

Instead, what we are offering the media giants is a novel idea: use the public interest as a baseline to settle a business dispute. The public has indicated its willingness to support news as an essential service. This viewpoint should be respected as a top priority; jockeying for power and perks can take second place.

The outcome of the drafting of the code matters for Australians. As Milton Friedman once put it: there is no such thing as a free lunch. But for Australians, it is equally a matter of the future of an informed democracy.

– ref. How much should Facebook have to pay for news? We have a suggestion how to calculate it – https://theconversation.com/how-much-should-facebook-have-to-pay-for-news-we-have-a-suggestion-how-to-calculate-it-145463

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Esterman, Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of South Australia

Metropolitan Melbourne’s stage 4 lockdown is due to end on Sunday September 13.

While there’s been much speculation around what will come next, we’ll have a clearer picture this Sunday, when Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews announces the state’s “roadmap” for easing COVID-19 restrictions.

Ahead of this announcement, we asked four experts what they see as the most important aspects of Victoria’s path out of stage 4.

Trade-offs and transparency

Adrian Esterman, Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of South Australia

I believe we need a much more nuanced approach than simply, say, going back to stage 3 restrictions.

The stage 4 restrictions are taking a heavy toll on people’s mental health. Every restriction must be carefully examined as a trade-off between improved quality of life and increased probability of transmission.

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

There are some no-brainers. Anecdotally, many people are already breaking the one-hour limit on daily exercise. Increasing it to two hours per day would be a great relief and should have little effect on transmission, provided people stick to social distancing.

Similarly, it’s not clear what evidence underpins the rule that bans people from travelling more than 5km from home (with some exceptions). Surely it could be increased to, say, 10km with little impact on case numbers.

UNSW epidemiologist Mary-Louise McLaws has suggested a bubble approach, which allows spending time with nominated people outside one’s own household. This would go a long way to reducing loneliness for those living on their own.

The 8pm-5am curfew has been contentious, with some experts arguing more attention should be placed on workplace safety rather than policing people’s movements. Given the high number of cases arising from nursing homes and health-care settings, there’s some merit in this argument.

Some restrictions, such as mandatory face masks, probably need to stay for a while longer.

Whatever actions the Victorian government takes at the end of lockdown, I would like it to publish the reasoning and evidence behind the restrictions that remain. This would go a long way towards building public trust.

Being prepared for any sign of resurgence

C Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity, UNSW

The best path out of stage 4 would be, once daily cases are in the low double digits, to use a step-wise, careful easing of restrictions, maintain the mask mandate, and to promote mask use as a tool that enables freedom rather than removes it. The biggest problem is asymptomatic infection, which means we cannot always identify who is infected and infectious.

We also need to keep up social distancing, make testing easy by continuing to provide drive-through sites widely, control the size and structure of gatherings, and continue hotel quarantine programs (heeding lessons from previous mistakes).

Importantly, we should have a low and clearly defined threshold for increasing the use of these measures, including lockdowns, at the first sign of a resurgence. A few weeks’ delay or procrastination can see the epidemic grow as it did in Melbourne within weeks, from low double digits to high triple digits.

Read more: Which face mask should I wear?

We will continue to live with COVID-19 until we have an effective vaccine. Until then it will be a balancing act between applying and releasing the brakes to enable as much activity as possible, while keeping the disease under control.

As we approach the end of the year and the festive season, we want to make sure the disease incidence is as low as possible, or we could face a large resurgence after New Year.

Plans for safe Christmas and New Year activities should be starting now. This includes seriously considering the safety of religious services, given the risky combination of large gatherings with singing. If going ahead, religious services should be smaller in size, socially distanced, outdoors if possible, or with open windows combined with fans.

Opening up the performing arts

Philip Russo, Associate Professor, Monash University

The first steps of the roadmap need to include a reopening of performing arts venues in Victoria. In regional centres, these venues are often the cultural lifeblood of the town, and a return to live entertainment will offer some minor relief to small businesses, and importantly, provide entertainment, joy and hope to the community.

Some simple strategies can minimise any risk of COVID-19 transmission in these settings.

First, make use of any outdoor venues and provide controlled audience sections (where individual groups are separated from one another). Indoors, restrict attendance to 25% of house capacity, and over time that can increase.

Second, for outdoor or indoor venues, minimise the number of performers on stage, ensure performers step no further than mid-stage, and keep the first four or so rows empty. Cast and crew would need to continue to physically distance, and they might also undergo regular testing.

The audience would need to wear masks, as well as provide their contact details in case of the need to follow up.

Minimise mingling of the audience. No hanging out in the foyer before or after the show, and no interval. Get in, get out. And no loitering near the stage door to meet your idol.

Other strategies could include temperature checking on arrival, and using one door in and one door out. If successful, audience and performer numbers could gradually increase.

If all this was in place, it’s quite likely it would be safer to go the to the theatre than to your local supermarket.

Read more: What is the COVID ‘bubble’ concept, and could it work in Australia?

A focus on prevention for safe work and play

Catherine Bennett, Chair in Epidemiology, Deakin University

The way ahead needs to be focused as much on prevention as it is on response. We need early warning systems and reliable contact tracing for outbreak identification and control, but we also need more emphasis on how we prevent transmission in the first instance.

Prevention is in our hands. Wearing masks, particularly when we can’t physically distance and in indoor public settings, will reduce transmission, minimise the likelihood restrictions will need to be reintroduced, and pave the way for a time when we might not have to wear masks all the time outdoors.

Our essential workplaces are now operating under COVID-safe plans, and other businesses and industries will need COVID-safe plans to reopen.

We now have the advantage of warmer weather ahead. If cafes and pubs can set up more outdoor seating alongside spaced seating indoors, and if everyone practises good hygiene and distancing, we can work and play safely.

The idea of a “traffic light” alert system is a hot topic right now. This approach designates areas at different levels of transmission, with corresponding travel or other restrictions to be implemented depending on whether the area is green, amber or red.

But blanket restrictions on movement, social networking and business operation are not a precise way to disrupt local transmission chains. We must aim to be as targeted as possible in our interventions to minimise collateral damage as we contain outbreaks.

Read more: Could ‘traffic-light’ alerts help Victoria exit lockdown safely?

– ref. 4 perspectives on how Victoria should exit stage 4 lockdown – https://theconversation.com/4-perspectives-on-how-victoria-should-exit-stage-4-lockdown-145448

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

Had the 2019 election panned out differently, Chris Bowen would have been the treasurer coping with Australia’s current economic crisis.

Instead, as shadow health minister, he has been critical of aspects of the government’s handling of the health issues, especially its failure to act earlier and more comprehensively to secure access to potential vaccines.

With Labor homing in on aged care, which has seen the deaths of hundred of residents, Bowen in this podcast questions the performance of the sector’s regulator, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission.

“I was frankly shocked by a number of things.

“I was shocked by the fact the regulator was informed by St Basil’s, [that] they had a positive case – and on the face of it, did nothing. I’ve seen no evidence that they actually did anything about it. Their defence is it was somebody else’s job – we had no role to play.

“I just don’t think that cuts the mustard for a regulator.

“I was surprised to learn that ‘no notice’ or very short notice inspections [ by the regulator] had ceased during the pandemic.

“I think these are problematic decisions which the regulator is accountable for, and I do have deep concerns about [them].

“And as a parliamentarian, I am expressing the view that there have been shortcomings [by the regulator] and I’ve yet to see an adequate explanation for those.”

Additional audio

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

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Chris Bowen on the recession, aged care and priorities for health policy – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-chris-bowen-on-the-recession-aged-care-and-priorities-for-health-policy-145551

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Suzanne Mahady, Gastroenterologist & Clinical Epidemiologist, Senior Lecturer, Monash University

If you’re under 50, the recent death Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman of colon cancer at just 43 may have prompted a worrying thought.

Isn’t colon cancer – also known as bowel cancer – an older person’s disease? If I’m around Boseman’s age or under, should I be getting tested?

The short answer is that anyone is free to go to the chemist and buy a home testing kit (officially known as a faecal occult blood test or FOBT), which can detect tiny traces of blood in your stool.

These tests, which involve dipping a sample stick into a bit of poo collected on paper, are sent free to eligible people when they turn 50, but there’s nothing stopping a younger person buying one if they’re concerned.

If you have more serious symptoms, however – such as the recent appearance of blood in the stool – make an appointment to see your GP as soon as possible.

Read more: What’s behind the increase in bowel cancer among younger Australians?

Assessing your risk

Age is the biggest risk factor for bowel cancer, and the absolute risk for young people remains low.

That said, research shows the incidence of bowel cancer, which includes colon and rectal cancer, has increased by up to 9% in people under 50 from the 1990s until now.

We can’t say for sure what’s driving this rise, but we do know increased bowel cancer risk is associated with obesity, eating lots of processed foods (including meats), alcohol, and not doing enough exercise.

The other key risk factor is a family history of bowel cancer in a close relative — meaning your mother, father, sister or brother has had it, particularly if they had it while young. Another symptom doctors look for is a low iron level, particularly in men.

Bowel cancer is also more common in men than in women.

Going to the GP

A really important symptom to look out for is new rectal bleeding when you pass a bowel movement. Some people may see bright red blood on the toilet paper from time to time over the years, but if it is a new symptom or you are concerned, you need to get checked out by your GP.

Your GP can work out if you need specialist review and further investigations. They’ll likely ask you to do a blood test, they’ll want to know your iron count and possibly do some stool testing. In some cases, a colonoscopy will be recommended.

A colonoscopy is where a doctor inserts a flexible instrument fitted with a camera into your anus and into your bowel while you’re under anaesthetic. It is not without risk, so it is only done with good reason.

Home testing kits

The home testing faecal occult blood test (FOBT) kit is a screening test, so it doesn’t pick up all cases – but it’s reasonably accurate in low risk populations. They are designed for screening asymptomatic people.

If you are male, overweight and have a family history of bowel cancer and want to do a home testing kit, then see your GP to discuss this.

Importantly, keep your weight in a healthy range and exercise regularly. This will reduce your risk for many cancers, not just bowel cancer.

And if you are over 50, please make sure you use your free stool testing kit. Don’t just put it in the bathroom drawer – do it the day after it arrives. There’s no better day.

Read more: Here’s what you can eat and avoid to reduce your risk of bowel cancer

– ref. Chadwick Boseman died of colon cancer at just 43. Here’s what under 50s need to know about bowel cancer – https://theconversation.com/chadwick-boseman-died-of-colon-cancer-at-just-43-heres-what-under-50s-need-to-know-about-bowel-cancer-145544

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

One of the most striking responses to the COVID-19 pandemic has been the sudden, shift of around half the workforce to working at home.

In many cases, this was combined with an equally sudden shift to home schooling.

Contrary to what might have been expected, working from home was one part of the pandemic response that went remarkably smoothly. Most kinds of office work continued almost as if nothing had changed.

Discussion of the crisis has mostly worked on the assumption that a return to something like the pre-crisis ‘normal’ is both inevitable and desirable.

But the unplanned experiment we have been forced to undertake suggests we might have stumbled upon a massive opportunity for a microeconomic reform, yielding benefits far greater than those of the hard-fought changes of the late 20th century.

The average worker spends an hour on commuting every work day. Remarkably, this is a figure which has remained more or less stable since Neolithic times, a finding known as Marchetti’s Law. (The same observation has been attributed to Bertrand Russell).

If working from home eliminated an hour of commuting, without changing time spent on work or reducing production, the result would be equivalent to a 13% increase in productivity (assuming a 38 hour working work).

If half the workforce achieved such a gain, it would be equivalent to a 6.5% increase in productivity for the labour force as a whole.

For a comparison, let’s look at the radical microeconomic reforms of the 1990s, including privatisation, deregulation and national competition policy.

In 1995 the main advocate of these reforms, the Productivity Commission, then called the Industry Commission, estimated they would increase national income by 5.5%.

In retrospect, that estimate appears to have been over-optimistic.

Although there was an upsurge in measured productivity growth in the mid-1990s, the total increase relative to the long term trend was less than 1 percentage point per year above normal and low productivity growth since then has wound back those gains.

These gains are big, compared to those we sweated on

Even so, those reforms were, and to a large extent still are, widely seen as a crucial contributor to economic prosperity.

So, an improvement of 6.5% would be a huge benefit. It would be enough over a few years to offset the economic costs of the lockdown and many other impacts of the pandemic.

But, as in the case of microeconomic reform, this initial estimate may be misleading. And even if there are real benefits on average, it’s important to ask who will get them and who, if anyone, will lose.

A study by Harvard and New York University economists finds that people working from home spend around 48 minutes more time per day connected to their offices, leaving an average gain in free time of only 12 minutes per day.

Read more: Vital Signs: Shorter meetings but longer days – how COVID-19 has changed the way we work

It seems likely however, that at least some of this time is spent on household tasks, especially to the extent that workers had to take on child care and home schooling during the lockdown period. And, as well as saving commuting time, workers also save the monetary costs of commuting and at least some of the time spent getting ready for work.

On balance, it seems clear that on average working from home yields net benefits.

However, workers for whom social contacts at work represent a significant “fringe benefit” will lose that benefit while other workers who value privacy or separating work and social life will gain a benefit.

It’ll be harder for managers…

Similarly, those who rely on chatting to colleagues to develop ideas will lose something relative to those who prefer more systematic approaches to obtaining information relying on electronic contact.

Another group of workers who might lose from remote working are middle managers.

To the extent that management depends on “presenteeism”, that is, physically keeping an eye on workers, remote working presents problems.

Intrusive checking on computer activity is likely to be resisted and evaded. Managers will have to learn to manage by objectively assessing results rather than observing what people do, and to get that evidence accepted further up in the hierarchy.

…manageable for employers

For employers, the shift to working from home has had little immediate impact. Workers wages haven’t changed, and, at least in the short run, neither has spending on office space.

But in the long run, remote working offers the possibility of much greater flexibility in hiring. Some employers such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have already floated the idea of paying workers less because they can now live in cheaper locations, setting the stage for future conflict.

For the most part, disputes over sharing the benefits of remote office work will be hashed out between employers, workers and unions, in the ordinary workings of the labour market.

Read more: Thinking about working from home long-term? 3 ways it could be good or bad for your health

But what about the other half of the workforce, who don’t have the option of working from home? In particular, what about the mostly low-paid service workers who depend on people coming into offices?

If the productivity gains made possible through remote work are to be shared by the entire community, substantial government action will be needed to make sure it happens.

Most obviously, the higher rate of JobSeeker allowance has helped us get through the pandemic without the upsurge in suicide and other measures of social distress predicted by many. Returning to the poverty-level unemployment benefit (the old Newstart) would be a disaster.

We’ll need to change the way we support workers

The pandemic has shown how whole sectors of the economy, such as aged care, rely on casual workers piecing together multiple jobs, with no access to standard conditions like sick leave. Younger workers in particular suffer from underemployment and difficulties in making the transition to permanent full-time work.

What will be needed is both an expansion of publicly funded employment in a wide range of services including aged care and a reversal of trends towards casual and contract employment.

Disastrous though it has been, COVID-19 has taught us a lot about ourselves and about how our economy and society work. If we learn these lessons, we might be able to benefit and mitigate at least some of the harm done by the disaster.

– ref. Have we just stumbled on the biggest productivity increase of the century? – https://theconversation.com/have-we-just-stumbled-on-the-biggest-productivity-increase-of-the-century-145104

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jagadish Thaker, Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing, Massey University

Three in four New Zealanders (74%) say they intend to get vaccinated against COVID-19 when a vaccine becomes available, but just over half (56%) would put their names on a list to be vaccinated, according to a new national survey.

Fewer still (52%) would get vaccinated if they had to pay for it themselves. One in ten (13%) say they have no intention to get vaccinated, while 22% remain neutral.

Taken together, the survey findings suggest roughly half of the New Zealand public is strongly motivated to get the COVID-19 vaccine, with about a quarter undecided, and another quarter unwilling.

Building public trust and enthusiasm for vaccination is as important as developing the vaccine itself. Unless enough people get vaccinated, outbreaks and subsequent lockdowns are likely to continue.

Why people want to get vaccinated

Māori (64%) have lower intentions to get vaccinated compared to European New Zealanders (76%) and Asian and other ethnicities (81%).

This finding is similar to attitudes expressed by other minorities, such as African Americans in the US. It likely reflects lower trust in government agencies and scientists to act in the public interest, even as COVID-19 disproportionately affects these communities.

Read more: 5 ways we can prepare the public to accept a COVID-19 vaccine (saying it will be ‘mandatory’ isn’t one)

The most frequently cited reasons for people who plan to get vaccinated include protecting family and themselves (62%), community (49%), health concerns (52%), a return to normality (43%) and a doctor’s recommendation (23%).

Safety concerns (18%), side effects of vaccines (16%) and fear of getting infected through a vaccine (10%) are the top reasons given by people who would refuse a COVID-19 vaccine.

Support for restrictions on anti-vaxxers

A majority of New Zealanders support restrictions on people who refuse vaccination. Travel bans (61%), restricted entry to public places (57%) and restrictions on their children attending school (50%) are among the measures that find support. People are less willing to consider a higher tax rate (28%) and reduced pay (30%).

Generally, the majority have a positive attitude towards vaccination, but a significant minority say they have previously refused to get vaccinated (16%) and refused to get their child vaccinated (10%).

More than half of New Zealanders (57%) say they would be uncomfortable getting a vaccine that was rushed into production. Almost a third (29%) think new vaccines carry more risks than older ones.

Understanding these public concerns will help government and public health agencies to prepare, particularly in light of conspiracy theories and general vaccine safety concerns.

About one in ten New Zealanders (11%) expect a vaccine to be available this year. About half believe we will have to wait until sometime in 2021. Setting realistic expectations about the availability of a vaccine will help overcome public anxiety and protect against beliefs that vaccine development is rushed to suit political purposes.

Ensuring public trust in a coronavirus vaccine

The New Zealand government has done well in building public trust in expertise and support for preventive measures. But with the return of lockdowns and recent revelations of a lack of testing of border security staff, it may have lost some support. Pandemic fatigue is also likely setting in.

A recent meta-analysis shows attitudes and norms are the strongest predictors of vaccination intentions.

Individuals are less likely to have either the time or aptitude to verify scientific studies. Their attitudes about vaccine safety and effectiveness will depend on what they hear from trusted sources and what their friends and family are doing.

Mandatory vaccination could ensure universal coverage but would likely alienate those who already distrust government and science. Such measures might also face legal challenges.

Read more: Should a COVID-19 vaccine be compulsory — and what would this mean for anti-vaxxers?

Borders provide some protection against the pandemic but little against the “infodemic”. Uncertainty about clinical rigour in vaccine development abroad, such as in Russia and the US, will influence New Zealand public perceptions of vaccine safety.

We can learn lessons from New Zealand’s 2019 measles outbreak. More than 2,000 confirmed measles cases, the most in two decades, were reported. It was a timely reminder of the need for local vaccine catch-up campaigns.

Historically, New Zealand has never reached the measles vaccination coverage of 95% recommended by the World Health Organization. Other factors that contributed to the outbreak include increasing equity gaps among minority ethnic groups and a small increase in the number of people refusing vaccination generally.

A catch-up campaign could have increased immunisation rates by decreasing fear of vaccines, which social media often amplify.

Simple clear messages from trusted sources, communicated with compassion and kindness, helped New Zealand to contain the coronavirus. We will have to do the same to contain vaccine misinformation and refusal. Vaccines are only as effective as the rate of vaccination.

– ref. Survey shows 1 in 4 New Zealanders remain hesitant about a coronavirus vaccine – https://theconversation.com/survey-shows-1-in-4-new-zealanders-remain-hesitant-about-a-coronavirus-vaccine-145304

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lucas Marie, Early career researcher, Curtin University

In the South Bronx of New York City, in the early-to-mid 1970s, block parties started to incorporate much of the artistic elements of hip hop as we know it today.

On the streets between their apartment buildings, young African-American, Caribbean and Latino people would gather at parties in which graffiti art, breaking, DJing and rapping were taking place.

These block parties, writes American studies scholar George Lipsitz, were “an attempt to channel the anger of young people in the South Bronx away from gang fighting”. They would become a positive social, cultural and political force for many young people and their communities.

By the mid-1980s, hip hop had hit the mainstream with a force. Today, it is one of the most popular musical genres in the world. During the coronavirus pandemic – and with the resulting high unemployment, disruption to education, restricted travel and lockdown – hip hop has again become a vital outlet for many young people.

Instead of dancing on the streets, they are now performing online and across the world.

Connecting online

As hip hop music and dance artists tend to gather in public places, the pandemic and lockdowns have heavily restricted these kinds of events. Many hip hop artists – both in Australia and internationally – have taken to social media to voice their frustration and disappointment with feeling cut off from this community.

Artists responded to the early stages of the pandemic by moving online. Zoom, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube provided a much needed social and creative outlet.

In July, Melbourne hip hop dancer Nadiah Biddle started running an online “Krump Dance” program for women. Krumping started in Los Angeles in the 1990s, and is now recognised for its expressive, exaggerated, and highly energetic movements.

Attracting dancers from across Australia and New Zealand through Zoom video-conferencing calls, Biddle teaches the basics of Krumping and leads students through choreography.

“The vibes have been really high”, says Biddle.

“The ladies have expressed to me that they feel so much more uplifted [after dancing] and that they always look forward to the classes.”

Sydney dancer Lowe Napalan recently won the The B-Side Hip Hop Festival organised by the Break Mission crew in the UK.

The annual festival takes place at Birmingham’s Hippodrome Theatre, but during the pandemic it moved online for the first time – opening up the competition to international artists like Napalan. He competed from the comfort of his own home in Mount Druitt via Instagram live.

Although he was on the other side of the world, Napalan says he had a real feeling of belonging in the event, just as if they had all been in the same room.

He set up his laptop in the living room to watch the other competitors and to film himself. It was a little strange, he says, because the music had to come through the laptop speakers, and there was some internet lag during some moments of the competition.

Nonetheless, it he found it amazing to compete on the international stage with some of the top breakers in the world.

The move online hasn’t just been for professionals. The Perth City Breakers, a collective of hip hop dance teachers and performers from Perth, started a hip hop dance podcast featuring local performers and an online training program for absolute beginners, giving people a new way to stay fit under lockdown.

A global artform

Hip hop is ever-changing, dynamic and globally diverse. While graffiti art, breaking, DJing and rapping are often recognised as being the forms core artistic elements, the label is much more expansive than that.

It encompasses a wide range of different musical and artistic practices, all of which are able to be expressed and transformed in ways that are local and unique.

Read more: Aboriginal hip-hop meets Iranian diaspora in a cross-border rap

In late July, for instance, Soundz of the South, a hip hop music collective based in Khayelitsha, South Africa, organised an open-mic event called Rebel Sistah Cypher. Eight South African hip hop music artists and poets each performed on a Zoom call live-streamed on the group’s Facebook page to raise money for Wave of Hope, a charity that supports refugees and asylum seekers living in overcrowded camps in Lesbos, Greece.

Hip hop is the representative voice of many young people, since the culture was created by and for them. It is a uniquely malleable, dynamic and empowering artform – and its adaptation to the pandemic is especially vital given creative outlets are so important for well-being.

– ref. Competing in Birmingham, live from Mount Druitt: how hip hop moved online under COVID-19 – https://theconversation.com/competing-in-birmingham-live-from-mount-druitt-how-hip-hop-moved-online-under-covid-19-143902

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Blair, Emeritus Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, OzGrav, University of Western Australia

Why is there gravity? Xander, aged 3, Lindfield, Sydney, NSW.

Hi Xander, great question!

I’m told you were rolling marbles when you asked that question, wondering why they roll down more easily than they roll up.

To understand this, we need to know what gravity is.

Something seems to hold us down on the ground. It makes us hit the floor with a thump if we fall over, and makes your marbles roll down slopes.

Have you ever jumped on a trampoline? When you are in the air your arms feel light, your hair floats away from your head. You feel light as a feather, but not for long.

When you come back down onto the trampoline itself you feel heavier, so heavy that the trampoline sinks right down, like it would if your mum was standing on it, as she’s probably heavier than you.

A happy thought

More than 100 years ago a young man called Albert Einstein was thinking about this sort of thing as he was sitting at his desk in an office in Switzerland.

He suddenly had an idea that made him jump up excitedly. Many years later Albert said this was the happiest thought of his life.

He was thinking about how you feel weightless when you are moving freely in the air (like jumping on the trampoline), and how you feel pushed back in your seat when your car suddenly speeds up (called acceleration). Cars were completely new things at that time.

Read more: Curious Kids: is time travel possible for humans?

Albert realised the thing that holds us down on the ground is exactly the same as the pushing feeling you feel when a car speeds up. That was his happiest thought.

He realised it is all to do with things changing speed. That includes your car, your marbles, and even you when you land on a trampoline.

Warp speed

It took Albert another eight years of really hard thinking before he worked it all out properly.

The full explanation is very complicated. But we can use a few toys to show you why your marbles roll downwards more easily than upwards.

What Albert found was that big things, like the whole planet Earth, are so heavy they actually change the shape of space and time around us. This is very, very hard to understand but it’s a bit like the way a trampoline would dip down if you sit in the middle.

Now imagine you put your marbles on a trampoline. If no one is sitting on the trampoline the marbles don’t move. But if someone sits in the middle, the marbles roll towards them because the shape of the trampoline has changed.

To show this, we sometimes use a big sheet of stretchy material and roll balls around on it. The heavier the ball, the bigger the dent it makes, and other balls roll around it because the material is warped.

The planet Earth warps time in a similar way. We can’t see the warping, but special scientific machines called atomic clocks can measure it. It is this warping of time by the Earth that makes marbles speed up and fall towards the ground when you let them go. And that’s what we call gravity.

Trip to space

Suppose you won prize to be the first kid to visit the International Space Station, which is a spaceship where astronauts do experiments.

On the space station, everything is weightless. It’s like the same feeling you have at the very top of a trampoline jump, when your hair lifts off your head, except all the time! Astronauts call this being in freefall.

This means your marbles wouldn’t roll down a ramp. But you could still have great fun with marbles. Look at these astronauts having fun with large marbles on the space station.

What if you went to the Moon? Well, the Moon is much smaller than Earth, so it is less heavy, which makes it have less gravity.

Read more: How big is the Moon? Let me compare …

If you fell over on the Moon, you would fall really slowly. You could take your marble game to the Moon, but they would roll much more slowly on the ramps of your marble roller. It would be pretty slow and boring.

But if you threw them upwards they would go really far up into the black sky before coming back down again 10 or 20 seconds later – much longer than here on Earth. That would be really fun!

– ref. Curious Kids: why is there gravity? – https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-why-is-there-gravity-144061

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Watson, Senior Lecturer, Science, University of the Sunshine Coast

Unlike many mammals and birds, most reptiles show little sign of being caring parents. But our new research shows one lizard species may be more doting parents than we thought – the adults risking their own safety to protect their babies.

We used cameras in the Snowy Mountains to study the Cunningham’s skink. We were surprised to record evidence of the lizards actively defending their babies against formidable predators. Our findings are outlined in a paper released today.

Most startlingly, we recorded a mother skink aggressively attacking a large, deadly brown snake while her babies watched on. We also witnessed 12 incidents of skinks chasing magpies away from their young.

We originally set out to record how species such as skinks will cope with climate change. But this evolved into a study of the fascinating and surprising social bonds between lizard offspring and their parents.

What is the Cunningham’s skink?

The Cunningham’s skink (Egernia cunninghami) is a large, sun-loving, spiny lizard native to southeast Australia. It’s named after Alan Cunningham, an explorer who collected the first specimen in the Blue Mountains.

The skinks are active during the day. They feeds on a variety of invertebrates such as insects, snails and slugs, as well as vegetation.

The Cunningham’s skink lives in social groups – a behaviour very rare among lizards and reptiles. In these groups, mothers give birth to live young (rather than eggs) then live alongside their kids, sometimes for several years.

The species has strength in numbers – living in a group makes it easier to spot threats, which helps the group survive.

The mother of all discoveries

Using video and thermal imaging, we observed the skinks on 32 days over three years, in the Snowy Mountains region of New South Wales.

Among reptiles, evidence of parental protection in their natural environment has been rare and typically anecdotal. We witnessed four birthing sessions, and then monitored skink encounters in the presence of their offspring.

Read more: New research reveals these 20 Australian reptiles are set to disappear by 2040

Videoing nature can be tricky. Often, the action takes place away from where you’ve directed your camera. So when we saw a snake, it was a scramble to get a free video camera and start recording.

We witnessed two separate encounters with an eastern brown snake. The first involved the snake sneaking up on six-day-old skinks basking in the sun (see footage below). We recorded the mother running towards the predator and biting it for several seconds. The snake writhes around before the mother releases her grip and returns unharmed to her young.

The following year, we encountered two adult skinks attacking another eastern brown snake in bushes. Juvenile skinks were nearby. The skinks bit tight to the snake’s body, and the snake dragged them for more than 15 metres before the skinks released their grip.

Snakes were not the only predator vanquished by the protective skink parents – Cunningham’s skinks regularly chased magpies away from their young. We observed 12 encounters between skinks and magpies. In each case, an adult skink aggressively chased and/or attacked the magpie after the bird came close to the group.

What does this all mean?

Some animals rarely interact with others of the same species, even their offspring. In fact, available data suggests infanticide – where mature animals kill young offspring of the same species – can occur among some skink species.

We saw no such behaviour among the Cunningham’s skink, or aggression towards each other.

While the aggression of the adult skinks towards predators took place in the presence of young, the adults may have been exhibiting self-defence or territorial behaviour. Regardless, the attacks on predators in the presence of newborns does reflect parental care, either directly or indirectly. Our future field excursions will hopefully shed more light on this.

Understanding the factors that bring parents and offspring together, and keep them together, is important in our broader understanding of social evolution – that is, how social interactions of species arise, change and are maintained.

It will also help us understand how animals cooperating with and caring for each other can benefit both the individual, and the whole.

Read more: A few months ago, science gave this rare lizard a name – and it may already be headed for extinction

– ref. Scientists capture rare footage of mother skink fighting a deadly brown snake to protect her babies – https://theconversation.com/scientists-capture-rare-footage-of-mother-skink-fighting-a-deadly-brown-snake-to-protect-her-babies-145530

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

Israel’s Supreme Court ruled on September 2 that Malka Leifer is fit to stand trial on charges she faces in Victoria. Leifer is accused of 74 counts of rape and sexual assault.

This ruling is a significant milestone in the ongoing effort to extradite Leifer from Israel to Australia. It is the final legal hurdle to a full assessment of Australia’s extradition request. The District Court will decide on September 21 if Leifer should be extradited, although that hearing will still offer avenues for appeal and may result in further delay.

Read more: Explainer: what is extradition between countries and how does it work?

The charges

In 2000, Leifer was employed from Israel to become headmistress of the ultra-orthodox Adass Israel girls’ school in Melbourne. During her time at the school, Leifer is alleged to have sexually abused three students – sisters Dassi Erlich, Nicole Meyer and Elly Sapper.

When the allegations emerged in 2008, Leifer fled to Israel with her family. The school funded her flights. Her alleged victims have doggedly pursued Leifer’s extradition to Australia in the years since, at considerable personal toll.

Australia seeks extradition

In 2013, Australia lodged an extradition request with Israel. Extradition is a process by which an alleged offender may be apprehended by an “extraditing state” and transferred to a “requesting state” in order to be tried for a crime in the requesting state’s jurisdiction.

Although extradition is a longstanding concern of international law, it relies on extradition arrangements between states rather than an overarching system of enforcement.

Australian law governs extradition through the Extradition Act. The act sets a framework for courts to determine if a person is to be extradited from Australia. It also empowers the government to make extradition requests of other governments.

Following Australia’s request, Israel eventually arrested Leifer in 2014. However, she was later bailed, claiming to be too unwell to attend multiple subsequent court hearings on her case.

In 2018, Leifer was again jailed, when evidence emerged that she had been living and socialising normally in an orthodox Israeli settlement.

Where does the extradition request stand now?

Extradition is a complex process, including legal and political elements.

In January this year, a psychiatric panel determined Leifer was mentally fit to stand trial. In May, the District Court in Jerusalem confirmed that finding.

Leifer appealed the May ruling, and it was that appeal that has now been dismissed in the Supreme Court of Israel. The judges noted the case has dragged on considerably longer than is reasonable.

Read more: Malka Leifer has been ruled fit to stand trial. Will extradition to Australia follow?

Leifer’s lawyer, Nick Kaufman, had argued she would not receive a fair trial in Australia, because the case has been so widely reported. In Kaufman’s view, a jury would be prejudiced against Leifer because of the earlier findings she was faking her mental illness to avoid extradition.

The Supreme Court rejected this argument. But this does not mean Leifer will soon be extradited to Australia (never mind the additional complication of arranging her travel during the pandemic).

In extending the legal process for so long, Leifer has managed to avoid any substantive decision on the extradition claim itself. Years of hearings have been concerned with her fitness to stand trial.

So this week’s decision paves the way for the substantive extradition process to commence. Hopefully it will proceed more quickly than all the steps that have led to this point. The District Court in Jerusalem is due to give its finding on the substantive extradition matter on 21 September.

If the District Court concludes Leifer should be extradited to Australia, she will again have an opportunity to appeal.

Extradition decisions in Israel are governed by Israeli law. Once the matter is resolved in the courts, responsibility will shift to the Department of International Affairs in the Israeli Ministry of Justice.

This means the eventual political outcome of Leifer’s case, even if Israel agrees to extradite her to Australia, may come with conditions. For example, Israel could require that Leifer be returned to Israel to serve a sentence of imprisonment, should she be convicted in Victoria on the charges she faces.

This would be a challenging outcome for Australia, particularly in light of the current controversy regarding the conviction of an Australian national for the Christchurch massacre. In that case, some in New Zealand are calling for Australia to repatriate the convicted man to serve his life imprisonment sentence in Australia.

One thing is certain – this week’s ruling will bolster Australia’s strong and consistent demands for Leifer’s extradition to face prosecution in Victoria. This case has strained relations between Australia and Israel. A swift resolution of the remaining processes, and Leifer’s extradition, would be significant in shoring up friendly relations between the two countries.

– ref. The Israeli Supreme Court has cleared the way for Malka Leifer’s extradition hearing. What happens now? – https://theconversation.com/the-israeli-supreme-court-has-cleared-the-way-for-malka-leifers-extradition-hearing-what-happens-now-142986

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Damien Spry, Lecturer, University of South Australia

Google and Facebook have threatened to limit or remove news services for Australian users, in response to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s draft news media bargaining code.

This week, Facebook announced should the code become law, the company would stop letting publishers and users share local and international news on its Australian Facebook and Instagram sites.

Google has also made implicit threats to limit its Australian news services – potentially by removing Google News in Australia, as it did in Spain in 2014.

Arguments in favour of the code centre on two points. First, that Australian media outlets are in critical danger of going bust because of Google and Facebook’s dominance of the digital advertising market.

Second, that Google and Facebook are Godzilla-like entities dominating the market and resisting any regulation attempt – especially one that could set an international precedent.

It’s true regulation has a role in addressing the anti-competitive aspects of the digital advertising industry, but I have doubts about the ACCC’s code. It would allow commercial news businesses to bargain with Google and Facebook, in order to be paid for Australian news content published on their platforms.

But I don’t think it will work (which I say reluctantly as both Google and Facebook have much to answer for). I also don’t think the code is fair – and there’s a better way to solve the problem.

Read more: In a world first, Australia plans to force Facebook and Google to pay for news (but ABC and SBS miss out)

Misunderstanding how news works on social media

For years, Facebook has tinkered with its algorithm to prioritise posts from users’ personal connections, in what chief Mark Zuckerberg characterised as a preference for the digital lounge over the digital town square.

Basically, your Facebook News Feed (the main feed in which you discover new content) isn’t really a “news” feed. Rather, it features personalised content from those you most often, or have most recently, connected with.

If a news story appears on your feed, it has likely been shared by one of your connections. Or, you may be following that company’s Facebook page, or the company may have paid to advertise (boost) the content.

Which news stories you come across on Facebook depends on a variety of factors and algorithmic decisions. This process is complicated and vastly different to how news is presented on a publication’s website, or in a newspaper.

The ACCC’s attempt to have media businesses “fairly” paid for the value of Australian news on social media is problematic because accurately attributing value to this content is anything but straightforward.

It’s worth noting a major point of resistance against the ACCC code is the requirement for Google and Facebook to give 28 days’ notice of algorithmic changes that will affect either referral traffic to news, or the ranking of news behind paywalls.

The opaque business of digital advertising

Commercial news today is funded largely through advertising based on audience numbers and demographics, rather than content alone (excluding subscription models).

Traditionally, however, audiences have been targeted based on news content. For example, ads for wedding dresses would be placed in bridal magazines. In such scenarios, the content itself is valuable to advertisers because it attracts their specific audience.

In digital advertising, however, the news content is often secondary or even inconsequential for generating ad revenue. The ads target their audience directly based on a user profile of recorded behaviours, characteristics and preferences. The page the ad appears on may be a factor, but one of many.

This is called programmatic advertising. When you visit a site, an automated “bidding war” is instantly conducted where your user profile is matched against potential advertisers. The winner takes the ad spot – and this is decided by several factors including offer price, as well as the likelihood of the ad being clicked.

All of this happens in the time it takes for a website to load (about 200 milliseconds).

The ACCCC code proposes remuneration for publishers based on a negotiated value of news content, but the value of news for online advertisers isn’t derived from the content as much as the targeted audience.

Hence, the tussle between the ACCC, Google and Facebook is both confusing and confused.

Assessing the value of news

The ACCC code also conflates the ways digital news content and social media users are socially and commercially valued. In explaining the need for the code, the ACCC states:

While bargaining power imbalances exist in other areas, the bargaining power imbalance between news media businesses and major digital platforms is being addressed as a strong and independent media landscape is essential to a well-functioning democracy.

This “public sphere” ideal is the premise for treating news content as being important enough to force digital giants to subsidise it. Fair enough, but the ACCC’s “professional standards test” which news businesses must pass to qualify for remuneration sets a low bar.

It doesn’t consider important aspects of public interest journalism, such as concentration of ownership, or newsroom diversity – a vexed issue in Australia’s news landscape.

Also, the code states the ABC and SBS are not able to claim remuneration (but can still benefit from information about algorithms and data). This is based on the idea that commercial news media are more vulnerable than public broadcasters, due to advertising revenue lost to Google and Facebook.

With this, the argument has changed: the value of news is not only democratic, it’s also commercial.

There is another way

It seems Google and Facebook would rather take extreme measures than be forced to pay for news, or provide news businesses information about algorithm changes and user data. Both companies have claimed they provide greater value to Australian news businesses than they receive.

Perhaps the way forward is to regulate programmatic advertising. Specifically, we should scrutinise the complex network of companies that discretely trade data profiles and advertising space. And this industry is dominated by, guess who, Google and Facebook.

Reform in this space may help address the advertising revenue and market power problems the code seeks to resolve.

The ACCC’s next cab off the rank is a review and report on the ad tech industry that considers these issues.

Hopefully it will suggest approaches to regulating the digital advertising market. This seems a better option than the compensation currently being sought.

Read more: How the shady world of the data industry strips away our freedoms

– ref. It’s not ‘fair’ and it won’t work: an argument against the ACCC’s news media bargaining code – https://theconversation.com/its-not-fair-and-it-wont-work-an-argument-against-the-acccs-news-media-bargaining-code-145391

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Phillips, Adjunct Professor, Griffith University

In a year shaped by climate disasters and a pandemic, Australia’s most powerful sporting organisation – the Australian Football League (AFL) – continues to be confronted by another foundational issue: systemic racism.

At issue is not only the question of how the Australian sports industry engages with the Black Lives Matter movement, but also the continued failure of key Australian organisations to adequately reflect on, and reform, their own colonial values and power structures.

A continued failure to address racism

While the AFL would likely prefer attention was focused on the historic move of the men’s grand final outside Victoria, the continued distress caused by racism within the game is a more pressing issue.

Most recently, the AFL’s 2020 Sir Doug Nicholls Round, set up to celebrate Indigenous Australian contributions to football, was overshadowed by the story of how racism in football has traumatised Yorta Yorta man Robert Muir.

Muir was persecuted at a junior level (being unjustly suspended for two-and-a-half years for the falsified charge of kicking), humiliated by his St Kilda VFL teammates and routinely abused by many opposition players and supporters. He was then largely neglected by St Kilda, which used an image of him in the club’s heralded 2019 Reconciliation Action Plan, but never even spoke with him.

The mistreatment of Muir is not merely testament to how racist Australia used to be. It is also indicative of Australia’s current systemic racism. Just this year, Eddie Betts, Shelley Ware, Elijah Taylor and Harley Bennell (among others) have been repeatedly subjected to vile racist abuse via various social media platforms. These are not isolated incidents, but represent a pattern of abuse.

When Muir tried to speak out about the racist vilification he received, he was not believed. Over 40 years later, Héritier Lumumba was also largely dismissed when he first spoke out about the racism he experienced at the Collingwood Football Club. This included being given the nickname “Chimp” by some teammates. It has taken until now for Collingwood to instigate a formal investigation into Lumumba’s treatment and broader institutional issues.

Former Gold Coast Suns player Joel Wilkinson has also spoken out against the systemic racism he experienced.

Read more: Fair Game? The audacity of Héritier Lumumba

The struggle to be believed

The questioning of racism by key figures in the AFL industry remains a significant issue. Many people responded with outrage and sympathy to Muir’s tale. The AFL, St Kilda, Geelong, Collingwood and the Ballarat Football League (among others) apologised for the acts of racism that Muir endured.

However, AFL Hall of Fame member Mick Malthouse suggested Muir tried to “live up to” his racist “Mad Dog” nickname, and suggested the racist slur “served him well”.

Malthouse’s comments bring to mind the 2020 podcast by veteran AFL media figures Sam Newman, Mike Sheahan and Don Scott, which trivialised Nicky Winmar’s iconic 1993 gesture against racism. They suggested Winmar was merely saying he had “guts”.

In a telling instance of the erasure of the history of racism in the AFL, Sheahan had presumably forgotten that just one week after Winmar’s defiant gesture he had written (in an article about Essendon coach John Worsfold regretting he had “used racist remarks”):

The debate on racism in football came to a head this week after St Kilda’s Nicky Winmar’s on-field protest around racism last Saturday. He lifted his guernsey, pointed at his chest, and told the crowd: ‘I’m black – and I’m proud to be black.’

The AFL frequently uses the image of Nicky Winmar to market itself as an organisation and industry that helps lead the fight against racism in Australia. Yet even its celebration of Sir Doug Nicholls indicates that broader issues, both structural and symbolic, remain unaddressed.

After being racistly excluded from playing VFL by Carlton, Sir Doug starred as a footballer for Northcote in the VFA, then Fitzroy in the VFL. He was good enough to be selected in the Victorian sides of both leagues.

Later Sir Doug coached Northcote in the VFA and the first Aboriginal All Stars football team. He did this while he was the inaugural chairman of the National Aboriginal Sports Foundation, which conducted National Aboriginal Football Carnivals in all capital cities.

Yet somehow he is still not in the AFL Hall of Fame.

Saying ‘sorry’ – but it never leads to change

Newman, Sheahan and Scott ended up apologising to Nicky Winmar, as the AFL industry has done with Muir, and did earlier with Sydney Swans’ dual Brownlow medallist Adam Goodes, who was driven out of the game by racist booing and the conspicuous failure of the AFL to support him. This pattern of denial, then apology, then repeating abuse, then denial again, then another apology, is not unique to corporatised sporting codes. It is emblematic of a broader pattern of Australian corporate, government and non-government organisations defensively making Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and their outcomes “the problem” to be “helped”.

So how should the AFL better redress systemic racism and ensure that Black Lives do Matter? Certainly not by blaming the individual Black workers responsible for institutional white problems.

Read more: The AFL sells an inclusive image of itself. But when it comes to race and gender, it still has a way to go

After the soul-searching with Goodes, the AFL promised it had learned of the need to fully support those people in the AFL industry who are subjected to vile hatred and vilification.

Yet this past week we have seen the leaking of attacks against the league’s only Indigenous executive, who along with other Aboriginal people in the football industry – especially Aboriginal women – shoulder the burden of trying to redress the systemic racism of the football industry. Moreover, there are suggestions the league is also reducing the financial investment and support provided in the diversity area (along with curtailing the freedom of those involved).

And the AFL executive remains largely white and male. It is telling that, as the league lurches from crisis to crisis regarding racism, it is the Indigenous leader of “inclusion and social policy” whose position is under threat. This is also made worse by lateral violence from otherwise dis-empowered voices. That the messenger becomes attacked is indicative of a culturally unsafe organisation.

At the same time, Eddie McGuire continues to not only be president of Collingwood, but to hold great power within the AFL media, despite his history of racist comments and other “gaffes”.

What kinds of culturally safe work environments can Aboriginal nurses, doctors, policymakers, teachers or indeed AFL players expect from their workplaces? And where are the unions, businesses and governments that should be demanding accreditation and accountability systems for anti-racist workplaces? Where are the investments in something other than colourfully designed guernseys and displays of cultural pride – critical though these are?

Read more: How COVID caused chaos for cricket – and may force a rethink of all sport broadcasting deals

An undiagnosed crisis of values is afoot. When we think of those young, vulnerable men and women in the arena and in the locker-rooms, and the fans and sponsors and controllers of the industry – all desperate for belonging, ceremony and triumph, we think perhaps they could learn something from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as the custodians of 60,000 years of science and deep belonging.

There are organisations and industries undertaking strategic efforts at decolonisation. We implore the AFL and other industries to join that effort, because it is good for business and good for our grandchildren. Why not use the crises as signposts to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander brilliance and success, and their value to all?

Put simply, Black Peoples do not represent an issue of diversity, but one of sovereignty.

– ref. The AFL has moved the grand final from Melbourne for the first time – but it has a far more pressing issue – https://theconversation.com/the-afl-has-moved-the-grand-final-from-melbourne-for-the-first-time-but-it-has-a-far-more-pressing-issue-145184

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Magdalene Montgomery, NHMRC CDF Fellow, Senior Research Fellow, Head Metabolic Crosstalk Laboratory, University of Melbourne

A newly discovered protein produced by the liver, and which helps to control blood sugar levels, could potentially revolutionise treatment for type 2 diabetes.

Our research, published today in Science Translational Medicine, found that injecting this protein, called SMOC1, into diabetic mice helped them control their blood glucose much more easily.

We have also engineered a long-lasting form of SMOC1 which, if it works the same way in humans as in mice, would only need to be injected once a week, rather than given daily as is the case for many current diabetes medications.

Our results in mice suggest SMOC1 is more effective than metformin, the current frontline drug for type 2 diabetes, in improving blood glucose control and insulin sensitivity. It’s also without the risk of dangerously low blood sugar associated with current drugs.

Most of us have friends, family members or colleagues with type 2 diabetes. This is not surprising, given the disease affects more than 400 million people worldwide, and almost one million in Australia alone.

Type 2 diabetes is also closely linked to obesity, and with the reported incidence of obesity growing (more than two billion people worldwide are overweight or obese), it is forecast 578 million adults will have diabetes by 2030, and 700 million by 2045.

People with diabetes have many complications that can impair their quality of life and reduce their life expectancy. A major problem for people with type 2 diabetes is high blood glucose, which if left unchecked and untreated, can cause the development of many serious health problems:

Almost every second person with diabetes experiences a mental illness, such depression or anxiety.

Reducing blood glucose levels before any sign of diabetes damage is evident can help thwart this silent and underestimated killer.

Read more: A disease that breeds disease: why is type 2 diabetes linked to increased risk of cancer and dementia?

Current diabetes medications aren’t good enough

A healthy diet and exercise are the first lines of treatment for diabetes. But this has limited effectiveness in reducing blood glucose, particularly as the disease progresses. So it ultimately becomes necessary to use drugs to control blood glucose.

There are a range of drugs available to maintain blood glucose levels. The most common first-choice drug is metformin, which is prescribed to more than 120 million people worldwide. While metformin is generally safe and effective, it frequently causes gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhoea and flatulence.

All diabetes medications, without exception, have either limited effectiveness or unpleasant side effects. Many can also potentially cause very low blood sugar (hypoglycemia), which can cause shakiness, anxiety, sweating, chills, lightheadedness, confusion and, in severe cases, coma or even death.

Insulin is used to treat type 2 diabetes typically later in disease progression, after other anti-hyperglycemic medications become less effective at managing blood glucose levels.

So, we can see there is an urgent need to develop new approaches to treat patients with this disease.

The next generation of diabetes therapies

Our discovery of SMOC1, which is naturally produced by the liver and is released into the blood when glucose levels are high, could offer a new way to control blood glucose.

We initially discovered SMOC1 as a protein that was released from mouse liver cells (hepatocytes). Its release increased when liver cells accumulated excess fat.

We further found SMOC1 levels in the blood to be reduced in people that are insulin resistant (pre-diabetic). Based on our animal studies and studies using human liver cells, we anticipate SMOC1 could be effective in people with type 2 diabetes, whether advanced or newly diagnosed. SMOC1 could make daily medications a thing of the past, boosting a patient’s quality of life.

Given the prevalence of type 2 diabetes, this would help reduce the public health burden of the disease, with patients potentially needing fewer hospital visits and shorter hospital stays.

Read more: Weekly Dose: metformin, the diabetes drug developed from French lilac

What happens next? We will need to test SMOC1 in humans, and enlist the help of the pharmaceutical industry to help develop this potential new therapy.

With the right support, SMOC1 could move to human trials within six to eight years, helping us get closer to reducing the global public health toll of type 2 diabetes and obesity in general.

– ref. Weekly injection could treat type 2 diabetes, new enzyme discovery suggests – https://theconversation.com/weekly-injection-could-treat-type-2-diabetes-new-enzyme-discovery-suggests-145312

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rita Krishnamurthi, Associate Professor (cerebrovascular epidemiology), Auckland University of Technology

Stroke is the third highest cause of death in New Zealand, after cancer and coronary heart disease. But our new research shows very few people are aware of the risk, particularly in Pasifika communities – despite being much more likely to have an early stroke.

Each year, about 9,000 New Zealanders have a stroke and according to the latest data, 2,322 died of stroke in 2016. Just over half of the people who survive a stroke live with ongoing health impacts.

Our study, based on a random national sample of 400 people, shows only 1.5% identified stroke as a common cause of death. In contrast, 37% identified heart disease and 33% identified cancer as common causes of death.

Our research is unique in that it recruited a group of participants who represent New Zealand’s ethnic groups. It shows people from Pasifika communities have the lowest stroke awareness, despite being at higher risk than the general population.

Recognising stroke symptoms and risk factors

The research also shows around 43% of people surveyed did not believe they could tell if a person was having a stroke.

The most common symptoms of stroke are:

• the sudden onset of face drooping on one side

• arm weakness, especially if one-sided

• speech difficulty

• complete or partial loss of vision on one side

• swallowing difficulties

• acute confusion or memory loss

• unusually severe, abrupt headaches.

While the majority responded correctly to stroke symptoms, a large proportion (45-70%) also responded “yes” to unrelated symptoms, such as chest pain.

Read more: Coronavirus may be increasing risk of stroke – doctors on the frontline witness new pattern

Awareness of stroke risk factors was also low. There is clear evidence that stroke is highly preventable. Ten potentially modifiable risk factors are associated with around 90% of strokes.

Risk factors include high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking, low levels of physical activity, and a diet low in fresh fruits and vegetables. Without any prompting, only 30% of people identified two or more risk factors for stroke.

People identifying as Pasifika or Māori recognised fewer stroke symptoms compared to European New Zealanders, and Pasifika people were 58% less likely to correctly identify risk factors. This is an important finding because our earlier research highlights that age-standardised rates of stroke are 30-60% higher for Pasifika and Māori, with an onset 15 years earlier compared to European New Zealanders.

A Pasifika person in New Zealand is twice as likely to die of a stroke as a European New Zealander. That disproportionately high stroke risk, combined with lower awareness about strokes and their warning signs, means New Zealand needs to develop more language and culturally specific education material, as well as better methods of delivery.

Stroke rates in younger people on the rise

In our study, higher incomes and education were both associated with better stroke awareness, and this is similar to findings in other developed countries such as Spain. People in middle-income households were twice as likely to correctly identify stroke risk factors as those on low incomes.

People for whom English is a second language, or who don’t speak it at all, are further disadvantaged. If we want to improve stroke prevention, we need to develop better communication strategies to address language gaps in understanding that stroke is avoidable.

Globally and in New Zealand, the number of people having strokes and dying from them is increasing because people are living longer and are more exposed to risk factors, including more sedentary lifestyles.

For the first time, over the past decade we’ve started to see an increase in the rate of younger people having strokes. This is of concern. It means more people are living longer with disabilities caused by a stroke and experience growing health and financial stress themselves as well as in their families.

Given that stroke is highly preventable, we call for better access to population-wide strategies, available to people at all levels of risk of stroke. Existing strategies are mostly aimed at people at moderate to high risk of cardiovascular diseases, including stroke.

This so-called “high-risk” strategy leaves out most people at risk, while those in the high-risk categories often lack the knowledge and motivation to address their individual lifestyle risks.

Read more: New blood pressure guidelines may make millions anxious that they’re at risk of heart disease

Preventing strokes will cut the risk of other deadly diseases

Population-wide strategies aimed at stroke prevention would also help prevent other major non-communicable diseases with similar risk factors, including coronary heart disease, many types of cancers and even some types of dementia.

The free Stroke Riskometer app can assess an individual’s risk of stroke, inform them about their personal risk factors and provide information about symptoms. Free blood pressure checks provided by the New Zealand Stroke Foundation throughout the country help raise awareness of the most important modifiable risk factors for stroke.

The economic cost of stroke is enormous, with an estimate of NZ$1.1 billion for 2020, increasing to NZ$1.7 billion by 2038.

The high health, social and economic burden of stroke on New Zealand – and its disproportionate impact on Māori and Pasifika communities – needs to be addressed urgently. The lower level of awareness in these groups highlights we need to deliver information that is tailored and delivered by culturally competent community workers.

We also need to complement these steps with improved access to affordable healthy foods, preventative primary healthcare, and support at individual and community levels to improve health and lifestyle.

– ref. Most New Zealanders don’t know how deadly strokes are – claiming 2,300 lives a year and rising – https://theconversation.com/most-new-zealanders-dont-know-how-deadly-strokes-are-claiming-2-300-lives-a-year-and-rising-144576

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hayley Geyle, Research Assistant, Charles Darwin University

Action came too late for the Christmas Island forest skink, despite early warnings of significant declines. It was lost from the wild before it was officially listed as “threatened”, and the few individuals brought into captivity died soon after.

Australia is home to about 10% of all known reptile species — the largest number of any country in the world. But many of our reptiles are at risk of the same fate as the Christmas Island forest skink: extinction.

In new research published today, we identified the 20 terrestrial snakes and lizards (collectively known as “squamates”) at greatest risk of extinction in the next two decades, assuming no changes to current conservation management.

While all 20 species meet international criteria to be officially listed as “threatened”, only half are protected under Australian environmental legislation— the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. This needs urgent review.

Many of these reptiles receive little conservation action, but most of their threats can be ameliorated. By identifying the species at greatest risk of extinction, we can better prioritise our recovery efforts — we know now what will be lost if we don’t act.

Six species more likely than not to go extinct

Our research team — including 27 reptile experts from universities, zoos, museums and government organisations across the country — identified six species with greater than 50% likelihood of extinction by 2040.

This includes two dragons, one blind snake and three skinks. Experts rated many others as having a 30-50% likelihood of extinction over the next 20 years.

More than half (55%) of the 20 species at greatest risk occur in Queensland. Three live on islands: two on Christmas Island and one on Lancelin Island off the Western Australian coast.

Two more species are found in Western Australia, while the Northern Territory, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria and New South Wales each have one species.

Read more: Australia’s smallest fish among 22 at risk of extinction within two decades

Each of the 20 species at greatest risk occur in a relatively small area, which partly explains the Queensland cluster — many species in that state naturally have very small distributions.

Most of the top 20 occupy a total range of fewer than 20 square kilometres, so could be lost to a single catastrophic event, such as a large bushfire.

So why are they dying out?

Reptile species are declining on a global scale, and this is likely exacerbated by climate change. In Australia, where more than 90% of our species occur nowhere else in the world, the most threatened reptiles are at risk for two main reasons: they have very small distributions, and ongoing, unmitigated threats.

The Cape Melville leaf-tailed gecko meets this brief perfectly. This large and spectacular species was only discovered in 2013, on a remote mountain range on Cape York. It’s threatened by virtue of its very small distribution and population size, and by climate change warming and drying its upland habitat.

Habitat loss is also a major threat for the top 20 species. Australia’s most imperilled reptile, the Victoria grassland earless dragon, used to be relatively common in grasslands in and around Melbourne. But the grasslands this little dragon once called home have been extensively cleared for agriculture and urban development, and now cover less than 1% of their original extent.

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

Little conservation attention

For most reptile species, there has been less conservation work to address the declines, partly because reptiles have historically received less scientific attention than birds or mammals.

We also still don’t fully understand just how many species there are in Australia. New reptile species are being scientifically described at an average rate of 15 per year (a higher rate than for other vertebrate groups) and many new reptiles are already vulnerable to extinction at the time of discovery.

To make matters worse, few reptiles in Australia are well-monitored. Without adequate monitoring, we have a poor understanding of population trends and the impacts of threats. This means species could slip into extinction unnoticed.

Reptiles also lack the public and political profile that helps generate recovery support for other, (arguably) more charismatic Australian threatened animals — such as koalas and swift parrots — leading to little resourcing for conservation.

Lessons from the past

Only one Australian reptile, the Christmas Island forest skink, is officially listed as extinct, but we have most probably lost others before knowing they exist. Without increased resourcing and management intervention, many more Australian reptiles could follow the same trajectory.

But it’s not all bad news. The pygmy bluetongue skink was once thought to be extinct until a chance discovery kick-started a long conservation and research program.

Animals are now being taken from the wild and relocated to new areas to establish more populations, signifying that positive outcomes are possible when informed by good science.

And the very restricted distributions of most of the species identified here should allow for targeted and effective recovery efforts.

By identifying the species at greatest risk, we hope to give governments, conservation groups and the community time to act to prevent further extinctions before it’s too late. Neglect should no longer be the default response for our fabulous reptile fauna.

Read more: A hidden toll: Australia’s cats kill almost 650 million reptiles a year

– ref. New research reveals these 20 Australian reptiles are set to disappear by 2040 – https://theconversation.com/new-research-reveals-these-20-australian-reptiles-are-set-to-disappear-by-2040-145385

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa Mundy, Research Fellow, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

Children aged 8 and 9 who watched more than two hours of TV a day or spent more than one hour a day on a computer had lower scores than their peers on reading and numeracy at ages 10 and 11, our study has found.

Our results, published in PLOS ONE, were collected as part of the Childhood to Adolescence Transition Study (CATS) based at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.

We found children who watched TV two hours per day at 8 and 9 years of age performed lower in reading two years later compared with children who had watched little TV. This was equivalent to the loss of a third of a year in learning. There was no impact of watching TV on numeracy.

Children who used a computer for at least one hour per day had a similar loss in numeracy scores two years later compared with their peers. There was no association between computer use and reading.

In contrast, we found no links between playing video games and children’s learning.

Although much has been written about the consequences of digital media use for kids’ physical and mental health, little attention has been paid to its potential impact on education.

How we conducted our study

The Childhood to Adolescence Transition Study (CATS) includes 1,239 children. These children entered the study in 2012 when they were 8 years old.

For our study, we used information collected across the first three years of CATS when the children were 8 to 11 years old. We asked parents to report on their child’s use of TV (including streaming on the computer), computer use (for email, school work, internet access and chat) and video games.

We obtained information about the academic scores by linking with NAPLAN, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy.

In our analyses, we took into account the child’s age, gender, earlier emotional and behavioural problems and their socioeconomic status. We also accounted for previous academic performance, which is important because children struggling with school work may choose to use more media.

Read more: Stop worrying about screen ‘time’. It’s your child’s screen experience that matters

The time children spend using electronic media tends to increase in late primary school (from around age 10) and with the move to secondary school. During these years children typically have more control over the types of media they use.

Academic problems often first emerge during these years too, predicting school dropout and longer-term academic performance.

At ages 8 to 9 and 10 to 11, around 40% of children watched more than two hours of TV a day.

Around 17% of 8 to 9 year olds used a computer for more than an hour a day — two years later, this had almost doubled to 30%.

One in four 8 to 9 year olds played video games for more than one hour a day — this rose to one in three in 10 to 11 year olds.

We also looked at the short-term effect of using media on learning. Children aged 10 to 11 who watched more than two hours of TV or used a computer for more than an hour a day had lower scores in numeracy compared with their peers (but none on reading) — equivalent to the loss of a third of a year of learning.

These findings remained even when accounting for prior media use. There was no evidence of short-term links between video games and academic performance.

These results suggest it is cumulative (or long-term) TV use that is linked with effects on reading rather than short-term.

We don’t have all the answers

This study doesn’t answer all the questions about electronic media and children’s learning. Because we relied on parents to report on their children’s media use, we don’t know as much about how and why children were using media heavily. This is significant because actively engaging with and producing content rather than just passively viewing media, is likely to be positive compared with just passively viewing media.

This will continue to be important as children get older and start to use social media more (most social media accounts specifying users must be at least 13 years old). Using social media to create and post material online, as well as connecting with friends can bring mental health benefits.

Read more: TikTok can be good for your kids if you follow a few tips to stay safe

This may also explain why heavy use of television, which is passive, predicted poor learning but there were no effects when it came to gaming, which is an active use. Our study didn’t capture how computers were used but browsing the internet and watching online videos are also passive activities, possibly explaining the link between computer use and learning.

Other possible reasons for the link between heavy TV and computer use and learning could be because they reduce time spent doing other activities such as physical activity, sleep or homework. They also have the potential to diminish concentration.

What our study means

Before the pandemic, electronic media use was already the most popular leisure-time activity for 7 to 18 year olds but the pandemic has meant children now spend around 50% more time with screens.

Electronic media have been essential for us all in coping with the pandemic. It allows us to work from home, access information and services, and maintain relationships with family and friends. For children, it has meant being able to continue their education through lockdowns and school closures.

Yet, our findings highlight the challenges for parents and teachers in guiding children in their use of electronic media. For parents, a family media plan is a useful tool where they can set limits on use, rules around when and where devices can be used, and help a child select quality content where they are more actively engaged.

Read more: The coronavirus lockdown is forcing us to view ‘screen time’ differently. That’s a good thing

Not all media use is the same in terms of benefits and risks. With active use, electronic media can become tools to create, to connect and to learn, bringing great benefits. However, where electronic media takes on merely a childminding role, poorer health, social and emotional development, and learning seem likely to follow.

– ref. 2 hours of TV a day in late childhood linked to lower test scores later – https://theconversation.com/2-hours-of-tv-a-day-in-late-childhood-linked-to-lower-test-scores-later-145095

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

The anger and outrage expressed by school leaders and teacher unions towards Green Party co-leader James Shaw’s announcement of a government grant of NZ$11.7 million to the private Green School New Zealand comes at a time of financial high anxiety.

Ordinarily, school funding is seen largely as an educational decision. This recent decision was justified on the basis of its potential contribution to the local economy as part of the government’s NZ$3 billion “shovel-ready” projects fund.

But the debate following Shaw’s announcement – as associate finance minister – shows educational, environmental and economic values coming into conflict.

Public vs private

The criticisms from educators are that this decision conflicts with values we hold dear in New Zealand, especially the value of equity in education. Even the Green Party sees it as a violation of its own education policy, which says “public funding for private schools” should be phased out.

In the face of criticism, Shaw felt it necessary to explain the decision and apologise. But as yet the grant has not been withdrawn from the private school at Oakura, near New Plymouth in Taranaki.

These kinds of conflicts of democracy interest me, particularly when they occur in the education sector between what are usually considered public and private interests.

They show up how difficult it is to spend state revenue on education in the name of the public good.

Read more: What do students need in the age of lockdown learning? Early lessons from New Zealand’s online frontline

According to the co-chair of the New Plymouth Principals’ Association, Richard Anderson, it is for the good of the public to distribute resources equitably.

The decision in favour of Green School New Zealand was an attempt by government to equalise distribution of funding within a local community, and was not made in consideration of schooling.

But it has come unstuck in the polarising debates between public and private education.

The public good

The problem is that education viewed through a lens where public=good and private=bad is too simple.

What is in the public interest is unclear because public education has become so entangled with private interests, and economic concerns take precedence in all aspects of social life.

Instead of painting every decision with a similar brush and calling out any state resourcing of private sector schooling, we might take a more refined view of, ask questions about, and make demands on what is in the public interest.

Can schools that sit outside the public sector contribute to a public good?

Or does having access restricted by school fees cancel out their commitment to the public values of a democracy and their capacity to contribute to the public good through equality of opportunity and equitable distribution of resources, or, as in the case of Green School, through nurturing the environment?

Private education

A student introduced me to Green School New Zealand during a lecture on my study of private schools in England.

In my study, I wanted to know to what extent did private sector schools present themselves as contributors to democracy. This was after encountering schools in both New Zealand and England that were described as democratic but were not mainstream, state-funded schools.

The student saw similarity between Green School and the private schools I was interested in because it was in the private sector, even though its educational philosophy was to do good in the world.

In a report by the World Economic Forum about schools of the future, the Green School model, which started in Bali in 2008, is described as operating through a global citizenship and sustainability lens.

When I first looked up Green School – and at the time the New Zealand school was not yet open – I was struck by the dissonance between the location of Green School Bali and the pupils it attracted. The school attracts students from around the world rather than from the local community.

What’s good for the community

My larger and more recent project looks at examples of education where private and public interests interact.

When economic and educational values interact, there are always compromises. That is the case whether we are talking about for-profit democratic schools or state-funded schools influenced by market values like competition and efficiency.

While their contribution to the public good is likely lessened by their need to pursue profit, it is an oversimplification to say schools such as Green School New Zealand do not contribute to the public good at all because they are situated in the private sector.

Distinctions between public and private sector schooling are especially too blunt for a government dealing with the complexity of supporting the resources of a locality in a global pandemic.

Read more: Young New Zealanders are turning off reading in record numbers – we need a new approach to teaching literacy

In ordinary times if the school acts on its philosophy it might contribute towards global sustainability and make a difference to its community.

The school might even forge good relations with the local iwi and community through immersion in the locality, even though my prior research suggests this is unlikely.

But now that the New Zealand government has decided to allocate funds to Green School New Zealand the school does have an opportunity to contribute to the public good through honouring its funding agreement.

That is, the government must hold the school to account and it must now create 200 jobs in its local community. This is the least members of the watching public can demand.

– ref. We need public value from govt funding of the private Green School New Zealand – https://theconversation.com/we-need-public-value-from-govt-funding-of-the-private-green-school-new-zealand-145441

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Stanley, Adjunct Professor, Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies, University of Sydney Business School, University of Sydney

Up to now the focus has been on managing “hot spots” in the COVID lockdowns of Melbourne and Victoria. We have identified four key factors that might help explain why we see high rates of COVID-19 cases in some parts of the city. Our analysis also suggests a phased easing of lockdown could start with reopening “cold spots” with few or no cases of COVID-19.

And reopening the state as soon as reasonably possible is of concern from many perspectives. The federal government and business groups have led calls to ease lockdowns.

Mental health experts are also very concerned about an impending mental health crisis. Others are warning about the growth in family violence. There are also growing concerns about the gap in education of young children and their mental health risks arising from isolation.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has expressed frustration at closures of schools and state and territory borders. He has asked the national cabinet to agree on a definition of hot spots used to justify closures. This article raises a related idea with a focus on Melbourne: rather than waiting for hot spots to fade out, cold spots could possibly be reopened earlier.

Some parts are hit much harder than others

Our recent paper highlighted the wide disparities in numbers of active COVID cases per 1,000 population across Melbourne. Local government areas (LGAs) in the north and west have had much higher numbers, relative to population, than those in the south and east.

Read more: Mapping COVID-19 spread in Melbourne shows link to job types and ability to stay home

The chart below shows an encouraging picture. As active case numbers fell between August 14 and 28, the north-west/south-east disparity narrowed. Numbers fell a little faster in the north and west.

However, the 16 lowest case rates (as of August 28) remained in the south and east. The nine highest were in the north and west.

A continued fall in case numbers across Melbourne will eventually justify reopening across the city. But the current disparity between north-west and south-east suggests reopening at different times in different places is a live option. Cold spots – groups of LGAs with the lowest case rates – could open sooner.

What factors might explain the divide?

Seeking to gain insights that might explain the differences between areas, we identified 30 variables for which census, population health, unemployment or other public data are readily available. A number of these variables were significantly correlated with active case numbers.

We found positive correlations (active case numbers increased along with these factors) for:

• population

• population growth rate from 2011 to 2016

• persons per dwelling

• unemployment rate

• adult smokers

• fair or poor health.

We found negative correlations (active numbers fell) for:

• English-only is spoken at home

• population aged 80 or over

• socioeconomic status, as shown by the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ SEIFA Index.

Read more: Your local train station can predict health and death

Four variables explained 63.9% of the variance in active case numbers by LGA as at August 14. Factors such as the unemployment rate, SEIFA Index and fair/poor health dropped out, as these were significantly correlated with other retained variables.

The four retained variables were:

• resident population – a larger LGA population is associated with more active case numbers

• percentage speaking English-only at home – a lower proportion is associated with more active cases, emphasising the importance of language-appropriate COVID messaging

• percentage of the population aged 80 and over – a larger proportion is associated with fewer active cases, suggesting good risk awareness in this vulnerable age group (although the impacts in many aged care homes have been shocking)

• percentage of smokers – a higher rate is associated with larger active case numbers, perhaps suggesting respiratory vulnerability and/or lower risk awareness of this group.

As active case numbers have come down, the predicted impact of each of these four variables has also reduced. In combination, however, they still explain a similar proportion of the variance in active case numbers by LGA as in the peak period.

Interestingly, the effect of English-only spoken at home on the variance in active case numbers declined substantially between August 14 and 28. This trend suggests some success in language-appropriate messaging over that time.

Read more: Multilingual Australia is missing out on vital COVID-19 information. No wonder local councils and businesses are stepping in

Staged reopening poses issues for equity

Of the four included variables, the effect of the proportion of adult smokers has shown the smallest relative improvement as active case numbers have fallen. At LGA level, adult smoking is highly correlated with unemployment rate (+), reported fair/poor health (+), productivity (-) and the SEIFA Index (-).

These linkages suggest the burden of spatial disadvantage is having a lingering impact on active case numbers. As a result, a staged re-opening would pose equity concerns.

The growing economic costs and adverse impacts of lockdown on many already disadvantaged people underline the importance of opening up areas in Melbourne and Victoria as soon as possible. The costs are both personal and societal. A failure to halt the decline in well-being will have continuing serious consequences, adding to inequality in Australia.

Read more: Why coronavirus will deepen the inequality of our suburbs

Early reopening of parts of Melbourne with the lowest active case numbers, which are concentrated in the south and east, is a policy option. However, action must then be taken to avoid reinforcing entrenched disadvantage in the north and west.

Early commitments by all levels of government to implementing the wide-ranging plans in the recently released North and West Melbourne City Deal Plan 2020-2040 would help. Good starting points for reducing disadvantage include upgrading mixed-use activity centres across the city’s north and west and immediately improving medium-capacity transit services in the Suburban Rail Loop corridor.

– ref. Open COVID ‘cold spots’ first: a way out of lockdown for Melbourne – https://theconversation.com/open-covid-cold-spots-first-a-way-out-of-lockdown-for-melbourne-145387

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Darius Sepehri, Doctoral Candidate, Comparative Literature, Religion and History of Philosophy, University of Sydney

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

Alfred Tennyson’s 1833 poem “Ulysses”, was, he tells us, written under a sense of loss — “that all had gone by but that still life must be fought out to the end.”

Dealing with the inertia created by grief, and the will needed to resist and move ahead, the poem perfectly expresses what St Paul called the “hope against hope”. Despite the heroism of the famous last line, (“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”), the poem’s defiance only makes sense in the light of the anguish animating it.

Tennyson’s book-length elegy In Memoriam AHH, published in 1850, once among the most popular poems in English, came out of the same sense that the whole world was over — not a world but the world — and yet life must be lived, somehow.

I experience In Memoriam as a soulful and provocative artwork, not a “relevant” one or one merely to be mined for therapeutic consolations.

Despite its formal control and elegance, and what we may hear as dated language, Tennyson’s long poem is tumultuous, chaotic, and not only personal but social, deeply connected with upheavals in Victorian society.

Read more: Ode to the poem: why memorising poetry still matters for human connection

Passion

Both Victorian and modern in style and composition, In Memoriam uses extraordinarily passionate language, tightly compressed. Its passion is directed by Tennyson at another man, his friend Arthur Hallam, a brilliant philosopher. Tennyson and Hallam met at university. We know their first encounters were magnetic and catalysing.

When Hallam died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in Italy in 1833, aged 22, it violently changed Tennyson’s life.

Tennyson took 18 years to write In Memoriam. The prologue and epilogue attest to unshakeable faith in Christianity and in life’s continuity. The prologue’s first line addressed to “Strong Son of God, immortal Love”, and the last lines professing the eschatological completion of the world in “one far-off divine event/To which the whole creation moves”, could hardly seem more assured.

And yet. The 131 cantos in between these bookends trace an agonising journey into suffering, doubt, helplessness and the possibility of unredeemed pain that has no meaning or purpose. The rhetorical strength of some of these cantos is such that it puts the orthodox Christian position the poem professes elsewhere in serious question.

The way the poem tries to think through the many grand subjects it raises, such as if God cares for each individual being, creates a meandering journey, now confused, now suddenly clear. This feels right for grief.

The poem spirals around its ideas, rejecting clean linear progression, organised around three Christmas sections (cantos 28, 78, and 104) of heightened feeling. Coming back and back to things, seemingly obsessed, Tennyson speaks of “a loss for ever new”. There is no “closure” of the wound. Can Christ really fill it? The world and its goods cannot.

I’ve committed many parts of In Memoriam to memory, made easier by the poem’s exceptionally memorable language (immortal, melodious phrases like “I loved the weight I had to bear/because it needed help of love”).

The poem’s form, entirely in quatrains of iambic tetrameter rhyming abba, composed in a long, ledger-like diary now kept at the British Museum, aids in memorisation.

Read more: Explainer: poetic metre

I recite a selection of cantos here, and the famous “Ring Out Wild Bells” sequence, which charts a move from devastation to rebirth.

In Memoriam has an almost relentlessly regular meter, meant to recall biological processes such as the beat of the heart and breathing, organic processes that sustain life even as the poet’s being cries that life has ended.

All creation mourns

After Tennyson received a letter telling him Hallam’s remains were coming back by sea to Hallam’s family in England, he wrote the very first part of In Memoriam, calling the ship home: “Sphere all your lights around, above/Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow/ Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now.”

A hypnotic enchantment is created with the ship phosphorescent as it sails at night.

The poem connects something cosmic and transcendent with Tennyson’s own very private, enclosed grief. Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, a film where the death of a young son is juxtaposed with grand existential and metaphysical questions that interrogate God, also aimed for such territory.

Soulful ambiguity

“Dear friend, far off, my lost desire”, cries Tennyson. Today if a man speaks such excessive language of love to another man, we are likely to apply a defined identity or classification.

Read more: Guide to the classics: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the complex life of the ‘poet of America’

Although modern readers may read Tennyson’s excessive professions of love for Hallam as homosexual, the nature of their relationship was unclear to Tennyson himself, and its expressions in keeping with Victorian sentimentality. He would have baulked at our collapsing of an entire world of feelings so complex.

In Memoriam testifies to the ineffability of human experience. Language is inadequate to capture its density and intensity.

Tennyson was protective of the intensity of his feelings: hence the time he took to publish. He avoided the imperative to immediately display. Today we feel immense pressure to respond at once, in public, with clear stances, to make things transparent. Such transparency destroys soulfulness.

What makes our times so hard to bear are not just external circumstances themselves but the common ejection of mystery and suffering from art, and transcendence from consciousness.

In Memoriam dwells with the mysteries of being and death, mounts an impassioned defence of love and friendship, and — perhaps rarest of all — reminds us of something noble in the capacity to suffer for an ideal.

Tennyson’s lavish, excessive passion, his “tarrying with the negative” as Hegel put it, shows us how soulful art stirs us to life and staves off banality — but the cost must be paid.

Tennyson had a deep interest in Persian poetry through his friend Edward Fitzgerald (translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam).

He surely found something in Persian poetry’s insistence that grief and joy are inseparable and that death is not total loss, because nothing we feel passionately and soulfully is truly lost to us.

– ref. ‘A doubtful gleam of solace’: reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam AHH in difficult times – https://theconversation.com/a-doubtful-gleam-of-solace-reading-tennysons-in-memoriam-ahh-in-difficult-times-143614

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vincent Ho, Senior Lecturer and clinical academic gastroenterologist, Western Sydney University

Media reports earlier this week described a Queensland nurse with stomach pains who went on to test positive for COVID-19.

Could stomach pains be another symptom of COVID-19? And if you have stomach pains, should you get tested?

Although we might think of COVID-19 as a respiratory disease, we know it involves the gut. In fact SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, enters our cells by latching onto protein receptors called ACE2. And the greatest numbers of ACE2 receptors are in the cells that line the gut.

COVID-19 patients with gut symptoms are also more likely to develop severe disease. That’s partly because even after the virus has been cleared from the respiratory system, it can persist in the gut of some patients for several days. That leads to a high level of virus and longer-lasting disease.

We also suspect the virus can be transmitted via the faecal-oral route. In other words, the virus can be shed in someone’s poo, and then transmitted to someone else if they handle it and touch their mouth.

Read more: We don’t know for sure if coronavirus can spread through poo, but it’s possible

What type of gut symptoms are we talking about?

A review of more than 25,000 COVID-19 patients found about 18% had gastrointestinal symptoms. The most common was diarrhoea followed by nausea and vomiting. Abdominal pain was considered rare. In another study only about 2% of COVID-19 patients had abdominal pain.

Some people believe COVID-19 causes abdominal pain through inflammation of the nerves of the gut. This is a similar way to how gastroenteritis (gastro) causes abdominal pain.

Another explanation for the pain is that COVID-19 can lead to a sudden loss of blood supply to abdominal organs, such as the kidneys, resulting in tissue death (infarction).

Are gut symptoms recognised?

The US Centers for Disease Control has added diarrhoea, nausea and vomiting to its list of recognised COVID-19 symptoms.

However, the World Health Organisation still only lists diarrhoea as a gastrointestinal COVID-19 symptom.

In Australia, nausea, diarrhoea and vomiting are listed as other COVID-19 symptoms, alongside the classic ones (which include fever, cough, sore throat and shortness of breath). But abdominal pain is not listed.

Advice of symptoms that warrant testing may vary across different states and territories.

How likely is it?

Doctors often use the concept of pre-test probability when working out if someone has a particular disease. This is the chance a person has the disease before we know the test result.

What makes it difficult to determine the pre-test probability for COVID-19 is we don’t know how many people in the community truly have the disease.

We do know, however, COVID-19 in Australia is much less common than in many other countries. This affects the way we view symptoms that aren’t typically associated with COVID-19.

It’s far more common for people’s abdominal pain to be caused by something other than COVID-19. For example, about a quarter of people at some point in their lives are known to suffer from dyspepsia (discomfort or pain in the upper abdomen). But the vast majority of people with dyspepsia do not have COVID-19.

Similarly, irritable bowl syndrome affects about 9% of Australians, and causes diarrhoea. Again, the vast majority of people with irritable bowel syndrome do not have COVID-19.

So how about this latest case?

In the Queensland case, we know the nurse was worried he could have had COVID-19 because he was in close contact with COVID-19 patients.

As he seemed otherwise healthy before developing new abdominal symptoms, and considering he worked on a COVID ward, his pre-test probability was high. Doctors call this a “high index of suspicion” when there is a strong possibility someone may have symptoms due to a disease such as COVID-19.

What does this mean for me?

If you have new gastrointestinal symptoms and you’ve potentially been in contact with someone with COVID-19 or if you also have other classic COVID-19 symptoms (fever, cough, shortness of breath and sore throat) you should definitely get tested.

If you have just gastrointestinal symptoms, you may need to get tested if you’re in a “hotspot” area, or work in a high-risk occupation or industry.

If you have gastrointestinal symptoms alone, without any of these additional risk factors, there is no strong evidence to support testing.

Read more: 8 ways the coronavirus can affect your skin, from COVID toes, to rashes and hair loss

However, if COVID-19 becomes even more common in the community, these symptoms now regarded as uncommon for COVID-19 will become more common.

If you have concerns about any gastrointestinal symptoms, seeing your GP would be sensible. Your GP will provide a balanced assessment based on your medical history and risk profile.

Read more: 4 unusual things we’ve learned about the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic

– ref. Diarrhoea, stomach ache and nausea: the many ways COVID-19 can affect your gut – https://theconversation.com/diarrhoea-stomach-ache-and-nausea-the-many-ways-covid-19-can-affect-your-gut-145440

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

Australia’s recession is the deepest since the Great Depression of the early 1930s.

Nothing else comes close.

The economy shrank an extraordinary 7% in the three months to June – by far the biggest collapse since the Bureau of Statistics began compiling records in 1959.

The previous worst quarterly outcome was minus 2%, in June 1974.

Quarterly percentage change in gross domestic product

It was going to be worse.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told a parliament house press conference that in March his advisers were predicting a collapse three times as big in the June quarter – 20%. In May the forecast was for a June quarter collapse of 10%.

Britain’s economy actually did collapse 20% in the June quarter; the US economy collapsed by nearly 10%.

What staved off a collapse of the order feared was unprecedented government support – more than A$100 billion in JobKeeper and expanded JobSeeker payments alone–enough to actually lift household incomes while 643,000 Australians lost their jobs and many more lost hours.

Contribution of government benefits to household income growth

A better measure of living standards, taking account households and businesses, so-called “real net national disposable income per capita”, fell nonetheless, by a record 8%.

Quarterly percentage change in living standards

Consumer spending fell by even more, an extraordinary 12.7%, in part because lockdowns and caution in the face of COVID-19 provided fewer opportunities to spend.

Given that consumer spending climbed not at all over the three quarters leading up to the June quarter, it meant that household spending fell over the entire financial year, for the first time since records have been kept.

Quarterly change in household final consumption expenditure

Spending on goods was barely hit, while spending on services collapsed 17.6%.

Spending on transport services, a category that encompasses everything from flights to public transport, fell 88%. Spending on accommodation, a category that encompasses tourism, fell 55.7%.

Spending on recreational and cultural services, a category that encompasses sporting events, gambling and performances and cinema admissions, fell 54.5%.

Household spending by category

It meant far more income than usual was saved. During the depths of the global financial crisis, Australia’s household saving ratio climbed to a peak of 10.9% as households squirrelled away one in every ten dollars they earned.

In June they squirrelled away a remarkable 19.7% – one in five dollars that came in the door.

Household saving ratio

The Bureau of Statistics says if household income from special initiatives including early access to super was included, the household income ratio would be even higher. What it calls the “household experience savings ratio” would be 24.8%.

It’s possible to see households saving one in every four dollars as a “glass half full”. Frydenberg does.

He says this never-before-experienced accumulation of savings will be useful in the recovery, giving people the capacity to spend big when restrictions ease and they are better able to spend.

What if we remain unwilling to spend…

That’s assuming people aren’t “scarred” by the experience, left with damaged psyches and unwilling spend, a possibility the Treasurer acknowledges.

He says for the next quarter, the current one that encompasses the three months to the end of September, the Treasury is expecting economic activity to shrink only a little further or no further at all.

A lot depends on how soon Victoria’s Stage 4 restrictions and other restrictions are eased, which means a lot depends on things that are unknowable.

…and businesses unwilling to invest?

The Treasurer will deliver the budget in a little over four weeks’ time.

He said a key part of it will be measures to make it easier for businesses to do business, unlocking “entrepreneurship and innovation” at low cost.

Businesses certainly could invest more. Non-mining business investment was down 9.3% in the quarter. On Tuesday the Reserve Bank made available an extra $57 billion at low cost for banks to advance businesses and households.

But they are only likely to want to invest more when they can see returns.

Read more: Australia won’t recover unless Victoria does too. The federal government must step up

Examining the figures on Wednesday, former Reserve Bank economist Callam Pickering said they showed the economy being held together “with duct tape by JobKeeper and JobSeeker”.

At his press conference, Frydenberg resisted suggestions that he revisit the wind-downs of JobKeeper and the JobSeeker Coronavirus Supplement due to take place over the next six months.

But the Victorian situation is far worse than when he announced the schedule on July 21.

He might find there’s a case for more duct tape, for a while longer.

– ref. Six graphs that explain Australia’s recession – https://theconversation.com/six-graphs-that-explain-australias-recession-145445

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Daley, Senior Fellow, Grattan Institute

It’s become a truism of Australian politics that important economic reform peaked in the 1980s and 1990s.

Sometimes the early years of the Howard government in the late 1990s are given credit as well.

This Grattan Institute map of important reforms illustrates the story.

Important economic policy reforms in Australia

Indeed, it looks like Australian governments have merely ‘improved’ at unwinding the reforms of their predecessors, and the reforms they propose for themselves.

But it’s possible that this is all just the rosy-hued memories of former politicians, public servants, and journalists.

It might also be that today there are fewer policy reforms worth doing – perhaps most of the big ones have already been done.

To test whether previous governments really were better at reform than more recent governments, we would need a running list of reforms proposed in advance, so we could see what proportion were adopted.

Between 1972 and 2018, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development produced 31 Economic Surveys of Australia – roughly one every 18 months.

Each publication put forward reforms that the OECD believed would increase economic growth and living standards.

The good old days were better

Our analysis of the full series finds that between 1984 and 2001 the overwhelming bulk of these recommendations were taken up by the Hawke and Keating governments, and by the Howard government in its first two terms.

But from roughly 2003 onwards, the record is a lot more patchy: many more of the reforms recommended by the OECD have been either rejected, only partially implemented, or (in the case of carbon pricing) implemented and then unwound.

Fate of OECD Economic Survey recommendations

Policies that the OECD recommended but which ran into the sand include reducing the gap between the company tax and top personal income tax rates, implementing a mining resource rent tax, reviewing negative gearing, creating competitive neutrality among Australian ports, aligning the eligibility ages for superannuation and the age pension, including more of the value of owner-occupied housing when calculating eligibility for the age pension, and raising Newstart.

Read more: Grattan Orange Book. What the election should be about: priorities for the next government

A number of other proposed reforms continue to sit in the too-hard basket, including increasing the rate and coverage of the goods and services tax, swapping stamp duties for property taxes, congestion charging for roads, and the use of smart meters for time-of-day electricity pricing.

An imperfect measure, that tells us something

As a means to evaluate the history of reform, the OECD Economic Surveys aren’t perfect, but they’re guide.

It’s true that the scope and number of OECD recommendations has expanded over time, but that expansion was already underway during the Hawke/Keating and Howard eras.

And it’s arguable that these days, the OECD recommends smaller reforms – it certainly recommended many more between 1997 and 2010.

It’s likely that the OECD’s recommendations are partly influenced by the views of the government of the day. But many recommendations have been suggested under one government and implemented by the next.

Read more: One year on from the carbon price experiment, the rebound in emissions is clear

And while OECD recommendations aren’t gospel, many policy experts support most of them. For instance, all of the policies that are on the OECD’s continuing wish-list are also advocated by the Grattan Institute.

Our review of what happened after the OECD surveys is broadly consistent with popular wisdom, or at least the recollections of old men (usually men) that the good old days really were better.

And it is consistent with work in progress by Alphabeta reviewing the history of Australian economic reform.

Read more: Grattan Institute Orange Book 2018. State governments matter, vote wisely

Our review also shows that it often takes a long run-up of research, advocacy, and detailing before a government implements a major reform. Many reforms were only implemented after sitting on the slate for well over a decade, including the goods and services tax, lower tariffs, a more flexible award system, lower company tax, and competition in utility industries. Reforms often require patient advocacy.

It’s hard to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Australia has got worse at it. But our review of the OECD’s recommendations for Australia over the past 48 years is consistent with the oft-cited view that governments in the most recent 20 years have rejected many more significant reforms than governments in the 20 years before them.

There’s plenty still on the slate for the 20 years to come.

– ref. When it comes to economic reform, the old days really were better. We checked – https://theconversation.com/when-it-comes-to-economic-reform-the-old-days-really-were-better-we-checked-145296

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael William Blissenden, Professor of Law, University of New England

Most graduates leaving university today do so with a massive debt hanging over their heads. They will take many years to repay their accrued HECS-HELP debt through the taxation system. There will be little relief for these graduates as the government has slammed the door shut on the tax deductibility of these repayments against the income earned.

The government also intends, for new students from 2021, to increase the amount many students pay towards their education. Popular courses such as humanities, commerce and law will cost them A$14,500 a year. A combined commerce/law or arts/law course, which are the most popular study choice for aspiring lawyers, will cost them over A$70,000.

The government constantly reminds us government-supported students’ HECS-HELP debts are deferred. Only start when they reach the annual income threshold (A$45,881 for 2019-20) do they start repaying their debt.

Read more: Lowering the HELP repayment threshold is an easy target, but not the one we should aim for

The underlying rationale is that students are receiving an interest-free loan, as the HECS-HELP debt is only indexed to inflation (increases in CPI, the cost of living). HECS-HELP provides eligible students with a loan to pay their student contribution for a Commonwealth-supported place in their chosen course.

Another scheme exists for those students not eligible for a Commonwealth-supported place. This is called FEE-HELP. These students receive a loan to pay tuition fees for units of study in their chosen course. A FEE-HELP debt is also indexed each year.

Graduates repay these HELP debts if and when their earnings rise above the threshold.

However, as explained below, only graduates with a FEE-HELP debt can claim a tax deduction on their repayments.

Read more: Students’ low financial literacy makes understanding fees, loans, debt difficult

Two student loan schemes, two different rules

The usual rule for taxpayers is that expenses incurred in earning assessable income are deductible. Taxpayers can claim self-education expenses, which includes undertaking university courses, where they are able to show the study is connected with their income-earning activity. These deductible expenses include university fees or repayments of loans from the government under the FEE-HELP scheme.

In contrast to FEE-HELP repayments being deductible, student debt under the HECS-HELP scheme has specifically been rejected as a tax deduction under section 26-20 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997. These students are unable to claim a tax deduction for their university fees regardless of whether they are earning relevant income during their course or when they get a job as a graduate after completing their course.

Graduates start paying income tax on amounts above the normal tax-free threshold of A$18,200 but may not actually earn above the HECS-HELP threshold amount. On this basis graduates may be paying their fair share of tax on their income, but their HECS-HELP debt continues to grow over time. When graduates reach the threshold, they start paying both income tax and repayments of their HECS-HELP debt. In short, there is no tax relief for graduates.

The inequity between graduates and other taxpayers becomes clearer when you consider the additional self-education expenses these other taxpayers can claim. If already working within their chosen job and studying part-time, but not confined by the HECS-HELP tag, they can claim for textbooks, student union fees, computer expenses, internet costs for online learning and stationery.

Crucially, they can also claim for repayments of FEE-HELP debt. Once they reach an income threshold, this debt is also repaid through the taxation system.

Read more: Five things senators (and everyone else) should know about changes to HELP debts

Treat all self-education expenses equally

It is time to revisit the tax deductibility of HECS-HELP repayments. The current regime is complex, difficult to comprehend and has inbuilt inequities. The basic rule of tax deductibility should apply across the board, regardless of what type of support the government is providing to university students.

If we accept the arguments from the government that full-time students are receiving interest-free loans for their education and that the debt is deferred until they earn above the threshold, then there is an equally strong argument that graduates should then be able to defer, until that time, a tax deduction for the payment.

The general rule that a tax deduction is allowed to a taxpayer for expenses directly incurred in deriving income should apply to all relevant taxpayers. All taxpayers should be treated equally when spending on self-education. There should be no distinction between students receiving different types of HELP from the government.

At the moment undergraduate students tend to receive HECS-HELP while postgraduate students tend to receive FEE-HELP. These postgraduate students can immediately claim their repayments as a deduction in their tax return. This is because postgraduates are normally working in their chosen field and satisfy the necessary link between expense and income earned.

Undergraduate students tend to be studying full-time and working in casual jobs, which are not relevant to their studies. Students in this situation would not be able to claim their fees as a tax deduction regardless of the HECS-HELP tag. It would be equitable to amend the Tax Act to allow graduates to claim deductions for their debt later when they are working in their chosen field.

– ref. Let working graduates claim a tax deduction for their HECS-HELP debt – https://theconversation.com/let-working-graduates-claim-a-tax-deduction-for-their-hecs-help-debt-145027

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jo Caust, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow (Hon), School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

On Tuesday, seven months after the sector closed down in March, applications opened for the government’s COVID-19 arts relief package, named “Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand”, or RISE.

A$75 million will be allocated between 2020 and 2021, but a close read of the criteria for this new funding program raises more questions than it answers.

The recipients will be selected by department officials. Their proposals must be “efficient, effective, economical and ethical”.

And, perhaps most crucially, in the shadow of the “sports rorts”, the NSW “arts rorts”, and the pain felt by the sector during the Brandis era, the final say on where the grants go will be placed in the hands of the federal minister for the arts, Paul Fletcher.

An opaque process

The standard mode for delivering arts funding in Australia is through arms length funding judged by artform peers.

It has been long recognised government arts support should be kept separate from political processes, and arts knowledge – as in fields such as science, medicine or education – is a prerequisite for determining the quality of arts funding applications.

The RISE funding guidelines applications will be assessed by “experienced assessors” from the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications – a department that dropped “arts” from its name this Feburary.

Will these “experienced assessors” have any artform knowledge or experience, or simply be experienced in assessing grants?

The document states the government assessment officials are allowed to consult more widely, including with the Australia Council or State government entities – but this does not imply any peers will be involved in the process.

Further, the officials will only be making “recommendations”, and the minister “decides which grants to approve.”

The arts have an uneasy recent history with arts ministers deciding funding.

In 2015, then minister George Brandis reallocated A$104.7 million from the Australia Council’s funding to fund his own scheme for “excellence”, later named Catalyst.

This did not end well for either the minister or the arts. Brandis lost his job under a new prime minister and Catalyst was retired.

Read more: After the Catalyst arts funding mess, many questions remain

The Australia Council never returned to its pre-Brandis funding allocation.

In New South Wales in 2018, the ABC reported the minister for the arts had interfered in the funding decision process, overruling recommendations and redirecting money to his own favoured projects. And in the lead up to the last NSW state election, more reporting found arts grants were selectively targeted to organisations in Coalition-held seats.

Efficient, effective, economical and ethical

The funding guidelines say projects must represent “value for relevant money”, defined as “an efficient, effective, economical and ethical use of public resources”.

What is “value for money” in the context of the arts? It could be the amount of money requested, the intent of the project, the quality of the people involved, the numbers in a potential audience, or the amount of money that may be earned.

How do you determine “efficiency”? Is a play with a cast of two deemed more “efficient” than a play with a cast of four? Or is a project more “efficient” if it involves no people at all and only involves technical effects?

Is performance “effective” if it can occur over several platforms – live, in audio and in video – and so it has a broader audience impact? Or perhaps that makes it “economical”.

The meaning of “effective” here could be that a performance moves one to tears or to laughter. It has an emotional “effect” on the audience.

The term “ethical” might suggest no animals are hurt during the production – or maybe it is just another way of describing high moral values.

‘Contributing to government objectives’

The conditions for funding note:

Activities must demonstrate that there is a funding need, contribute to job creation, support Australian artists or performers (or their work), provide experiences to audiences, be of a nature that is likely to be popular with Australian audiences, and financial viability.

These are all factors which are hard to argue in an arts grant proposal. There isn’t a formula for producing popular art.

Perhaps of most concern though is that any proposal should be “contributing to government objectives”.

Many arts projects are critical of government objectives and policies. That is the nature of arts practice which takes a critical or different view of the world we live in.

This potential for public criticism by artists has a chequered recent history in Australia. In 2014, Brandis threatened to withdraw government funding from the Sydney Biennale for refusing sponsorship from Serco due to their work in immigration detention.

Read more: We should value the Biennale protest, not threaten arts funding

Welcome, with lingering concerns

Given the impact of the pandemic, the arts in Australia are in a dire situation and the sector needs all the help it can get. But it is important the process for making decisions in arts funding is transparent, ethical, and not subject to any political preferencing or rorting.

While this package is welcome – if not long overdue – the selection criteria suggests an approach that does not serve arts practice well and in fact suggests that, once again, a minister for the arts is exercising his personal largesse and judgement.

The Brandis era resulted in a senate inquiry, a divided arts sector and a significant loss in arts funding.

Let’s hope history isn’t doomed to repeat.

– ref. Too little, too late, too confusing? The funding criteria for the arts COVID package is a mess – https://theconversation.com/too-little-too-late-too-confusing-the-funding-criteria-for-the-arts-covid-package-is-a-mess-145397

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

The West Australian government recently took the extraordinary step of passing legislation to try to stop mining magnate Clive Palmer from collecting about $30 billion in damages from the state.

As Premier Mark McGowan argues, such a hefty bill risks bankrupting WA.

While the so-called “Mineralogy Act” passed state parliament in just two days, it is far from straightforward.

It raises a host of questions that are likely to be tested in courts in the months – and possibly years – ahead.

What is this dispute about?

Palmer is no stranger to litigation. Recently, he has also been fighting the WA government over COVID border closures.

But this particular dispute dates back to 2012 and concerns an iron ore project in the Pilbara.

Read more: Federal Court finds border closures safest way to protect public health in Clive Palmer case

Palmer has argued his development proposals for the Balmoral South iron ore project were unlawfully refused by the previous state government, under former premier Colin Barnett. He is reportedly seeking about $30 billion in damages.

The Mineralogy Act

In mid-August, the state government passed the Mineralogy Act to terminate the damages claims against it.

Before this, Palmer and his companies, including Mineralogy, had been pursuing these claims through arbitration – a dispute resolution process that happens outside the courts. This arbitration was about whether the WA government properly dealt with proposals Palmer’s companies made under a 2002 agreement.

Last week, after the act passed, Palmer declared he would sue McGowan and Attorney-General John Quigley for “contempt of the High Court of Australia”.

This is likely to be one of many salvos in a protracted legal battle.

Does Palmer have a claim for contempt of court?

Contempt of court means acts that interfere with or undermine the authority, performance or dignity of the courts.

The Mineralogy Act seeks to terminate the arbitration for the reported $30 billion claims.

It also invalidates existing arbitral awards, which are decisions determining parties’ rights and liabilities. Given that arbitrations are not court proceedings, these aspects of the act do not establish contempt of court.

However, where a party does not comply with an arbitration award, the award can be registered with the courts and then enforced as if it were a court judgment.

Before the act was passed, Palmer had registered two arbitration awards in the Queensland Supreme Court. The act seeks to remove the basis for these claims. There is precedent that this may constitute contempt of the Queensland court (although contrary to Palmer’s assertions, not the High Court).

However, even if Palmer establishes contempt of the Queensland court, that would not invalidate the Mineralogy Act. Any penalty imposed by the court would also be modest in comparison to the $30 billion damages claim.

Can the WA parliament pass a law that takes away rights without compensation?

Apart from the contempt issue, Palmer may argue the WA parliament cannot pass a law that takes away individual rights without compensation.

In this regard, state laws that take away rights are unusual, but not new.

Read more: The WA government legislated itself a win in its dispute with Clive Palmer — and put itself above the law

The High Court and Queensland and WA supreme courts have previously treated state laws that remove rights of particular persons without just compensation as valid.

While the WA parliament has not previously amended a state agreement with a mining company without consent, this was found to be valid in Queensland. This approach is consistent with the principle that the present parliament can generally amend existing laws.

As a political, rather than legal matter, politicians have found that laws targeting mining rights can be hazardous.

Whether public opinion will ultimately support the Mineralogy Act remains to be seen. But the current popularity of the WA government over its handling of COVID-19 and the potential popularity of “saving” the state’s finances will undoubtedly influence perspectives.

Are parts of the Mineralogy Act unconstitutional?

Palmer may also argue parts of the Mineralogy Act are unconstitutional.

Parliaments can pass laws about matters involved in ongoing legal disputes. They can even target particular cases or parties. But based on Chapter III of the Constitution, they can’t compromise the court’s integrity by telling a court how to decide. This constitutional line is often tricky to draw.

The act does not entirely remove the court’s power to examine the legality of government actions. But it does try to stop courts from giving remedies that are unfavourable to WA.

So, it doesn’t quite tell courts how to decide, but it does restrict what they can do, which is getting into uncertain constitutional territory.

The WA government has described the Mineralogy Act as “unprecedented,” containing a number of measures that are “not usual”.

but Mineralogy and Mr Palmer are not normal and these measures are needed to best protect the interests of the state and the community.

However, even necessary laws must be constitutional.

Does Palmer really stand to gain $30 billion in damages anyway?

Palmer has said the widely reported $30 billion price tag is “bullshit”. But Quigley tabled details in parliament last month showing the total damages sought by Palmer and his companies in relation to the iron ore project was at least $27.75 billion.

Palmer’s damages claims focus on the loss of opportunities to develop and sell the project to Chinese state-owned enterprises.

But core principles for assessing damages for breach of contract – which in this case is a 2002 agreement between Mineralogy and the state government – may stand in the way.

Read more: These young Queenslanders are taking on Clive Palmer’s coal company and making history for human rights

The state’s improper delay in approving the project must have caused the loss – but it is not clear this is the case. There may have been other reasons for the losses, including the post-GFC mining slump.

Also, the value of what Palmer has lost needs to reflect the likelihood the project would have occurred without the delay, and so is likely to be much lower than $30 billion.

Palmer must also have taken reasonable steps to minimise his loss. This might mean following the standard industry practice of amending the development proposals to meet state government conditions, noting the Mineralogy Act still leaves this possibility open.

What happens now?

Palmer has a potential claim that the passage of the Mineralogy Act constitutes contempt of the Queensland Supreme Court. It is also possible parts of the act, such as those that restrict the remedies available to courts, are unconstitutional.

Read more: Mineral wealth, Clive Palmer, and the corruption of Australian politics

However, even if Palmer succeeds in these claims, it is not clear how much he will actually gain financially, or if his claim is really worth $30 billion.

The Mineralogy Act is so unusual, it would be foolish to predict outcomes to these complex legal questions. Over the coming months, we will start seeing answers to these questions as Palmer brings lawsuits and proceedings work their way through the courts.

The answers will provide profound insights into the decision-making powers of states.

– ref. How Clive Palmer could challenge the act designed to stop him getting $30 billion – https://theconversation.com/how-clive-palmer-could-challenge-the-act-designed-to-stop-him-getting-30-billion-145098

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Madhu Bhaskaran, Professor, Electronic and Communications Engineering, RMIT University

Skin is our largest organ, made up of complex sensors constantly monitoring for anything that might cause us pain. Our new technology replicates that – electronically.

The electronic artificial skin we’ve developed reacts to pain stimuli just like real skin, and paves the way for better prosthetics, smarter robotics and non-invasive alternatives to skin grafts.

Our prototype device mimics the body’s near-instant feedback response and can react to painful sensations with the same lighting speed at which nerve signals travel to the brain.

Our new technology, details of which are published in Advanced Intelligent Systems, is made of silicone rubber with integrated electronics. It mimics human skin, both in texture and in how it responds to pressure, temperature and pain.

Human skin senses things constantly, but our pain response only kicks in at a certain threshold. Once this threshold is breached, electric signals are sent via the nervous system to the brain to initiate a pain response.

You don’t notice when you pick up something at a comfortable temperature. But touch something too hot, and you’ll almost instantly recoil. That’s our skin’s pain-sensing system in action.

Helping hand

Our new pain-sensing electronic skin is a crucial step towards the development of “smart prosthetics” featuring sophisticated feedback systems. We want to develop medical devices and components that show similar pain sensing responses to the human body.

Prosthetics significantly improve an amputee’s quality of life, but they still lack the ability to sense danger. A prosthetic hand does not sense when it’s placed on a hot surface, while someone with a prosthetic arm might lean on something sharp but won’t realise the damage being caused.

Technology that provides a realistic skin-like response can make a prosthetic much more like a natural limb.

With further development, our electronic skin could also potentially be used for skin grafts, in cases where the traditional approach is not viable.

Skin in the game

We created our electronic skin by building on our research group’s previous breakthroughs in stretchable electronics, temperature-sensitive materials, and brain-mimicking electronics.

For example, we used our process for integrating temperature-sensitive vanadium oxide, a material that can change its electronic behaviour in reaction to temperatures above a particular threshold (65℃ in this case).

This material then triggers electrical signals similar to those generated by our nerve endings when we touch something hot. The electrical signal from the sensing part of the system (which is temperature- or pressure-sensitive) goes to a brain-mimicking circuit which processes the input and makes a decision based on threshold values.

The electrical output from the brain-mimicking circuit is like the nerve signals that initiate a motor response (such as moving your hand away) in the human pain response.

In our experiment, we measured the current generated. To use the silicone skin for real, this would need to be connected to nerve endings or apparatus that could initiate a motor response.

Read more: It’s not easy to give a robot a sense of touch

Our material responds just as fast as a real human pain response, mimicking the entire process from stimulus to response triggers from the brain – or in our case, the brain-mimicking circuit. The response is stronger depending on both the intensity and time of stimulation – just like a real human pain response.

The electronic skin brings to reality the threshold-based responses to pain, both in the way the skin reacts differently to pain above a certain threshold and how it takes longer for skin to “recover” from something that’s more painful. This is because stronger stimuli generate more voltage across the brain-mimicking circuit.

We can also modify this threshold in our devices to mimic the way injured skin (such as sunburnt skin) can have a lower pain threshold than normal skin. The electronic skin can also be used to increase sensitivity, which could be particularly useful in sports and defence as well as for skin grafts.

Another unique application could be smart gloves that could provide precise feedback from a surgeon’s hands when palpating tissue.

Read more: Prosthetic limbs affect our attitudes to disability – expressive design might change things for the better

Our silicone skin will need further development to integrate the technology into biomedical applications. But the fundamentals – biocompatibility and skin-like stretchability – are already there.

The next steps are working with medical researchers to make this even more “skin-like”, and to figure out how best to integrate it with the human body.

– ref. Pain-sensing electronic silicone skin paves the way for smart prosthetics and skin grafts – https://theconversation.com/pain-sensing-electronic-silicone-skin-paves-the-way-for-smart-prosthetics-and-skin-grafts-145386

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phillip Mendes, Associate Professor, Director Social Inclusion and Social Policy Research Unit, Monash University

The Black Lives Matter protests have highlighted concerns about white-dominated systems and structures and the oppression of Indigenous people. Most notable is the high rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody.

Another less-publicised but equally significant concern is the large number of Indigenous children in out-of-home care. This is currently estimated at 18,000 children — more than one-third of children in the system.

An estimated 1,140 Indigenous young people leave out-of-home care annually, but state and territory governments provide limited assistance to them to transition to independent adulthood or reconnect with their culture and community.

There are several factors that help explain the large number of Indigenous children in out-of-home care. Many of these are rooted in past policies of forced removal of children from their homes, which caused inter-generational trauma for many Indigenous communities and resulted in enduring socio-economic disadvantage.

For example, research on children living in households with members of the Stolen Generations has found they experience a range of adverse outcomes, such as poor health, high stress and frequent non-attendance at school.

On a positive note, the over-representation of Indigenous children in out-of-home care has recently been included in the new Closing the Gap targets, with an aim to reduce the rate by 45% by 2031.

Lack of basic data on Indigenous children in care

Little is known about the experiences of Indigenous children in out-of-home care, or the effectiveness of existing services to support their transition to adulthood.

Young people transitioning from out-of-home care (known as “care leavers”) are generally a vulnerable group due to their difficult childhoods, problematic experiences in care and accelerated transitions to adulthood. On top of that, many Indigenous care leavers face dislocation from culture and kinship structures, as well as racism.

Read more: FactCheck Q&A: are Indigenous children ten times more likely to be living in out-of-home care?

There is even a lack of clarity about the number of Indigenous young people leaving out-of-home care each year. It appears Indigenous youth make up about one-third of all children leaving care, but there are discrepancies between the figures provided by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the states and territories.

It is also uncertain whether this data includes young people who return to live with their families, as well as those who transition into so-called “independent adulthood”.

As a first step, we need a nationally consistent system for collecting this data in order to adequately address their needs.

Lack of support, cultural planning and life skills

Our national study of Indigenous care leavers has identified major deficits in our existing support services, programs and policies to help them, too.

Firstly, there is little funding specifically set aside for these young people, despite the widespread recognition of their unique cultural needs and disadvantages.

Only Victoria and Queensland allocate specific funding to Aboriginal community-controlled organisations to deliver leaving care services to Indigenous children so they can develop cultural connections and access housing, health services, education, training and employment.

Read more: Another stolen generation looms unless Indigenous women fleeing violence can find safe housing

International research shows that providing Indigenous young people with connections to culture and community can help make transitions from care much smoother.

Yet, in Australia, we found many Indigenous youth either do not have transition plans when exiting care, or the plans are inadequate. This contributes to poor outcomes for these care leavers, including a risk of homelessness and imprisonment. For young women, there is also the threat of family violence, early pregnancy and removal of their children.

Many Indigenous youth also prefer to live with family members rather than live alone. So, another challenge for Indigenous care leavers is accessing stable and affordable housing that is culturally appropriate.

And many young people exit care and take on responsibilities, such as caring for younger siblings or other family members, without having acquired basic independent living skills, such as cooking and budgeting. Many also struggle to access education and employment.

How can we better help Indigenous care leavers?

So, what does a good transition plan look like? We’ve arrived at several recommendations:

• commence as early as possible, starting as young as 12 to 15 years old

• target independent living skills such as cooking, cleaning and budgeting

• support relationships with wider social and community networks

• include key transition areas, such as education, employment and housing, plus a strong connection to culture.

It is highly preferable that Aboriginal community-controlled organisations be responsible for transition plans as they understand Indigenous youths’ cultural needs. These organisations need to be funded proportionately to develop effective leaving care programs.

Additionally, there is a strong belief the National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children should include a new commissioner for Indigenous youth to oversee a national strategy for care leavers. This strategy should also adhere to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child placement principle.

Lastly, greater emphasis should be placed on early, supportive intervention for Indigenous families to prevent the removal of children in the first place, or to enhance the prospects of children’s reunification with their families at a much younger age.

Read more: Child protection report lacks crucial national detail on abuse in out-of-home care

– ref. Indigenous children are leaving out-of-home care to uncertain futures. This is the support they need – https://theconversation.com/indigenous-children-are-leaving-out-of-home-care-to-uncertain-futures-this-is-the-support-they-need-143906