A New Zealand youth MP Shaneel Lal is speaking out against education policies that exclude some Pacific Island people from Pasifika programmes and scholarships as unfair.
Lal, who is eighth generation Indo-Fijian, applied for a Pasifika scholarship at the University of Otago only to be told he had to prove he had “indigenous” Pacific Island ancestry because Indo-Fijians did not qualify.
He is not the only one to be rejected on the basis of race – even though he was born in Fiji – but he aims to take the matter up with the Education Minister Chris Hipkins.
Lal told Stuff: “I know I’m Fijian. I’m eighth generation Fijian. I have indigenous [ancestry] along the lines I just cannot draw a family tree and say, ‘this person is an indigenous person’.”
Lal said the policies were unfair as Indo-Fijian people experienced many of the same challenges as other Pacific Island groups.
He said that some universities that did not recognise Indo-Fijians as Pacific people “kind of highlights the subtle racism that’s going on in our Pacific community”.
The Auckland-based student said he struck the same problem when applying for Pasifika leadership opportunities while at secondary school and his cousin had a similar experience when she tried to apply for a place in the Māori and Pacific Admission Scheme (MAPAS) at the University of Auckland.
‘Not enough evidence’ He was told his passport and birth certificate were not enough evidence of him being of Pacific descent and he would need to get a Pacific community leader to vouch for him.
He said that would be difficult having come from Fiji to New Zealand in 2014.
The irony in his circumstance was that he was chosen as youth MP for Minister for Building and Construction, Minister for Customs and Minister for Ethnic Communities Jenny Salesa, who was not responding on the issue.
When asked for a response, a spokesperson from her office said: “Yes, but probably not from the minister. It will be around definitions and criteria.”
Meanwhile, Professor Vijay Naidu from the University of the South Pacific based in Suva – where all Fiji citizens are recognised as Fijian and the indigenous people are recognised as I-Taukei – had a historical perspective on the issue.
“Some years ago, Loraine Pillai who migrated to New Zealand many years ago and retired as a senior high school teacher over there wrote to then Prime Minister Helen Clark about Pasifika identity and Indo-Fijians,” he said.
“Her response was that Indo-Fijians were Pasifika. Apparently, Aotearoa had arrived at this decision when [founding Fiji prime minister] Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara had expressed his disaffection with the absence of Fijians of Indian descent at an official reception hosted for him.
“Back to Loraine’s letter. She wrote her letter because, at a workshop for school administrators in Wellington, she had been told by a woman by the surname of Wendt that Indo-Fijians were not regarded as Pasifika people.”
Education Minister Chris Hipkins has said universities set the criteria for Pasifika scholarships, not the government.
While COVID-19 restrictions were initially announced by the federal government and implemented across Australia in March, since then the states and territories have devised their own strategies to manage the virus. This approach acknowledges different areas will be affected in different ways and at varying times.
But as a result, it can be hard to keep track of the mass of information around changing restrictions, particularly with different rules scattered around lengthy government website pages.
So we’ve compiled some of the key restrictions in each state and territory.
These restrictions are correct at the time of publication and are subject to change.
Mobile phones are a lifeline for those in immigration detention. But if the government has its way, this thread will soon be cut.
A proposed bill would allow the minister to deem mobile phones and other internet-capable devices “prohibited items”. It would also grant staff new powers to search detainees without a warrant and allow strip searches and detector dogs within the centres.
Detainees’ friends and family members would also be targeted via expanded powers to screen and search visitors.
The bill is expected to be voted on in parliament this week. The crucial vote will likely be in the Senate, where the government is trying to sway key vote Jacqui Lambie to its side.
to ensure that the department can provide a safe and secure environment for staff, detainees and visitors in an immigration detention facility.
The government claims some detainees are using mobile devices to organise criminal activities, and intimidate staff and other detainees.
Yet, the greatest risk to detainees and their loved ones comes not from mobile phones, but from the isolation and trauma of our immigration detention system.
A 2019 report by the Australian Human Rights Commission found only a minority of detainees use mobile phones inappropriately. In contrast, rates of self-harm in Australia’s immigration detention system are 200 times higher than in the Australian community.
This bill would only make things worse.
For asylum seekers in indefinite detention in hotels like this one in Melbourne, mobile phones can be a lifeline.Michael Dodge/AAP
The current situation in detention
In theory, immigration detention in Australia is not meant to be punitive. Yet, my research shows the logic of “deterrence” infuses all aspects of detention centre life.
Detainees are subject to constant surveillance and frequent room checks. Dorm-style sleeping arrangements afford minimal privacy. Recreational activities are limited and regular changes to internal rules breed instability.
The excessive use of force is also a concern. Just this month, the Commonwealth ombudsman cautioned,
there appears to be an increasing tendency across the immigration detention network for force to be used to resolve conflict or non-compliant behaviour as the first rather than last choice.
In this context, connections with friends, family members, medical professionals and legal representatives are vital. But maintaining communications is far from easy.
Where spontaneous visits were once permitted, loved ones must now apply to visit detention at least one week in advance. Longer application times apply for group visits. The online application is prohibitively complicated for those with poor digital literacy or limited English-language capabilities.
At times, visiting room capacity limits cause applications to be rejected, meaning detainees can go weeks without seeing loved ones. During COVID-19, visits have been cancelled altogether.
When applications are approved, visitors must submit to screening, x-rays and drug scanning.
There are also strict rules on the admission of food and gifts. Where visitors could once bring items like birthday cakes, fresh fruit, children’s toys and board games to their visits to create a warmer atmosphere, these items are now banned or require special approval. Guards supervise all interactions.
The recently reopened immigration detention centre at Christmas Island.Richard Wainwright/AAP
The importance of mobile phones
Mobile phones are an imperfect solution to these challenges. They help detainees maintain their relationships and mental health when other lines of communication are severed.
Last year, when the authorities attempted a late night deportation of the family, they used their phone to contact supporters and journalists, who in turn alerted their lawyer. An emergency injunction was subsequently granted and their plane turned back mid-flight.
Banning mobile phones would rob detainees of many of the strategies they use to survive and access justice. It would also punish detainees’ children, partners, parents and friends.
The senselessness of the bill
Beyond the mobile phone ban itself, granting new screening and search powers would add to the trauma of detention spaces. These are already environments in which excessive force is used. Allowing strip searches and the use of detector dogs would only increase the potential for abuse.
Australia’s immigration detention facilities are highly securitised places. Where there are reasonable grounds to suspect criminal activity, the police already have power to search the facilities. Granting centre staff power to perform invasive searches is neither necessary nor appropriate.
The proposed bill would not make detention centres safer. It would increase the cruelty of an already cruel system.
Its observations in the wake of our Black Summer suggest the commission’s final report, due on October 28, may recommend a major shake-up of how disaster management is governed at the federal level. This includes setting up a national body focused on recovery from and resilience to future disasters.
Most initial observations are uncontroversial and sensible, but there is a glaring omission. It involves the most urgent measure to reduce the risk of future disasters: reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
In my former role as the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, I saw first-hand the impacts of natural disasters, and nations’ efforts to build their climate change resilience. The royal commission process is a unique opportunity to accelerate progress in these areas, which are so critical for Australia’s future.
What’s in the report?
In February, the royal commission was tasked with finding ways to improve disaster management in three main areas:
how the federal government coordinates with other levels of government
resilience to climate change and mitigating disaster risk
the laws governing the federal government response to national emergencies.
The initial observations touch on each of these areas. This includes the need to collate, harmonise and share disaster data across jurisdictions; enhance research in climate and disaster resilience; reassess aerial firefighting capabilities; and plan more effectively around critical infrastructure.
Royal Commission chair Mark Binskin.AAP Image/Supplied by the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements
It’s also worth noting the royal commission hasn’t yet formed a view on a key change Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggested was necessary in the wake of the bushfires: establishing the legal authority for the federal government to declare a national state of emergency. Currently, only state and territory governments have this power.
AFAC is a non-government organisation that facilitates the deployment of emergency personnel and equipment interstate and internationally. But the states and territories may not be willing to relinquish the engagement they have under the current arrangements.
The royal commission also reported that many people said terms like ‘watch and act’ were confusing.Shutterstock
Most importantly, the royal commission is considering consolidating disaster recovery and resilience functions in a new national body.
These functions reside in at least three agencies. They include Emergency Management Australia, the National Bushfire Recovery Agency, and the National Drought and North Queensland Flood Response and Recovery Agency.
Consolidation makes good sense as the recovery phase from disasters can contribute to strengthening resilience.
It’s also sensible to separate the resilience function from the disaster response function, currently led by Emergency Management Australia. In my experience, resilience work rarely gets the whole-of-government attention it deserves when it’s embedded in agencies focused around responding to emergencies.
Three months of disasters
After the devastation Black Summer wrought, it’s clear resilience to future disasters must start with action on climate change. So it’s disappointing the royal commission has not yet commented on the need to lower greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as possible.
Although COVID-19 has masked our awareness of the rapidly increasing climate threat, the evidence — even over just the past three months — is overwhelming.
In June, the record was set for the highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic. The associated unprecedented heatwave in Siberia contributed to massive bushfires razing an astonishing 20 million hectares.
While Siberia burned, severe floods devastated South Asia, China and Japan. One-third of Bangladesh was underwater, affecting almost 15 million people.
Catastrophic floods in Bangladesh were among many disasters that occurred in the last three months.EPA/Monirul Alam
In China the figure was 63 million, with daily rainfall records set across the country. China’s Three Gorges Hydroelectric Dam, the world’s biggest, received the largest inflow of water in its history, prompting fears last week the dam would be breached.
In southern Japan, record-setting rains that dumped 1,000 millimetres of water in just three days forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.
Then, earlier this month, deadly fires erupted across California, exacerbated by persistent drought and record-setting temperatures. In just five days, the fires burned more land in the state than was destroyed in all of 2019.
We can’t ignore climate change
While it’s difficult to scientifically demonstrate that climate change “causes” any one disaster, the general direction is crystal clear. As the climate continues to warm, the frequency and severity of these events will increase.
We’re already seeing worrying signs of this in Queensland, our most hazard-prone state. Over the past three years, 53 of Queensland’s 77 local government areas have endured three or more major disasters. And 71 out of 77 local government areas have experienced two or more such events.
These communities are increasingly in the unsustainable situation of chronically recovering from disasters.
Burnt and recovering bushland around Bendalong.AAP Image/Dean Lewins
The prime minister has argued “Australia, on its own, cannot control the world’s climate, as Australia accounts for just 1.3% of global emissions”.
But because we’re disproportionately vulnerable to the threats of climate change, it’s imperative we convince other nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Our international advocacy will only be credible if we strengthen our own ambition to mitigate climate change. And as the government prepares to submit its updated targets under the Paris Climate Agreement, a recommendation to reduce emissions from the royal commission would be appropriate and extremely useful.
A recent demonstration video released by Elon Musk’s firm Neuralink might not look like much at first. In the video, a pig named Gertrude eats snacks from a person’s hand, while an accompanying computer screen displays blue lines that peak and trough, accompanied by some musical bleeps and bloops.
But this is no ordinary pig. Gertrude has been surgically implanted with a brain-monitoring device and, as the video’s narrator explains, the bleeps and bloops represent data being collected from the implanted device (in this case, extra contact with the snout means more bleeps and bloops, and bigger peaks in the visual data).
The important thing here is not the data itself collected via the Neuralink device in Gertrude’s brain. It’s no surprise that touching a pig’s sensitive snout causes neurons to fire in its brain.
The most interesting thing is how free Gertrude is to move around while the implanted chip collects the data.
Credit: Neuralink.
Not stuck to a hospital bed
This video shows Neuralink has created an implant device that can deliver brain recordings to a computer in real time while the brain’s owner is moving around and interacting with the world.
That’s a pretty big step forward, and it’s definitely an element that has been been missing from the research on brain-computer interfaces thus far. While some other wireless brain implants exist, they require major surgeries to implant and are typically either bulky or limited in where in the brain they can be placed.
There is a lot of research on how to decode data from the brain and the readings generated from more traditional brain-monitoring devices, but we don’t have good ways to collect that data.
So if Neuralink can get this device into humans, and it works, that would be hugely exciting for researchers.
In terms of what data you can get from Neuralink’s device, however, things are a bit less exciting. This device covers data collected from a tiny part of the cortex from a small number of neurons. In humans, we know important brain functions typically use many parts of the brain at once, involving millions of neurons.
To use a device like this to, for example, help restore some mobility to a person who is quadriplegic, you’d need it to collect much more data, from a much bigger area of the brain.
It’s also worth taking a breather to remind ourselves that there is still so much we don’t understand about how to decode data collected from brain-computer interfaces.
Neuralink aims to develop brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.Shutterstock
While we’ve come to understand a lot about how the brain works, there is currently no way to predict what makes any specific neuron fire or not fire.
We don’t fully understand the complex patterns produced in brain monitoring. We can say “this area of the cortex seems to be involved in such-and-such function”, but we don’t always know exactly how it is involved or how to make it work “better”.
So we are not yet at the point where Neuralink’s device puts us on the cusp of being able to improve memory or attention, or to use our brains to send a hands-free message to your partner’s phone.
But the device might help us towards exciting steps such as restoring the ability to talk, or move a wheelchair or robotic arm using signals from the brain. And for people in those situations, any incremental progress is very promising.
It’s like Neuralink has invented the wristwatch before the clock itself has been fully invented.
A new stage
Musk told reporters the company is preparing for first human implantation soon, pending required approvals and further safety testing.
Today, I am in my lab working on experiments that aim to train people to improve their visual attention. I observe them trying to focus their attention on a task, and giving them feedback on how well they are doing based on the signals I can see in their brains in real time.
But these people are not free to move around the lab or go about their daily lives – they are bound, by necessity, to the machines I need to use to do my research.
If, one day, researchers like me could use a device like Neuralink’s to collect data without my subjects being so constrained, that would represent a new stage in this area of research.
A recent decision by Australian Securities and Investments Commission to deny a newspaper access to a confidential bank document raises questions about its attitude to regulating the financial services industry.
In the wake of the banking royal commission, the Australian Financial Review made a freedom of information request, seeking a report prepared for the Commonwealth Bank board by its lawyers, Speed & Stracey.
ASIC obtained a copy of it from the bank as part of its post-royal commission intensification of oversight.
The report is important because it deals with astounding claims that emerged during the royal commission.
Under questioning, the bank’s chair Catherine Livingstone said she had voiced concerns at a board meeting about its responses to breaches of money laundering laws that led to a record A$700 million penalty.
The concerns were not recorded in the board minutes. Her recollections were disputed by others present.
Keeping accurate minutes is a core obligation under the Corporations Act. Breaches attract heavy penalties because minutes can become central evidence in prosecutions.
ASIC has chosen not to pursue Livingstone and the Commonwealth Bank board.
In its response to the Australian Financial Review’s request, ASIC said:
ASIC’s (regulatory) function is best achieved by maintaining a trusting and cooperative relationship with organisations who have shown a willingness to voluntarily provide information to ASIC on a confidential basis.
The statement raises questions about how ASIC balances its relationship with those it regulates with its job of enforcing the law.
In the final report of the banking royal commission Commissioner Kenneth Hayne challenged regulators such as ASIC to ask – why not litigate?
It’s a question still relevant today.
Concern and co-regulation
After losing a case against Westpac in the Federal Court over the way it approved loans, ASIC decided not to appeal to the High Court because it wanted to be a “force for the recovery”.
“We are in a very different economic environment than we were when we started this case,” its chairman James Shipton said on Monday. “The world has changed. We are cognisant of that.”
ASIC has long extolled the virtues of “co-regulation”, which it defines as “circumstances where the administration and enforcement of regulatory obligations occur in collaboration with industry”.
Co-regulation, sometimes called meta-regulation, is a concept with some advantages. By subcontracting regulation to professional organisations, boards and managers closest to the action, the uber regulators can save money and concentrate on the big picture.
But it relies on those managers acting well.
Shipton stressed how important this was to ASIC in a speech delivered while the royal commission was sitting:
…industry, and the people within it, need to do more to support the proper functioning of the financial system. They need to take more of a leadership role in promoting professionalism. For example, the industry itself, working with standard setting and professional bodies, could promote and perhaps even require professionalism within their sectors.
While seeming reasonable, co-regulation is unreasonably one-sided. It extracts promises to do better in the future, while undermining the courts’ ability to hold them to account.
It sends the message that undocumented boardroom recollections, for instance, are acceptable, or at least no more than a regrettable lapse.
Yet finding after finding in the fields of criminology, business ethics, public administration and political science suggests that what matters most for misconduct is not psychology but structure.
One multi-disciplinary study entitled Beyond bad apples and weak leaders examined both prisoner abuse in Baghdad’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison and also the falsification of architectural internship report in the United States.
It found that in both of these very different environments organisational structures and incentives contributed more to bad behaviour than “bad apples” with bad psychology.
For banks, what needs attention are
Board structure. Current structures are susceptible to capture by executives or dominant shareholders, with independent directors have limited desire or ability to monitor what’s going on.
Organisational design. Removing hierarchies, outsourcing and creating temporary project teams limits oversight and opportunities to raising concerns about ethically problematic conduct.
Pay for Performance. Bonuses distort decision making and create incentives that can reward misconduct.
Policies and procedures. Poor ones create confusion and make decisions excessively reliant on discretion.
Conflicts between laws and norms. Maximising shareholder value is not an express legal duty of directors, but companies have justified breaking the law in its pursuit.
Moral/ethical language in guidelines. Their absence opens the way for a focus on instrumental goals (often linked to bonuses) without consideration of ethics.
Consequences. Prosecuting corporations doesn’t deter office bearers, prosecuting individuals does. The last prominent Australian company director to go to jail was Rodney Adler, in 2005.
In our series Art for Trying Times, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.
In days of COVID-19, I’m seeking escape and the screen is a glowing cornucopia of distraction. As a former worker in the Hollywood studio system I’m intrigued by Hollywood, a seven-part Netflix miniseries that’s equally adored and abhorred by critics.
Some have criticised Hollywood for being smug and unrealistic. But the series is clearly not realism. It’s camp, it’s glitz and it’s quietly hilarious, with producer credits including big names from Glee, Big Bang Theory, American Horror Story and Scream Queens.
I see where critics get confused. The real Hollywood is often mythologised as a dog-eat-dog environment, which suits the need of storytelling focused on dramatic conflict. But having lived “the dream” in the ‘90s as a script and story editor for Fox, Working Title, CBS, MTV and others, I can refute the stereotype.
Professionals I worked with around town, especially in the old school 20th Century Fox studio (pre-Murdoch), went out of their way to help each other and improve conditions for all players. My experience of the ‘90s Hollywood studio system was of highly organised, cooperative artist teams, collaborating, working and playing hard; a central theme of the Hollywood series.
This camaraderie of the studio “family” is evident in the opening titles of Hollywood, a group of young actors clamber up the scaffold of the famous Hollywood sign, giving each other a leg-up to catch a view from the top.
In seven snappy instalments, Hollywood follows this ensemble of young hopefuls into the post war 1950s. The action centres on Ace Studios, where Jack (David Corenswet), aspiring actor from out of town, waits at the gates to be picked as an extra so he can pay the rent.
‘Dreamland’
Jack ends up in uniform at a special gas station on Hollywood Boulevard. Surprisingly this is the front of a male prostitution racket run by a loveable rogue who provides day jobs to his band of wanna-be-star hopefuls. For drive-in clients of both sexes, the codeword for service is “take me to dreamland.”
Jack becomes a gigolo in the gas station (bright and sparkly, like an ice cream parlour.) He wears a neat, white, military-looking uniform and caters to an array of attractive female clientele while waiting for his big break.
Like his wife, we forgive Jack his indiscretions, which finally pay off in a studio audition thanks to some help from one of his clients Avis, played by veteran Patti LuPone. Avis is a grand dame of the old school, the neglected wife of Ace Studio head “Ace” (Rob Reiner).
Patti LuPone and David Corenswet in Hollywood (2020).Ryan Murphy Productions
This Hollywood power couple are reminiscent of the old studio heads — Fox, Laemmle, Mayer, Warner, Zukor — that film historian Neal Gabler calls “the Jews who invented Hollywood.” They are smart, resourceful immigrant workers who transform their knowledge of rabbinic storytelling and of fashion, marketing and manufacturing into a large-scale film industry.
Finally inside the studio with a contract as bit player, Jack teams up with a screenwriter, a director and thespians of varied racial and sexual background. Their passion project is “Meg”, a script written by and starring young African American talents.
The plot picks up steam when Jack and his team of young artists encourage Avis to confront bigotry in the studio system by accepting the radical script, “Meg”, written by a black man. Further, they persuade her to forget threats from the Ku Klux Klan and cast a black actress in the lead of “Meg”. Despite death threats, our crew bravely confront the religious and white supremacist groups who picket Ace Studios to protest the promotion of gay and coloured talent.
Darren Criss, Laura Harrier, and Jeremy Pope in Hollywood.Ryan Murphy Productions
With the help of the screwy talent agent Henry (played with delicious malice by Jim Parsons of Big Bang Theory) they beat the Klan and make it as far as the Oscars. Our young African American screenwriter arrives at the red carpet holding hands with his boyfriend, Rock Hudson (Jake Picking). They bravely confront a mixed reception from waiting press.
Like so many of his contemporaries, the real Rock Hudson was forced to hide the truth of his life within a fake, short-lived marriage.
In this alternate history, we are invited to view the world through a new lens as Rock transforms from a shy, closeted country boy into a determined young advocate for homosexual rights, which is what he eventually became in the 1980s. In this way, the series truncates history and gives voice to characters across time.
Jake Picking as Rock Hudson.Ryan Murphy Productions
In re-imagining this already pre- and re-packaged history of media production, Hollywood offers a queer blend of nostalgic whimsy and sharp meta-commentary. The series invites us to speculate on a world that could have once and still can challenge the stereotypical onscreen representation of black and gay lives. In one scene, an Asian actress complains that she is already, actually Asian and does not need to wear makeup that accentuates her slanted eyes.
In another, the regally cool Queen Latifah plays popular actress Hattie McDaniel who complains that despite her talents, as the descendant of slaves, she is only ever cast as a mammie or a maid.
Whether they are fighting the KKK, the studio system or their own demons, each main character has a major sexual and/or racial issue to confront and conquer. This universal theme is updated and laced with LGBTQI irony, offering very NOW, queer angles on the courage of those who take risks in times of change.
While often critiqued for being elitist and white, queer theory and art disturbs the stale conventions, the “truths” and limited perceptions of our social world in a way that is fluid and “becoming”.
The ‘heart’ of Hollywood
In this series, we get to know a range of characters at the intersection of racial and gender stereotypes. To get their movie made, our characters confront violent religious groups and the KKK. Like all Hollywood heroes, their courage goes beyond what most of us can muster in our daily struggles.
The series pays respect to characters who offer us insight into what it’s like to feel closeted, persecuted or “invisible” within mainstream culture. At the same time, the producers dress these serious themes with sequins and lighthearted, campy fun to ensure we enjoy the ride. Backstage or on-set, we observe the construction of character, of film “reality”, of “truth” in all its colourful fakery.
The series has what the studio story department traditionally calls “heart,” the empathic ability to reach out and touch audiences at their core. It is not to be read as “true” to the facts but “true” to the poetry of the Hollywood ethos; the world may be in tatters but we all deserve our dreams. When viewed with a sense of humour, the result is a sophisticated, juicy and eye-opening entertainment.
In times of COVID-19, we perhaps can’t bear too much reality. This series both challenges and reassures us that despite our woes outside the theatre, there’s a warm place for everyone inside.
The Thousand Talents Plan is a Chinese government program to attract scientists and engineers from overseas. Since the plan began in 2008, it has recruited thousands of researchers from countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, Canada, Japan, France and Australia.
While many countries try to lure top international research talent, the US, Canada and others have raised concerns that the Thousand Talents Plan may facilitate espionage and theft of intellectual property.
Why are we hearing about it now?
China has long been suspected of engaging in hacking and intellectual property theft. In the early 2000s, Chinese hackers were involved in the downfall of the Canadian telecommunications corporation Nortel, which some have linked to the rise of Huawei.
These efforts have attracted greater scrutiny as Western powers grow concerned about China’s increasing global influence and foreign policy projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative.
Last year, a US Senate committee declared the plan a threat to American interests. Earlier this year, Harvard nanotechnology expert Charles Lieber was arrested for lying about his links to the program.
In Australia, foreign policy think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute recently published a detailed report on Australian involvement in the plan. After media coverage of the plan, the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security is set to launch an inquiry into foreign interference in universities.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) developed the Thousand Talents Plan to lure top scientific talent, with the goal of making China the world’s leader in science and technology by 2050. The CCP uses the plan to obtain technologies and expertise, and arguably, Intellectual Properties from overseas by illegal or non-transparent means to build their power by leveraging those technologies with minimal costs.
According to a US Senate committee report, the Thousand Talents Plan is one of more than 200 CCP talent recruitment programs. These programs drew in almost 60,000 professionals between 2008 and 2016.
China’s technology development and intellectual property portfolio has skyrocketed since the launch of the plan in 2008. Last year China overtook the US for the first time in filing the most international patents.
What are the issues?
The plan offers scientists funding and support to commercialise their research, and in return the Chinese government gains access to their technologies.
In 2019, a US Senate committee declared the plan a threat to American interests. It claimed one participating researcher stole information about US military jet engines, and more broadly that China uses American research and expertise for its own economic and military gain.
Dozens of Australian and US employees of universities and government are believed to have participated in the plan without having declared their involvement. In May, ASIO issued all Australian universities a warning about Chinese government recruitment activities.
On top of intellectual property issues, there are serious human rights concerns. Technologies transferred to China under the program have been used in the oppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and in society-wide facial recognition and other forms of surveillance.
A global network
The Chinese government has established more than 600 recruitment stations globally. This includes 146 in the US, 57 each in Germany and Australia, and more than 40 each in the UK, Canada, Japan and France.
Recruitment agencies contracted by the CCP are paid A$30,000 annually plus incentives for each successful recruitment.
They deal with individual researchers rather than institutions as it is easier to monitor them. Participants do not have to leave their current jobs to be involved in the plan.
This can raise conflicts of interest. In the US alone, 54 scientists have lost their jobs for failing to disclose this external funding, and more than 20 have been charged on espionage and fraud allegations.
In Australia, our education sector relies significantly on the export of education to Chinese students. Chinese nationals may be employed in various sectors including research institutions.
These nationals are targets for Thousand Talents Plan recruitment agents. Our government may not know what’s going on unless participants disclose information about their external employment or grants funded by the plan.
The case of Koala AI
Heng Tao Shen was recruited by the Thousand Talents Plan in 2014 while a professor at the University of Queensland. He became head of the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and founded a company called Koala AI.
Members of Koala AI’s research team reportedly now include Thousand Talents Plan scholars at the University of NSW, University of Queensland, University of Melbourne and the National University of Singapore. The plan allows participants to stay at their overseas base as long as they work in China for a few months of the year.
The company’s surveillance technology was used by authorities in Xinjiang, raising human rights issues. Shen, who relocated to China in 2017 but is still an honorary professor at the University of Queensland, reportedly failed to disclose this information to his Australian university, going against university policy.
What should be done?
Most participants in the plan are not illegally engaged and have not breached the rules of their governments or institutions. With greater transparency and stricter adherence to the rules of foreign states and institutions, the plan could benefit both China and other nations.
Governments, universities and research institutions, and security agencies all have a role to play here.
The government can build partnership with other parties to monitor the CCP’s talent recruitment activities and increase transparency on funding in universities. Investigations of illegal behaviour related to the talent recruitment activity can be conducted by security agencies. Research institutes can tighten the integrity of grant recipients by disclosing any participation in the talent recruitment plans.
More resources should be invested towards compliance and enforcement in foreign funding processes, so that researchers understand involvement in the Thousand Talents Plan may carry national security risks.
Following US government scrutiny in 2018, Chinese government websites deleted online references to the plan and some Chinese universities stopped promoting it. The plan’s website also removed the names of participating scientists.
This shows a joint effort can influence the CCP and their recruitment stations to be more cautious in approaching candidates, and reduce the impact of this plan on local and domestic affairs.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rob Nicholls, Associate professor in Business Law. Director of the UNSW Business School Cybersecurity and Data Governance Research Network, UNSW
Facebook will ban publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram if a proposal to force tech giants to pay for news becomes law, the tech giant has announced.
The announcement follows the release of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s draft news media bargaining code, under which Google and Facebook would be forced to pay for news on their sites to help fund public interest journalism. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced in April the code would be mandatory.
On its website, Facebook Australia’s Will Easton said:
Assuming this draft code becomes law, we will reluctantly stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram. This is not our first choice – it is our last. But it is the only way to protect against an outcome that defies logic and will hurt, not help, the long-term vibrancy of Australia’s news and media sector.
Google is campaigning against the same draft code, telling users of Google Search and YouTube the services would be under threat unless the government dumped its proposed revenue-sharing laws.
Facebook risks making its products less compelling
If Facebook follows through with this threat, it will potentially lead to very uncompelling content on both Facebook and Instagram. Can you imagine Instagram or Facebook without the ABC or Australian news sources?
How are you going to share interesting information with family and friends without being able to put links into posts?
Facebook claims the ACCC code “misunderstands the dynamics of the internet”. But it seems Facebook misunderstands how mandatory industry codes work. If you want to be a platform business in Australia, you have to follow the relevant code. If not, you can exit.
The ACCC code is similar to the franchising code of conduct. For instance, if I want to set up a pizza franchise in Australia, as a franchisee I have to abide by the franchising code of conduct.
Those are the rules of the game in Australia because there’s a recognised power imbalance between franchisers and franchisees. The same goes for news media businesses and social media platforms.
Facebook’s public response focuses largely on the exchange of money for news content but the ACCC code is much broader than that; it’s not just a way for news media businesses to be paid. It recognises that Australian news content on social media platforms provides value to both sides and any resulting payment is simply a net of that value.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has said the ACCC’s code would be mandatory.AAP/Lukas Coch
On the other hand, Facebook has suggested it will have to pay for every bit of news that appears on its platforms. In fact, the code allows for the private values of each news media business to be revealed during negotiations, which may end up in a price that is actually very low for Facebook, or even free.
The ACCC allows for both the news media businesses and platform businesses to negotiate, but Facebook’s threat today suggests they are in no mood for negotiation.
A blanket ban
If Facebook sticks to its claims, it would need to implement a blanket ban on all Australian news media businesses.
This proposition isn’t compelling because it means no news at all. And then there’s the issue of fringe news and information sources.
You could argue citizen journalists and amateur news content creators aren’t media businesses, so you’ll still have them – but they won’t have the checks and balances in place required by the media industry.
Sources such as QAnon actively and deliberately spread misinformation, which will also remain. These sources could cause irreparable damage if they go unchecked or without any reliable rebuttal.
A calculated, commercial response
Facebook’s position is a commercial one and presumably has been carefully thought through.
To the extent Facebook fails to go ahead with the threat of removing all news for Australian users, the platform will inevitably be captured by the ACCC code. If they were to post news without paying, the ACCC would likely come down on Facebook. The penalties could be as high as 10% of Facebook’s annual revenue in Australia.
What about Facebook News?
Facebook News offers news content from approved publishers (who are paid), collated for users to consume within the Facebook platform. The service launched last year in the US and could have been a viable option for Australia’s news media businesses.
But this service wasn’t offered early enough to Australia. The current debacle is a result of both Facebook and Google holding back in negotiations when there could have been a voluntary code of conduct much earlier.
Voluntary codes are non-mandatory sets of standards that aim to help organisations such as industry associations deal with their members and customers. They only apply to those who sign up to them. Initially, the ACCC was directed to try to negotiate a voluntary code and the change to a mandatory one was driven by the failure of these negotiations.
It’s Facebook’s failure to make a sensible offer early enough that has landed it in this position.
At the end of the day, if Facebook follows through on its threat, we’ll end up with a platform that is much less appealing. More than anything else, that’s likely to drive the decline of Facebook.
The Christchurch mosque shooter has been designated as a “terrorist entity” by the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
The designation under New Zealand legislation freezes the assets of terrorist entities and makes it a criminal offence to participate in or support the activities of the designated terrorist entity.
He had earlier admitted 51 charges of murder, 40 of attempted murder and one charge of terrorism.
Jacinda Ardern said the designation was an “important demonstration of New Zealand’s condemnation of terrorism and violent extremism in all forms.
“This designation ensures the offender cannot be involved in the financing of terrorism in the future. We have an obligation to New Zealand and to the wider international community to prevent the financing of terrorist acts,” she said.
There are currently 20 terrorist entities designated under New Zealand law, including the mosque shooter, police said.
Under Section 22 of the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002, the prime minister may designate individuals or groups as terrorist entities, on advice from officials, police added.
Australia is set to record its biggest quarterly fall in GDP in history this week. The federal government will extend its JobKeeper wage subsidy program by six months. About 1.75 million workers, including about 1 million Victorians, are expected to rely on it till March.
But there’s more to be done, particularly to help the small and medium-sized businesses taking the brunt of the COVID-19 economic impacts.
Small and medium enterprises employ about two-thirds of the workforce. They are crucial to the prosperity of local communities.
A full third are pessimistic about making it through the next three months, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ most recent survey of COVID-19 business impacts. By comparison only 18% of large companies (those employing more than 200 employees) expect difficulties in meeting their financial obligations.
Even at the best of times many small businesses struggle. Yet our research on 223 Australian business owners highlights failure (or success) isn’t just the result of individual entrepreneurs’ personal resources and capabilities. The local business environment plays a significant role.
The tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn, it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured.
The same is true for businesses. Even the most resourceful business owners struggle to get ahead when the environment stifles their efforts.
This is a thorny problem for governments as they turn from emergency measures to chart longer-term recovery policies.
There will, no doubt, be much debate over the usual areas – of subsidies and grants, tax breaks, red tape and industrial relations changes. But we suggest four less obvious priorities to create a favourable environment for small business.
1. Government procurement
Small businesses should be given a real advantage in procurement. Procurement policies and processes must be clear, protective and accessible to the small guys, not a maze that ends up helping only the big corporations.
The Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, Kate Carnell, has proposed that federal government contracts worth up to A$10 million go through a small business panel as part of the tender process. “Lowest cost is not always the best value for money,” she said. We agree, with state and local government procurement policies being equally important.
Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman Kate Carnell at the National Press Club with Council of Small Business of Australia head Peter Strong on July 29 2020.Mick Tsikas/AAP
2. Ensure they get good advice
One of the biggest decisions many small business owners will face will be whether to borrow money to keep their business going or cut their losses. That’s something for which they should get sound professional advice.
But when small businesses are cash-strapped, cutting back spending on advisers such as lawyers and accountants can be an obvious way to save money.
State and local governments offer some (limited) support to small business advisory services. Western Australia’s Small Business Development Corporation, for example, provides free advice to local government for encouraging small business.
What we need now is a national program to ensure all small business owners can get good, free professional advice.
Encouraging consumers to “buy local” is a pillar of regional development strategies. “Buy Australian” campaigns have been around since the 1980s with the latest incarnation Buy Australian Made campaign launched in June. Its slogan: “It’s never been more important to buy Australian than right now.”
Australian Made, Australian Grown campaign 2012.
The success of these campaigns is open to debate, but the general principle appears sound. A 2017 analysis of foodstuffs, for example, found greater localism associated with more resilient and sustainable local economies.
4. Promote mental health
The last measure is more psychological support. This has been a neglected area in the past, but improving business owners’ mental health is as effective as building a stronger network or increasing cash flow.
Our calculations suggest developing hope, optimism, self-efficacy and resilience can improve firm performance by 38%. That’s the same as building a stronger social network (38%), and twice as much as formal entrepreneurial education (15%).
With growing recognition of mental health issues, and the effects of COVID-19 crisis, government policies to promote small business should include a focus on business owners’ mental health.
The Catholic professionals group has filed an application in Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court to intervene in last month’s challenge on the constitutional validity of the National Pandemic Act 2020, reports the PNG Post-Courier.
It has also called on Prime Minister James Marape’s government to repeal the law.
The Catholic Professionals Society (CPS) was opposed to the National Pandemic Act 2020 before its passing on June 12, 2020, to deal with the covid-19 coronavirus crisis calling for wider consultation given the constitutional and human rights implications of the law.
According to president Paul Harricknen, CPS representatives also met with Health Minister Jelta Wong and Pandemic Controller David Manning on June 19, 2020, to express concerns about the law.
Opposition leader Belden Namah filed an application to challenge the constitutionality of the Act in the Supreme Court on August 5, 2020.
“We commend the opposition leader for seeking the Supreme Court interpretation of the law and its implications on “CPS filed its application on August 14, 2020, to intervene in the proceedings and to be heard along with Mr Namah’s application”, Harricknen said on Friday.
Alois Jerewai of Jerewai Lawyers had been engaged to represent CPS in the proceedings.
PM commended for action “We commend the Prime Minister and his government too for the efforts taken to contain and work to prevent the spread of the covid-19 pandemic,” he said.
However, the NPA in its current form raised serious questions about its constitutional validity.
Harricknen said the law was brought into force and effect on June 17, 2020, under National Gazette No. G358.
“CPS analysis of the law with its lawyers finds it to be unconstitutional in its entirety when among other implications the NPA usurps the powers and functions of the National Parliament and it abrogates and divests the Parliament’s powers and functions to the executive government.
“In doing so, the NPA denies and deprives the Parliament of its powers on Emergencies under Part X of the Constitution (ss. 226-243), has implications on the oversight powers of the Parliamentary Accounts Committee (s. 239), excludes the application of Public Finances (Management) Act 1995, National Procurement Act 2018 and the Audit Act 1989 and impacts on the Constitutional rights and freedoms of people,” Harricknen said.
He said the law had the appearance of “martial law” law and a “police state”.
According to Harricknen, the Act under Section 3(2) extricated itself from the application of the Constitution, which was tantamount to altering the Constitution, contrary to Section 14 of the Constitution.
Defend constitutional supremacy “The CPS challenge of the constitutional validity of the law is to defend and uphold constitutional supremacy.
“CPS has already written to Minister Wong on August 12, 2020, inviting the government to consider repealing the law,” he said.
He said the letter was copied to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Justice and Attorney General Davis Steven and the Controller David Manning.
“If the government decides not to repeal the law then the Supreme Court will be asked to proceed to hear and decide on the constitutional validity of the law,” he said.
The Post-Courier did not report any government reaction.
In 1991, Donald Trump’s mother, Mary, was mugged on a New York street. As Trump’s niece recounts in her new book, the young assailant slammed Mary’s head into her Rolls Royce so hard, her brain haemorrhaged.
This firsthand experience with violent crime informed Trump’s hardline views on criminal justice and could serve him well now as he crafts a law-and-order election strategy to try to defeat Democratic challenger Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election.
A president cruising to an almost certain defeat – with the deaths of 175,000 Americans (and rising), urban unrest, a tanking economy and an impeachment trial all on his watch – has hit upon a key issue that will make him competitive in November.
With the possible exception of a vaccine for COVID-19 being found in the next two months, Trump could hardly contrive a more potentially effective campaign theme.
History should give Trump reasons for optimism. The presidential elections in 1968 and 1988 provide a template for Republican victory on a law-and-order platform. Indeed, each of those previous elections presents a parallel that should concern Biden — and which he must counter.
As protests against police violence have raged this summer, Trump has sought to capitalise on scenes of unrest.Julio Cortez/AP
Nixon’s pledge to restore ‘order’ in 1968
When Trump was 22, he saw Republican Richard Nixon run a campaign against a Democratic party and administration struggling to deal with widespread political, social and racial unrest.
In April 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., sparked rioting in Washington DC, Baltimore, Chicago and Kansas City — all Democratically controlled cities.
With then-President Lyndon Johnson refusing to run again, and with his likely successor, Robert F. Kennedy, himself assassinated two months after King, the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, floundered.
At the Democratic national convention in Chicago that summer, shocked Americans watched as police beat anti-Vietnam war protesters outside the building. Inside, Democrats were split between pro- and anti-war candidates. Capitalising on the latter’s inability to cohere around a single candidate, Humphrey won the nomination by default.
But the unrest proved insurmountable. Uniting the increasingly warring wings of his party was beyond him.
In response to the social upheaval, Humphrey fell back on ambitious projects to redress racial injustice. His “war on poverty” theme, however, rang hollow as Americans saw their cities in flames and sons dying in Vietnam.
Tied to a cunning strategy of picking up disaffected Southern Democrats, this “restore order” platform was enough for him to win with only 43.4% of the popular vote (and 32 states in the electoral college).
Four years later, again channelling appeals for law and order, Nixon was re-elected in a landslide, winning every state except Massachusetts.
Bush campaign stokes racial fears in 1988
It took another 20 years before the intersection of race and crime dominated another presidential election.
Again, the parallels between that election in 1988 and the current campaign are many. Incumbent President George H. W. Bush trailed his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, by at least 10 percentage points in July that year. Dukakis looked an odds-on cert to make Bush a one-term president.
Instead, he lost by nearly eight points (and 40 states to 10), considered by many to be one of the weakest men to ever run for the office.
Michael Dukakis lost the 1988 presidential contest, in part, due to his rival’s ‘law and order’ campaign.Bob Jordan/AP
What happened? Several factors explain Dukakis’ defeat. But the law-and-order and race campaign the Republicans ran against him was arguably decisive.
In 1974, Willie Horton, an African-American man, was involved in the robbery and murder of a teenage gas station attendant. He was sentenced to life without parole, but in 1986 was released on a weekend “furlough” as part of a Massachusetts rehabilitation scheme.
Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts when Horton was released. And though he had not designed the furlough program, he had supported it.
The Bush campaign made great hay. In an ad that became infamous for stoking racial fears, prisoners were shown moving through a revolving prison gate. A Black inmate – in a clear allusion to Horton – featured prominently.
The Bush team even showcased Horton’s rape victim in a subsequent tour. The message, repeated often and insufficiently rebuffed by the Democrats, was simple and effective: “weekend prison passes — Dukakis on crime”.
In some ways, the Willie Horton ad is the 1.0 version of Trump’s relentless tweets and comments about African-Americans.
Can Trump run a similarly successful strategy?
These prior campaign failures should make Democrats nervous. While the Democrats can expect to carry most non-white voters by significant margins in this year’s election, they are still vulnerable to Trump’s claims of being soft on crime.
Trump has not much to lose by painting his opponent as Dukakis 2.0 — weak on law and order and a supporter of de-funding the police (which Biden is not).
Just as Nixon did in 1968, Trump is asserting that Democrat-controlled cities cannot keep order – with an added twist. He claims Black voters should back Republicans in order to have the safer streets and economic opportunities Democratic policies have denied them.
In a tight election, even a small shift in the African-American vote could prove decisive. The GOP convention was notable for the number of Black Republicans it featured.
Biden’s lead in the polls has slipped in recent weeks, making Democrats nervous.Andrew Harnik/AP
Herein lies Biden’s key challenge. Biden, like Humphrey 52 years ago, leads a Democratic house divided. He cannot afford to go hard on law and order and thus alienate the left wing of his party that finds common cause with the Black Lives Matter movement.
He must both defend the police and acknowledge their systemic racism. And he must, as Dukakis failed to do, explain effectively and believably that he can keep people safe.
Over the weekend, Biden attempted to do this by condemning the violence that has erupted between right- and left-wing protesters in the city of Portland as “unacceptable.” And he sought to turn the issue around on Trump:
He may believe tweeting about law and order makes him strong – but his failure to call on his supporters to stop seeking conflict shows just how weak he is.
Rather than the 2020 election solely being a referendum on Trump and his handling of coronavirus, it is now shaping up to be a fight over law and order and racial justice, as well.
This is a tough position for Biden to be in — and one he must resolve quickly to avoid a repeat of both 1968 and 1988.
In 1991, Donald Trump’s mother, Mary, was mugged on a New York street. As Trump’s niece recounts in her new book, the young assailant slammed Mary’s head into her Rolls Royce so hard, her brain haemorrhaged.
This firsthand experience with violent crime informed Trump’s hardline views on criminal justice and could serve him well now as he crafts a law-and-order election strategy to try to defeat Democratic challenger Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election.
A president cruising to an almost certain defeat – with the deaths of 175,000 Americans (and rising), urban unrest, a tanking economy and an impeachment trial all on his watch – has hit upon a key issue that will make him competitive in November.
With the possible exception of a vaccine for COVID-19 being found in the next two months, Trump could hardly contrive a more potentially effective campaign theme.
History should give Trump reasons for optimism. The presidential elections in 1968 and 1988 provide a template for Republican victory on a law-and-order platform. Indeed, each of those previous elections presents a parallel that should concern Biden — and which he must counter.
As protests against police violence have raged this summer, Trump has sought to capitalise on scenes of unrest.Julio Cortez/AP
Nixon’s pledge to restore ‘order’ in 1968
When Trump was 22, he saw Republican Richard Nixon run a campaign against a Democratic party and administration struggling to deal with widespread political, social and racial unrest.
In April 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., sparked rioting in Washington DC, Baltimore, Chicago and Kansas City — all Democratically controlled cities.
With then-President Lyndon Johnson refusing to run again, and with his likely successor, Robert F. Kennedy, himself assassinated two months after King, the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, floundered.
At the Democratic national convention in Chicago that summer, shocked Americans watched as police beat anti-Vietnam war protesters outside the building. Inside, Democrats were split between pro- and anti-war candidates. Capitalising on the latter’s inability to cohere around a single candidate, Humphrey won the nomination by default.
But the unrest proved insurmountable. Uniting the increasingly warring wings of his party was beyond him.
In response to the social upheaval, Humphrey fell back on ambitious projects to redress racial injustice. His “war on poverty” theme, however, rang hollow as Americans saw their cities in flames and sons dying in Vietnam.
Tied to a cunning strategy of picking up disaffected Southern Democrats, this “restore order” platform was enough for him to win with only 43.4% of the popular vote (and 32 states in the electoral college).
Four years later, again channelling appeals for law and order, Nixon was re-elected in a landslide, winning every state except Massachusetts.
Bush campaign stokes racial fears in 1988
It took another 20 years before the intersection of race and crime dominated another presidential election.
Again, the parallels between that election in 1988 and the current campaign are many. Incumbent President George H. W. Bush trailed his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, by at least 10 percentage points in July that year. Dukakis looked an odds-on cert to make Bush a one-term president.
Instead, he lost by nearly eight points (and 40 states to 10), considered by many to be one of the weakest men to ever run for the office.
Michael Dukakis lost the 1988 presidential contest, in part, due to his rival’s ‘law and order’ campaign.Bob Jordan/AP
What happened? Several factors explain Dukakis’ defeat. But the law-and-order and race campaign the Republicans ran against him was arguably decisive.
In 1974, Willie Horton, an African-American man, was involved in the robbery and murder of a teenage gas station attendant. He was sentenced to life without parole, but in 1986 was released on a weekend “furlough” as part of a Massachusetts rehabilitation scheme.
Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts when Horton was released. And though he had not designed the furlough program, he had supported it.
The Bush campaign made great hay. In an ad that became infamous for stoking racial fears, prisoners were shown moving through a revolving prison gate. A Black inmate – in a clear allusion to Horton – featured prominently.
The Bush team even showcased Horton’s rape victim in a subsequent tour. The message, repeated often and insufficiently rebuffed by the Democrats, was simple and effective: “weekend prison passes — Dukakis on crime”.
In some ways, the Willie Horton ad is the 1.0 version of Trump’s relentless tweets and comments about African-Americans.
Can Trump run a similarly successful strategy?
These prior campaign failures should make Democrats nervous. While the Democrats can expect to carry most non-white voters by significant margins in this year’s election, they are still vulnerable to Trump’s claims of being soft on crime.
Trump has not much to lose by painting his opponent as Dukakis 2.0 — weak on law and order and a supporter of de-funding the police (which Biden is not).
Just as Nixon did in 1968, Trump is asserting that Democrat-controlled cities cannot keep order – with an added twist. He claims Black voters should back Republicans in order to have the safer streets and economic opportunities Democratic policies have denied them.
In a tight election, even a small shift in the African-American vote could prove decisive. The GOP convention was notable for the number of Black Republicans it featured.
Biden’s lead in the polls has slipped in recent weeks, making Democrats nervous.Andrew Harnik/AP
Herein lies Biden’s key challenge. Biden, like Humphrey 52 years ago, leads a Democratic house divided. He cannot afford to go hard on law and order and thus alienate the left wing of his party that finds common cause with the Black Lives Matter movement.
He must both defend the police and acknowledge their systemic racism. And he must, as Dukakis failed to do, explain effectively and believably that he can keep people safe.
Over the weekend, Biden attempted to do this by condemning the violence that has erupted between right- and left-wing protesters in the city of Portland as “unacceptable.” And he sought to turn the issue around on Trump:
He may believe tweeting about law and order makes him strong – but his failure to call on his supporters to stop seeking conflict shows just how weak he is.
Rather than the 2020 election solely being a referendum on Trump and his handling of coronavirus, it is now shaping up to be a fight over law and order and racial justice, as well.
This is a tough position for Biden to be in — and one he must resolve quickly to avoid a repeat of both 1968 and 1988.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mary-Louise McLaws, Professor of Epidemiology Healthcare Infection and Infectious Diseases Control, UNSW
The concept of a COVID-19 “germ bubble” refers to close contacts with whom we don’t practise mask use or keep physical distancing. In strict lockdown, this generally means just the members of your own household. But several countries, such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom, have experimented with bubbles larger than a single household.
Victorian Premier Dan Andrews will unveil a roadmap out of restrictions on Sunday. Many will be keen to see if a bubble strategy is part of this, after Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton confirmed the concept is under “active consideration”.
Extended bubbles mean your household can nominate other people or households with whom you could have close contact. These would need to be exclusive, so the infection risk is contained, and your nominated households would be required to live in the same town or city.
It’s a way of balancing the risk of exposure to COVID-19 with our need for social interaction, allowing vulnerable and isolated people to have social connections to help cope with the stress of a pandemic.
While the idea undoubtedly comes with risks, it’s crucial for governments to implement restrictions with compassion. A pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint, and if people feel that policies are crafted with compassion they may be more likely to adhere to restrictions in the long run.
Bubbles across the Tasman
In the current lockdown in Victoria, the germ bubble is restricted to people in our immediate household. Only those in an “intimate relationship” are allowed to visit each other.
This increases loneliness and has a large impact on mental health. And, understandably, it has left many single people and people from differing family structures frustrated.
The bubble idea tries to overcome this by allowing people to have close contact with a very defined and exclusive group. It’s a relatively new concept, and was not used in the management of the SARS epidemic in 2003.
New Zealand was the first country to implement an extended bubble during COVID-19, allowing people to have close contact with family members outside their household, under its “alert level 3” restrictions. Its bubble extension was a compassionate solution to the mental health effects of strict lockdowns.
New Zealand’s approach was not just compassionate, but realistic about the modern social structure.
Socially, our important connections are complex and culturally diverse. Our understanding of who is family includes blended families, step-family members, partners, lovers and close friends — all of whom may not share our dwelling.
Nominating members into a compassionate germ bubble may benefit the community in the long run as we move in and out of lockdown.
A bubble approach was also used in the UK when easing restrictions in June, allowing single-person households to form a bubble with one multi-person household.
Under New Zealand’s extended bubble, in alert level 3, you could connect with close family members outside your household.Nick Perry/AP/AAP
What about the risks?
Despite the social benefits, there are indeed risks with a virus as infectious as SARS-CoV-2. The advantages of a compassionate approach to mental well-being must be weighed against any infection transmission disadvantages.
If a bubble system was to be implemented anywhere in Australia, a formalised process for joining a germ bubble would be needed. The maximum number of people allowed in any single bubble would also have to be limited.
The bubble would need to be exclusive. If you were “bubbling” with one household, you could not just decide to change to a different one whenever you please. If you did need to alter your bubble, there would have to be a 14-day gap between one set of people leaving and another group joining, to reduce the risk of transmission between bubbles.
A bubble tracker app could facilitate the nomination process. The app would need to include consent to join by both, or all, parties. A bubble system would also need to consider what to do with different areas of varying degrees of transmission.
For example, if one member of a multi-household bubble lives in an area of very high community transmission, this brings a greater risk to the whole bubble, even if other members of the bubble are in areas of low transmission. It means the virus could enter areas of low transmission via these bubbles. People can also pose a greater degree of risk to their bubble if they work in a risky zone or occupation.
In epidemiology, our aim is to reduce risk as much as possible, but in a long pandemic we have to leave room for compassion (without increasing the risk for the wider community).
Many Victorians are hoping the state government will consider bubbles as a way of balancing infection risk with the need for social connection.Erik Anderson/AAP
Compassionate policies breed compliance
Isolation causes stress and may reduce cooperation. But a compassionate germ bubble may foster resilience by reducing a sense of isolation for people living alone and friends, extended family and partners distressed by the separation.
Developing a compassionate bubble for our future lockdown plans may also help us endure a lengthy pandemic that features multiple lockdowns and ringfencing of hotspots when required. Compassion may improve the community’s willingness to adhere to restrictions rather than merely being forced to comply.
Authorities who respond scientifically may be viewed by their community as competent and reliable. But there cannot be a ration on compassion. A safe and compassionate plan will ensure there is little incentive for some to game the system by joining multiple germ bubbles. A compassionate approach, coupled with the appropriate checks and balances, could lead people to view authorities as trustworthy and capable of leading us safely out of COVID-19.
A report of a review of NAPLAN released in recent days cited the writing part of the test to be the most problematic. The report noted the NAPLAN
[…] has led to formulaic writing in students’ responses to the prompt and, as a further unintended consequence, to formulaic teaching of writing in some schools as they seek to prepare students for the NAPLAN writing test.
My research looked at how the pressure of teaching to the test affects teaching of writing. Teachers told me formulaic approaches to teaching writing could harm students’ capacity to express themselves.
Too many adjectives
My kids come home from school with more and more rules for writing. These include: “don’t change tense”, “stay in the third person” and “end with a clear resolution”.
Yet stories by professional authors do change tense, deliberately use different voices and have complicated conclusions.
I find it increasingly harder to match what my kids do at school and what society understands to be good writing.
This isn’t only a problem in Australia. In March 2019, analysis from the UK highlighted how crude rules, such as “use lots of adjectives” have led to students producing poor writing. Using more adjectives can score highly on a test, because the adjectives can be counted.
However, the writing may be cluttered, vague, overwritten and unwieldy. The article uses the example of one student writing:
I raced buoyantly out of my house back into the caged domain.
As the author explains, this student has been taught that complex words earn extra marks, and that adjectives and adverbs should be used to create “colourful writing”.
Yet this sentence is clunky. It suffers from wordiness when it seeks to describe a simple action. Nor is it clear what “the caged domain” actually is. Sometimes a strong, simple verb or noun is better:
For example, a student’s statement “I stared in awe at the beauty”, to describe a pond, is rewarded as being a “precise phrase”. But this is a classic example of weak narrative writing, or what composition teachers would call “telling not showing”.
In telling, the student overwrites with lofty abstract nouns like “awe” and “beauty” rather than giving concrete details. Instead, they might describe the same scene by saying “I stared in awe as sparkles of light played on the water’s surface like fireflies”, to try to give the reader a sense of being there and show what it is like.
The student is also complying with pressure to use “nominalisation” to make their writing more sophisticated. This means making a word like “beautiful” into the noun, “beauty”. Nominalisation is not always appropriate. Writers need to be able to strategically use these devices, not use them because they must.
While nominalisations can readily be checked off on a tickbox, this does not necessarily lead to good writing, or to precision.
NAPLAN often marks students down for being creative.Shutterstock
Research confirms NAPLAN testing has led to students being disadvantaged in their understanding of what a story can be — only one narrow form of narrative is valued. Interesting and original creative writing is being marked down.
A colleague told me the story of a child she knew who wanted to end his narrative with the main character being murdered mid-sentence, in the middle of a word. Alas, this creative ending was forbidden by the teacher because the assessment rubric required a full paragraph conclusion and “clear resolution”.
Predictable, easy endings
My research shows teachers feel the formulaic NAPLAN approach limits the quality of students’ independent thought. Students are also so drilled into formulaic writing they experience anxiety about whether every sentence fits the required template.
Here is what one teacher told me:
I loathe the NAPLAN writing assessment and the preparation that goes into that. I don’t like the disjointed marking rubric where spelling and sentence structure are ‘worth’ more than ideas.
At home, many parents want their kids to tick the NAPLAN boxes. The School Zone NAPLAN home drilling series, widely sold in newsagents, requires students to write narratives structured by the words “first”, “second”, “next”, “then”, “eventually” and “finally”. Imagine if all short stories were organised in this predictable way.
The series’ assessment grid requires persuasive writing to use words like “obviously”. This is what is known as a bullying word; it implies readers are foolish or ignorant if they do not agree. Yet it is flawed logic to assume what is obvious to the writer is also obvious to readers.
These kinds of words demonstrate poor writing, as the writer simply makes empty claims rather than using reason. If something is wrong, it is necessary to explain why it is wrong, rather than claim it is “obviously” so.
Essentially, students are not thinking of the best ideas, words or strategies to achieve their communication goals. They are thinking of what NAPLAN wants, even if this is bad writing.
This removes the learning that comes with the challenge of students working out what they want to say, and having the freedom to say it in a way they devise. Our kids deserve better than a system that hampers their efforts to become good writers. What NAPLAN values, and what genuine readers, not NAPLAN markers, value are two different things.
We need to call NAPLAN, and the government to account, and ask for an honest assessment of the expanding body of research that says NAPLAN is harming students’ capacity to write.
There are many ways children absorb public health messaging about COVID-19. They may receive information from social media platforms like TikTok, via direct text messages, or through daily briefings from state chief medical officers and politicians on television.
The messages to stay safe during the pandemic are essential, but there are a couple of things we need make sure of when communicating advice to children.
Second, children need the opportunity to ask questions and have them answered by experts in ways they can understand.
This is where formal COVID briefings for children could help.
Teachers can’t do it all
COVID-19 messaging in classrooms has focused on making sure staff and students are safe by adjusting teaching to account for social distancing requirements.
A recent survey in New South Wales found teachers are feeling pressure to meet daily sanitising requirements with limited supplies. They are overwhelmed with the responsibility to keep children safe and don’t necessarily have the time and energy to help them understand more about the pandemic.
Children-specific briefings might take some of the pressure of teachers who are already overworked adapting to new ways of learning.Shutterstock
Even teachers who are delivering lessons remotely during lockdown are adapting to the time demands of teaching via technology. So they don’t have the opportunity to explore children’s hopes, fears and thirst for knowledge about coronavirus.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern also hosted a live-streamed press conference especially for children.
At New Zealand’s children’s-presser Prime Minisiter, Jacinda Ardern, was accompanied by a microbiologist as well as a children’s science communicator known as Nanogirl.BORIS JANCIC/ AAP
And Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin brought along her minister for education and minister for science and culture to a similar press conference in April, where children 7-12 years old were invited to submit video questions.
But there was a key difference between the Scandinavian conferences and New Zealand’s. In place of politicians, accompanying Ardern were Siouxsie Wiles, a microbiologist, and Michelle Dickinson, a children’s science communicator also known as “Nanogirl”.
One of Dickinson’s videos, which she posted on Twitter, explains, using age-appropriate language and models, how soap destroys the virus. It’s been viewed more than 34,500 times.
Politicians have a responsibility to explain how the government is addressing public needs relevant to their portfolio, but there is no certainty a particular minister is an expert in that field. This is why an expert panel should be offered to children to answer the unpredictable and varied questions they might ask.
How should a kids-only briefing be run in Australia?
In deciding how to run such a conference in Australia, we can learn from the questions asked by the children at these previous events.
The Norwegian conference prioritised mental health, distributing advice from the World Health Organisation (WHO) to “support each other” and offer “compassion and kindness”.
The New Zealand conference took a more educative approach to explain how things happen, such as how soap destroys the fat layer of the virus. This resonates with many of the key ideas of the Australian Health and Physical Education curriculum, such as taking a strengths-based approach (seeing young people as having resources to solve problems), developing health literacy, and focusing on educative outcomes, rather than just focussing on changing a child’s behaviour.
Having an expert explain to children the psychology behind the uncertainty, anxiety and helplessess of living under COVID restrictions could be beneficial.Shutterstock
The Finnish conference was dominated by questions like “when can we go back to school?”, “is the situation in Finland good? (compared to other countries)” and “why can’t I hold my birthday party?”
The role of the experts could be to help children gain a better understanding of the psychology behind the uncertainty, anxiety and helplessness they may be feeling from living under COVID restrictions.
Kids should hear from experts
It is entirely appropriate that our prime minister should lead an Australian panel of experts from a variety of disciplines to answer questions from children. A COVID briefing for children would help the government take children’s views seriously and switch the narrative from one-way, informed compliance to a two-way educated conversation.
Children deserve to have access to expert knowledge in order to make informed decisions about their own health behaviours and their role in the wider community in these COVID-19 times.
Health education is comprised of many sub-disciplines, requiring general classroom teachers to acquire new and diverse knowledge sets at a time when rapidly changing teaching demands have pushed them to the brink of exhaustion.
A televised COVID briefing with a multidisciplinary panel of experts would not only satisfy children’s right to access quality knowledge, but also create an enduring, age-appropriate resource to help schools, teachers and the wider community into the future.
Australia has seen the latest extraordinary twist in its climate soap opera. An alliance of business and environment groups declared the nation is “woefully unprepared” for climate change and urgent action is needed.
And yesterday, Australian Industry Group – one of the alliance members – called on the federal government to spend at least A$3.3 billion on renewable energy over the next decade.
The alliance, known as the Australian Climate Roundtable, formed in 2015. It comprises ten business and environmental bodies, including the Business Council of Australia, National Farmers Federation and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU).
There is no systemic government response (federal, state and local) to build resilience to climate risks. Action is piecemeal; uncoordinated; does not engage business, private sector investment, unions, workers in affected industries, community sector and communities; and does not match the scale of the threat climate change represents to the Australian economy, environment and society.
This is ironic, since many of the statement’s signatories spent decades fiercely resisting moves towards sane climate policy. Let’s look back at a few pivotal moments.
Preventing an early carbon tax
The Business Council of Australia (BCA) was a leading player against the Hawke Government’s Ecologically Sustainable Development process, which was initiated to get green groups “in the tent” on environmental policy. The BCA also fought to prevent then environment minister Ros Kelly bring in a carbon tax – one of the ways Australia could have moved to its goal of 20% carbon dioxide reduction by 2005.
caption.AAP Image/Steven Saphore
And the BCA, alongside the Australian Mining Industry Council (now known as the Minerals Council of Australia), was a main driver in setting up the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network (AIGN).
Don’t let the name fool you – the network co-ordinated the fossil fuel extraction sector and other groups determined to scupper strong climate and energy policy. It made sure Australia made neither strong international commitments to emissions reductions nor passed domestic legislation which would affect the profitable status quo.
Its first major victory was to destroy and prevent a modest carbon tax in 1994-95, proposed by Keating Government environment minister John Faulkner. Profits from the tax would have funded research and development of renewable energy.
Questionable funding and support
The Australian Aluminium Council is also in the roundtable. This organisation used to be the most militant of the “greenhouse mafia” organisations – as dubbed in a 2006 ABC Four Corners investigation.
The council funded and promoted the work of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE), whose “MEGABARE” economic model was, at the time, used to generate reports which were a go-to for Liberal and National Party politicians wanting to argue climate action would spell economic catastrophe.
In 1997, the Australian Conservation Foundation (another member of the climate roundtable) complained to the federal parliamentary Ombudsman about fossil fuel groups funding ABARE, saying this gave organisations such as Shell Australia a seat on its board. The ensuing Ombudsman’s report in 1998 largely backed these complaints. ABARE agreed with or considered many of the Ombudsman’s recommendations.
John Faulkner’s vision for a price on carbon was thwarted.AAP Image/Alan Porritt
businesses accounting for well over 10% of national production and around one million jobs will be affected by significant cost increases.
Australian economist Ross Garnaut was among many at the time to lambast this complaint, calling it “pervasive vested-interest pressure on the policy process.”
Back in July 2014, the Business Council of Australia and Innes Willox (head of the Australian Industry Group) both welcomed the outcome of then prime minister Tony Abbott’s policy vandalism: the repeal of the Gillard government’s carbon price. The policy wasn’t perfect, but it was an important step in the right direction.
In doing so, Australia squandered the opportunity to become a renewable energy superpower. With its solar, wind and geothermal resources, its scientists and technology base, Australia could have been world-beaters and world-savers. Now, it’s just a quarry with a palpable end of its customer base for thermal coal.
Tony Abbott derailed the carbon tax.AAP Image/Joel Carrett
What is to be done?
Given the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the global pandemic and the devastating fires of Black Summer, it would be forgivable to despair.
It shouldn’t have been the case that business groups only acted when the problem became undeniable and started to affect profits.
Somehow we must recapture the energy, determination and even the optimism of the period from 2006 to 2008 when it seemed Australia “got” climate change and the need to take rapid and radical action.
This time, we must do it better. Decision-makers should not look solely to the business sector for guidance on climate policy – the community, and the broader public good, should be at the centre.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Neal Hughes, Senior Economist, Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES)
It’s been 13 years since the Australian Government set out to develop the Murray-Darling Basin Plan with the goal of finding a more sustainable balance between irrigation and the environment.
Like much of the history of water sharing in the Murray-Darling over the last 150 years, the process has been far from smooth. However, significant progress has been achieved, with about 20% of water rights recovered from agricultural users and redirected towards environmental flows.
One of the most difficult debates has been over how the water should be recovered.
Initially most occurred via “buybacks” of water rights from farmers. While relatively fast and inexpensive, opposition to buybacks emerged due to concerns about their effects on water prices and irrigation farmers and regional communities.
This led to a new emphasis on infrastructure programs including farm upgrades in which farmers received funding to improve their irrigation systems in return for surrendering water rights.
While these farm upgrades are more expensive, it was thought that they would have fewer negative effects on farmers and communities.
The Murray-Darling Basin operates under a “cap and trade” system. Each year it imposes a limit on how much water that can be extracted from the basin’s rivers, based on the available supply.
Water users (mostly farmers) hold rights to a share of this limit, and they can trade these rights on a market.
To date 1,230 gigalitres of these water rights have been bought from farmers via buyback programs at a cost of about A$2.6 billion.
The other type of program is farm upgrades which offer farmers funding to improve their irrigation infrastructure in return for a portion of their water rights.
To date 255 gigalitres of water has been recovered through farm upgrades at a cost of about $1 billion.
Annual volume of water rights recovered for the environment since 2007-08
For infrastructure projects the financial year refers to the contract date. The actual transfer of entitlements may occur in a later financial year. The volume of water recovered is expressed in terms of the long-term average annual yield. The estimates do not include water recovered through state projects (160 gigalitres) or water gifted to the Commonwealth (15 gigalitres). Off-farm infrastructure includes water recovered through projects that are a combination of on-farm, off-farm and land purchases.Sources: Department of Agriculture Water and Environment, Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder
Water recovery has increased prices
As would be expected, the dominant short-term driver of prices is water availability, with large price increases during droughts. The dominant longer-term drivers include lower average rainfall related to climate change and the emergence of new irrigation crops including almonds.
While water recovery has played less of a role, buybacks and farm upgrades have still reduced the supply of water to farmers and increased prices to some extent.
Our modelling suggests that over the 13 years of the plan southern basin water prices have been around $72 per megalitre higher on average as a result of water recovery measures, with the effects varying year-to-year depending on conditions.
Modelled water allocation prices with and without water recovery
Price refers to volume weighted average annual water allocation prices across the southern Murray Darling Basin. Water recovery reflects the cumulative volume of buybacks and farm upgrades at each year. Water recovery began in 2007-08.ABARES modelling
Farm upgrades increase prices more than buybacks
Farm upgrades are often viewed as an opportunity to save water and produce “more crop per drop”.
But they can also encourage farmers to increase their water use as they seek to make the most of their new infrastructure: sometimes referred to as a “rebound effect”.
While there have been concerns about rebound effects for some time, there has been limited evidence until recently.
Less-wasteful irrigation can save water, as long as there’s no ‘rebound’
As would be expected, our study finds that upgraded farms have benefited in terms of profits and productivity. However, we also find large rebound effects, with upgraded farms increasing their water use by between 10% and 50%.
To get the extra water they need to buy it from other farmers, putting pressure on prices. We find the resulting price impact to be much more than the impact of buying back water. Per unit of water recovered, it is about double that of buybacks.
These higher water prices increase the risk that irrigation assets – including some newly upgraded systems – could become stranded as price sensitive irrigation activities become less profitable.
No easy answers
Recovering water through off-farm infrastructure is one alternative, however the most effective projects have already been developed, leaving cost-effective water saving schemes harder to find.
This brings us back to buybacks. Because buybacks are cheaper than farm infrastructure programs, there is more scope to combine them with regional development investments to help offset negative impacts on communities.
The challenge is that in a connected water market the flow-on effects on water prices and farmers can be complex and difficult to predict, making it hard to know where to direct development investments.
A potential middle ground is rationalisation, where parts of the water supply network are decommissioned, and affected farmers are compensated both for their water rights and for being disconnected from water supply. This approach has less effect on water prices and allows regional development initiatives to be targeted to the affected areas.
However, rationalisation can be hard to implement given it requires negotiating with all affected farmers and all levels of government.
Given the complexity of the Murray-Darling Basin, water policy is far from simple. While it is clear more water will be needed to put the basin on a sustainable footing, there are no easy options.
Further progress will require careful policy design to help ease adjustment pressure on farmers and regional communities.
Source: Council on Hemispheric Affairs – Analysis-Reportage
The event will take place on September 11 and 12, via Zoom
By COHA Editorial team From Washington DC
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) is honored to cosponsor the second encounter of the Philosophies of Liberation Conference, sponsored by Bowie State University and also cosponsored by Fordham University. The virtual Encuentro II will take place on September 11 and 12 with free access via Zoom, continuing a North-South dialogue that began in 2019 at Loyola Marymount University.
The event brings together scholars and artists from various universities in the US, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, all dedicated to liberatory theory, artistic expression, and practice.
The idea for the two encounters has been inspired in large part by the work of co-founder and leading voice of the philosophy of liberation, the renowned Argentine-Mexican philosopher, Enrique Dussel. Dr. Dussel will deliver the keynote speech of the conference on September 12.
The conference will feature 45 speakers, organized among 14 panels, a musical performance, an art exhibit, and a theatre performance, on topics that include decolonization, ethics, and pedagogy.
The program can be seen here. People can register for the conference by visiting here.
Decolonizing our minds as prelude to building a more just world
Dussel’s ground breaking work, Philosophy of Liberation (1977) and his magnum opus, Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion (1998), as well as his numerous volumes on history, political theory and other decolonizing themes, have inspired several generations of scholars. These academics continue to link the ethics of liberation to the social, economic and political struggle to transform the prevailing system and build a more just world.
The task of transformation is a long-term project; it involves first decolonizing our minds so that we can critically interpret history and expose the underside of the increasingly exhausted neoliberal ideology. This critical work lays the groundwork for an ethics that affirms the growth of life in community, using genuinely democratic procedures, over endless war, extreme economic inequality, and imperial domination.
In concrete terms this means overcoming the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America and supporting regional integration and independence, so that the sovereign peoples of each country can combat corruption and establish democratic institutions that obey their constituent power. It also means building a world in which the great diversity of peoples can share in certain core values that can lead us out of this desert of endless war and the destruction of the earth’s ecosystems to a “world in which many worlds can fit”, to use a Zapatista expression.
Philosophies of liberation are not mere ivory tower academic exercises, but forms of thinking linked to the defense of human life and the biosphere at a time when the very continued existence of the human species is at risk.
Former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce has condemned the slimmed down, part-virtual COVID parliament as living “in a half life” and compromising democratic rights.
“No disease in 2020 should interfere in your parliamentary democratic rights. Parliament in a half life is not a parliament, it is merely a rather large building, kind of a new age palace in Canberra.”
Under rules agreed for the current sitting fortnight MPs can participate in parliament remotely and ask questions and speak but cannot vote.
The prohibition on remote voting reflects not just technological challenges but a desire to preserve the integrity of votes, represented by the tradition of the chamber doors being locked when votes are counted.
There are some differences in rules between the House of Representatives and the Senate – senators can move amendments remotely.
The House numbers in the chamber at any one time are limited not just to comply with social distancing but to avoid ACT health rules that would apply if the number was above 100. The parties have rosters. Numbers are managed to reflect the balances between the parties.
Writing on Facebook, Joyce said he was in Canberra but every second day he did not have a seat in the parliament to do his job.
“This is all very epidemiologically responsible but also a dangerous intrusion into your democratic rights.”
Legislation passed on a majority vote, but if he was “rostered off” on the day of a vote, how did the people in his New England seat have their wishes represented?
“On that day New England is disenfranchised and there is merely the presumption that their wishes are the same as the executive.
“It is difficult to be responsible for something I had no vote on and I don’t want to explain how I didn’t actually support something but … that was my RDO”.
Joyce said to bring on a private member’s bill required more than half of the actual 151 members of the House, posing a big problem when many members were not there.
“Nothing will be brought on against the wishes of the executive and don’t the ministers in the executive love that.”
He gave the example that the Senate might soon vote to restore the Northern Territory’s two lower house seats (one of which has been abolished due to population loss) but in present circumstances there would be no way to bring the bill on in the House unless the executive agreed.
“Our parliament can’t work on the presumption of the benevolence of the boss being all good. Whether right or wrong it is just too North Korea.”
“I am sure the PM and cabinet are doing the right thing, I don’t see them as bad people, but if they went off the reservation then there is little or rather vastly less than there should be, to check them.
“This must stop because when the malady is hard to diagnose it is easy to cure, however when it is easy to diagnose – well it is then too late.”
Questioning why MPs could not vote remotely, Joyce said “a person can transfer millions of dollars back and forth in bank accounts but apparently it is too dangerous for a member of parliament to press ‘y’ for yes or ‘n’ for no, check that they have registered on the correct side for how they intend to vote and then press ‘enter’.
“Apparently it is too difficult to declare the empty public gallery, to allow social distancing, as being part of the chamber, so if you are in Canberra, you can vote responsibly.”
In a recent radio interview, Australian Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan was asked whether NAPLAN is the best way to check how students are going academically.
The minister said:
ministers have had a look at what else takes place across the globe, and NAPLAN is regarded as one of the best tools for measuring how our children are going at school. There are not many others which are preferred.
This would indicate that, at a certain ministerial level, there seem to be no serious identified issues with NAPLAN. But the recently released report of the NAPLAN review — commissioned by the governments of NSW, ACT, QLD and Victoria — says otherwise.
In fact, many reports over the 12 years of NAPLAN’s existence, including a Senate inquiry, highlight a plethora of issues with the test that need to be urgently addressed.
The NAPLAN is trying to achieve too much. If we keep it, it must be reformed to be a national school assessment tool for systemic improvement alone.
What is the official goal of NAPLAN?
The National Assessment Program – Literacy And Numeracy (NAPLAN) is an annual assessment for all Australian school students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Run by the National Assessment Program (NAP), it has tested certain types of skills that cover reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and numeracy.
The assessments are conducted every year in the second full week in May. The data and information gained from NAPLAN drives ongoing continuous improvement at school, state and national levels.
The NAP estimates around one million students sit the test each year. Exemptions may be granted for students with a language background other than English or with a disability. Parents or carers can also withdraw students from the testing program if there are religious beliefs or philosophical objections to testing.
NAPLAN moved from paper to online testing in some parts of Australia over 2018 and 2019. In 2019, participation in NAPLAN increased from 15% of students in school to more than 50%.
But the 2019 trial showed a serious problem with connectivity and computer glitches that affected nearly 40,000 students who took the test online.
The NAP has stated four main benefits for NAPLAN. They are that the data
helps school systems and governments implement policy in teaching, learning and school improvement
helps schools set goals and a direction by mapping individual student progress, and identifying strengths and weaknesses in teaching programs
helps teachers challenge high performers and identify students who need support
provides evidence for parents and students to discuss progress with their teachers and compare their performance against national peers.
The NAPLAN online version is tailored to student responses. It gives students questions that may be more or less difficult than the previous ones. This results in improved assessments and more precise results.
In a submission to the Council of Australian Governments in March 2019, the Gonski Institute recommended:
the sole purpose of the national assessment and reporting system should be to monitor education system performance against the purpose of education, particularly on the issues of educational excellence, equity, wellbeing and students’ attitudes toward learning.
However, NAPLAN needs to go through a deep overhaul before it can be considered “suitably fit for diagnostic purpose”.
What issues did the review identify?
Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT commissioned the independent review into NAPLAN to help ensure NAPLAN the test better met the needs of students, teachers and parents.
To remedy these flaws, the review has offered some recommendations:
reducing the extent of NAPLAN’s use on the My School website, or removing it from the site completely
changing the time the test is administered to earlier in the year so results can be used more productively by schools and teachers
shifting the test from Year 9, which had high absenteeism, to Year 10 when students are more mature and at the stage where they were making important choices about subjects in the senior years of school
introduce a new test to monitor critical and creative thinking in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in Years 5, 7 and 10, which would widen the scope of assessment.
The review outlined the writing component of the test as the most problematic as it has led to increased formulaic writing in responses to a prompt. In turn, this leads to a formulaic way of test preparation at some schools.
In classrooms, students learn critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration, creativity and communication. NAPLAN doesn’t capture these aspects of student achievement. The NAP needs to seriously consider alternatives in the online NAPLAN that assess more complex skills students need for their future life and work. It could look to tests such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for ways to do this.
The NAPLAN online test has been cancelled this year, and the next NAPLAN test is scheduled for 2022. We need to make the changes now. We can’t afford to get this wrong any longer.
A new look Regional Fisheries Ministers (RFMM) group met for the first time virtually last week to discuss the state of the Pacific Ocean and voiced their concerns over the state of coastal fisheries, climate change and marine pollution.
Their decisions reflected regional priorities for the fisheries and marine sector.
The ministers and senior officials were led by Cooks Islands Prime Minister Henry Puna and ministers representing Australia, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Niue, Samoa and the Solomon Islands.
Senior officials from French Polynesia, Kiribati, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Nauru, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Tokelau, Tuvalu and Vanuatu were also in attendance at the Noumea-hosted web forum.
Their talks reflected with concern on the results that have signalled a decline in the status of key indicator invertebrate and finfish species, and reef and ecosystem health, which have direct impacts on livelihoods and food security.
They called for the strengthening of coastal fisheries management.
Puna addressed the meeting, saying: “One undeniable and tangible resource, asset, and lifeline that we all possess is our shared fisheries resources”.
He called for initiatives to diversify the use of fisheries and marine resources, using innovative and collaborative approaches.
Statement of outcomes While highlighting the Pacific’s strong response to the national and regional security threats the covid-19 pandemic has posed, he stressed the importance of enhancing fisheries management, maintaining food and economic security.
“Our collective response must always reflect how much we value our people, and the mana, resilience and Pacific community spirit that underpins the very fibre of our nations,” he said.
The meeting, chaired by the FSM’s Secretary for the Department of Resource and Development, Marion Henry, was hosted online, gathering Fisheries Ministers and officials from the Pacific Island Forum countries and territories as well as regional organisations
The talks covered regional coastal fisheries and aquaculture priorities and the impact of covid-19 on these fisheries, the 2020 Coastal Fisheries Report Card, and options for enhancing discussions on community-based management of coastal fisheries.
Ministers also endorsed the Regional Framework on Aquatic Biosecurity.
The Victorian, Queensland and Morrison governments all sought to address their various COVID vulnerabilities with announcements on Monday.
The Andrews government – under intense attack from the federal government – said it will unveil on Sunday its “reopening roadmap” for easing restrictions – a week before the hard Melbourne lockdown is due to expire on September 13.
The Palaszczuk government – after publicity about health hardship cases involving border issues – announced it is setting up a unit in its health department to help with residents from NSW who need medical treatment in Queensland.
The Morrison government – fighting off strong attacks from Labor over the daily death toll among nursing home residents – provided $563 million to extend support under existing measures for the aged care sector.
Andrews said his government would hold extensive discussions with industry, unions and community organisations ahead of Sunday’s announcement “to inform the final development” of the roadmap. The government would tailor guidance to different industries.
Andrews said: “Workplaces will need to look very different as we find out ‘COVID Normal’. By working with business we’ll make sure that can happen practically and safely”.
He warned of the danger of opening too quickly – if that happened “we will lose control of this. The numbers will explode,” .
The tally announced on Monday of new cases in Victoria was 73. The number of deaths was 41. But these included 33 deaths before August 27 which were reported to the state department by aged care facilities on Sunday (under new reporting requirements to reconcile federal and state numbers).
Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg on Sunday called on Andrews to present a “message of hope” and a plan for the way out of the lockdown. In a round of interviews on Monday Frydenberg continued pushing the message of how great a drag Victoria, with its disastrous second COVID wave, is on the national economic recovery.
This comes ahead of Wednesday’s national accounts for the June quarter. Frydenberg said the quarter would show “the largest single quarterly fall [in GDP] that Australia has seen”.
Meanwhile, as the war over borders continues to rage, a defiant premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she would not be moved on the issue.
“Queensland will continue to have our borders closed to keep Queenslanders safe,” she said. “The federal government can throw whoever they want at that.”
But her government has acted to deal with health issues arising from the restricted access to the state.
This was highlighted last week after a woman from northern NSW who was sent to Sydney for medical treatment lost an unborn twin. She went to Sydney following confusion about how she could access treatment in Brisbane, which was much closer. Scott Morrison said on Friday the case was “heartbreaking”.
Palaszczuk said a hotline will be be set up to “coordinate with families in a timely manner”.
“I understand it is a very difficult time for people,” she said.
Although Morrison is deeply frustrated with premiers in states with few or no cases keeping borders shut, Newspoll on Monday showed eight in ten Australians thought premiers “should have the authority to close their borders or restrict entry of Australians who live in other states”. In Queensland it was 84%.
The extra aged care money extends existing spending on areas such as infection control and staffing, including to confine staff to working at only a single facility.
Having workers employed at multiple facilities was a problem in Victoria’s second wave. The federal government on Monday could not say how many workers in Victoria were still doing this.
Some of the funds will also extend current short-term home support for people whose families have taken them out of facilities because the pandemic.
Since July, 19 notices have been issued to aged care providers in Victoria to comply with standards.
Aged Care minister Richard Colbeck, appearing at a news conference with Health Ministrer Greg Hunt, said the government was “doing work on an alternative funding model and that is the real thing that [is] going to put a floor under the sector, and we’re working with the sector.
“And we’re doing the preparatory work to put that in place as quickly as possible now once we come to our Royal Commission response.”
The government ruled out calls for the Medicare levy to be increased to provide more money for aged care.
It is illegal for any Papua New Guinean police officer to demand spot fines from people not wearing face masks in public, says Police Minister Bryan Kramer.
“There is no fine that I am aware of. However there are orders. There shouldn’t be any spot fines.”
He said he would discuss the matter with Police Commissioner David Manning.
Kramer said some officers had been “abusing” the public health safety orders regarding the covid-19 coronavirus pandemic such as on the wearing of face masks in public transport and in public places.
“There is a concern about these orders on the pandemic which certain officers have abused,” he said.
“I would encourage [people told by police to pay a fine] to file a complaint when they feel something is wrong. If officers are asked to be paid, or there is a need for clarification, just write a letter to my office and the Commissioner of Police David Manning.”
Kramer told The National that anyone ordered to pay a spot fine or threatened of arrest for not wearing a mask in a private vehicle should report the matter to the nearest police station and write a formal complaint to his office.
He said offending police officers would be dealt with.
Rebuilding ‘internal investigations’ “We are rebuilding and strengthening the Internal Investigations Unit (for this purpose),” he said.
“We want to start aggressively dealing with this issue of police officers charging those who do not adhere to the laws.
“Applying common sense is something everyone should be adhering to, and wearing face masks.”
National Capital District Metropolitan Superintendent Perou N’dranou said the bus drivers and checkers had been ignoring the covid-19 protocols such as the maximum of 15 passengers.
“On Friday, buses were removed from the roads after they were given ample time to adhere to the new measures set by controller David Manning,” he said.
Warning against complacency RNZ Pacific reports Pandemic Response Controller David Manning has warned against complacency after reporting no new cases of covid-19 in the past day.
PNG’s total number of confirmed cases remains at 459, with five related deaths reported so far, although less than 16,000 tests have been conducted to date.
Manning said that just because PNG had not reported any new cases today it did not mean that the virus was not spreading.
The Pacific Media Centre republishes articles from The National newspaper with permission.
The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) has issued a warning to all New Zealand businesses to be prepared for cyber attacks, following almost a week of daily attacks on the New Zealand stock exchange (NZX).
The attacks have caused outages, sometimes for hours, of NZX’s public-facing website since Tuesday last week. Today it continued trading under a new arrangement that allows it to post information to alternative platforms.
The attacks are part of worldwide malicious cyber activity and the government will likely share information via Interpol and government-to-government links, including the intelligence alliance know as Five Eyes.
Creating millions of bots
The type of attack is known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). The attacker infects large numbers, often thousands or even millions, of computers with a virus that allows the attacker to instruct the infected computer – known as a “bot” – to send thousands of requests for data to the target.
In effect, this means millions of attempts to access a website at the same time. The website being attacked can’t respond to each one quickly enough so either it simply stops responding or responds to some but not all data requests. Some people get the most up-to-date page and others don’t.
This is particularly damaging for financial information sites such as a stock market. They have a legal duty to give equal access to different users. They would normally shut down and stop trading for a while rather than allow some people to get information before others.
These attacks are not designed to steal data or do insider trading. They are generally set up to demand ransom from the victims, usually asking for thousands of dollars paid in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency which is effectively untraceable. Governments, terrorist organisations, political groups and even pranksters have also been known to use these attacks.
DDoS software is available on the dark web but also not very difficult to write. In many cases the people owning the bots will not be aware anything strange is happening.
The current attacks
Multi-day attacks have been rare but are becoming more common. The size of these attacks, including how many bots are used and their capacity to send requests, has been increasing.
This map shows the number of global attacks on August 15.CC BY-SA
Such multi-day attacks are potentially risky for the attackers as the defence team will be analysing the attacks, often using artificial intelligence tools, and should be able to respond more quickly to block illegitimate requests.
The defence against such attacks is based on being able to cope with the large number of requests, either by moving the website to a cloud-based system that can increase capacity quickly, or identifying bot requests and filtering them out by setting up a “whitelist” of legitimate users and excluding others.
This is normally done by firewalls at the level of each attacked entity, the internet service provider or, as in the case of New Zealand, at a country’s electronic border (for example, the Southern Cross trans-Pacific network of communications cables).
If an attack is coming from inside New Zealand, security software on the bot computer can normally remove the infection with up-to-date anti-virus software. Internet service providers can also detect this activity and may warn users or disconnect the infected machine until it is cleaned. But in this case, the attacks are coming from outside New Zealand.
The COVID-19 pandemic means millions of people are working from home around the world, outside their normal corporate security, often using the family computer. Some people may be less careful about downloading software, particularly on illegal streaming sites, and may be using free or unsecured wifi networks. This makes infecting computers to turn them into bots much easier.
Assuming this is a criminal gang, financial institutes are an attractive target. They rely on availability of service and potentially have money to pay ransoms.
In New Zealand, disaster management and recovery has tended to focus on responses to natural hazards rather than criminal activity. New Zealand does not have local cloud providers and expanding capacity is more difficult.
Even if NZX won’t pay a ransom, this attack is “advertising” for the criminal gangs that may act as “subcontactors” to larger criminal organisations.
The government’s aim will not be to catch the perpetrators in the short term but to share information on how to block the attacks. Normally the response is effective, but it can take some time to analyse details.
At the same time, other attacks (for example phishing to steal data) may use the confusion caused by the DDoS attacks to target potential victims. Organisations should encourage people to update their security software and remain vigilant.
In the future, as the internet of things (IoT) becomes more widespread, many billions of new devices will be connected to the internet. Security standards and forensic capability (storing data to analyse attacks) are not universal and there is a danger that these attacks will become more common and larger in scale.
But defence is possible and both technical and policy approaches are getting better. Artificial intelligence tools for rapidly analysing attacks are the focus of research.
Support for governments in vulnerable areas is also increasing to enforce international agreements, clarify local law and share information between network providers. For example, Macau recently introduced a much tougher cyber security law which seems to have been very effective.
This week’s Newspoll showed the Coalition and Labor in a 50-50 tie on a two-party preferred basis, a two-point gain for Labor since the previous Newspoll three weeks ago.
This is Labor’s best result in Newspoll since late April.
Primary votes were 41% Coalition (down two points), 36% Labor (up three), 11% Greens (steady) and 3% One Nation (down one). (The figures are from The Poll Bludger.)
Nearly two-thirds of respondents (64%) were satisfied with Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s performance (down four points) and 32% were dissatisfied (up three), for a net approval of +32, down seven points. While Morrison’s ratings are still very good by historical standards, this is his worst net-approval since early April.
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s net approval, meanwhile, dipped one point to +2. Morrison led Albanese as better PM by 58-29% (compared to 60-25% three weeks ago).
In late July and early August, new coronavirus cases peaked in Victoria, reaching more than 700 per day. Since then, new cases have dropped back to just 73 today. While the Victorian Labor government was blamed for its initial handling of the outbreak, it is likely now receiving credit for controlling it.
While coronavirus deaths have not slowed, the vast majority of these are connected with aged care, which is a federal government responsibility. Conservative attacks on the Victorian government also likely appear partisan to many voters, and this may have further contributed to the Coalition’s slide.
In an additional question, 80% of respondents thought premiers should have the authority to close their borders or restrict the entry of Australians who live in other states, while just 18% disagreed. Support for this was over 90% in Western Australia and South Australia.
Labor wins NT election with at least 13 of 25 seats
Analyst Kevin Bonham has followed the late vote counting after the recent Northern Territory election. Labor has now won 13 of the 25 seats, the Country Liberal Party (CLP) six and independents two, with four seats still in some doubt.
If doubtful seats are assigned to the current leader, the result would be 15 Labor (down three since the 2016 election), seven CLP (up five), two independents (down three) and one Territory Alliance.
Electoral College may save Trump
This section is an updated version of an article I had published for The Poll Bludger last week.
In the FiveThirtyEight poll aggregate, President Donald Trump’s ratings with all polls are 42.0% approve, 54.2% disapprove (net -12.2%).
In polls of registered or likely voters, Trump’s ratings are 42.9% approve, 53.4% disapprove (net -10.5%). Since my article three weeks ago, Trump’s net approval has improved about one percentage point, continuing a recovery from July lows.
Just over two months from the November 3 election, FiveThirtyEight’s national polling aggregate has Democratic challenger Joe Biden’s lead over Trump slightly increasing to a 50.4% to 42.2% margin, from a 50.0% to 42.5% margin three weeks ago.
In the key battleground states, Biden leads by 6.9% in Michigan, 5.9% in Wisconsin, 5.4% in Pennsylvania, 5.3% in Florida and 3.9% in Arizona. FiveThirtyEight adjusts state polls to the current national vote trends.
On current polling, Pennsylvania and Florida are the most likely “tipping-point” states — that is, these states are most likely to give Trump or Biden the magic 270 electoral votes needed to win the Electoral College and the election.
So, if Biden wins either of those states (and all the other states more favourable for him), he become president.
Trump, however, can win the election by capturing Pennsylvania, Florida and all of the more reliably Republican states.
Joe Biden still leads in crucial states like Pennsylvania and Florida, but a key election model shows his chances of winning down to 69%.Paul Vernon/AP
The problem for Biden is the gap between his national polling advantage and his lead in those two tipping-point states has widened from three weeks ago. Biden leads Trump by 8.2% nationally, but only by 5.4% in Pennsylvania and 5.3% in Florida.
This makes the scenario where Trump loses the popular vote, but sneaks a win in the Electoral College more realistic.
In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.1%, but won the tipping-point state by just 0.8% — giving him the election.
FiveThirtyEight now has a model forecasting the presidential election result, which currently gives Biden a 69% chance to win, down from about 72-73% a week ago.
Biden has received virtually no bounce from the Democratic national convention two weeks ago, while Trump could get some bounce from the more elaborately staged Republican convention that concluded last week.
Why has Biden’s advantage in tipping-point states shrunk recently? One possible reason is that the Midwestern states have a higher percentage of non-university-educated whites than nationally. Trump’s general behaviour has offended better-educated voters, and they are likely to vote for Biden.
This tweet by Cook Political analyst Dave Wasserman shows whites without a university education made up over half the 2016 vote in most battleground states, but only 44% nationally.
Whites without a university education may have moved slightly back to Trump because new coronavirus cases are slowing and the economy is improving.
On the economy, there is a clear downward trend in new jobless claims since their peak in April, and also a downtrend in continuing jobless claims.
If the jobs situation continues to improve, and there is no resurgence in coronavirus cases, Trump could win another term in the same way he won his first term — by exploiting the greater share of whites without university education in the electoral battlegrounds than nationally.
In the RealClearPolitics Senate map, meanwhile, Republicans currently lead Democrats by 46 seats to 44, with ten toss-ups. If toss-ups are assigned to the current leader, Democrats lead by 51 to 49, unchanged from three weeks ago.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jake Whitehead, Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellow & Tritum E-Mobility Fellow, The University of Queensland
For 50 years hydrogen has been championed as a clean-burning gas that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The idea of a “hydrogen economy” is now enjoying a new wave of enthusiasm — but it is not a silver bullet.
Amid the current hydrogen hype, there is little discussion about when the technology can realistically become commercially viable, or the best ways it can be used to cut emissions.
Australia must use hydrogen intelligently and strategically. Otherwise, we risk supporting a comparatively energy-intensive technology in uses that don’t make sense. This would waste valuable renewable energy resources and land space, increase costs for Australians and slow emissions reduction.
Here’s where we can focus hydrogen investment to get the best bang for our buck.
A poorly targeted hydrogen strategy will slow emissions reduction.AP
Hydrogen sucks up energy and space
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but rarely is it freely available. It must be unlocked from water (H2O) or fossil fuels such as methane (CH4), then compressed for transport and use. These steps waste a lot of energy.
Australia could become a renewable energy superpower in the future. But there are serious medium-term challenges, including constraints in the infrastructure that transmits energy.
The world must reach net-zero emissions within 30 years to avert the worst climate change. That means using renewable energy as efficiently as possible to maximise emissions reductions and minimise the land space required. So we must be strategic in how and where we use hydrogen.
Hydrogen pathways.Staffell et al 2018. The role of hydrogen and fuel cells in the global energy system.
Use hydrogen in places electricity won’t go
In most applications, renewables-based electrification has emerged as the most energy efficient, and cost-effective way to strip emissions from the economy.
Yet there are some industries where electrification will remain challenging. It’s here renewable hydrogen — produced from wind and solar energy — will be most important. These industries include steel, cement, aluminium, shipping and aviation.
A renewable hydrogen export market may also emerge in the long-term.
Renewable hydrogen will also be important to replace existing hydrogen produced by fossil fuels. But this alone will require a significant increase in electricity generation, to reach net zero emissions by 2050. This is a major challenge.
Australia’s renewable energy capacity would need to increase substantially to produce green hydrogen.Mick Tsikas/AAP
What about cars and trucks?
Road transport is one area where we believe hydrogen will not play a major role. In fact, Telsa founder Elon Musk has gone as far as to call hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles “mind-bogglingly stupid”.
Hydrogen vehicles will always consume two to four times more energy than battery electric vehicles. This is simply due to the laws of physics, and cannot be resolved by technological improvements.
In the case of hydrogen-powered vehicles, this will mean higher costs for consumers compared to battery-electric vehicles. It also means far more space for solar panels or wind turbines is needed to generate renewable energy.
Most global car makers have recognised the lack of advantage for hydrogen cars and instead invested about US$300 billion in the development and manufacturing of electric cars. Toyota and Hyundai — the last main proponents of hydrogen cars — are also ramping up efforts on electric cars.
As for trucks, the US Department of Energy does not expect hydrogen semi-trailers to be competitive with diesel until around 2050, mainly due to the high cost and low durability of hydrogen fuel cells.
While hydrogen trucks may have a role to play in 20 to 30 years, this will be too late to help reach a 2050 net-zero target. As such, we must explore energy-efficient options already widely deployed overseas, including electric trucks, electrified roads and electrified trailers.
Hydrogen vehicles are less energy-efficient than electric vehicles.Kydpl Kyodo/AP
A truly strategic plan
If Australia is serious about climate action, we must focus efforts on where renewable hydrogen can deliver the greatest environmental and economic benefits: regional ports.
Hydrogen derived from fossil fuels is currently used to make products such as fertiliser and methanol. Supporting the transition to renewable hydrogen for these uses will be an important first step to scale up the industry.
If produced at regional shipping ports close to aluminium, steel or cement plants, this will provide further opportunities to expand renewable hydrogen use to minerals processing, while creating new jobs.
As hydrogen production scales up and costs fall, excess hydrogen would be available at ports for fuelling ships — either directly or through a hydrogen derivative like ammonia. Hydrogen gas could also be used to make carbon-neutral synthetic fuel for planes.
If an international export market emerged in the future, this strategy would also mean renewable hydrogen would be available at ports to directly ship overseas.
Finally, if the development of hydrogen truck technology accelerates before 2050, renewable hydrogen would be available to power the significant number of semi-trailers that travel to and from shipping ports.
A strategic hydrogen plan would link hydrogen production with Australia’s ports.Daean Lewins/AAP
Let’s get real
Renewable hydrogen is a scarce and valuable resource, and should be directed towards sectors most difficult to decarbonise.
If you’re not a comics fan, you may have been surprised at the extent of the heartfeltgrief expressed following the death of actor Chadwick Boseman.
One explanation lies in the extraordinary power of the 2018 movie Black Panther, in which Boseman starred as T’Challa/Black Panther, to address racist stereotypes about Africa and Africans.
Boseman’s character was heir to the hidden kingdom of Wakanda, a mythical African nation free of European colonisation. The film’s subtext explores African Americans’ varying identifications, past and present, with Africa and a global Black diaspora.
Dark continent
Westerners’ ideas about Africa are steeped in myth. The United States, wrote German philosopher Georg Hegel in 1830, was “the land of the future”. Africa, by contrast, was “the land of childhood” where history was meaningless. European powers dubbed it the “Dark Continent”, as if its people could never make progress.
‘We must find a way to look after one another … as if we were one single tribe.’
From explorer Henry Morton Stanley’s tales of impenetrable jungles to the Tarzan novels and early “talkie” films, entertainment portrayed Africa as irredeemably backward.
These (pseudo) scientific and cultural stereotypes underpinned colonisation. They served Western extraction of Africa’s natural resources, enslavement of Africans and of their descendants all over the Americas.
Breaking chains and forging links
Such ideas meant that when Black Americans broke slavery’s chains, starting in the 1820s in northern US states and ending in 1865, it was not straightforward to claim African allegiance. The Atlantic and internal slave trades had devastated ties between families and communities on either side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Black Americans had, instead, forged ties between themselves in the United States. This meant few people (roughly 12,000) were keen to migrate to Liberia, established by the American Colonization Society in 1816.
By the 1920s, with memories of enslavement the preserve of older people, Black Americans began once again to forge links to Africa. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association suggested a global black United States of Africa. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, African Americans were incensed.
Colourised portrait of activist and academic Angela Davis. Original black and white negative by Bernard Gotfryd (1974).US Library of Congress/Unsplash, CC BY
In the 1960s–70s era of Black Power, accelerated by film and television, ties to Africa became more prominent again.
Activists changed their names: Stokely Carmichael became Kwame Ture; Cassius Clay chose Muhammad Ali; and JoAnne Byron’s rebirth was as Assata Shakur. More widespread was the adoption of dashikis and “natural” hairstyles.
Interest in Africa spiked dramatically with Alex Haley’s Roots: the Saga of an American Family. The book (1976) and the miniseries (1977) told the story of Haley’s “furtherest-back ancestor”, Kunta Kinte, and his generations of American descendants.
In more recent decades, Black American tourism to Africa has soared as people seek out their own roots.
In Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman – along with a host of other wonderful actors, and director and screenwriters Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole – brought to life a “splendidly black” utopian vision. The film, which reverses stereotypes about Africa, delighted many African American fans.
In Wakanda, the fictional metal vibranium is the bedrock of a society in which wealth is distributed so justly that both men and women thrive and King T’Challa can stroll the city streets unnoticed.
Vibranium represents the resources of the 54 countries of Africa, whose extraction has not, on the whole, benefited Africans. It is mahogany, ivory, rubber, diamonds, salt, gold, copper, and uranium.
Black Panther draws on an artistic movement known as Afrofuturism, in which knowledge about past violence and injustice inform an imagined future built on equality. Afrofuturists have included novelists Sutton E. Griggs and George Schuyler in the early days, and later Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, and Ishmael Reed, and now N. K. Jemisin and Colson Whitehead.
Beyoncé’s new visual album Black Is King also draws on the Afrofuturist tradition.
It has been criticised for prioritising aesthetics over politics. In particular, Beyoncé’s effort to reclaim colonial stereotypes linking Africans to flora and fauna by donning couture animal prints has drawn mixed responses.
Dedicated to her son, Black Is King falls into a long tradition of romanticising black ancestors as kings and queens. Criticising this tendency, historian Clarence Walker has asked: “If Everybody Was a King, Who Built the Pyramids?”
But kingship is also a metaphor for the power of history, properly told. “History is your future,” Beyoncé tells the film’s young king. An exchange following the track Brown Skinned Girl starts with a male voice saying, “Systematically, we’ve had so much taken from us”. A second voice responds:
Being a king is taking what’s yours. But not just for selfish reasons, but to actually build up your community.
King T’Challa comes to the same realisation and at the end of Black Panther, we see him leave his tech-whizz sister at the helm of a new Wakandan outreach centre in Oakland, California.
In both Black Is King and Black Panther, global connections underpin a reimagined future universe – a marvellous one, even – where disadvantage and injustice stemming from racism are overcome. Wakanda forever.
While filming herself putting on makeup before work recently, TikTok user @gracie.ham reached deep into the ancient foundations of mathematics and found an absolute gem of a question:
How could someone come up with a concept like algebra?
She also asked what the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras might have used mathematics for, and other questions that revolve around the age-old conundrum of whether mathematics is “real” or something humans just made up.
Many responded negatively to the post, but others — including mathematicians like me — found the questions quite insightful.
Is mathematics real?
Philosophers and mathematicians have been arguing over this for centuries. Some believe mathematics is universal; others consider it only as real as anything else humans have invented.
Thanks to @gracie.ham, Twitter users have now vigorously joined the debate.
For me, part of the answer lies in history.
From one perspective, mathematics is a universal language used to describe the world around us. For instance, two apples plus three apples is always five apples, regardless of your point of view.
But mathematics is also a language used by humans, so it is not independent of culture. History shows us that different cultures had their own understanding of mathematics.
Unfortunately, most of this ancient understanding is now lost. In just about every ancient culture, a few scattered texts are all that remain of their scientific knowledge.
However, there is one ancient culture that left behind an absolute abundance of texts.
Babylonian algebra
Buried in the deserts of modern Iraq, clay tablets from ancient Babylon have survived intact for about 4,000 years.
These tablets are slowly being translated and what we have learned so far is that the Babylonians were practical people who were highly numerate and knew how to solve sophisticated problems with numbers.
Their arithmetic was different from ours, though. They didn’t use zero or negative numbers. They even mapped out the motion of the planets without using calculus as we do.
Of particular importance for @gracie.ham’s question about the origins of algebra is that they knew that the numbers 3, 4 and 5 correspond to the lengths of the sides and diagonal of a rectangle. They also knew these numbers satisfied the fundamental relation 3² + 4² = 5² that ensures the sides are perpendicular.
No theorems were harmed (or used) in the construction of this rectangle.
The Babylonians did all this without modern algebraic concepts. We would express a more general version of the same idea using Pythagoras’ theorem: any right-angled triangle with sides of length a and b and hypotenuse c satisfies a² + b² = c².
The Babylonian perspective omits algebraic variables, theorems, axioms and proofs not because they were ignorant but because these ideas had not yet developed. In short, these social constructs began more than 1,000 years later, in ancient Greece. The Babylonians happily and productively did mathematics and solved problems without any of these relatively modern notions.
What was it all for?
@gracie.ham also asks how Pythagoras came up with his theorem. The short answer is: he didn’t.
Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570-495 BC) probably heard about the idea we now associate with his name while he was in Egypt. He may have been the person to introduce it to Greece, but we don’t really know.
Pythagoras didn’t use his theorem for anything practical. He was primarily interested in numerology and the mysticism of numbers, rather than the applications of mathematics.
The Babylonians, on the other hand, may well have used their knowledge of right triangles for more concrete purposes, although we don’t really know. We do have evidence from ancient India and Rome showing the dimensions 3-4-5 were used as a simple but effective way to create right angles in the construction of religious altars and surveying.
Without modern tools, how do you make right angles just right? Ancient Hindu religious texts give instructions for making a rectangular fire altar using the 3-4-5 configuration with sides of length 3 and 4, and diagonal length 5. These measurements ensure that the altar has right angles in each corner.
In the 19th century, the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker said “God made the integers, all else is the work of man”. I agree with that sentiment, at least for the positive integers — the whole numbers we count with — because the Babylonians didn’t believe in zero or negative numbers.
Mathematics has been happening for a very, very long time. Long before ancient Greece and Pythagoras.
Is it real? Most cultures agree about some basics, like the positive integers and the 3-4-5 right triangle. Just about everything else in mathematics is determined by the society in which you live.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Kemish, Former Ambassador and Adjunct Professor, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland
We fully respect local customs and culture when interacting with the Pacific countries. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
Let’s set aside the argument over the incident itself. I’d just note in passing there were several occasions when, as a senior Australian representative in the region, I had to quietly back away from ceremonies where my involvement could have sent the wrong signal.
The foreign ministry’s statement raises a more important point. As a genuine regional partner, it’s not enough for China to “do as the Romans do”. Those who aspire to a meaningful partnership with the Pacific also need to be clear about what they stand for themselves.
What then, does China stand for in the Pacific? Does it really have what it takes to be a constructive, long-term partner for the region?
Others say China’s financial aid is essentially “debt-trap diplomacy”, with unsustainable loans providing a pathway for China to control the strategic assets of Pacific states.
The Lowy Institute has shown that China has not been a major driver behind rising debt in the Pacific, but it nevertheless has a responsibility to help prevent future debt risks. The scale of its lending patterns — and the absence of mechanisms to protect recipients from debt — present substantial hazards for some countries.
There’s been no sign yet that Beijing is prepared to collaborate with western donors as they engage with regional countries to mitigate these risks. This would signal China cares about the region’s sustainability — an important qualification for a genuine partner.
A development site for a Chinese Investment bank in Nuku’alofa, Tonga.Mark Baker/AP
A top-down approach isn’t going to be effective
Chinese representatives sometimes struggle to understand that centralised control is not the Pacific way. In the commercial sphere, effective partnerships require patient management of multiple stakeholder relationships — with landowners, local authorities and environmentalists.
In Papua New Guinea, however, Chinese firms like Shenzen Energy and Ramu Nickel have been disappointed that agreements they have signed with the country’s prime minister haven’t guaranteed smooth project implementation.
China also showed great frustration in the Solomon Islands when provincial leaders thanked Taiwan for coronavirus-related aid, which was delivered after the national government had switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.
Success also requires conscious support for national development aspirations and a willingness to lean in at difficult moments.
Australia and New Zealand don’t always escape criticism from the region; climate change and labour market access continue to be sore points.
But over time, these traditional partners have shown their commitment to the region’s development through the investment of billions of dollars. They have helped run elections, repeatedly deliver disaster relief and mount stabilisation missions in regional hot spots.
This kind of comprehensive partnership, recently reaffirmed in a new economic and strategic development agreement signed between Australia and PNG, is outside Beijing’s traditional comfort zone.
Australian humanitarian aid sent to Vanuatu earlier this year after Cyclone Harold.Andrew Eddie/Department of Defence
China hasn’t stepped up with real coronavirus support
The current pandemic poses very serious risks to the fragile economies of the Pacific. It’s an important moment for regional partners to show their commitment.
Beijing has highlighted its Pacific Conference on COVID-19, a video link-up in May between the Chinese vice foreign minister and senior Pacific representatives, as a sign of its support for the region.
But there were no substantive outcomes, and despite multiple press releases, China appears to have announced only A$3.5 million in virus-related regional support.
It also pales in comparison to the A$100 million that Australia announced in March would be redirected from existing aid programs to mitigate the regional effects of the virus.
China might actually have some things to offer the region, including lessons from its highly successful development model.
But it will need to be more thoughtful about the region’s actual needs and aspirations if it wants to build a substantial and effective partnership with the Pacific in the wake of this pandemic.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dominic O’Sullivan, Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, and Associate Professor of Political Science, Charles Sturt University
Unfair and avoidable differences in health outcomes separate Māori from other citizens, said a report from this month’s parliamentary select committee inquiry into Māori health.
The report focused mainly on why cancer screening and treatment are not as effective for Māori.
But it also showed clinical and policy decisions don’t always give Māori the same chance at good health as other people, and identified significant systemic racism in the health system.
Among the recommendations was the setting up of a new agency focused on improving Māori health, to be run by Māori. Similar recommendations have been made in the past, but have not been implemented.
The causes of ill health
Contemporary health policy research is heavily influenced by the argument that inequitable health outcomes are partly caused by social determinants of health. This includes things such as poor housing, low incomes and limited education increasing people’s chances of getting sick.
These ideas help policymakers think about the causes of ill health and develop coherent policy responses. But they only address part of the problem.
For example, racism is a political determinant of health. So is the exclusion or marginalisation of indigenous voices from decisions about how public health systems work and how resources are distributed.
Clinical skills treat ill health. But a health practitioner’s political values may influence how those skills are used.
Some practitioners might try to find ways around policies and practices that disadvantage some patients over others. On the other hand, race may be a political determinant of health when decisions are made about the level of care given to one patient or another.
Political determinants may also influence how health systems direct their resources, and what services are provided to which communities.
The right to self-determination
New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States initially opposed the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the UN in 2007. The declaration confirms that, like everybody, indigenous people have the right to self-determination.
Self-determination includes people’s right to make their own health policy decisions. All four countries have since decided that this, and the declaration’s other presumptions, are reasonable aspirations and support it.
But what they haven’t done is fully develop policies to put this aspiration into practice.
In New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi affirms Māori rangatiratanga on one hand and citizenship on the other. In short, rangatiratanga means authority to make decisions over one’s own affairs. Citizenship means the political capacity to be part of state decision-making.
The latest parliamentary select committee report makes a recommendation that could be developed to respect both rangatiratanga and citizenship. It could then help eliminate political inequities from the health system.
Māori responsible for Māori health
The committee recommended a government-funded entity be made responsible for eliminating health inequities for Māori. It should be given the authority and resources to do so, and should monitor and report annually on the health system.
Just one month earlier, the government-commissioned Health and Disability System Review recommended such an entity, which it called a Māori Health Authority.
This authority would be an independent advisory body. It would be responsible for monitoring and reporting on the health system’s effectiveness for Māori.
Assuming the authority would have a representative and professionally skilled Māori membership, it could become an important policy advocate.
But the review committee was divided on whether this authority should also be able to make decisions about funding Māori health services.
Indigenous right to make decisions
In 2009, a review into Australia’s health system recommended an independent indigenous purchasing authority. Through a tender process, the authority would procure primary health services for indigenous people, primarily from indigenous community-controlled health services.
Indigenous communities would define their own health priorities. Their bids for public funding would be evaluated by an expert indigenous authority.
The proposal was not accepted, but it is an instructive model for New Zealand. It would mean Māori values, aspirations and expectations would be foremost at every stage of the funding decision.
It would also mean a Māori body would become accountable to Māori people for the effectiveness of policy decisions. It would strengthen Māori health providers and ensure their capacity to deliver health outcomes would be evaluated according to Māori criteria.
Some claimants to the Waitangi Tribunal’s 2019 health inquiry argued the NUKA System of Care in Alaska was an example of what stronger Māori health providers could look like.
The NUKA system doesn’t have patients; instead it serves “customer-owners”, the local indigenous people, who own the system and to whom the system is accountable. It has more independence from the state than Māori providers and takes an integrated and holistic approach to health care.
The NUKA system is not entirely dependent on the state, as much of its funding comes from philanthropic sources. So it has a level of independence that may be possible for Māori as iwi (tribal) economic bases develop.
An independent Māori authority with the power to monitor and report on service providers’ effectiveness, but also the power to discontinue their funding, would ensure meaningful Māori voice.
French Polynesian unions say they will hold a general strike this Thursday unless covid-19 measures are tightened.
Five unions jointly issued the warning as the number of covid-19 infections this month rose to 444.
They said they acted to protect the health of employees which was no longer assured by the “explosion” in the number of cases, which were concentrated on Tahiti.
Their demands include the reintroduction of a 14-day quarantine for arriving travellers which the local Tahitian government and the French High Commission abolished in mid-July to boost tourism.
The unions want passengers to be isolated in two dedicated places despite a court ruling which disallowed such restrictions.
They also said they wanted class sizes to be limited to 15 students and a school to close if covid-19 was confirmed in two classes.
Furthermore, they want masks made available to students for free.
A meeting between the unions and the authorities is expected on Wednesday.
Earlier the government and the French High Commission ruled out another general lockdown to curb the spread of the virus.
However, the Health Minister said the territory, which was again on maximum alert, could see targeted restrictions affecting some neighbourhoods.
Since the start of last month, four airlines have resumed flying between Tahiti and both France and the US.
This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says the New Zealand alert level system is designed to work when there are active cases at lower levels, despite some experts saying it could be too soon.
She told RNZ Morning Report covid could not only be managed at levels 3 and 4.
She said the move to level 2.5 while the Auckland cluster continues to grow was what the system was designed for.
Ardern said she had received advice that restrictions of gatherings in Auckland to a limit of 10 was “very important”.
“You’ll see from the alert level framework that we set from the very beginning of this pandemic, it has anticipated being at level 2 whilst we’re managing cases,” she said.
“Our system is designed to be able to do that. What we need to ensure is that we’ve got really good compliance with the other things we expect at level 2 in order to be able to make that work.”
Ardern said everyone must play their part by social distancing and wearing masks.
‘Masks no substitute’ “Masks are not a substitute for keeping our distance.
“If we all play our role, then we are able to continue to manage the cases that we do have in a 2.5 environment.”
However, some experts warn it is too early to move from alert level 3 in Auckland.
The National Māori Pandemic Group says the Auckland cluster of Covid-19 cases isn’t well enough contained for the region to move down a level.
Te Rōpū Whakakaupapa Urutā had urged the government to halt the relaxation of restrictions while community transmission of the virus is at current levels.
Co-leader Professor Sue Crengle told Morning Report a number of the sub-clusters were not well defined.
Though the majority of cases were linked to the main cluster, there were still one or two where there was no clear epidemiological pathway even though there was a genomic pathway, she said.
‘Perimeter not well described’ “We still don’t think that the perimeter is really well described and contained even though it looks like it’s one large cluster with some sub-clusters.”
The group would have liked to see a “small amount of time at a higher level” while new cases were monitored over the next few days.
With Aucklanders now able to travel out of the region, New Zealand would be depending on them to take precautions against the spread of the virus, she said.
Covid-19 data modelling expert Professor Shaun Hendy yesterday said the government should consider extending level 3.
Professor Hendy was concerned by the number of cases that had been picked up through community testing instead of via contact tracing.
He said easing the travel restrictions meant people could spread the infection to other parts of the country.
And epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker said the move to alert level 2 could see a growth in the case rate.
Transmission ‘may drift up’ “It does suggest if we reduce the controls starting tomorrow that that transmission will not go away and it may actually drift up, or track up, over the next few weeks.
Ardern said restrictions were not the only way to manage the virus and places like Taiwan were almost solely reliant on contact tracing.
“We’ve talked about the fact that there have been some scenarios where, had we had a singular case we could trace back to the source right from the beginning, we might not have had to move alert levels at all.
“Restrictions alone are not the only way we manage this virus. We have many tools, we just need to make sure we deploy them properly.”
Ardern said regional boundaries were difficult for the many thousands of people who travelled across the country for legitimate purposes and general precautions across New Zealand the trade-off for lower restrictions in Auckland.
She said New Zealand took graduated moves through alert levels last time around so level ‘2.5’ should not be “too confusing”.
“We didn’t go immediately to mass gatherings of 100 people, we had a limit of 10 in the beginning. We did that last time and some people started loosely using the term 2.5 at that time.”
Adapt to new practices Ardern said the new thing this time around was mask use and that we had to be willing to learn and adapt to new practices to combat the pandemic.
An Instagram message from the Ministry of Health this weekend incorrectly urged anyone in West or South Auckland to get tested.
Ardern said she was sorry for people who felt anxiety from the incorrect messaging on Instagram and the government moved quickly to correct it.
“It was frustrating but, as I’ve said, if we were going to urge 700,000 people to get a test, we wouldn’t have shared that message solely through Instagram – you would’ve heard that from us.”
Crengle said the wrong call on testing for West and South Auckland would have meant people without symptoms were tested, so it was not the worst error to happen.
“Anyone can make a mistake, and we have to have some aroha for the person or people who made that mistake. It was cleared up relatively quickly and in some ways it was a message that would have people who were asymptomatic tested rather than actually discouraging people from testing,” Crengle said.
“If you’re going to make a mistake that wasn’t a bad one to make.
“It was cleared up very quickly, the prime minister was very clear yesterday, and hopefully it will mean anyone putting messaging out will be very cautious and double and triple check what they’re messaging.”
This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.
If you havesymptomsof the coronavirus, call the NZ Covid-19 Healthline on 0800 358 5453 (+64 9 358 5453 for international SIMs) or call your GP – don’t show up at a medical centre.
“It was an honour to get the letter … to be [offered] this role. It was a huge responsibility,” the Auckland University of Technology graduate said.
The sentence hearing lasted four days, starting on Monday, August 24, and was conducted under heightened security.
A large number of victims and their families attended with 98 people giving impact statements, with those who could not be in the room due to covid-19 restrictions watching a restricted livestream in additional courtrooms or overseas.
The terrorist, Brenton Tarrant, who represented himself after he pleaded guilty to murdering 51 people, attempted murder of 40 people, and engaging in a terrorist act, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of ever leaving jail – the harshest sentence ever handed down by a New Zealand court.
Police and health settings Dr Derbashi completed a Graduate Certificate in Arts (Interpreting) at the Auckland University of Technology in 2018, opening the opportunity for him to be a qualified interpreter in courts and tribunals, with the police and in health settings.
“I’ve worked in courts over the past few years and I’ve seen difficult situations … you need to be of your full consciousness,” he says.
Last week’s hearing was unprecedented and interpreting for it was a difficult challenge.
It was unpredictable, he said, as the victims and the relatives or anyone who represented them could be part of heightened emotions at the court, he said before the hearing.
“I am very humbled to be able to serve the country in this way. I would like to give special thanks to my legal and health interpreting lecturers, Jo Anna Burn and Ineke Crezee, both subject experts and excellent teachers.”
Interpreters do not just put together words in different languages, Dr Derbashi said. They need to be trusted and to have an ethical commitment which includes confidentiality, but also to convey the message as it is, without any omission or addition.
Court interpreting also has its own challenges.
Flexibility, impartiality needed “You need to have not just a flexibility, but to be really impartial and ready to face any situation, particularly emotionally, psychologically and when you are talking about legal terms,” he said.
“Even if somebody swears, you need to go there.”
For example, a defence lawyer in a case might use vivid language to ask a victim whether sexual harassment and rape really happened.
If the interpreter could not interpret the question properly, then there could be a miscarriage of justice with an offender getting away with a crime.
Dr Derbashi also interpreted at the Dunedin vigil for the victims of the Christchurch mosque attacks.
“That was the first huge event I did. I was chosen by the Dunedin City Council at that time… and all the feedback that came afterwards was really amazing,” he said.
“For three hours I interpreted for more than 22 speakers, without knowing anything in advance about their speeches. It was a great honour, and a great challenge as well.”
This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre from AUT News.
But people may not realise there is also a ban on overseas travel for all Australian citizens and residents, subject to a limited number of exemptions.
Since March, about one in three requests to leave the country have been granted. This comes amid reports of Australians facing huge hurdles to see sick and dying relatives overseas.
So, what’s going on? Who can actually leave Australia at the moment?
What is the ban?
The ban on leaving Australia was put in place by Health Minister Greg Hunt on March 25, as an “emergency requirement” under the Biosecurity Act. It is the first time Australia has had such a ban, and it was made on the advice of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee.
An Australian citizen or permanent resident … must not leave Australian territory as a passenger on an outgoing aircraft or vessel.
The accompanying statement explains,
[This] is in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which continues to represent a severe and immediate threat to human health in Australia and across the globe.
Is this legal?
The government legally made the determination under the Biosecurity Act, which gives the health minister power to put in place “any requirement” they believe is necessary to prevent or control the entry or spread of the virus into Australia.
International law recognises the right to leave any country, including your own, but there is no equivalent constitutional protection in Australia.
There is a legal ban on Australians leaving Australia.Darren England/AAP
In other words, Australians don’t have a constitutional right to leave Australia.
Strict exit bans for citizens are generally associated with authoritarian states, like North Korea and the former USSR. But the Health Department has said the ban is needed because of the burden returning residents place on quarantine arrangements, the health system and testing regimes.
The government has also argued it is “impossible” to only ban travel to specific places, due to the fast-moving nature of the pandemic in different countries.
Who can leave Australia at the moment?
Anyone who is isn’t a citizen or resident is allowed to leave Australia.
Some Australians are also still free to leave. This includes those who are “ordinarily resident in a country other than Australia”, airline and maritime crew, outbound freight workers, and essential workers at offshore facilities.
All other citizens and residents must have an exemption if they want to leave. They need to apply online (which is free) and then bring the approved exemption to the airport.
To be granted an exemption, you must have a “compelling reason” for needing to leave Australian territory, and your travel must fall into one of the following categories:
compassionate or humanitarian grounds
part of the response to the COVID-19 outbreak
essential for the conduct of critical industries and business
to receive urgent medical treatment unavailable in Australia
urgent and unavoidable personal business
in the national interest.
Most applications to leave are not successful
Despite these exemptions, it is still difficult to get permission to leave. Only about one in three requests are being granted.
According to Border Force, between March and mid-August it received more than 104,000 requests to leave Australia. About 34,300 exemptions have been granted.
Exemption applications are assessed by Border Force and applicants are advised to apply at least two weeks but not more than three months before departure.
Border Force adds:
If you are travelling due to death or critical illness of a close family member, you can apply inside this timeframe and we will prioritise your application.
However, timeframes haven’t been guaranteed and people have reported significant delays even in emergency situations. If a request is refused, an applicant can reapply.
Failing to comply with the ban is a criminal offence, punishable by up to five years’ prison, a $63,000 fine, or both.
Are Victorians especially banned?
There is nothing to exclude Victorians, currently under Stage 3 and 4 restrictions, from applying to leave Australia.
The Victorian government directs residents to federal government advice regarding overseas trips.
However, Victorians would also need to comply with or seek exemptions from state-based restrictions (including for travel to the airport, for example) where an exemption was granted.
What are the problems with the ban?
Usually when governments pass legislation, they provide definitions of key terms. However, no definitions for any exemptions are included in the travel ban determination, which was made by Hunt and not reviewed by parliament.
What exemptions like “urgent and unavoidable personal business” cover is unclear, to say the least (luxury yacht, anyone?).
The ban on overseas travel was introduced in March as the coronavirus crisis took hold in Australia.Biance De Marchi/AAP
There have been repeated stories of Australians having enormous difficulties getting permission to see family and loved ones overseas. Although recent reports suggest the process is becoming easier.
One woman reported difficulty meeting the “compassionate grounds” exemption because her dying step-parent was not in hospital, due to a choice to spend his last days at home. Another received three different responses to the same request.
Applicants must provide sufficient documentation, but it is also unclear what documents are required. People whose documents are not in English must have them officially translated as part of an application. Those in distressed or bereaved states must nonetheless gather complex documentary evidence, which may include death certificates, or proof of an event or relationship.
Due to this lack of clarity, some people are seeking the advice of migration agents to help them leave Australia.
This adds to the ever-growing costs of mobility during the pandemic, while creating the extraordinary circumstance where legal advice is needed to help residents and citizens depart their own country.
When will the ban end?
Australia’s complete travel ban has not been adopted in similar countries. In New Zealand, Canada and Britain, overseas travel is strongly advised against but not banned.
Other countries to have completely prohibited travel include Kazakhstan, Lithuania and Uzbekistan.
Australia’s ban will automatically cease when the “biosecurity emergency period” is declared over, unless revoked beforehand.
But while the the current period runs until September 17, it is likely to be extended. In June, Hunt warned borders will remained closed for a “very significant” amount of time.
Although he also described Australia as an “island sanctuary”, it’s unlikely the many people held on either side of its borders feel the same way.
That’s according to the Penington Institute’s annual overdose report, released today.
The largest number of overdose deaths (more than 1,000) involved opioids (for example, heroin, morphine, oxycodone, fentanyl), followed by benzodiazepines (for example, Valium).
Opioid-related deaths in Australia have been on an upward trend in recent years, having doubled since 2006. This means we’re now not far off numbers recorded in the late 1990s, when opioid-related deaths were highest. There’s more we could be doing to curb this problem.
What kind of opioids are causing harm?
Unlike North America, where illicitly manufactured fentanyl has been involved in many opioid deaths, most opioid deaths in Australia involve pharmaceutical opioids.
Among all opioid deaths, just over half of people overdosing have a history of injecting drugs, and substance use problems. We know people with chronic non-cancer pain are becoming dependent on pharmaceutical opioids and are also among these statistics.
Some 80% of opioid deaths are accidental, while 16% are intentional overdoses (the remaining 4% we don’t know). Intentional overdoses are twice as common with pharmaceutical opioids.
As many of these changes have only been implemented recently, it’s too early to know whether or not they’re having a positive effect.
But regulatory responses run the risk of unintended consequences. We saw this in Australia with the re-formulation of oxycodone tablets to a product that’s more difficult to inject. Heroin-related ambulance call-outs and emergency department presentations increased significantly in Victoria after this change was introduced.
In North America, restricted opioid prescribing was associated with dramatic increases in heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl deaths.
Restricting the availability of pharmaceutical opioids can steer people towards illicit opioids.Shutterstock
One key response to opioid overdose has been providing opioid agonist treatment (for example, methadone or buprenorphine) to opioid dependent people, typically those with a history of injecting drugs.
Barriers to treatment include critical shortages of prescribers (addiction medicine specialists and trained GPs), stigma, and the requirement to attend a clinic or pharmacy daily at the start of treatment.
We need to double treatment capacity to meet the demand for people who may benefit from opioid agonist treatment.
What else can we do?
We can make opioid use safer.
The two supervised injecting facilities in Australia play an important role in reducing public injecting, and responding to overdoses on site. Neither service (in Sydney or Melbourne) has had a death since opening.
The Victorian government has approved a second Melbourne facility, and a study currently underway is looking at whether a facility would be useful in Canberra.
Establishing these facilities requires a lot of planning as well as changes to legislation, and scaling them up to reach more Australians who inject drugs has proven difficult. There has been no movement on calls made several years ago to set up a second service in Sydney.
But we know these services save lives and help get people into treatment, so we need to keep scaling them up. In the past three years Canada has opened 24 new supervised injecting facilities, while Australia has opened just one.
We also need to consider innovations to ensure safer opioid supply.
In Europe and North America drug researchers monitor the heroin supply for dangerous contaminants, and we’ve seen early work like this in Australia, including at Sydney’s safe injecting centre.
These monitoring services provide critical information on opioid supply and can help people using opioids make informed decisions.
Safe injecting centres can help get people into treatment.Tracey Nearmy/AAP
But one thing is clear: the pandemic has shown we can respond quickly to implement change. Treatment services have rapidly adapted to COVID-19 restrictions, for example by making it possible for people to receive methadone and buprenorphine without having to visit a clinic or pharmacy every day.
As well as making treatment more flexible, the pandemic has addressed broader needs for some people who are dependent on opioids, such as providing temporary accommodation. Hopefully these changes will provide longer-term benefits, including encouraging people to remain in treatment.
In addressing opioid overdose deaths in Australia, we need to follow the best evidence, extend our vision to responses implemented internationally, and evaluate them locally.
Importantly, responses should be formulated within the frame of good clinical care, rather than relying on punitive responses, such as mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients. This creates further problems, such as stigma, for people who use drugs.
California is ablaze, again. Currently, the second and third largest fires in the US state’s history are burning at the same time, and are only partially controlled. Already, seven people have died and 2,144 structures are damaged – and their fire season still has months to run.
The outbreak continues a relentless trend of bigger and more destructive fires in the western US, including California’ largest fire in 2018.
For Australians, the spectacle of California burning is deeply concerning. It’s just months since our last fire season, concentrated in a band of eucalyptus forests along the continent’s southeast coast.
There are strong parallels between the two disasters: drought, parched landscapes, high temperatures, prolonged heatwaves and dry lightning storms to set it all off. And both Australia and California are particularly vulnerable as climate change makes bushfires worse. So let’s look at the fiery fate we share with those across the Pacific – and how we must all adapt.
Australia endured its own bushfire disaster just months ago.David Mariuz/AAP
An uncertain future
We know bushfires are being made worse by human activity and climate change. But, owing to a lack of long-term data and the complex interactions between humans, climate and fire, it’s hard to predict exactly how fires will change – for example how frequent or severe they will be, how long fire seasons will last and how much land will burn.
In research published last week, we describe recent trends in fire activity and examine projections for the near future. From this, it’s clear the global impact of bushfires due to human-induced climate change will intensify.
Among the areas expected to be worst hit are flammable forests in populated temperate zones, such as Australia’s eastern states and California.
Climate is not the only driving factor here. Human changes to landscapes – such as urban sprawl into flammable forests – are also making fires worse.
The damage is not just environmental, but also economic. Already, Australia’s last bushfire season is likely to be our most expensive natural disaster, costing around A$100 billion. And the California fires in 2017–2018 caused an estimated A$55 billion in structure losses alone.
Scorched homes and vehicles in a mobile home park in California. The economic toll of bushfires globally is set to worsen.Noah Berger/AAP
The escalating threat demands an urgent rethink of our inadequate and inappropriate fire management strategies. These span land use planning, fuel management, communications, evacuation and firefighting capacity. All are constrained by complex administrative arrangements, limited physical and human resources, and poor budgets.
Climate change also raises the frightening sceptre of a “positive feedback” loop in which climate change exacerbates fire, producing carbon dioxide emissions which worsen climate change further. This vicious cycle threatens to fundamentally alter the Earth system.
What’s more, fire seasons in southern Australia and the western US increasingly overlap. As California burned last week, uncontrolled winter bushfires ripped through northern New South Wales. Australia is sending firefighters to California this time around. But as fires increasingly rage in both hemispheres simultaneously, our respective nations will have fewer firefighting resources to share.
The COVID-19 crisis is making these difficult circumstances even more challenging. For example in California, authorities are dealing with both the fires and the pandemic; the state reportedly has the highest number of infections in the US.
Firefighters must practice social distancing: that means fewer people in each vehicle and no communal eating or sleeping arrangements. And Australian firefighters will be forced into quarantine for two weeks upon their return home.
Australians look on with sympathy as California burns.Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
Accepting reality
In this context, recommendations handed down by the NSW bushfire inquiry last week are a landmark in how we adapt to bushfires. Central to the report is an avowed acceptance climate change is transforming bushfire management.
The report contains 76 recommendations, all accepted by the NSW government, providing creative licence to rethink how we sustainably co-exist with bushfires. They include:
reforms of arrangements to manage bushfires, such as better coordination between agencies, better shared data and streamlining fuel management programs
trialling new approaches to reducing fuel loads, fighting fires and managing smoke pollution
involving Aboriginal people in managing landscapes
maintaining the safety and mental health of those on the frontline such as fire fighters, first responders and affected citizens
improving disaster management through improved training and work practices for firefighters, better communication, new technologies and investing in equipment.
The scope and scale of the recommendations underscores the huge task ahead of us.
Importantly, underpinning the recommendations is a clear commitment to analysing which approaches work, and which do not. This accepts our current state of knowledge is partial and imperfect.
Amanda Shields from the Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council inspects the plant regrowth after a fire. Indigenous people should be more involved in fire management.Joel CArrett/AAP
Our fire-filled futures
Co-existing with a flammable landscape is a massive and complicated task – a fact California is now being brutally reminded of. Australia can lead the way globally, but to do this requires significant investment in bushfire management to build the necessary tools, techniques and talent.
Climate change is making bushfire seasons longer, more dangerous and socially demanding. Like it or not, we have embarked on the bushfire adaptation journey, and there is no turning back.
The question now is, how far do we go? All Australians must turn their minds to this critical social and political challenge.
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