Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ellie Martus, Lecturer in Public Policy, School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University
Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images
In 1973, the world’s post-war boom hit the rocks. Oil producers restricted supply, sending prices soaring. In the aftermath of this oil shock, nations like America began seeking energy independence.
In 2022, we may well see history repeat, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolds.
Why? Major European nations like Germany have turned to Russian gas to fill the gap between coal plants retiring, the move away from nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster, and the point where zero emissions renewables and storage can act as full replacement.
With around 40% of the EU’s gas coming from Russia, the invasion will focus the minds of European leaders on the question of whether they can rely on these supplies. The war in Ukraine comes as much of the world is already reeling from energy chaos, with pandemic disruptions to transport sending energy prices soaring.
To add still more complexity, the invasion comes just days before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases a report on regional climate impacts and adaptation, which will underscore efforts to reduce damage from fossil-fuel caused climate change.
So how will this play out?
Why Russia matters to world energy consumers
The export of fossil fuels is central to the Russian economy. The nation of 145 million is one of the world’s largest energy exporters. Russia is the leading exporter of gas, the second largest of crude oil, and third largest coal exporter.
But Russia is well aware of its vulnerability in selling fossil fuels to Europe, which is committed to decarbonisation.
The coal lobby in Russia has been actively seeking to expand its Asian markets for years now, due to the risk to exports posed by European climate driven restrictions.
While Europe remains the largest export market for gas, Russia wants to diversify here too by increasing supplies to China.
In 2019, the Power of Siberia pipeline began transporting gas from Siberia directly to China. Only weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia announced a deal for a new pipeline to China.
We are likely to see Russia’s pivot towards Asia intensify in the current climate.
Europe needs the Russia-Germany Nord Stream series of gas pipelines – but for how long? This image is from the construction of the first pipeline in 2010. Dmitry Lovetsky/AP
Will this speed up the shift to renewables?
It was only in January that Germany’s new climate and economy minister announced major new measures to accelerate his nation’s slowing renewable roll-out and power industry with clean energy.
And now? We believe the crisis has the potential to accelerate Europe’s trend toward renewables, as it seeks to reduce its reliance on Russian gas.
We may see increased efforts to shift to interdependent renewable generation, such as the proposed offshore windfarms intended to be shared by multiple European nations.
But this is not guaranteed. In the near term, there is a huge risk that the crisis in Ukraine focuses attention on energy security at the expense of decarbonisation.
We may see a return to coal power. Countries like Germany may even be forced to rethink or delay their nuclear phase out.
Other major fossil fuel exporters such as Australia are already lining up to fill any gaps in European markets.
What does this mean for international climate efforts?
Long regarded a notorious laggard, Russia has not been a willing participant in international climate negotiations.
In the lead up to Glasgow’s COP26 climate conference last year, Russia hinted it might be open to taking a more serious line on climate action. Putin committed the country to carbon neutrality by 2060, and domestic policy developments in recent months suggested a shift was underway.
The war will obviously hinder this. Any potential for greater climate engagement with Russia before the next major climate meeting in Egypt later this year is off the table for the time being.
This is a setback for international climate efforts, given Russia’s role as one of the world’s top five greenhouse gas emitters.
Is other environmental damage likely?
Both traditional and cyber warfare can add substantially to climate emissions and wreak havoc on the environment and on many species. The serious implications for present and future generations were dramatically highlighted this morning with the Russian takeover of Chernobyl.
It is not known what Russia plans to do, but the targeted destruction of nuclear facilities, either as a weapon or an act of defensive deterrence, would likely breach international law.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin may have an outsized influence on energy trends due to the war. Shutterstock
Wanton environmental destruction is a war crime, on par with targeting of the civilian population and the destruction of cultural heritage. In 2020, the Red Cross issued guidelines for protecting the environment during wartime.
This is a real issue. The founding document of the International Criminal Court notes it is a war crime to intentionally cause “widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment”, assuming it was clearly excessive relative to the military advantage gained.
Russia signed this document, the Rome statute, in 2000 but never ratified the agreement to become a member. In 2016, Russia announced its withdrawal from the International Criminal Court altogether.
This came after the court ruled Russia’s activity in Crimea following the 2014 annexation of that region amounted to an “ongoing occupation”.
The international community has also come to a historic agreement about the definition of ecocide in 2021, as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”.
That means it is possible the Russian government may be held to account for environmental as well as humanitarian impacts of its aggression.
Susan Harris Rimmer receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Queensland Public Service Commission and the Department of Defence.
Ellie Martus does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Naoise McDonagh, Lecturer in Political Economy, Institute for International Trade, University of Adelaide
The economic sanctions Australia has imposed in the wake of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine are an extension of those applied in 2014 after Russia annexed the Crimea.
As with the US, UK and European Union sanction regimes, Australia’s operate across three areas:
technological, involving bans on exports of goods for use in oil and gas exploration and weapons production
financial, involving bans on financial services and financial trading with designated entities
personal, involving travel bans and limits on commercial relations for designated people
The question is whether they will have consequences for Russia’s economy and so act as a deterrent to further military action.
Certain conditions are needed for sanctions to have coercive power.
Either there needs to be a large and preferably asymmetric economic relationship between the countries, with the asymmetry favouring the sanctioning country. This might be the case if Russia bought many more goods from Australia than Australia bought from Russia.
Or the sanctioning country needs to control critical technologies and/or infrastructure that are essential to the targeted country, and the sanctions will cut-off access.
Neither of these conditions hold for Russia and Australia.
Australia’s leverage is negligible
Of Australia’s total A$873 billion two-way trade with all countries in 2019-20, only a miniscule $1.2 billion was with Russia. For both countries this figure is negligible, so asymmetry is irrelevant.
Nor does Australia control any critical infrastructure or technology of consequence to Russia which cannot be sourced elsewhere.
All told, Australian sanctions will have almost zero real-world consequences for Russia, nor do they imply difficulties for Australian businesses, aside from the tiny fraction who have trade and investment ties with the country.
The only states that have both the potential for effective sanctioning power over Russia and the will to use it are the US, the United Kingdom and the European Union acting as a block, due to large trade relationships and critical dependencies.
Europe has more leverage
Russia is highly dependent on fossil fuel exports, which comprised 39% of total state revenue in 2019. The European Union takes 70% of its gas exports.
Things are not entirely asymmetric because the EU in turn depends on Russia for about 40% of its gas imports.
Sanctions on buying energy would hurt Russia badly, but also result in a very significant price hike across the European Union and to a lesser extent globally – a cost that has made EU leaders cautious about using this most potent of sanctions.
The US has more leverage still
The US has significant power over the global financial system in what amounts to an asymmetric relationship to Russia. This derives from the dominant position of US financial institutions and of the US dollar as the global currency.
This dominance allows Washington to apply sanctions third countries must also enforce, or themselves face becoming financially sanctioned, making these sanctions global in practice – as Iran experienced to devastating effect.
Yet Russia is far larger than Iran economically, so there will be far greater costs from cutting Russia out of the global financial system, if not so much for the US, then for its allies in the European Union, where European banks have tens of billions in outstanding loans to Russian entities.
So far, the US is cautious
Repayments of these loans would be threatened by broad-based financial sanctions, especially banning Russia from the global payments system SWIFT run by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications.
While US sanctions announced on February 24 against Russia’s biggest financial institutions will cause considerable economic disruption and costs, they still do not amount to the full expulsion from the global financial system that was imposed on Iran.
British sanctions could significantly hurt Putin’s clique of supporting oligarchs in the UK by shutting down “Londongrad”, a term used to describe a city awash with laundered funds from Russian oligarchs.
Freezing the oligarchs’ assets could undermine their support for Putin, but has obvious financial costs to London, and would have to overcome the political influence of Russian elites in London.
Little could deter Putin
Australia cannot hurt Russia using sanctions, and the countries that can hurt Russia have complex calculations to make in calibrating their actions for maximum impact at minimum cost.
That does not mean Australian action is pointless. Australian sanctions exhibit solidarity with allies and add to the international pressure and outcry against Putin’s illegal act of war.
The bigger question is whether any sanctions at all will now deter Putin from following through on his goals, given that the invasion is underway.
Naoise McDonagh is a Lecturer at the Institute for International Trade, University of Adelaide, and President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs South Australia, a not-for-profit educational association.
The Australian Cyber Security Centre has said it is not aware of any specific direct threat to Australia, but that the country could be affected by “unintended disruption or uncontained malicious cyber activities”.
It wouldn’t be the first time a Russian cyber attack has caused serious collateral damage to nations that aren’t its intended target.
Attacks so far
Ukraine has suffered through a sustained digital assault from Russia over the past few weeks. One of the most penetrative attacks came on Wednesday, cutting off access to several Ukrainian government and banking websites – followed by more on Thursday. These were distributed denial of service attacks, in which the perpetrator knocks targeted websites offline by flooding them with bot traffic.
Meanwhile, experts at the internet security company ESET identified a malicious data-wiping malware called “HermeticWiper” circulating on hundreds of computers in Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania – which they said may have been months in the making.
According to reports, experts from software company Symantec found the malware had affected Ukrainian government contractors in Latvia and Lithuania and a Ukrainian bank.
Australia’s risk in the face of ongoing cyber attacks from Russia would almost certainly come in the form of a “spill over” effect.
For example, if a Ukrainian bank is targeted and goes offline, this would still impact Australians who use that bank to receive or send money to Ukraine. Attacks on banks are particularly alarming when you consider Ukraine’s dire need for financial aid and economic support right now.
All global business conducted with, or through, the bank will be affected – and the impact could reach virtually anywhere in the world. Similarly, distributed denial of service attacks on Ukrainian news media would also have global ramifications, by limiting the exchange of crucial information.
Another concern is the potential for Russia to cut off gas supplies flowing through Ukraine to Europe, either directly or through a cyber-enabled attack (the Colonial Pipeline attack being a recent example). This also introduces significant market instability, resulting in shortages and driving up prices (including for Australia).
Australian companies are a part of global supply chains. Many will have interests in Russia and/or Ukraine, and thus will also have digital and potentially even direct network connections with them through a virtual private network – a tool that allows users to establish a private network over a public internet connection (but which can also be used to spread malware between the connected devices).
Once a “wiper” malware – the likes of that currently circulating in Ukraine – gets enough footing, it can spread across countries within minutes. If an office in Canberra with a virtual private network connection based in Ukraine becomes compromised, it can allow the malware to jump countries.
The NotPetya malware attack in 2017 is a pertinent example. This “self-propogating” malware spread globally and caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage. It, too, was attributed to a Russian source by investigators, and traced back to the update mechanism for a tax-accounting software application used widely in Ukraine.
Apart from malicious Russian state-sponsored cyber crime, the current mayhem unfolding in Ukraine provides opportunity for cyber criminals more generally, too.
It’s very difficult to attribute cyber crime. While experts can analyse code taken from malware, this is usually a slow and costly process. Cyber criminals the world over may want to take advantage of the chaos, and try to carry out attacks they may not otherwise get away with.
Among all the noise, and with so many Ukrainians (including cyber security professionals) either displaced or fleeing, the chances of being caught may be lower. Also, it is likely any major cyber affliction will be blamed on Russia – at least initially.
At the same time, we might see an increase in phishing and scam attempts as a result of the crisis. Opportunistic criminals use global narratives to add credibility to their scams. For instance, they may send phishing emails posing as a Ukrainian citizen desperate for emergency funds.
How can businesses protect themselves
A critical step in a defensive posture for companies and organisations in Australia is to determine their exposure level. This means being acutely aware of any direct or indirect connection with Ukraine and Russia, and the online systems and supply chains these countries partake in.
Employers also have a duty of care to employees who may have loved ones or other connections in Ukraine, and may be more vulnerable to various forms of cyber attacks exploiting the current situation.
And of course, the most basic cyber security advice is once more relevant. That is, individuals, businesses and organisations must take special care to ensure all devices are up-to-date and have software patches installed.
The 2017 NotPetya attacks were, in part, successful because the malware exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows – even though a patch to fix it was available at the time. But the massive number of devices that hadn’t been patched meant NotPetya could spread without constraint.
In the case of Ukraine, where pirated software is common, this issue is particularly prevalent. Complications with (or a lack of) proper software licensing means updates may not be accessed or installed.
Paul Haskell-Dowland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Their social media feeds contain images of tanks, bombs and propaganda. Our kids could stumble across extreme footage and we’ll likely never know.
They will also have seen spam and memes about “Vladdy daddy” – the nickname of Russian president Vladimir Putin – pleading with him to avert war.
Here’s how to help your child navigate social media “news” content about war, while minimising any distress.
This is what children will see
Children access news in a different way to adults. They access news less. But when they do, they usually watch a short video on their phone.
Footage about disasters and political conflict has always been on the TV.
However, news on social media is not like watching the 6pm nightly news.
On social media, there is no newsreader contextualising the footage, there are generally no accompanying facts, and often no-one knows the source of the video. Meanwhile, TV news attempts to fact check, including verifying the sources of videos.
As an adult, I question where the videos depicting “bombings” on TikTok, using the hashtags #russia #ukraine #invasion, come from.
Is this real footage, or doctored footage cut and pasted from a different event? Which video is propaganda and which is fact? Is this actually news or something uploaded in the hope of getting lots of views?
Children can’t always spot what’s reliable
On social media, home-made doctored footage sits snugly alongside real news footage from reputable sources. On the surface, such images share similar themes, and have a similar overall appearance. So children can often group them together as “the news”.
Spotting fake news and determining what to trust online is a complex and intellectually challenging task.
Most children don’t question news content they see on social media. They can confuse popularity rankings with quality; they consider the item that tops their search list the most reliable.
An international UNICEF survey found up to 75% of children feel unable to judge the accuracy of the information they find online. This was especially true for children in the 9-11 and 12-14 year-old groups. Coincidentally, this is the same age children begin using social media.
The basic premise for posting on social media is to get a reaction. Considering what may lie ahead of us with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, footage could be violent and disrespectful of people and their tragic circumstances.
So, it’s likely a child on social media will see war footage and human suffering, while they are on the bus or in between goofy TikToks.
One minute there’s war footage, the next goofy TikTok videos. Shutterstock
Viewing distressing content can have both immediate and longer lasting effects on children.
In the short term, viewing online violence can increase the likelihood of aggressive thoughts and behaviour, or angry feelings. It can also increase the likelihood of physiological arousal, such as feeling excited or “pumped”.
Long term it can lead to a desensitisation to violence, and lack of empathy for the suffering and hardship of others.
While girls and boys are equally vulnerable to the impacts of online violence, there is no certainty how a child will react. Scenes of violence may horrify one child and induce extreme sadness in another.
Young children (under about age seven) are particularly sensitive to the effects of violent footage because they have difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy. For this reason a six-year-old viewing real-life footage of a bombing with dead bodies is likely to act aggressively after viewing, mimicking what they have seen online.
If children share that content, however well-meaning, more people will be exposed to these distressing images.
Young people’s news consumption habits also tend to have lasting effects on the way they engage with the news throughout their life.
The habits they develop as children – their news sources and the type of information they accept as factual – impacts how they understand their world and their place in it.
Continually seeing confronting footage of war and military attacks, and other violence, online from a young, vulnerable age also creates the impression violence against another group is the norm and is acceptable.
What can we do about it?
Adults’ focus should be to minimise the harm misinformation, and extreme and violent imagery can have on children. So, education is the key.
Adults can talk to children about war or conflict. They can support them to stay informed, while helping them feel safe and secure.
The best way is to view some footage with them and talk openly about it. Discuss:
what you see
the context and the facts
who uploaded it
the source of the footage
any comments added to it.
Aim to get to the bottom of why that footage is there and whether it is reliable. Compare it to footage of the Ukraine-Russia conflict from a reliable source.
You can do this regularly with children, not just with this current crisis. You can focus on any news event or potentially questionable content a child may see online.
You or your child can also report distressing or misleading content. This can be directly to the social media company. Or if there is high-impact violence, you can report it to the eSafety Commissioner.
As parents, we cannot always be aware of disturbing footage a child may see online. Children are highly vulnerable and while they may have great technology skills, they do not have adults’ life experience and cognitive abilities to handle or analyse what they see. They need our guidance.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800 or Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Joanne Orlando does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Abandoned building and barrel at Wilkes StationDarren Koppel, Author provided
Environmental scientists see flora, fauna and phenomena the rest of us rarely do. In this series, we’ve invited them to share their unique photos from the field.
This week the federal government announced A$804.4 million over ten years to bolster Australia’s scientific and strategic presence in Antarctica. Of this, $14.3 million is for cleaning up legacy waste from the continent – the abandoned waste and contamination accumulated from over a century of human visitors.
That there’s legacy waste in Antarctica may come as a surprise to some people, as we often think of Antarctica as a pristine wilderness. However, I’ve seen legacy waste first hand when I was in Antarctica over the 2017-2018 summer, researching how this waste impacts local environments.
One study site, for example, was Australia’s Wilkes station, a research station abandoned in 1969 after being buried in snow and ice. A 2013 study estimated its tip site contains 20,000 cubic metres of waste, including leaking oil drums, batteries, dead dogs, building material, and food.
Australia’s responsibility for its historical waste in Antarctica is both a moral and legal imperative. This funding announcement will hopefully be the start of a renewed push to clean up this once pristine frontier.
Our research team at Wilkes Station. Buildings here are buried in ice. Darren Koppel
Waste and the Madrid Protocol
Humans have occupied Antarctica since the early 1900s. But the big push into Antarctica occurred during the International Geophysical Year in 1957-1958, which saw 12 nations build 60 stations. Today, there are 158 locations with over 5,342 buildings, including currently operating and abandoned research stations and field camps.
Australia and other nations signed the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty System, or “the Madrid Protocol”, which came into force in 1998. The Madrid Protocol designates Antarctica a “natural reserve, devoted to peace and science” and requires its comprehensive protection. Australia played a leading role in its development, including by ensuring mining was banned in Antarctica.
Thanks to the Madrid Protocol, human activities in Antarctica today generally pose a low-risk to the environment.
Rusted oil barrels at the ‘Fuel Farm’ of the abandoned Wilkes Station. Darren Koppel
Pollution in Antarctica can come from a number of sources. Contaminants including metals, microplastics, and persistent organic pollutants can hitch a ride on wind and ocean currents. However, these are so low in concentration they’re unlikely to cause harm.
Tourism and active research stations also generate contamination from wastewater, diesel exhaust and incineration smoke, and localised fuel spills. These sources are generally well managed and new technologies are being implemented to minimise these impacts.
Prior to the Madrid Protocol, waste from stations was pushed into the ocean, buried or incinerated on land, or placed in tip sites – many of which remain today. Abandoned research stations and field camps, old oil spills, and historical tip sites still dot the continent and are generally unmanaged.
Rusted oil barrels partly buried in the snow at the abandoned Wilkes station in Antarctica. Darren Koppel Legacy waste in a melt stream near Casey Station. Darren Koppel
Competing with nature for ice-free land
A key issue is where this legacy waste is located. Over three-quarters of stations are built on the ice-free Antarctic coastline, which makes up just 0.06% of the continent. This is a practical decision because coastal locations are more accessible by boats, and moving ice sheets have a tendency to become icebergs).
But while building on the ice-free coast is good for us, it can cause problems for local wildlife. Ice-free areas are rare real-estate in Antarctica and much of the land-based biodiversity depends on it.
Marine birds and mammals nest among the rocks, lichens and mosses live in and around the streams of melted ice, which are also home to microinvertebrate communities (think tardigrades) and different types of microalgae. Concentrating our human activity to these areas concentrates our impact to Antarctica’s most sensitive ecosystems.
Whole ecosystems form around Adélie penguin colonies which roost among the rocky coastline of Antarctica. Green macroalgae (seen around and on the penguins) grows in the melted snow using nutrients from penguin poo and is home to micro-invertebrates such as nematodes, rotifers, and tardigrades. Darren Koppel
Australia, in many ways, is leading the Antarctic national programs developing clean-up technologies and science. For example, developing new technologies to remediate soils contaminated by fuel spills and undertaking studies to map the types of contaminants associated with legacy waste.
A lingering concern is that contaminants can leach from waste into surrounding environments, particularly in summer when melted ice streams flow through these sites.
My research, published last year, sampled these streams and along the coastlines to measure the concentrations of metals. Copper and zinc, which are toxic at high concentrations, were higher in some streams, and this correlated with a decreased number of algae species.
Chemical sampling devices deployed to a moss bed near Australia’s Casey Station. Darren Koppel Sampling through the sea ice near Casey Station. Adélie penguins were curious about the science going on. Darren Koppel
What’s needed to clean up Antarctica
Despite the protocol being in force since 1998, there’s been a clear lack of action to clean up this waste from many nations. It begs the question: just how committed are we to monitoring human impacts in Antarctica?
My biggest concern is that the lack of any legal enforcement, lack of monitoring, and an uncertainty in how exactly to clean up can be used as an excuse to delay, or even avoid, any effort.
But while cleaning up our legacy waste is a huge undertaking, there have been successful examples, such as the remediation of Australia’s Old Casey Station tip-site in 2003 and 2004.
A soft drink bottle and wooden crate from Wilkes Station in a melt lake. Darren Koppel
Likewise, the US’ McMurdo Station operated a nuclear reactor for power between 1961 and 1972, called “Nukey Poo”. The whole site required substantial remediation after it closed in 1972. This involved the removal of 12,000 tonnes of rock and soil over seven years for disposal in the USA to ensure no radioactive contamination was left in Antarctica.
These clean ups, however, are the exceptions rather than the norm, and there’s a lot left to do. The tip site at Australia’s abandoned Wilkes Station, for example, is ten times the size of the Thala Valley tip, which took more than ten years to clean up. And Australia’s other active Antarctic research stations, Mawson and Davis, have historical tip sites that are less studied.
Abandoned food provisions and building supplies give a snapshot into Antarctic life at Wilkes Station in the 1960s. Darren Koppel
The $14.3 million promised by the federal government to clean this mess will also go towards a new geospatial information system. This will hopefully see proper documentation of all waste sites.
Other necessary steps to clean up Antarctica include the characterisation of the types and quantities of waste, the development of environmental quality standards, and new clean up technologies.
But it will take more than platitudes, and it must be followed by a dedicated effort to actually remove the waste, in line with the Madrid Protocol signed 30 years ago. The funding is a good step towards meeting our obligations, but we need to be in it for the long haul.
Darren Koppel worked on an Australian Antarctic Science funded project (AAS4326), received funding from an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship, and received a bursary from Antarctic Science Ltd to conduct research on contaminants in Antarctica. He is not affiliated with the Australian Antarctic Division. Darren is currently employed by Curtin University and is working on a project funded by National Energy Resources Australia to investigate the ecological risk of contaminants from decommissioning activities.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dion O’Neale, Project Lead – COVID Modeling Aotearoa; Senior Lecturer – Department of Physics, University of Auckland; Principal Investigator – Te Pūnaha Matatini, University of Auckland
GettyImages
With Aotearoa New Zealand’s move into phase 3 of its response to the Omicron outbreak, new definitions and protocols for testing and isolation will mean new ways of measuring the impact of COVID-19.
Broadly speaking, there are two aspects to this new regime. The first relates to the changing definitions of who counts as a close contact, and what their isolation requirements are.
The second concerns testing processes, advice for who should get tested when, what sort of test they should take, and how the result is recorded. Switching to phase 3 means a switch to predominantly using rapid antigen tests (RATs).
Testing policy is important because the number of confirmed or probable cases informs our estimate of the number of underlying infections.
New confirmed cases are a lagging indicator of new infections, but a leading indicator of other important metrics like hospitalisations. The more we know about who is newly infected and where, the better we can plan individual and community responses to the outbreak.
RATs and risk
With the high case numbers we’re now seeing with Omicron, speed is key in returning test results. Quick results mean people can modify their behaviour accordingly and isolate if necessary. The sooner people receive a positive result, the sooner they can notify recent contacts, and those people can also isolate.
When case numbers are high, the risk of a false positive from a RAT is very low. This means the extra value from having a more sensitive PCR test is reduced compared with when we had lower case numbers.
Conversely, when case numbers in the community are high, there is a risk of false negative results on a RAT for someone who either has symptoms or is a close contact of a confirmed case.
In such cases the prudent course of action would be to take a second test – either another RAT or a PCR test – and to assume there is still a decent chance you may be infected.
People who have no known exposure to a confirmed case, and no symptoms, can be relatively confident in the accuracy of a negative result from a RAT. And regardless of test results, anyone with COVID-like symptoms should be isolating until they recover from whatever is causing those symptoms, COVID or otherwise.
Estimating actual infection numbers
The move to phase 3 acknowledges that infection and confirmed cases are becoming high enough that many of the processes for monitoring and planning will be stretched and may become inaccurate.
As the number of infections rise, we can expect the “case ascertainment rate” (CAR) will start to fall. The CAR is a measurement of the percentage of total infections at a given point in time that are turned into confirmed cases.
That is, given an observed number of confirmed cases, how many infections do we think are actually in the community, including those that are unconfirmed?
Keeping track of this metric at different stages of the outbreak is important. When isolation requirements for close contacts relax, infections may increase, while fewer people will be eligible for testing.
Or, people may test positive on a self-administered RAT but not report it. Both of these lead to higher numbers of unconfirmed infections.
Why accurate numbers matter
The only way to accurately estimate the CAR is through an “infection prevalence survey”. An example is the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) survey, one of the strongest aspects of the UK’s otherwise patchy COVID response.
This randomised survey tries to directly measure the fraction of people who are infected with COVID at any point in time. A well-designed survey makes sure to sample sufficient people in different demographic groups and with different infection risk factors.
Modelling can estimate the number of infections in different populations, subject to different assumptions. But without an infection prevalence survey, or equivalent data, only confirmed cases can be directly observed.
Since confirmed cases are an unknown fraction of total infections, and this fraction changes over time, it’s important to be able to accurately estimate the underlying infection numbers to validate such modelling.
And since infection numbers are a leading indication for hospitalisations, they are valuable for planning adjustments to processes or policies, such as testing or isolation.
Case numbers a fraction of the whole
Without an infection prevalence survey it is necessary to fall back on less accurate measures of infection estimates.
For example, the fraction of people admitted to hospital who test positive for COVID is an unreliable estimate of infection prevalence because it is biased by a large number of factors that are difficult to control for.
Namely, people rarely turn up at hospital for random reasons. Many of the same factors that might drive hospital admissions, even for reasons not directly linked to COVID, are nonetheless related to COVID infection risk.
As an example of infection prevalence data in action, in early January 2022, the UK recorded an average of around 200,000 daily confirmed cases. The ONS survey estimated just under 4 million people were infected at the time.
Details around the length of the survey period during which people might test positive can affect the exact value of the CAR. But the UK figures paint a picture of only a small fraction of infections being detected, even with RATs being provided frequently and free to every household.
With access to testing in Aotearoa being more limited than in the UK, we might expect our CAR to be even lower, and hence the number of reported cases is likely to significantly undercount true infections.
But without an infection prevalence survey, it’s difficult to tell exactly how much we are undercounting by.
Dion O’Neale receives funding from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, as part of COVID Modelling Aotearoa, for providing modelling advice related to the COVID response in Aotearoa. He is the lead investigator of Te Matatini o te Horapa – a project funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand to look the equity impacts of COVID in Aotearoa.
The world was treated to a grotesque spectacle this week. Russia, the current president of the UN Security Council, launched an invasion of Ukraine while the Security Council was holding an urgent meeting to try to resolve the crisis.
This has many people asking whether there is any point to international law – is it powerless to control the conduct of states?
Has Russia broken the law?
Yes. There is no question Russia has breached the rules of international law. Ukraine has a right to territorial integrity and political independence. Russian “recognition” of the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk does not change this, nor do any historical claims to Ukrainian territory on the part of Russia.
Russia has also committed an act of aggression against Ukraine. Aggression is an old concept in international law, predating the creation of the UN.
Finally, Russia’s acts constitute a serious breach of the UN Charter, which states:
All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.
But what is the point of all this international law if Russia can still invade Ukraine? Where is the enforcement?
Article 24 of the UN Charter grants the Security Council primary responsibility for the “maintenance of international peace and security”. This includes taking collective measures to prevent and counter threats to peace and suppressing acts of aggression.
The UN was established specifically to prevent a global war between great powers from happening again. And since we haven’t seen this sort of event in the past 75 years, the UN has been largely successful at this primary goal.
But here’s the rub: the UN Security Council (and the UN Charter more generally) was established by the allied powers who “won” the second world war. In establishing the UN, these powers (China, France, the UK, the US and Russia as successor state to the USSR) were positioned functionally above the law.
They were made permanent members of the Security Council (known as the P5) and given veto power over UN action.
This was done expressly to prevent the UN from being able to take action against them and to allow them to act as a balance to each other’s ambitions. The system only works, however, when the P5 agree to abide by the rules.
This worked through the Cold War because no P5 state felt comfortable enough in its own power to act unilaterally and upset that balance. Once that uneasy balance of power fell apart with the collapse of the USSR, the willingness of the P5 members to act with restraint began to chip away.
In the 1990s, the US and UK used the Security Council to rubber stamp their expansive military activity. Later, when Russia and China felt confident enough to use their veto power (most prominently in the Iraq invasion in 2003), the US and UK simply acted unilaterally. The Security Council – by design – was powerless to prevent it.
The same scenario is playing out now, with Russia as the aggressor. The restraint of the P5 in their use of military action has been hanging by a thread for decades. We may have just seen it permanently snap.
Are there other responses under international law?
Russia’s ongoing transgression of the law is not the end of the story. There are other ways international law can be used to either defend Ukraine or punish Russia that go beyond economic sanctions.
One option is the invocation of Article 51 of the UN Charter, which gives states the right of individual and collective self-defence.
Ukraine can legally use force to defend itself from attack, and moreover, can request military assistance from other countries. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Kuwait issued a number of such requests to help it defend itself.
Questions have also been asked about whether Russia could be stripped of its permanent membership on the Security Council.
Russia’s UN ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, speaks during an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. UNTV/AP
The simple answer is no. Arguments are now being made that Russia should not have inherited the USSR’s seat on the council. But all the states arising from the collapse of the USSR (including Ukraine) did agree to this in 1991.
As for the question of reforming the UN Charter to remove Russia, that is also functionally impossible.
While Article 108 of the UN Charter does allow for amendments, it requires all of the P5 to agree. So, in order to remove Russia from the Security Council, Russia would have to agree, and that’s never going to happen.
This, again, is by design, so the P5 would feel confident in their security when taking action to police the world. Unfortunately, peace can’t be enforced when your enforcer is the one breaching the peace.
There is also international criminal law. Putin has committed the crime of aggression by launching an illegal war, and any Russian war crimes on Ukrainian territory are within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
But Putin will not stand trial before the ICC for aggression, due to the court’s narrow jurisdiction. Uniquely, both the aggressor state and the victim of its actions must be parties to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court. Ukraine is a party to the Rome Statute, Russia is not.
So, the ICC has no jurisdiction over Russian aggression without the Security Council referring Russia to the court as a non-party. And, of course, Russia can veto this action as a permanent member of the council.
While the ICC also has jurisdiction over war crimes, tying a president to the crimes of foot soldiers is complex and not something the court has ever succeeded in doing.
However, the ICC is not the only game in town. Any country in the world can prosecute grave war crimes, such as intentionally attacking civilians.
And countries can prosecute nationals of other states for aggression, if they have laws in place to do so. Germany, the Netherlands, Ukraine and even Russia all have such “universal jurisdiction” laws that apply to acts of aggression.
Similarly, the doctrine of command responsibility is also subject to universal jurisdiction. So, war crimes prosecutions need not stop with front-line soldiers.
However, the difficulty with universal jurisdiction is bringing suspects into custody. Heads of state, in particular, are generally immune from being prosecuted for crimes in foreign courts.
Not only that, for such prosecutions to happen, Russian political and military leaders would need to be removed from their posts, arrested and then extradited to face trial.
So, in the short run, will anyone be hauled before a court? No. In the long run? Maybe.
Meanwhile, the job of the international community is to gather evidence of crimes as they occur, and to support Ukraine’s right of self-defence. International law is there, states now must use it.
Douglas Guilfoyle receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Tamsin Phillipa Paige received funding from the Australian Department of Education in the form of an Endeavour Scholarship in relation to her research on the UN Security Council.
Juliette McIntyre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage. You can sign up to NZ Politics Daily as well as New Zealand Political Roundup columns for free here.
When Vladimir Putin became the first Russian leader to visit Australia – for the 2007 APEC summit in Sydney – I had a chance to ask him what he thought of Australia.
“I never think of Australia,” he replied.
Putin has probably not thought of Australia much since, apart from the fuss we made over Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine shooting down Malaysian Airlines MH17 in 2014, and his visit to Brisbane in 2014 for a G20 leaders summit.
Russia and Australia have limited economic ties. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will ripple through the global economy, reaching as far as Australia. Russia’s actions are already affecting things like petrol prices.
More significantly Putin’s belligerence could further destabilise our already fraught relationship with China, our most important trading partner.
So Australia certainly has reason to think about Putin’s actions now.
Russia’s crucial role in the global economy
Measured by gross domestic product, Russia is the world’s 11th biggest economy, just behind South Korea and in front of Brazil. Its 2020 GDP of US$1,646 billion wasn’t much bigger than Australia’s (in 13th spot, with US$1,610 billion).
But Russia matters to the global economy because, like Australia, it is a major global supplier of natural resources such as oil, gas, coal, metals and wheat.
Disruption of these supplies could happen through Western sanctions on Russia, or through Russia cutting off supplies – or both.
The intention in either scenario is to punish the other side. The effect on the global economy, already threatened by inflation and COVID-related supply side shocks, will be the same.
Russia is also a major global supplier of metals such as aluminium and palladium, a rare and expensive metal used in catalytic converters to reduce toxic exhaust emissions from cars and other vehicles.
Palladium has other important uses too, including in hydrogen fuel technology. Russia accounts for about 40% of global supply.
Sanctions banning Russian imports will naturally reduce global supply and increase the prices of these resources, as well as the products made from them.
How much of an inflationary effect this causes will depend on how much other suppliers increase their output, or whether Russia can increase sales to other buyers not participating in sanctions. China, for example, has ended all restrictions on wheat imports from Russia
Putin has built strong ties with Saudi Arabia, Iran and other oil-producing and non-democratic states as a bulwark against the West. So replacing Russian supplies and enforcing sanctions effectively won’t be easy.
Europe’s vulnerability
The European Union is particularly vulnerable to supply shocks, due to its heavy reliance on energy imports, with 41% of the natural gas and 27% of the crude oil it consumes coming from Russia.
For Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, about 34% of oil imports and 35% of its gas imports come from Russia. This makes the German government’s decision to halt the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline being laid in the Baltic Sea between Russia and Germany a gutsy call.
Given the central role of German manufacturing to European supply chains, disruptions to its energy supply will have major global economic implications.
The biggest risks for Australia
In the very short term, there may be some upsides for Australian exporters, such as wheat farmers.
Russia is the world’s biggest wheat exporter and Ukraine, long known as Europe’s bread basket, is the fifth (Australia is sixth).
The likely disruption to these supplies can be expected to increase the world wheat price, as happened in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea.
Australia is also a major natural gas exporter. However, because it exports that gas by ship (as liquefied natural gas) rather than through pipelines, there are constraints on it increasing exports in the near term.
So some Australian exporters who compete with Russian suppliers should benefit from higher prices in the short run. But these benefits will soon be overrun by the adverse impact of global economic disruption.
The biggest risk to Australia, though, is if China decides to follow Russia’s lead.
We saw at the Beijing Winter Olympics the warming of what has historically been a frosty Sino-Russian relationship. Putin and Xi Jinping have much in common.
If Xi sees the West being divided and weak over Ukraine, as it was over Afghanistan, then he may make matters tougher for Taiwan. This would jeopardise Australia’s trade with China.
What else can be done?
All the signs are that Putin is prepared to ride out sanctions, gambling that he has enough reserves to tough them out or enough friends to undermine their effectiveness.
One option is a strong economic strengthening of Ukraine through trade and infrastructure measures. This could include the European Union granting Ukraine preferential trade and investment deals, and the Western allies assuring it favourable supply of natural resources.
Russia may like to intimidate, but it doesn’t have the economic strength of a united opposition, including the US, European and Asia-Pacific nations.
There may not be an immediate military solution, nor a neat diplomatic fix. But the economic dimensions to the crisis may be more in favour of Ukraine than first meets the eye.
Tim Harcourt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
People rest in the Kyiv subway, using it as a bomb shelter.AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti
With an all-out war on Ukraine underway, a key question has emerged: what can the West do to help Ukraine?
Sanctions and limited military aid will help. Another key strategy, however, is crucial: to counter Russian president Vladimir Putin’s justifications for the war.
Rebutting Putin’s information strategy will weaken his position in what is likely to be a long, drawn-out conflict.
To do that, we first need to understand what his information strategy is.
In a nearly hour-long speech to the Russian people released on February 21, Putin put forward his case for invasion. This speech has been described by observers as “angry” and “rambling” but it was highly scripted.
In fact, it included two key arguments, which we can expect to see constantly reappearing in Russian messaging in the coming weeks and months.
One is focused primarily on the Russian population. The other has both a domestic and international audience in mind.
The domestic pitch: Russia as victim of Ukrainian neo-Nazis
The first part of Putin’s argument outlined a one-sided narrative of Ukrainian history aimed squarely at appealing to the emotions of a domestic audience by showing Russia’s supposed victimisation at the hands of Ukraine.
The narrative begins with a fantastical version of history claiming Ukraine was “entirely created by Russia, or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, communist Russia”.
It then turned to the idea that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine “never had stable traditions of real statehood”.
Ukraine’s “pro-West civilisational choice”, Putin argued, then inevitably led to a series of catastrophes: endemic corruption, a “West-supported” neo-Nazi takeover of power in 2014, and systematic discrimination against Russian speakers (including a planned genocide).
He concludes by claiming Ukraine might soon have weapons of mass destruction (including nuclear weapons).
A woman holds her cat in a shelter during Russian shelling, in Mariupol, Ukraine. AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka
How to counter this narrative?
This one-sided, neo-imperial interpretation of history is a fantasy that has great emotional appeal to a former mid-level KGB officer like Putin, who experienced at first hand the humiliating end of an empire in 1991 and now sits in the Kremlin.
Putin gets to feel like an agent of history, rebuilding Russia from the terrible humiliation of the 1990s.
But what about 140 million Russian citizens? How does avenging this historical fantasy help them cope with rising prices, a tanking economy, and growing corruption in their country? What future does Putin’s war of vengeance actually offer to coming generations?
Alexey Navalny, the jailed opposition leader, put this well.
He likened Putin’s arguments to your drunk grandfather’s rant at a family gathering – except, this time, your grandfather “holds power in a country with nuclear weapons”.
Russia has all the tools, Navalny argued, for strong economic and cultural development “in the 21st century from oil to educated citizens”. But these are being thrown away on the basis of “war, dirt, lies, and the palace with the golden eagles in Gelendzhik” (a reference to Putin’s alleged palace that features in a notorious YouTube video).
The broader pitch: Russia as victim of the West
The second part of Putin’s speech included geopolitical arguments about the reckless expansion of NATO and the United States into Russia’s sphere of influence.
This included evocative language of a “US-built maritime operations centre in Ochakov”, and dire warnings that it will only take seven to eight minutes for US ballistic missiles to reach Moscow from Kharkiv in Ukraine.
He concluded by arguing the US will always want to dismember and weaken Russia because “they just do not need a big and independent country like Russia around”.
This kind of argument is aimed at both domestic and international audiences. In fact, much of this language could be aimed at Beijing, which sees the US in much the same way.
It also has been a popular discussion in the Western media and academia. Even prominent US academics such as John Mearsheimer have made a version of this argument for years. These academic arguments don’t go as far as Putin’s, and certainly the US would like to contain Russia’s power, but such arguments can be misinterpreted as justifying a war in Ukraine.
Black smoke rises into the air in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv. Kyodo via AP Images
Countering these arguments requires making a clear distinction between explanation and justification.
An explanation is an argument about why something causes a particular response; it ignores whether the response is good or bad. By contrast, a justification is a claim about why a particular response is the correct one. The West must counter Putin’s justification and show why it was the wrong choice.
In the Ukrainian context, it means being clear that although NATO’s eastward expansion might explain why Putin ordered a full-scale war, it does not justify it.
In fact, a war on Ukraine is the wrong response to NATO expansion because it is likely to encourage the expansion of NATO toward Russia’s borders.
We are already seeing this with growing support for NATO membership in Finland.
Countering Putin’s information strategy
Countering Putin’s information strategy therefore involves making two key arguments.
First, it means pointing out this is not a Russian war on Ukraine. It is war of choice entirely attributable to an increasingly detached clique of leaders led by Putin, who have little interest in solving the everyday problems of millions of Russians.
The protests in many cities across Russia – exceedingly brave in the knowing reality of police brutality – suggest many Russians believe this already.
Second, a successful counter to Putin’s information strategy shows a full-scale invasion of Ukraine will only worsen Russia’s security situation. This war of choice will only isolate Russia from allies and encourage the further expansion of NATO onto its borders.
William Partlett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
University of Canberra Professorial Fellow Michelle Grattan and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Change Governance Dr Lain Dare discuss the week in politics.
They talk about the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces, the immense uncertainty this has created, and the west’s response with rounds of sanctions.
They also canvass the government’s announcement a RAAF plane was targeted with a laser attack by a Chinese naval vessel that was sailing through Australia’s exclusive economic zone.
Meanwhile at home, as the election approaches, Anthony Albanese is on a charm offensive, featuring in an Australian Women’s Weekly interview with his partner, Jodie Haydon.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Most of us brush our teeth on autopilot. So let’s stop and ask: are you doing it properly? For a full two minutes? Do you use the correct type of brush and toothpaste?
Did you know you’re supposed to spit, not rinse after brushing?
And brushing soon after eating acidic foods, like citrus, can damage your teeth?
Here, I answer five questions commonly asked at the dentist.
1. Am I brushing correctly?
For starters, make sure you’re brushing both teeth and gums at least twice a day.
Brushing removes dental plaque, the grey-white bacterial mass that sticks to the tooth and gum surface.
Plaque can cause damage to the tooth enamel and the dentine underneath. Shutterstock
Mature plaque forms an architecturally complex mass with its own sewerage system.
Plaque feeds on the food we eat, particularly carbohydrates (sweet and savoury) to reinforce and build a complex structure that releases acids and gassy, smelly by-products (plaque sewage).
Mature plaque on your teeth and gum surfaces can lead to cavities (holes in our teeth) and gum disease.
Cavities form in our teeth when the mineral in our enamel and eventually, dentine, dissolves to neutralise plaque acids. Over time, the tooth softens and caves in.
Every time you brush, you stop plaque bacteria from feeding on your food, multiplying and maturing. Mature plaque mixed with mineral in your saliva forms calculus or tartar.
Calculus can only be removed completely by a dentist or hygienist using special tools.
Not brushing before bed is especially risky; saliva flow reduces and food stuck between your teeth ferments, creating a perfect petri dish for plaque growth. This is where flossing or using tapered interdental cleaners can help.
Make sure you clean the teeth at the back of your mouth, and don’t rush. The Australian Dental Association recommends brushing for two minutes morning and night.
Watch this video for some handy tips on how to brush your teeth.
2. How do I look after my gums and prevent bad breath?
But the plaque’s defence system repels the attack. Everything your body throws at it bounces off and starts to break down the bone that holds your teeth in your head.
This process is known as advanced gum disease or periodontal disease. It happens slowly and painlessly. As the gums recede, teeth appear elongated.
Untreated, your teeth may become painful, loosen and even fall out.
This is why it’s important to have a regular dental check-up and to brush and floss frequently.
3. What kind of toothbrush should I use?
The Australian Dental Association recommends using a toothbrush with a small head and soft bristles.
Do spit and not rinse at the end; avoiding spitting and rinsing means you get a fluoride treatment each time you brush.
What about whitening toothpastes? Whitening toothpastes can have strong abrasives that wear the tooth surface to cause sensitivity.
Most stain particles in our natural teeth hide in microscopic gaps in enamel.
The most efficient and least destructive way of removing these stains is by using peroxide-based whitening products.
Talk to your dentist about options and be wary of home remedies or gimmicks. And remember, whitening will not change the colour of dentures, crowns, veneers or fillings.
Arosha Weerakoon is a self-employed dentist in private practice. She has received funding from Colgate to conduct research on how collagen and mineral characteristics in teeth change as we age. She is a member of the Australian Dental Association and a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Dental Surgeons.
The pandemic has had a considerable impact on all businesses, but New Zealand’s construction sector appears particularly hard hit and is struggling to cope. Firms have failed, prices have gone up, and labour and materials are in short supply.
In the past few weeks alone, one construction company has gone under and building projects have ground to a halt due to shortages of Gib board.
These kinds of problems should not surprise anyone. Material and labour shortages, companies failing, red tape and poor quality outcomes for companies and consumers are not new for the sector.
The big question is why such shocks and stresses create problems for the New Zealand construction industry so regularly. More immediately, how can the sector deliver reliably on the significant building and infrastructure projects in the current pipeline?
A potted history of crises
A few key examples tell the tale. In 2002 there was the leaky building crisis, with predictions of a serious downturn and the “potential for a major systemic breakdown across the industry”.
In 2012, the building sector again faced a “bleak year”, in part due to delays in the Canterbury rebuild and low volumes of work elsewhere.
By 2015, there were reports of more than 60 construction-related Christchurch companies in liquidation that year, owing creditors an estimated NZ$40 million.
Post-earthquake rebuilding in Christchurch ran into rising costs, skills shortages and liquidations. GettyImages
Planning for resilience
Even in unremarkable times, the industry tends to be slow to innovate and has poor productivity. Firms win tenders with prices so low they often cannot make any profit. The industry does not spend enough on research and development, and it reacts rather than plans.
What is needed is the development of a resilient construction sector that’s able to cope with adverse events, recover well and continue to operate effectively.
We began researching organisational and construction sector resilience in the early 2000s. Since then, we have worked on a number of government projects in New Zealand and overseas, helping to develop infrastructure network, organisation and sector resilience.
Our past research tells us organisations are likely to be more resilient when they have leadership and a culture that actively plans and allows for constant change.
A resilient organisational culture is one where staff are engaged in resolving problems and are given time and training to develop innovative thinking. Resilient companies learn from the past and use those lessons to focus on what matters.
They also maintain effective relationships with other relevant organisations. They understand their position in the construction supply chain, including who they depend on and who depends on them. A resilient supply chain makes the industry less fragmented and more connected.
Moving to a new model
Our research leads us to believe that developing closer-to-home resourcing – not relying on so many imported skills and materials – would create greater resilience and a more sustainable industry.
And there are current initiatives making a difference. Educational programs focusing on training and career development are an excellent step towards creating workforce resilience. Similarly, a construction sector accord is creating partnerships between government and industry to achieve (among other things) a co-ordinated voice on industry reforms.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission are both involved in improving the sector’s climate change planning, skills and productivity, and risk management.
Our research aims to build on such developments by helping organisations in the construction sector understand their own resilience and to plan accordingly.
In particular, a five-year grant from MBIE’s Endeavour Fund will allow us to develop the CanConstructNZ project to help manage industry capacity and better understand how to manage shocks and stresses.
The hope is that all such initiatives will contribute to a more resilient construction sector that can deliver the multiple projects within the national pipeline forecasts.
With a more co-ordinated approach to planning and the ability to withstand shocks and setbacks, it’s hoped the industry can avoid the problems that have dogged it – and the country – for too long.
Suzanne Wilkinson receives funding from Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment under the Endeavour Research Programme, CanConstructNZ.
Monty Sutrisna receives funding from MBIE Endeavour.
Regan Potangaroa receives funding from the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment under the Endeavour Research Program, CanConstructNZ.
Rod Cameron receives funding from Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment under the Endeavour Research Programme, CanConstructNZ
Review: The Smallest Stage, by Kim Crotty for Perth Festival
A small, white rectangle taped onto the wide, open expanse of the Studio Underground playing space is a literal representation of one of the small stages evoked by the play’s title. But The Smallest Stage goes way beyond the literal to recreate its primary focus: the space between a parent telling a child a story.
Ostensibly a one-man show, actor Ben Mortley actually shares the stage with a cast of 20 others: ten children with one parent each.
These volunteers, experiencing the performance for the first time, receive their instructions (unheard by the rest of the audience) via headphones that direct their entrances and exits from the front row and stage choreography. They move props, play multiple roles and recreate key moments referenced in the storytelling.
A cast of children and their parents become integral parts of the storytelling. Perth Festival/Bew Yew
Mortley plays the character of West Australian writer and co-creator of this production, Kim Crotty, who was sentenced to two years in Dartmoor prison in the UK for growing cannabis, separating him from his partner and two sons.
In this autobiographical retelling, Mortley moves seamlessly between present day Crotty as narrator, Crotty in the past dealing with the reality of his situation and the characters he meets along the way.
With the white rectangle now serving as his prison cell, Crotty realises the fleeting phone calls and visits with his children are only deepening the trauma of his absence. This drives him to do what most parents do to settle their children: tell stories.
And so Crotty becomes both writer and illustrator, as he desperately seeks to maintain his connection with his family.
Stories as lifebuoys
Running the gamut of children’s storytelling genres, Crotty’s stories include gross-out humour featuring unforgettable characters like Snot Man and Tissue Monster, what he calls “alternate superheroes” and old-fashioned morality tales.
All in all he wrote and illustrated 47 stories for his sons.
Although some of them could work as children’s books or theatre in their own right, The Smallest Stage is about more than the stories themselves. It is about a father rising above his current circumstances to create new worlds to inhabit with his sons, seeking to gain a sense of control in fictional worlds that might eventually transfer to the real world.
The Smallest Stage is about a father rising above his current circumstances to create new worlds to inhabit with his sons. Perth Festival/Bew Yew
Crotty’s stories are lifebuoys cast by a drowning man. By adding the story behind them, The Smallest Stage casts a much wider net
Even with children in the audience, The Smallest Stage doesn’t avoid serious themes. The ugly remnants of family violence, incarceration and misogyny are faced squarely. The vestiges of what we inherit from our parents and what we pass on plays out in the storytelling. Reckoning with what Crotty describes as his own “father-shaped hole”, the work tracks his journey to be a better father than the one he had.
The simple paper of the original storytelling is very much in evidence. The work brilliantly stages the transformative capacity of storytelling via live drawing segueing into animation, projection, puppetry and a pop-up book simply lit by a hand-held torch. One extended animated story of Ghost Girl Elise is beautifully realised.
But while the stories draw us in on their own merits, the focus remains on how the stories bridge the gap between the father and his sons.
Live drawing segues into animation, projection, puppetry and pop-up books. Perth Festival/Bew Yew
Everyone has a story
This focus is also present in the presence of the audio-guided participant children and parents. Witnessing this layer of the performance illuminates the work’s premise: everyone has a story.
It also extends and expands the specificities of Crotty’s story. The choreography that accompanies the moment when Crotty is reunited with his sons when he is finally released and deported back to Australia creates a simple but emotional release. There is no acting required here.
Crotty’s decision to not hide the truth of his mistakes and failings from his children is one challenge most parents would understand. The Smallest Stage shows by finding “the words to name the ache” Crotty creates a pathway towards a more open, honest and loving relationship with his sons, ultimately forming a lifetime habit of love and storytelling.
The Smallest Stage doesn’t hide the hard parts of the story from its young audience. Perth Festival/Bew Yew
Mortley’s performance is an emotional slow burn. While the work itself is expertly crafted to accommodate all the variables at play, Mortley remains at the mercy of chance created by the presence of the other participants. Retaining and calibrating the emotional arc of the work, while remaining open to the variability of their input, he is the heart and soul of The Smallest Stage’s aches and joys.
Mortley, director Matt Edgerton and designer Zoë Atkinson worked with Crotty to co-create this world premiere performance. As theatre makers, they followed Crotty’s principle of using everything at their disposal to create.
A superb collaborative effort, The Smallest Stage is a real triumph of form emerging from content, a powerful example of the originality that can emerge from a group of artists given time, money and support to work towards one purpose.
It also reminds us of theatre’s communal roots and its capacity to activate and uplift an audience.
The Smallest Stage is at Perth Festival until February 27.
Leah Mercer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Vision is often regarded as first among the human senses, as our eyes are the way most of us come to know the world. However, vision has its limits.
Even now, as you use your eyes to read this, other senses are in operation that open up a greater appreciation of the world. Perhaps the most powerful of these is listening – audition.
Sound carries cues about the world we might otherwise miss. And with the development of new technologies and the work of dedicated scientists and artists, we can today listen to what was previously unimaginable, from the inner workings of plants to catastrophes in distant galaxies.
In my own work, currently exhibited at the Museum of Brisbane, I have made field recordings of environments and creatures around the world. These works take their place alongside an ever-growing collection of recordings revealing the unheard sounds of our world.
The limits of the ear
Humans can only hear a limited range of sounds: those with frequencies between about 20 hertz (low sounds like thunder) and 20 kilohertz (very high sounds like some species of bats). Other sounds exist outside the scope of our auditory capacities.
“Infrasonic” sounds such as the rumble of earthquakes have frequencies too low for us to perceive, although other animals can detect them. There are “ultrasonic” sounds too, with frequencies above the threshold of human hearing.
Strictly speaking, a sound is a vibration in air. But we can also think of other kinds of vibrations, such as electromagnetic waves, as having the potential to be registered as sounds.
With the right kind of technological translation tools, you can hear the electromagnetic sounds emitted by devices like the one on which you are reading this right now.
The ‘Stereo Bugscope’ created by the artist Haco amplifies the sounds of electronic circuitry.
Why should we listen?
Listening is a different way of knowing the world that expands our understanding. Sound travels around corners and through walls, from places that are out of sight.
Our ears are a gateway to a deeper sensing of the world. Take bird calls, for example.
For most, even those of us living in densely populated urban centres, dawn’s arrival is trumpeted by a chorus of bird calls. These voices, that seemingly splay out in all directions suggest acts of territorial dominance, of the seeking and discovery of food and other fundamental activities of animal species. A variation of the chorus occurs again, as the sun vanishes over the horizon.
Today we are listening to more of the world, and beyond, than ever before, with the growth of disciplines such as bio-acoustics, radio telescopy, and more philosophical fields such as sound studies.
The proliferation of technologies such as hydrophones (underwater microphones) and electromagnetic receivers has also increased the reach of our ears.
It’s this combination of intellectual, scientific and artistic curiosity, matched with technological developments and availability that have resulted in the capture of some incredible sound events that exist well beyond the visual plane.
Just a quarter of a century ago it seemed like science fiction that we might be able to capture the sound of two black holes colliding in space – but scientists did it in 2015.
These discoveries and others like them have fostered new research programs that aim to undertake the deepest and most concentrated galactic listening to date.
As above, so below
We have made many discoveries closer to home, too.
We have known for a long time that the underwater world is rich in sounds, but it has been underrepresented in dedicated research. This trend is changing, with numerous studies highlighting the rich acoustic diversity of rivers, oceans and reefs.
Plants may use the sound of water to guide the growth of their roots. Shutterstock
On land, the Australian researcher Monica Gagliano has explored plant audition. She demonstrated how plants can use sound to find water – so next time your plumbing is blocked by a plant’s roots, keep in mind they have been listening to the water flowing through the pipes.
Equally profound are the studies of bioelectrical sounds emitted by plants carried out by artists such as the Irish “sound ecologist” Michael Prime. For several decades, Prime has catalogued various bioelectric emissions from plants. At times they resemble unsettled but rhythmic avant-garde music.
Field recording
This curiosity for listening into places and those that inhabit them, has also spawned a zone of creative sound practice called field recording. A field recordist is a listener who is primarily focused on capturing the sonic aspects of environments that captivate them.
Once a marginal part of the sound arts canon, field recording has come to be regarded as a critical field of creative engagement. This year artists such as Philip Samartzis have been memorialised in a series of Australian Antarctic postage stamps.
Even if you don’t want to make your own field recordings, you might be interested in listening to the sound walks of Canadian artist Hildegard Westerkamp, or experiencing the situational listening of Japanese artist Akio Suzuki’s Oto Date project.
These works, like my own Site Listening at the Museum Of Brisbane, recognise that the more we listen into the world around us, the more we realise we are yet to hear its true resonances.
Lawrence English does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Reds are back. Scott Morrison’s Liberal-National government has recently launched an offensive of “red-baiting”, a practice long thought consigned to the history books, in preparation for an anticipated May 2022 election.
Last November, Defence Minister Peter Dutton hounded Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong, charging her with “not standing up for [Australian] values” in comments on the China-Taiwan dispute.
This week, News Corp has targeted Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese after the Chinese Global Times offered him some backhanded compliments. A video also emerged of Albanese speaking Mandarin at an economic summit, and he was found to have participated in a forum for Tribune, newspaper of the defunct Communist Party of Australia. (This interview, it should be noted, was 31 years ago.)
Such claims have long plagued the progressive side of politics. Since the first news of the Bolshevik victory in the 1917 Russian Revolution reached our shores, fears of Australia following Vladimir Lenin’s lead have been used and abused by conservative politicians for electoral gain.
But, how successful have these “moral panics” been? And do they still pass muster with today’s electorate?
A canker that must be cut out of our national life
The Communist Party of Australia was founded in October 1920 by a mix of Marxists, anarchists, feminists and trade unionists. Inspired by events in Russia, where the working class had seized power, they wanted world revolution. But, following Lenin’s theories, they also saw parliamentary representation as a way to politicise the working class.
Aside from Fred Paterson, an Oxford-educated communist lawyer who represented the seat of Bowen in the Queensland Parliament from 1944 to 1950, the party’s threat was not at the ballot box. Instead, the Australian Labor Party faced accusations of insufficient loyalty, or being knowing dupes of Moscow.
In 1925, when the Labor Party had only a few hundred members, the prime minister, Stanley Bruce, first used the communist bogey to electoral effect. A wave of industrial unrest was blamed on the work of “a few extremists” in the trade unions, and “political labor”, Bruce argued, was “afraid of the strength and power of those who control those organisations”. He declared:
“[T]he only manner in which citizens of Australia can declare their attitude is at the poll. […] the canker of these men advocating Communistic doctrines must be cut out of our national life”.
Stanley Bruce, pictured with his wife Ethel, was the first prime minister to use the communist bogey for electoral advantage. National Archives of Australia
Bruce, a staunch defender of White Australia, used the communists’ internationalism against Labor. Communist officials in the recently founded Australian Council of Trade Unions had affiliated it to the Soviet-aligned Pan Pacific Trade Union, which included organisations in China and Japan.
The pro-Bruce Daily Telegraph presented this as evidence the Labor Party, by extension, was soft on immigration restriction. The mud stuck and Labor lost six seats in the 1925 election.
The Labor Party did not take these attacks lying down. The New South Wales branch had banned “dual membership” in 1924. But such actions proved insufficient. Historians credit this “leftist bogey” with keeping Labor out of government – bar a brief spell during the Great Depression – until 1940.
Robert Menzies (left) was able to exploit fears of the Labor Party’s ties with communism in the 1951 election. National Museum of Australia
An alien and destructive pest
The 1940s were the heyday of Australian Communism. A wave of popular enthusiasm for the Soviet Union’s wartime accomplishments saw the party grow from 4,000 members in 1941 to over 20,000 three years later. Communists gained control of trade unions representing over half of Australian workers, and formed an alliance with the wartime Labor government of John Curtin.
A directive from Moscow that communists should launch an industrial offensive quickly made this wartime relationship an electoral liability for Labor. In 1946, at the helm of the recently formed Liberal Party, Robert Menzies blamed everything from fuel shortages to housewives’ difficulties finding essential items and trade relations with Malaya on
“the Government’s supine surrender to a minority of Communists and agitators”.
While Curtin’s successor, Ben Chifley, used wartime clout to win that contest, the 1949 election occurred only two months after Mao’s communists proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. This mixture of the “yellow peril” with communism, along with major disruption caused by a communist strike in the coal industry, delivered Menzies a handsome win. The Liberals received a 5% swing and a stunning 48 seats. He declared communism “an alien and destructive pest” and promised: “If elected, we shall outlaw it.”
Communist ranks were decimated in these years, but with the support of Labor leader H.V. Evatt, the Communist Party was able to narrowly defeat Menzies’ attempt to ban it. This result owed more to fears of what such a ban might mean for democracy than the electorate’s support for communist ideals.
Where do you draw the line?
This was seen as collusion by by some in Evatt’s own ranks. Labor had established trade union “industrial groups” to undermine communist control in the late 1940s and these hosted a right-wing, Catholic opposition. Headed by B.A. Santamaria, this opposition used revelations at the Royal Commmission on Espionage, sparked by the defection of Soviet diplomat Vladimir Petrov, as ammunition to split the Labor Party.
Originally called the Labor Party (Anti-Communist), the Democratic Labor Party’s raison d’etre was red-baiting, and it kept Labor out of office for a decade and a half.
Conservatives found one tool particularly useful in these years: stoking fears of national liberation movements in Asia, presented as an extension of the communist menace. A prominent Liberal party campaign poster from the 1966 election pictured arrows menacingly pointing through South-East Asia towards Australia, asking voters: “Where do you draw the line against Communist aggression?”
Electoral material prepared by the Liberal Party for the 1951 vote on banning communism. State Library of Western Australia.
In the late 1960s, however, the local communist party had broken with the Soviet Union, and the Cold War entered a period of detente. Labor Opposition Leader Gough Whitlam visited China in 1971, and Liberal Prime Minister William McMahon’s anti-communist fulminations fell flat when US President Richard Nixon announced similar plans only weeks later.
In 1983, prime ministerial aspirant Bob Hawke memorably saw off Malcolm Fraser’s suggestion voters should hide their money under the bed in the event of a Labor win by declaring:
You can’t keep your money under the bed – that’s where the commies are!
What had once been a tragedy for Labor seemed now only farce.
McCarthyism, 21st-century style
The hiatus of red-baiting as an effective tactic in the 1980s – arguably replaced by fears of refugees and terrorists – begs the question: why is it back today?
The rise of China from Cold War isolation to global superpower is one answer. Another can be found in the weaponising of far-right language about “cultural Marxism” from the United States.
But will it be effective? A 2007 campaign to tar Julia Gillard as a communist failed to keep Labor out of office, and it is unclear who the market for this rhetoric is today.
Australians under 40 have no living memory of the Cold War and are more open to socialist ideas after the Global Financial Crisis.
Furthermore: there is no dangerous “fifth column” on which to hang fears. The Communist Party of Australia wound up in 1991. And Chinese-Australians – whom government members have targeted in a McCarthyist fashion over imagined Communist Party links – tend to skew conservative.
Lastly, given there is no notable difference between Labor and Liberal on foreign policy towards China, the chances of mud sticking seem limited. We can only hope that 2022 – almost a century after its first usage – marks the end of red-baiting in Australian politics.
Jon Piccini does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
During the anti-lockdown protests at parliament last year, I was told about a 15-year-old who stopped to ask someone why they were crying. The person replied they were Jewish and had been upset by Nazi imagery used by some protesters, including swastikas chalked on the ground.
Water bottle in hand, they set about washing these off, until a well-dressed, middle-aged woman threatened to kill them and parliamentary security ushered them away.
The local Jewish community sounded a warning about the “grotesque and deeply hurtful” appropriation of the Holocaust by protesters that, as the situation in Wellington suggests, went unheeded.
The current occupation of parliament grounds has also seen disturbing references to Nazism and the Holocaust. These have been variously deployed to call for the execution of journalists and politicians, invoke the Nuremberg Code and compare vaccine mandates to the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Not only do such comparisons rest on false equivalences, absurd leaps of logic and historical anachronism, they are also tactics that tap into long histories of exploitation of the Holocaust for political ends.
A history of appropriation
Twenty years ago, American historian Peter Novick surveyed the causes (left and right) that since the 1970s had sought legitimacy and impact by comparing themselves to the Holocaust. These included:
anti-abortionists and pro-choice activists
campaigners against the death penalty
the National Rifle Association
Christian conservatives
LGBTQ activists during the AIDS epidemic
and even an Oklahoma congressman who took the TV mini-series Holocaust to be a warning of “the dangers of big government”.
Since then, the trend has grown and the list become even more diverse. Social media and the active dissemination of conspiracy theories have made it global. Holocaust references were used to condemn both Donald Trump’s immigration laws and Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Comparisons to Nazi genocidal policies have also cropped up wherever assisted dying legislation has been debated, with opponents claiming such policies would be akin to Nazi “euthanasia”.
As well as being inaccurate, that argument also perpetuates the criminal Nazi deception that hid racist mass murder under the euphemism of “euthanasia”.
Anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller at his first service after being released from imprisonment following the allied occupation of Germany in 1945. GettyImages
First they came for …
In this charged context, anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller’s oft-cited quote about apathy in the face of threat – “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…” – has emerged as a favourite meme.
Niemöller had initially welcomed Hitler’s rise to power but was later incarcerated in Dachau in 1937. Visiting the camp after the war, he was struck by a sign reading: “Here in the years 1933-1945, 238,756 people were cremated.”
While his wife was shocked by the number of victims, Niemöller was horrified by the dates: where had he been between 1933 and 1937? From that experience came the famous lines lamenting German conformism and indifference that had allowed Hitler’s rise.
Niemöller never wrote them down as a poem, but would open his speeches with them, amending the groups of victims depending on his audience (as indeed do the many memorials where his words are now engraved).
The deliberate universality and adaptability of Niemöller’s words have now been hijacked by any number of protest groups, only sometimes in intended jest: “First they came for the wealthy…”, “First they came for the YouTubers…”.
Now, inevitably, the US alt-right’s “First they came for the unvaccinated…” reverberates around anti-vax conference venues and the online forums of “freedom convoys”, alongside imagery featuring yellow stars and striped pyjamas.
These threaten to become the rallying cries of those with no experience of genuine dictatorships, lack of freedom or persecution, yet who share forums with neo-Nazis and anti-Semites – including in New Zealand.
A ‘Freedom and Rights Coalition’ protest at parliament on November 9 2021. GettyImages
False equivalence
Reading ourselves and our times into history is a reasonably common phenomenon and easily done. After all, what was the Nazi party in its early days other than a tiny minority of disgruntled and disaffected “ordinary” people, coalesced around economic grievances and a general sense of moral and cultural malaise?
And while some historical analogies might be wrong, they’re not always harmful. But to compare vaccine mandates to Nazism is both inaccurate and harmful. As is comparing the New Zealand government’s health response to South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Not only do such comparisons equate fundamentally different policies, they wilfully ignore the fact those historical persecutions discriminated against people for who they were, not for what they believed or how they chose to behave.
Media and other commentators sometimes play down exploitation of the Holocaust or Nazism, either to starve it of publicity or because it can seem less serious or threatening than other more overt forms of intimidation.
But we should also guard against complacency. Since the 2019 Christchurch terror attack, New Zealand has known firsthand that racist and intolerant discourse can lead to deadly violence.
Despite evidence of violent rhetoric and behaviour in Wellington, some have sought to reassure that most protesters were “ordinary Kiwis”.
Just what constitutes an “ordinary” Kiwi is open to speculation. But I’d prefer to think they’re like the compassionate teenager who took out a water bottle to help remove swastikas, not the protesters who tolerate or ignore them.
Giacomo Lichtner is a former Board member of The Holocaust Centre of New Zealand.
About two years into the pandemic, we’re still trying to find where and how it all started. Only last week, we heard bats in Laos may hold a clue about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID.
Our interest in viral origins, especially pandemic viruses, is understandable. But we need to remember one key lesson from history. It can take years to pin down their animal source.
Here’s why it’s important to keep trying and – in the case of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 – why it’s too soon to expect miracles.
Emerging infectious diseases like COVID are becoming an increasing problem. Most are zoonotic. In other words, they originate in non-human animals, mainly wildlife.
However, identifying these animal sources and how the viruses entered human populations is difficult. This is a major problem.
If we can identify sources and routes of spillover, then we should be better able to understand the processes driving emergence of new diseases. This means we could better predict when and where spillover is likely to occur in the future.
Understanding the underlying processes would also help us devise strategies to either reduce the risk of wildlife diseases transferring to humans, or to nip spillover in the bud before an epidemic or pandemic occurs.
In the case of SARS-CoV-2, some people say scientists’ inability so far to identify the source wildlife population and to definitely say how the virus entered human populations suggests the virus originated in a laboratory. Yet the lab origin theory has been thoroughly debunked.
However, this delay in finding definitive answers is not unusual. For many recently emerged human viruses, the wildlife source (the natural reservoir) took years to identify, or is still rather unclear.
For example, Ebola has caused devastating outbreaks of deadly haemorrhagic disease in Africa since the 1970s.
Most scientists think bats are the reservoir. Yet no one has yet successfully isolated Ebola virus from a wild bat, despite lots of circumstantial evidence.
How about bats and COVID?
The closest known animal virus to SARS-CoV-2 occurs in a species of horseshoe bat found throughout China and Southeast Asia. That virus is called RaTG13.
Although RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 are 96.1% similar in their genetic code overall, this does not necessarily mean the human SARS-CoV-2 came directly from those bats.
The DNA of chimpanzees and humans is almost identical. But that doesn’t mean we are directly related. Shutterstock
Genetic similarity between two species tells us they are connected in a “family tree” to a common ancestor. The extent of that similarity gives some information about how long it was since the two species arose from that ancestor.
For SARS-CoV-2 and the bat coronavirus RaTG13, this separation likely occurred some decades ago.
Viral family trees have ‘tangles’
To make things more complex, some viruses can also acquire genetic changes via recombination. This occurs when two different virus strains or species infect the same cell. They can swap bits of genetic code with each other, producing a “mosaic” virus. This means the “family tree” becomes more like a tangle of brushwood.
So, rather than looking for a single coronavirus as the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, we need to look at a whole range of related viruses that might co-occur in nature.
More evidence for this came just last week, in a paper published in the prestigious journal Nature.
It found previously unknown bat viruses in Laos that are not quite as closely related to SARS-CoV-2 as RaTG13 overall. But some of these bat viruses from Laos are more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 at the particular region that allows the virus to bind to human cells.
This means SARS-CoV-2 likely arose from mixing of different bat coronaviruses in natural bat populations. This is likely how SARS-CoV-2 acquired the genetic sequence that allows it to bind to human cells and infect humans.
Pangolins are scaly mammals considered a delicacy in parts of Asia and are severely endangered by the wildlife trade. There has been a lot of discussion about the possibility pangolins may have been a bridge species that enabled the transfer of this coronavirus from bats to humans.
These ideas arose because we know some highly pathogenic (disease causing) emerging viruses in humans do indeed have a bridge host. Bats infect them and they, in turn, pass the virus to humans.
For example, we work on Hendra virus in Australia, where horses act as a bridge host. Flying foxes (a type of bat) infect horses, which in turn, infect humans.
Similarly, MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) is caused by a coronavirus of bats which has passed to camels and then on to humans.
With the new coronaviruses detected in bats in Laos, our understanding of the role of pangolins has changed. It appears both pangolins and humans are infected by coronaviruses derived from bats, but the human virus did not come via pangolins.
How did a coronavirus get from bats in caves to humans in Wuhan?
This critical question remains a mystery. People go into the caves where these horseshoe bats live, often to collect guano (bat faeces) for fertiliser. But the nearest bat caves are some distance from Wuhan.
No bats were sold in the Wuhan wet market that many of the earliest cases were linked to.
However, Wuhan is a major city and transport hub. So an infected person who had been in those caves may well have passed through Wuhan, and visited the wet markets.
SARS-CoV-2 is now known to infect a wide range of other mammals. So it is also possible a bat or a human may have infected another mammal, which then passed through the Wuhan wet market.
Lessons learnt from other viruses meant that early on in the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, we had a solid basis for hypothesising the virus had links to bats and quite possibly arose through a bridging host in the wildlife market.
We still have unanswered questions about the path the virus took from bats to humans. But the more we continue to look in bat populations, the more we find these pieces of SARS-CoV-2 genetic code already exist in nature.
As with other emerging viruses, if we keep looking, we may eventually find all the missing pieces we need to close the case on where SARS-CoV-2 came from. If we’re smart, we’ll use this information to take action to prevent the next pandemic.
Hamish McCallum receives funding from ARC, and the US agencies NSF, NIH and DARPA.
Alison Peel receives funding from ARC, and the US agencies NSF and DARPA.
I first heard the standard joke about fusion as an undergraduate physics student in the 1960s: Fusion power is fifty years away – and probably always will be.
More than fifty years later, we still don’t have fusion. That’s because of the huge experimental challenges in recreating a miniature sun on earth.
Still, real progress is being made. This month, UK fusion researchers managed to double previous records of producing energy. Last year, American scientists came close to ignition, the tantalising moment where fusion puts more energy out than it needs to start the reaction. And small, fast-moving fusion startups are making progress using different techniques.
A limitless, clean source of baseload power might be within reach – without the nuclear waste of traditional fission nuclear plants. That’s good, right?
Not quite. While we’re closer than ever to making commercial fusion viable, this new power source simply won’t get here in time to do the heavy lifting of decarbonisation.
We are racing the clock to limit damage from climate change. Luckily, we already have the technologies we need to decarbonise.
Solar, wind and storage – the new electricity model. Shutterstock
How much progress is being made on fusion?
Five seconds. That’s how long the UK’s Joint European Torus was able to sustain a fusion reaction, producing enough energy to run a typical Australian household for about three days. That’s a small fraction of the energy needed to make the fusion reaction happen, which used two 500 megawatt flywheels. That amount of power would meet the peak needs of 100,000 average Australian households. So we are still a long way from getting a net energy benefit from fusion.
On a technical front, achievements like this are incredible. Nuclear fusion is the process that powers stars like the sun, and we are working to harness this for our own use.
At very high temperatures, light atoms such as hydrogen can combine to produce another element such as helium, releasing enormous quantities of energy in the process.
In the sun, these fusion reactions take place at temperatures about 10 million degrees. We can’t do it at that temperature, because we don’t have access to the enormous gravitational pressure at the centre of the sun.
To achieve fusion on earth, we need to go hotter. Much hotter. Experiments like the one in the UK are able to superheat a body of gas called a plasma to inconceivable temperatures, reaching as high as 150 million℃. The plasma has to be confined by incredibly strong magnetic fields and heated by powerful lasers.
This temperature is far hotter than anywhere else in our solar system – even the centre of the sun.
While the recent progress represents a major step forward, sober reflection suggests the dream of limitless clean energy from hydrogen is still a long way off.
On the megaproject front, the next step is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being built in southern France. Far too big for any one country, this is a joint effort by countries including USA, Russia, China, the UK and EU member countries.
The project is enormous, with a vessel ten times the size of the UK reactor and around 5,000 technical experts, scientists and engineers working on it. Famously, the project’s largest magnet is strong enough to lift an aircraft carrier.
Even this enormous project is only expected to produce slightly more power than it uses – around 500 megawatts. The first experiments are expected by 2025.
To me, this illustrates how far away commercial fusion really is.
Construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor megaproject seen from a drone as of October 2021. ITER Organization, CC BY
Fusion won’t get here in time
It will take decades yet to go from these promising experiments to a proven technology powering modern society. That means it simply will not get here in time to make a real contribution to slowing and reversing climate change.
To have a decent chance of keeping climate change below 2℃, we have to get to net zero emissions worldwide in under 30 years.
We can’t wait. We have to decarbonise energy supply and energy use as quickly as possible.
Many countries are already moving at speed. The UK is planning to get to zero-emissions electricity within 12 years. States like South Australia and New South Wales should get there around the same time. The International Energy Agency predicts renewables will become the largest source of electricity generation worldwide by 2025.
The shift away from baseload
Even if fusion arrives, it would face major challenges due to the cost of the plants and the changing nature of the grid.
In the second half of the twentieth century, power stations became larger to achieve economies of scale. That worked, until recently. Only ten years ago, large coal-fired or nuclear power stations produced cheaper electricity than solar farms or wind turbines.
This picture has changed dramatically. In 2020, global average prices of power from new large wind turbines was 4.1 cents per kilowatt-hour, while solar farms were even cheaper at 3.7 c/kWh. The average for new coal? 11.2 c/kWh.
Ever more favourable economics drove a massive investment in renewables in 2020: 127 gigawatts of new solar, 111 of new wind and 20 of hydro-power. By contrast, only 3GW of net nuclear power came online, while coal-fired power actually dropped.
As a result, we’re seeing a global shift away from old models of baseload power, where power is generated in large power stations and transported to us by the grid.
These shifts are driven by cost. The price of electricity from renewables is now falling below the running costs of old coal-fired or nuclear power stations. Coal power requires digging the stuff up, transporting it, and burning it. Renewables get their power source delivered free of charge.
The idea of fusion power is alluring. There’s a real appeal in the idea we could replace large coal and gas stations with one large clean fusion power plant. That, after all, is the selling point of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor: to produce baseload power.
Fusion power is premised on the old baseload grid model, as seen in this EUROfusion diagram of a planned future fusion power plant. EUROfusion, CC BY
But will we need it? The pattern of power supply is changing. The massive take-up of solar power by households means we have now permanently shifted from the old model of large power stations to one where supply is distributed around the network.
It will be a technological marvel if we are finally able to build fusion plants in the second half of this century. It’s just that they won’t be in time.
Luckily for us, we don’t need fusion. We already have what we need.
Ian Lowe received funding in the 1980s from the National Energy Research, Development and Demonstration Council for a study of Australia’s future energy needs. He is a former President of the Australian Conservation Foundation.
Universities face many threats to their future. The traditional universities have become over-managed business enterprises, which may not reflect societal, national or global educational needs. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many of these issues into focus.
In a new book, I propose a model that responds to the broad range of challenges universities face. I call this model the distributed university – that is, a university that distributes education online to where it is needed.
In more than 50 years as an academic in Australia and the UK, I have seen the potential for a pivot to online learning that, through distributed learning, could solve many of the problems the higher education sector faces.
I have been involved in online master’s-level programs to build public health capacity in both high-income and low-to-middle-income countries. Face-to-face teaching designed for the International Clinical Epidemiology Network was augmented by distance learning – first paper-based, followed by online. I established the University of Manchester’s first fully online master’s program.
The pressures on universities are both external and internal.
Externally, universities need to be responsive to the ways people access information today (and will tomorrow). They also need to ensure environmental sustainability. And amid global inequalities in access to higher education, our universities are overly dependent on income from overseas students.
Internal developments pose multiple threats too. Universities have downgraded teaching, with academics not rewarded for educational excellence as opposed to research. They have adopted a competitive business model, rather than a collaborative model of education, and intrusive managerial oversight instead of placing trust in academics. And they work in centralised ivory towers rather than engaging with local communities and industries.
The distributed university I describe in my book (free to read and download) sets up higher education to adapt to the changes in how we work and learn today.
Online learning, which must be fit for purpose, is central to this as it allows for structural change. Smaller local hubs can largely replace central large campuses, reducing the large carbon footprint created by students and staff travelling to campus. These hubs may be physical or virtual.
The distributed university offers education mainly online rather than in lecture halls. Local or regional hubs engage with local communities, industries and other education providers. They encourage practice-based active learning, which can be a hybrid of online and face-to-face.
Each of the hubs can be replicated over geography (including internationally) and over time. Learning needs will change over time as careers and interests develop. Central administration is much smaller, but ensures the courses being offered meet societal needs.
Intrusive managerialism is replaced by trust in academics – made easier by this structure. It is not generally recognised that online education is much more transparent than face-to-face. All materials, student contact and student-tutor interactions are captured, allowing for unobtrusive quality assurance.
Social interaction between students and between academics is offered partly in the hubs but mainly online. This reflects the way we communicate and learn in today’s world.
IT support for education and research is vital. It will allow us to respond to future developments in communications and to the changes and challenges of the fourth industrial revolution.
The distributed university will be light on the environment. Although online education is IT-heavy and has its own carbon footprint, it’s much smaller – even more so when powered by renewables – than the face-to-face version with buildings and travel. It will thus show leadership in achieving environmental sustainability.
This model’s local and regional hubs will also encourage regional development.
Our recent research paper highlights the environmental benefits of online education. A group of 128 master’s degree students (mainly from Africa) studied online rather than travel to live and study in the UK. They saved nearly a million kilograms of carbon emissions.
Distributed learning is a proven concept that has helped build public health capacity in Africa. Shutterstock
Three new programs
COVID has exposed the over-reliance on overseas student fees. This revenue has largely been diverted to support research. The government’s recent international education strategy makes no mention of the role Australia can play in reducing global inequalities in access to education.
In addition to the benefits described above, a pivot to online education opens up other opportunities. I describe three potential programs: a global online program, a tertiary version of the International Baccalaureate and a “PlanE for Education”.
A global online program can create low-cost learning for overseas students. This will help meet current educational needs while providing a bridge to future mutually beneficial partnerships with emerging economies. Research must be properly funded, and not rely on the diversion of income from overseas students paying high fees.
To help reduce the destructive emphasis on competition between universities, a higher education version of the International Baccalaureate used in schools might be created. This would involve global collaboration between universities, which would reduce competition and standardise quality.
Continuing the collaboration theme is a proposal to create “PlanE for Education”. This would be similar to initiatives such as PlanS that require publicly funded research to be published in open access journals or platforms. At least some of the educational resources generated in universities using public money would be made freely available under PlanE.
We live in a digital and distributed world. Universities should too. The notion of a distributed university may help the higher education sector survive, prosper and be sustainable.
Richard F. Heller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A curious feature of the Australian tax system is “bracket creep”. Taxpayers whose income climbs by no more than prices (inflation) get no increase in their living standards. Instead, they see more and more of their income pushed into their highest tax brackets, or to even higher tax brackets.
It means the government’s income from income tax keeps climbing, even if there are no more people paying it and the value of what they earn hasn’t climbed.
Here’s how it works. The first A$18,200 are tax-free, the rest up to $45,000 are taxed at 19 cents in the dollar, the rest up to $120,000 at 32.5 cents in the dollar, the rest up to $120,000 at 37 cents in the dollar, and anything in excess of $180,000 is taxed at 45 cents in the dollar.
Australia’s income tax scale
What each extra dollar of income is taxed at, excluding Medicare levy and offsets
It means that as someone’s income climbs from, say, $80,000 to $90,000, a greater proportion of it is taxed at 32.5% and a lower proportion of it is either taxed less or untaxed.
This happens even if rising prices mean what that person can buy hasn’t changed – or at the moment, with prices climbing faster than wages, means their buying power has shrunk.
Bracket creep is increased tax by stealth
It’s why every few years the government trumpets a tax cut, which in reality is often no more than giving back some of the proceeds of bracket creep.
It could all be ended if the thresholds at which each tax rate cut in were indexed to inflation, climbing each year in line with price increases.
Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser briefly introduced tax indexation in 1976 but abandoned it partially in 1979 and fully in 1982, finding himself not thanked for it.
This week in the Australian Financial Review, economics professor Steven Hamilton made a persuasive case for indexation based on “starving the beast.”
As he put it, indexing brackets to inflation at this year’s budget
may be the Liberals’ last chance this decade to put some brakes on the relentless creep of the state and the sapping of hard work and entrepreneurship, having spent a decade enabling it
This argument has a degree of truth to it, for sure. An ever-expanding government is bound to become lazier and spend money less efficiently than a government that is income constrained.
And it certainly doesn’t suggest that there is no role for government, as is suggested by US anti-tax campaigners such Grover Norquist:
I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub
But there is also a progressive case for indexation.
The progressive case for indexation
If governments had go to voters and ask for a tax increase to fund additional spending (for any given budget surplus or deficit) then the link between tax and spending decisions would become clear.
If voters wanted more services, such as better hospitals or a better national disability insurance scheme, they would have to vote for higher taxes.
Bracket creep means the link is effectively hidden from them, as it shrouds the funding of spending.
It sounds like a subtle shift, but it would be a significant one. Instead of the debate being about “we can get what we want without increasing taxes”, it would become “tax is worthwhile because unless we increase it we won’t get what we want”.
Progressives ought to support the shift. The bottom line is that whatever your politics, there’s a strong case for indexing tax thresholds to inflation.
It would make our tax and our political system more honest, ensuring politicians actually acted in our interests.
Richard Holden is President of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Meg Elkins, Senior Lecturer with School of Economics, Finance and Marketing and Behavioural Business Lab Member, RMIT University
Netflix
Two of Netflix’s top trending series, Inventing Anna and The Tinder Swindler retell the true stories of convicted con artists, who fleeced their victims through the well-established ruse of presenting as members of high society.
Inventing Anna is a fictionalised version of the case of Anna Sorokin/Delvey, who fooled the New York social set into believing she was a German heiress. The original story was reported on for a viral article in The Cut back in 2018. Tinder Swindler recounts the true story of Simon Leviev (Shimon Hayut), who conned $10 million from women on Tinder pretending to be the son of an Israeli diamond trader.
Our current viewing fascination with con artists includes documentaries such as the enthralling case of Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos, a multi-billion dollar tech company and a massive fraud.
This prevalence of the scam narratives begs the question: why do fraudsters fascinate us? The answers lies in the way we see ourselves and how we view the gullibility of others who have fallen prey to these con artists.
Julia Garner as Anna Delvey in Netflix’s Inventing Anna. Netflix
Watching a scam artist at work
We tend to think of ourselves as good decision makers. Human brains have evolved a “cheating detecting module”, allowing us to establish cooperation with strangers. Bottom line – we assume we would see the red flags.
Watching a scam artist at work fills us with a mix of surprise at their audacity –and glee and relief that it didn’t happen to us.
But it is the methods scam artists use to con people that are the same reason we are so fascinated by them. The truth is con artists make systematic use of every rule in a veritable playbook of exploiting our human psychological foibles.
Here is how they use the rules to bypass our cheat detectors?.
Decision making is cheap and cheerful
According to psychologists, we make around 35,000 decisions a day, and each comes with an unmanageable complexity in countless options and their possible consequences.
Given our limited brainpower we automatically resort to mental shortcuts known as heuristics to make good (rather than perfect) decisions. Think of these as the software of our minds, standard operating procedures we use for all of our mundane and repetitive decisions. Examples of a heuristics we use in everyday life would be the decision of how to get to work, or what to have for breakfast, or how we evaluate people when we first meet them.
Despite their advantages in everyday decision making, heuristics sometimes get it horribly wrong.
Con artists exploit these systematically by understanding how people make good and not great decisions. Psychologist Robert Cialdini, author of Influence, the definitive manual of persuasion tricks explains the most common ones tricksters exploit.
One is the social proof heuristic – the con artist’s success and connections are meant to demonstrate that others believe them and their lies too. Here the shortcut to decision making is that we tend to rely on the decisions others make.
The Inventor is the story of Theranos, a multi-billion dollar tech company, its founder Elizabeth Holmes, the youngest self-made female billionaire, and the massive fraud that collapsed the company. IMDB
People discount the improbable
One reason we fail to detect con artists is that they are, thankfully, relatively rare, which is what makes characters like Anna Delvey and Elizabeth Holmes so fascinating. Psychologists have found that people underrate the probability of rare events. Our brains evolved economically, equipped to deal with the most important and common threats – this leaves us vulnerable to rare decision problems.
A matrix experiment on honesty, by behavioural economist Dan Ariely, revealed how much people cheat if they think no one is watching. Ariely’s experiment had participants self report correct answers, and then shred the answers. What he didn’t tell participants, is he had rigged the shredder to preserve their responses. Out of 40,000 participants, 70% lied a little – 20 people out of the 40,000 lied to the maximum amount.
What this tells us is lying a little is common, but the big cheats are rare.
People think good things come in three (or four or five)
When we meet people who present as super wealthy or super attractive, we tend to use shortcuts to attribute a whole series of positive characteristics to them.
Con artists exploit the fact seeing only one observable “good” quality in a person is enough for a favourable general impression.
We call this the halo effect, it is a confirmation bias first described by American psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920. The halo effect explains how when we ascribe one positive attribute to someone, we inadvertently add other positive traits to our overall impression of them. So if someone is rich then we tend to believe they might also be honest, hardworking and fair.
Fame means power
Con artists often carefully curate an illusion of being famous and well connected – which Anna Delvey did with flair. We are also programmed to respond to the social status of others.
It tickles our ego if a person of perceived status engages with us – the desire for a positive self image stops us from questioning their real status of intent.
The Tinder Swindler documentary tells the story of the Israeli conman Simon Leviev (born Shimon Hayut) who used the dating application Tinder to connect with individuals who he then emotionally manipulated into financially supporting his lavish lifestyle. Netflix
It can’t happen to me
Unfortunately there is a final bias that makes us lower our guard: overconfidence. We like to think that we are not so gullible. The average person thinks they are above average when it comes to resisting persuasion and decision making.
However, the evidence suggests most people are at risk of falling for others – irrespective of intelligence and education. Psychiatrist Stephen Greenspan, author of the book Annals of Gullibility: Why We Are Duped and How to Avoid It, also fell for Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
The one saving grace is that our interest in con artists shows our ability to learn from others’ experiences. Here the internet and Netflix are playing their part to warn us. Con artists, we are on to you.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As Russia’s attack on Ukraine unfolds dramatically, Australia is in the choir stalls, not centre stage, when it comes to the West’s response. But Scott Morrison is determined its voice be loud.
His denunciation of the Russian “thugs” and “bullies” has been cast in the most forceful language. After announcing sanctions on Wednesday, he assured Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal that Australia, working with its partners, was prepared to do more.
Wednesday’s Australian sanctions were in line with those of the United States and United Kingdom. Just a day later, with Russia’s invasion, they were quickly expanded to include more individuals and entities. A further concerted step-up will come.
In term of effect, anything Australia does means a lot less to the Russians than similar sanctions imposed by the bigger players (not that those are deterring President Putin). As Morrison noted, our trade with Russia is small.
Morrison, incidentally, was careful about local blowback. For Australian businesses, the government said there would be more than a month’s breathing space before the measures affecting them come in.
What Morrison described as this “brutal invasion” will have seismic international ramifications, including in economic terms, although notably no countries are willing to put troops on the ground to defend Ukraine.
Given the timing, these events could be important in Australia’s domestic politics.
The Ukraine crisis feeds directly into Morrison’s push to make national security a central feature of the campaign for the May election.
One is tempted to revert to 2001, when the election victory of John Howard, who’d been seriously struggling politically, came off the back of the terrorist attacks in the US and the Tampa’s load of asylum seekers.
That comparison is limited, however. 9/11 had a more immediate impact on Australians, not least because Australian forces were part of the ensuing war in Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, the Ukraine crisis will continue to escalate, and what happens there will feature heavily in the news in the weeks ahead. Morrison will keep it prominent in the national conversation.
A crisis gives the PM a potent new focus. As Paul Kelly observes in his just-published book Morrison’s Mission: How a beginner reshaped Australian foreign policy, “Morrison’s character is that of a compulsive political activist. He is always on the move, talking, travelling, doing.”
Labor is leading comfortably in the polls, but for Anthony Albanese the Ukraine crisis presents, at the very least, a political challenge.
This is not a matter of a wedge – no one can suggest any lack of bipartisanship over Ukraine. Labor was immediately and solidly behind the initial sanctions, and Albanese will ensure it will continue in step with the government. But such a major conflict, even one far removed and in which we are not directly involved, changes the domestic atmosphere and plays to the status quo.
It also limits the attention on the issues on which Labor wants to focus, such as the increasing cost of living and stagnant wages (although rising oil prices will impose further pressure on high petrol prices).
Assuming there is not a new COVID variant, the foreign crisis may help to put a full stop under “pandemic politics”, making it harder for Labor to get public attention back on the government’s failures on issues such as aged care.
Simon Welsh of the RedBridge Group, a Labor-aligned consultancy firm, says its focus group research has been finding people have a general sense of tension increasing in the world. So far, however, that still sits behind their concern with the domestic bread and butter issues.
But, as of now, we are in a dynamic, rapidly changing situation.
Morrison is trying to bring China – on which he is attempting to wedge Labor – into the Ukraine story.
“China, of course, is watching this very carefully,” Morrison said on Thursday. “And that’s why I’ve been at pains to say that China needs to take as strong a position as other countries in the world and in denouncing what Russia is doing.”
But research, both qualitative and quantitative, is suggesting Morrison may be at risk of overplaying his hand with the China card.
Welsh says the focus group work indicates it is a two-edged sword. “China is a nuanced discussion,” he says. It’s not hard to stoke anti-China feeling. “But people also say you need a good relationship – for jobs, business.”
A similar picture comes through in the Essential poll published this week. Some 61% agreed with the proposition that “Australia’s relationship with China is a complex relationship to be managed”. This compared to 26% who thought “Australia’s relationship with China is a threat to be confronted”.
When people were asked which party they would “most trust to build a relationship with China in Australia’s best interests”, 37% said Labor, 28% said the Coalition and 34% were unsure.
Albanese knows he must make himself better known to voters and has counted on doing this in the approach to the election. Now he finds himself pursuing his charm offensive in the fog of a conflict that is distant but dominant.
Earlier this month we had the Meet the Morrisons program courtesy of Nine’s 60 Minutes. This week we have “At home with Anthony Albanese and partner Jodie” in the Australian Women’s Weekly.
The soft article was the formal introduction to the public of Jodie Haydon. It canvassed Albanese’s (oft-repeated) childhood story as well as Jodie’s, their meeting (a coming together of two Rabbitoh supporters), and her reaction when early last year he was badly hurt in a car accident. (“As I jumped in the ambulance and saw Anthony, I knew then the depth of my feelings towards him.”)
Jenny Morrison will be on the campaign trail; it remains to be seen what Jodie’s role might be.
As he attends to marketing his human side, Albanese is working hard on selling himself to business, including a speech to business figures this week, and an Australian Financial Review Magazine profile in which he declares: “I’m comfortable in the boardrooms as well as the pub.”
To those who argued Labor risked leaving its run too late, Albanese has retorted it’s the “fourth quarter” that counts. But, as we’re now seeing, the fourth quarter can be much complicated by the unexpected.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As Ukrainian cities come under air attack from Russian forces, the country has also suffered the latest blows in an ongoing campaign of cyber attacks. Several of Ukraine’s bank and government department websites crashed on Wednesday, the BBC reports.
The incident follows a similar attack just over a week ago, in which some 70 Ukrainian government websites crashed. Ukraine and the United States squarely blamed Russia.
With a full-scale invasion now evident, Ukraine can expect to contend soon with more cyber attacks. These have the potential to cripple infrastructure, affecting water, electricity and telecommunication services – further debilitating Ukraine as it attempts to contend with Russian military aggression.
A critical part of Russia’s operations
Cyber attacks fall under the traditional attack categories of sabotage, espionage and subversion.
They can be carried out more rapidly than standard weapon attacks, and largely remove barriers of time and distance. Launching them is relatively cheap and simple, but defending against them is increasingly costly and difficult.
After Russia’s withdrawal from Georgia in 2008, President Vladimir Putin led an effort to modernise the Russian military and incorporate cyber strategies. State-sanctioned cyber attacks have since been at the forefront of Russia’s warfare strategy.
The Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) typically orchestrates these attacks. They often involve using customised malware (malicious software) to target the hardware and software underpinning a target nation’s systems and infrastructure.
Among the latest attacks on Ukraine was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
According to Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, several Ukrainian government and banking websites went offline as a result. DDoS attacks use bots to flood an online service, overwhelming it until it crashes, preventing access for legitimate users.
A destructive “data-wiping” software has also been found circulating on hundreds of computers in Ukraine, according to reports, with suspicion falling on Russia.
On February 15, Ukraine’s cyber police said citizens were receiving fake text messages claiming ATMs had gone offline (although this wasn’t confirmed). Many citizens scrambled to withdraw money, which caused panic and uncertainty.
Ongoing onslaught
In December 2015, the GRU targeted Ukraine’s industrial control systems networks with destructive malware. This caused power outages in the western Ivano-Frankivsk region. About 700,000 homes were left without power for about six hours.
This happened again in December 2016. Russia developed a custom malware called CrashOverride to target Ukraine’s power grid. An estimated one-fifth of Kiev’s total power capacity was cut for about an hour.
More recently, US officials charged six Russian GRU officers in 2020 for deploying the NotPetya ransomware. This ransomware affected computer networks worldwide, targeting hospitals and medical facilities in the United States, and costing more than US$1 billion in losses.
NotPetya was also used against Ukrainian government ministries, banks and energy companies, among other victims. The US Department of Justice called it “some of the world’s most destructive malware to date”.
Another Russia-sponsored attack that began as early as January 2021 targeted Microsoft Exchange servers. The attack provided hackers access to email accounts and associated networks all over the world, including in Ukraine, the US and Australia.
Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia was accompanied by a well-coordinated cyber attack run by state-sponsored hackers. These were primarily DDoS attacks that forced a number of Georgian government and commercial websites offline. Getty Images
International cyber aid
Ukraine faces serious risks right now. A major cyber attack could disrupt essential services and further undermine national security and sovereignty.
The support of cyber infrastructure has been recognised as an important aspect of international aid. Six European Union countries (Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Estonia, Romania and Croatia) are sending cyber security experts to help Ukraine deal with these threats.
Australia has also committed to providing cyber security assistance to the Ukrainian government, through a bilateral Cyber Policy Dialogue. This will allow for exchanges of cyber threat perceptions, policies and strategies. Australia has also said it will provide cyber security training for Ukrainian officials.
The international implications of the Russia-Ukraine situation have been noted. Last week New Zealand’s National Cyber Security Centre released a General Security Advisory encouraging organisations to prepare for cyber attacks as a flow-on effect of the crisis.
The advisory provides a list of resources for protection and strongly recommends that organisations assess their security preparedness against potential threats.
The Australian Cyber Security Centre has since issued similar warnings.
Evading responsibility
Historically, Russia has managed to evade much of the responsibility for cyber attacks. In conventional warfare, attribution is usually straightforward. But in cyberspace it is very complex, and can be time-consuming and costly.
It’s easy for a country to deny its involvement in a cyber attack (both Russia and China routinely do so). The Russian embassy in Canberra has also denied involvement in the latest attacks against Ukraine.
One reason plausible deniability can usually be maintained is because cyber attacks can be launched from an unwitting host. For example, a victim’s compromised device (called a “zombie” device) can be used to continue a chain of attacks.
So while the operation may be run by the perpetrator’s command and control servers, tracing it back to them becomes difficult.
Mamoun Alazab does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The mainstream political narrative that emerged in late March 2020 was a ‘narrative of fear’ which set up the Covid19 coronavirus as a ‘tricky’ enemy that was out to get us by finding ways through our defences; and that we had to build collective barrier defences; defences such as lockdowns, border closures, and, eventually, facemask mandates. While the lockdowns, sensibly, were time-limited (albeit extendable), the border closures and over-reaching mask mandates were time unlimited.
The one initial point of optimism from the Prime Minister was, reminiscent of when the United Kingdom entered World War One, “it would be over soon” (eg by Christmas). Total victory would be quickish, we believed, because we – as a species – can be both clever and resolute. In New Zealand in 2020 we subscribed to the mantra that ‘the team of five million’ would defeat Covid through a mix of resolution and kindness. As in the World Wars, the resolution has been largely maintained; though the façade of kindness slipped long ago, with government immigration and travel policy leading the way.
Novel versus Established Respiratory Viruses
The distinction here is critical; the appropriate distinction is the difference between the 1918 influenza pandemic – a novel virus – versus the 2019 influenza outbreak in New Zealand. And we note the distinction between the 1890-93 novel coronavirus pandemic (long assumed to have been a novel influenza strain) and its RNA descendent, the OC43 ‘common cold’ coronavirus. Covid19 was a crisis in 2020 because it was caused by a novelvirus. Omicron appears to be more like the OC43 ‘cold’, which does trigger fatal illness. (See my Respiratory Viruses: Seasonal Mortality Compared, and its follow-up with more countries, for a view of the mortality associated with winter illnesses, both epidemic – eg influenza – and endemic.)
There are two reasons why a novel virus can be a very serious public health issue. The first is that it represents an unevolved virus that has not a chance to adapt to its environment; as such, it may be ‘unintentionally’ fatal to its host population. The second reason is that the host population is unadapted to the new virus. Host adaptation comes from exposure, and may be accelerated through vaccines, when available. Host vulnerability is enhanced by adverse socio-economic factors which may be present. Inequality and performance pressure lead to socially unacceptable levels of homelessness, malnutrition, substance abuse, and ennui.
This is the usual process of a new epidemic: one or more waves of severe illness, followed by a stabilisation as both virus and population adapt to each other. In some cases, the process can be averted by very rapid political action to eliminate a new virus, as happened with SARS in 2003. It turns out that the SARS elimination response was not the best response to the new 2019 virus that was both more transmissible and less severe than SARS; the ‘cat was already out of the bag’, so to speak.
In addition to adaptation or quick elimination, some countries may be able to choose to free-ride on the rest of the world, shutting themselves off while the rest of the world adapts to the virus (including its development of vaccines), and while the virus adapts to the rest of the world by becoming less severe. This would allow a country to open-up to a now-mild virus, and with a vaccine-adapted population. This has been New Zealand’s unwitting strategy, in practice if not in intent, and it may have been successful (possibly more successful than in Hong Kong), despite overt (and misguided) policy attempts to fend off the adapted (evolved, mild) version of the virus. This free-rider strategy additionally piggybacks off the necessarily foreign acquisition of knowledge about the novel virus, and the abovementioned adaptations by both virus and host species.
Delta vs. Omicron
Omicron is the adapted and evolved version of the virus. And it’s a very interesting scientific story which has not been well told. Delta is the last of the under-evolved (and potentially lethal) under-adapted versions of the SARS-COV2 coronavirus that causes the Covid19 disease. It was always likely to be displaced, eventually, by a better-adapted variant. It is the Neanderthal of the covid world.
The ‘out-of-Africa’ story of omicron-covid may be remarkably like the ‘out-of-Africa’ story of homo sapiens (aka us, modern humans). We may treat the ‘under-evolved’ version of homo – homo neanderthalensis – which predominated in Europe through many ice ages for about 300,000 years as delta-homo. Modern humans may be the homo equivalent of omicron-delta. Delta-covid is analogous to Neanderthal humans, who were displaced (after a few thousand years of coexistence) – in their European and Asian homelands – by modern humans. Modern humans migrated out of Africa, as did omicron-covid.
Of most significance is that omicron-covid evolved directly from the original covid variant (equivalent to homo erectus), and not from homo neanderthalensis or its immediate predecessor variants. That’s why there were so many ‘new mutations’ when scientists compared Omicron with Delta.
This analogy between covid and homo is also useful in allowing us to be prepared for a likely but otherwise unexpectable evolutionary development. Delta-covid continues to linger – especially, but not only, in New Zealand – and intermingles with omicron-covid. Just as we now know that modern humans are in reality hybrids, fused with Neanderthal (and Denisovan) DNA, we should expect the most evolved version of covid to be a fusion – mostly Omicron RNA but with a smattering of Delta RNA. Thus, as with influenza, covid may prove to be a more formidable seasonal foe than are the other adapted coronaviruses which almost all of us (at least in temperate latitudes) have ‘enjoyed’ the company of in the past.
(The 1918 influenza pandemic’s lethal second wave was most likely due to a hybrid novel H1N1 virus, forged on the western front battlefields of World War One. The 2009 ‘swine-flu’ pandemic was due to an H1N1 variant.)
Dr Angelique Coetzee and the Political Pushback re Omicron
My concern to write this present essay was motivated more than anything by this news.com.au article that I read, courtesy of the New Zealand Herald, on 10 Feb 2022.
Before commenting on that, we may note: “Dr Angelique Coetzee became internationally known in December 2021 as the medical doctor who treated one of the first cases of the then unknown Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. She was also one of the first to controversially indicate, and was later proven to be correct, that the virus caused less severe disease than other variants like Beta and Delta.” (Quoted from Daily Maverick, 21 February 2022.)
The assertive South African doctor says: ‘”I was told not to publicly state that it was a mild illness,” she said. “I have been asked to refrain from making such statements and to say that it is a serious illness. I declined.” Asked [by Germany’s Die Welt newspaper] what she meant, Coetzee said “based on the clinical picture there are no indications that we are dealing with a very serious disease”. “The definition of mild Covid-19 disease is clear, and it is a WHO definition”.’ Coetzee was being pressured to make an unscientific political assessment that was contrary to her empirical findings.
And: “According to Coetzee, chairwoman of the South African Medical Association, she came under pressure from scientists in the UK and the Netherlands who said, ‘How can you explain that it’s a mild disease? It’s a serious illness. Look at the mutations’.”
There seems to be a popular view, a sort of Frankenstein view, shared by some career scientists, that mutations are a measure of an organism’s nastiness. While this view may reflect the “arms’ race” hypothesis, mutations in an adapted species are actually indicative of its adaptation. Thus, omicron’s mutations are a key part of omicron-covid being less lethal than other variants.
WHO’s Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says: ‘”While Omicron does appear to be less severe compared to Delta, especially in those vaccinated, it does not mean it should be categorised as mild,” told a press conference. “Just like previous variants, Omicron is hospitalising people, and it is killing people. In fact, the tsunami of cases is so huge and quick that it is overwhelming health systems around the world.” Except that it’s not, unless you are in Hong Kong, where a positive test has so far meant automatic hospitalisation. (The latest weekly figures I have show that the number of people in Hong Kong seriously ill with covid at two per million, compared to ten per million for the world as a whole. Hong Kong’s hospitals are overstretched by admissions, not by serious illness.)
It’s clear from Europe and elsewhere (ref my Seasonal Mortality Comparedand Denmark and Israel) that the coming of Omicron has reduced deaths and hospitalisations, although many people in hospital – including those who have died there – have tested positive for covid. Having covid in hospital is not the same thing as being ‘hospitalised’ because of covid. Further, delta-covid has not gone away, so deaths that can be attributed to covid are not necessarily deaths attributable to Omicron. There is no scientific controversy about the observation that a person with delta-covid has a much greater chance of requiring hospital care than a person with omicron-covid.
The story about Angelique Coetzee finishes with: ‘A US oncologist from the Mayo Clinic this week pushed back on the characterisation of Omicron as mild. Professor Vincent Rajkumar shared data from Johns Hopkins University and the World Health Organisation showing daily deaths attributed to Covid-19 in the US were higher now than any time since the pandemic began in late 2019, with the exception of two months last winter.’ My published charts, showing excess deaths, tell a different story. Professor Rajkumar would appear to have more expertise as a cancer doctor than as an interpreter of statistics. The WHO data are of deaths ‘with covid’, not deaths that only happened ‘because of covid’. My brother-in-law was very sick with covid in the USA this January. At least, as he recovered, he was informed that he had the severe delta-variant.
Delta-Covid in New Zealand
New Zealand, along with a few East Asian countries, has become a delta-variant holdout, thanks to New Zealand’s stringent policy initiates to slow down the displacement of delta by omicron.
According to ourworldindata.org, in the two weeks to January, these countries had more than 11 percent Delta:
New Zealand (29.1%)
Lithuania (29.1%)
Slovakia (22.9%)
Hong Kong (21.8%)
South Korea (19.6%)
Thailand (17.0%)
Poland (15.3%)
Germany (11.3%)
In the following two weeks, the only countries so far known to have significant Delta were:
Hong Kong (10.8%)
South Korea (10.4%)
New Zealand (9.5%)
While new infections of Delta, today, are probably less than five percent of all new reported covid cases, of New Zealand’s 22022 active cases (as of 22/02/2022), at least 500 of these will have been Delta infections.
The Push to Downplay the Upside of Omicron in New Zealand
In New Zealand one major area of concern is the narrational fuzzing of the distinction between covid-delta and covid-omicron. The two variants are so different that they could be classified as two separate viruses. Indeed, the process of separate classification opens the door to the (sensible) inclusion of other human coronaviruses and influenzas in a single public health diagnostic framework. One barrier to such an evolution of the covid public health framework is the earlier mischievous and ongoing (re Ashley Bloomfield last year, and Rod Jackson this week) characterisation of Covid19 as a significantly more serious disease than influenza. (This was aways mischievous, because, as noted above, a novel coronavirus disease was contrasted, inappropriately, with established seasonal influenza strains. To slightly misquote Shakespeare [from Hamlet], “methinks the man [Bloomfield] didst protest too much”.)
There is a major ethical problem if New Zealanders with a positive covid test are being asked to assume that they have Omicron. That ethical problem is compounded if clinical information relating to patients who knowingly or unknowingly have Delta is being used to push to a public audience the counter-scientific alternative fact that omicron is ‘not a mild illness’.
Finally, for this essay, we may note this reported case: Covid 19 Omicron outbreak: Virus leaves healthy NZ woman, 36, struggling for breath (NZ Herald, 23 Feb 2022). The article says: “Before her GP called with the results the next day, she knew she had the virus – her taste and smell had gone haywire.” A red flag! Loss of taste and smell are classic symptoms of the Delta evolutionary branch of Covid19, but are not at all characteristic of Omicron. The article states: “she’s never been so sick as she was in the past week after catching Covid – despite it likely [my emphasis] being the Omicron variant, which many people think is mild.” ‘Likely’ here is based on the fact that Omicron is more prevalent in New Zealand, and not on any description of her symptoms.
This poor woman, unlike my brother-in-law, has been led to believe she has omicron-covid, not delta-covid. And New Zealand Herald readers have been likewise misled. While she may have Omicron, the symptoms clearly point to Delta.
We can do better than this. Omicron is good news – global good news, the world’s way out of the pandemic – being peddled as bad news by people who seem happy to perpetuate a narrative of fear. New Zealanders need a narrative of hope, as we move into the winter season. The actual science gives us much hope.
*******
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
New Zealand will move to phase 3 of the omicron response at 11.59pm tonight, Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins has confirmed.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield and Hipkins laid out what phase 3 includes.
While the ministry’s daily update of case numbers will come out later this afternoon, Hipkins confirmed today’s cases were “about 5000”. The actual figure was later confirmed as 6137 new cases and one death.
“This continued rise and also the number of hospitalisations we have which today sit at 205 means that we are now confirming our shift to phase 3 of our planned Omicron response. That’ll happen at 11.59pm tonight.”
He says most had been gearing up for this and it would not come as a surprise.
However, the move to phase three would not mean a “sudden lurch” in terms of additional restrictions or movements, because the traffic light system had been designed to smooth things out already.
“Our priorities now shift to isolating those with covid-19 and their household contacts to reduce the spread, while at the same time supporting supply chains and essential services to continue to operate.”
Only confirmed cases Only confirmed cases and their household contacts – the people they lived with – would be required to isolate. All other contacts would be asked to monitor for symptoms but they would not have to isolate.
Hipkins said it was important to note that the legal requirement to isolate for cases and household contacts did not mean people who did not fit in those groups should not isolate.
“If you have a friend who has covid-19, you can make a judgment about whether you think you might be at risk … we are asking New Zealanders to accept a much greater degree of personal responsibility.”
Watch the announcement:
Today’s media briefing. Video: RNZ News
Dr Bloomfield said healthcare workforces who were essential and were household contacts were not allowed to go back to work for the first seven days but may return to work after that — three days early — if they returned a negative RAT on days five and six and were asymptomatic.
Hipkins said detailed information would be sent to schools but the principle remained the same — if you are not a household contact you are not required to isolate.
He said he acknowledged some parents were in a better situation than others.
Dr Bloomfield said people who did not respond to the text message would be followed up to confirm whether or not they needed clinical or social support to isolate.
RATs primary testing Rapid antigen tests (RATs) will become the primary means of testing for covid-19, and will be available from thousands of sites. Millions more are expected to arrive over the coming days.
It is expected that businesses would be able to make the tests available to the public through retail outlets from March, he said.
Hipkins said RAT tests had been distributed throughout the health network.
“They’re available to people who need them … through the testing network,” he said.
“The last thing we want is people sitting on big stockpiles of them when there’s more demand elsewhere.”
Businesses have been able to import RATs since the beginning of December, but many “like ourselves, have had challenges in securing supplies because of global constraints”, Dr Bloomfield said.
He said clinics in Tāmaki Makaurau would begin rolling out supervised rapid antigen testing from today.
Testing locations Locations where people can get a rapid antigen tests would be listed on the Healthpoint website.
He said there were 6.3 million unused tests in the country yesterday, another million arrived last night and another 10 million were expected to arrive in the coming week.
Hipkins said that because only household contacts were required to isolate, a self-assessment tool would help the government keep track of very high risk locations and the overall spread of the virus.
This included things like hospitals and aged care facilities.
Hospitalisations had become a major focus and daily case numbers would be a less important metric from now, Hipkins said.
“There’s no doubt the next few weeks are going to be pretty challenging… We just need to stick to the plan that we’ve set out as we manage a higher number of cases in our coming weeks before we reach a peak as other countries have,” he said.
Dr Bloomfield said hospitalisation rates were about 85 percent at the moment, which was “about what they usually are”, but an increase in cases would drive an increase.
Isolation plans needed That said, “if you are unwell for any reason, you can and should seek care in our health system and that includes in our hospitals”.
Hipkins said omicron’s lower likelihood of severe illness, and high vaccination rates, were what allowed the self-management approach.
He suggested people should have an isolation plan, and talk to friends and whānau about how they would manage if they needed to isolate.
He also urged people to take up booster shots.
“You are far less likely to end up in hospital if you get covid-19 [and] if you’ve had a booster.”
He said modelling of the low-transmission scenario assumes high booster uptake.
Dr Bloomfield said two new studies confirmed the vaccine protected against getting infected in the first place and protected against severe illness.
“One of the studies, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that compared with being unvaccinated the odds of contracting omicron after receiving three doses dropped by 67 percent — two thirds — and for delta the risk declined by a stunning 93 percent.”
“So a highly-boosted population here will serve us all well.”
Covid cases among protesters at Parliament The Ministry of Health has reported there have been at least two positive covid-19 test results among the anti-mandate protesters in Wellington.
The ministry said the infected people had been told to self-isolate.
However, it would not say if the cases were among those who had been arrested in the past few days.
Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said a team of staff working at the protest had caught covid-19 and while it had not been linked to protesters, it “stands to reason” the coronavirus was there.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
National Māori Authority chair Matthew Tukaki has seen plenty of protests and received his fair share of abuse, but what’s been happening in Wellington this week is like nothing he has encountered before. Justin Latif reports for Local Democracy Reporting.
If there’s one thing Matthew Tukaki thought he and the protesters at Parliament might agree on, it’s the right to free speech. But after starting a campaign to end the occupation, he discovered that wasn’t quite the case.
“I started a campaign on Sunday, which kind of went viral, called #endtheprotest, via social media,” the Wellington-based chair of the National Māori Authority said.
The hashtag is now one of the top trending topics for New Zealand Twitter users and has been shared by close to 60,0000 people on Facebook, hitting a reach of 2.3 million accounts.
Tutaki said the backlash, which had included physical threats and racial abuse, was initially just online but it quickly escalated once protesters realised he was behind the campaign.
“I came out of a hotel on Sunday and someone recognised me, they grabbed me by the arm, and the force was so great, they ripped the sleeve off my anorak and left a bruise,” he said.
Never one to let a single incident perturb him, Tukaki passed the protests on his way to lunch a few days later.
“I was down there on my way to get some sushi and a group of about eight of them piled in, shouting verbal abuse and trying to physically intimidate me. One of them was about to lunge and if it wasn’t for the police, it could have turned into something much more brutal.”
No self-respect He said the protesters seemed to have no self-respect, either for their own space or the environment they were occupying, given the amount of human waste that was swirling around Parliament grounds.
“It’s like someone has turned up at your house, put a tent in your lounge, and then shat in your sink. It’s another level of disrespect out there and these people have no respect for the whenua.”
National Māori Authority chair Matthew Tukaki … accosted twice this week by abusive protesters in Wellington. Image: Justin Latif/LDR
Having attended many protests over his life as well as having many friends and family involved in different types of activism, he said the difference in how a Māori-led campaign operated was stark.
“Ihumātao was totally different, hīkoi to parliament are different,” he said. “With Māori, when we have a protest, our people will go down to Wellington, we prosecute our kaupapa, present our petition and members of parliament will often come out to greet you.
“It’s always well-organised, and it’s safe and then we clean up after ourselves and we continue to prosecute the kaupapa back home from our marae.
“This is completely different. It’s violent, it’s aggressive and they have no respect for the whenua.”
He noted that even after protesters sent out a press release welcoming visitors, “a reporter from Wellington Live went down there, and was beaten up”.
Māori culture appropriated He said it was particularly concerning to see both Māori culture and New Zealand’s wartime history being appropriated.
“Unfortunately our Māori whānau are being used as clickbait by those in the alternative right, who are pushing messages from the United States,” he said.
“We’re being used, our symbols are being appropriated. Our tino rangatiraranga flag is flying next to the Trump flag, next to where a Nazi swastika symbol was painted on a war memorial.”
He said the prime minister had made the right call not engaging and he felt some blame could be laid at the feet of politicians who had helped stoke racist conspiracies.
“Many politicians have used Māori issues as a political football over the last 12 months,” he said.
“What they have done is they have set free the sorts of racist attitudes that have been hiding in dark corners, and look at what those same politicians have done now — blame the government for it all.”
Peddling of racist ideas ‘normalised’ This wasn’t the first time Tukaki had received abuse, given his role with the National Māori Authority, which advocated for iwi and Māori business and community service organisations around New Zealand, but he was concerned by how normalised the peddling of racist ideas was becoming.
“I was getting racist and threatening messages before the protest, but what this has taught me is the issue of racism is out there more, because people are now emboldened to show their names and faces.
“And to be frank, people like [David] Seymour and [Judith] Collins, [Winston] Peters and Matt King all need to take responsibility for the beast in the cave they have conveniently let loose.”
Justin Latif is a Local Democracy Reporting project journalist. Read more of his stories here. Asia Pacific Report is a community partner.
The People’s Party has made an unprecedented announcement to endorse four women candidates for all four National Capital District (NCD) seats in the Papua New Guinea national election this year.
Making the announcement at Parliament House, People’s Party founder and Enga Governor, Sir Peter Ipatas introduced the four candidates — Tania Bale (Nugent) for Moresby Northeast, Anna Kavana Bais for Moresby Northwest, Michelle Hau’ofa for Moresby South and Sylvia Pascoe for NCD regional.
The four women rallied behind Sir Peter as he made the revelation, where he said: “These are women with integrity — if people of this city decide to put a women team to lead them then I think they can make a big difference.
“People’s Party has a history and culture of integrity and we are supporting candidates that reflect this — both men and women. We believe these four candidates we are endorsing for the NCD seats hold the People’s Party values and principles.”
Party leader and Jiwaka Governor William Tongamp said: “People’s Party supports women leaders and believes the way to get more women into Parliament is to increase the number of women standing in seats around the country.
“That is why we are proud to support and endorse these four women and that is why People’s Party has a policy to legislate for political parties to amend their constitutions to have 50 percent of their endorsed candidates to be women.”
All four candidates have illustrious careers spanning from business, media, public service, charitable work and advocacy.
Bais took part in last year’s Moresby Northwest byelection under the same party, and said she was looking forward to assisting her sister candidates with her experiences.
She added that she looked forward to standing alongside her party of women candidates for the elections in NCD, and assisting each other in their campaign.
Sir Peter also challenged other political parties to “walk the talk” and endorse women candidates in this coming election.
Thierry Lepaniis a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.
Misinformation researchers are concerned the protest at New Zealand’ s Parliament is becoming a “free-for-all” as the idea of any leadership within the blockade area slips away.
In recent days, the messaging among the occupation has noticeably fractured and with a number of people joining in, including influential personalities such as yachtsman Sir Russell Coutts, singer Jason Kerrison, and New Zealand First Party leader Winston Peters.
Kerrison did a series of Facebook Live videos on Tuesday, where he said he was capturing his own experiences — noting he did not “quite know what’s happened”.
He later ended up on Molesworth Street, where a man was earlier arrested for driving a vehicle towards a line of police officers, stopping just before he would have hit them.
Other than being aware of a “commotion”, Kerrison instead referred to an incident from Monday where police officers had human faeces thrown over them, claiming it did not happen and that people should stop being “hypnotised” by mainstream news and “that stupid scripted rhetoric”.
Kerrison is correct when he suggests throughout his livestreams that there are calm people in the crowd.
But Te Punaha Matatini misinformation researcher Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa said the presence of extreme or far-right views could not be ignored.
It was more noticeable in online channels connected to the protest, Dr Hattotuwa said.
‘Gone in a bad way’ “And I empathise with individuals who don’t know that because it requires a certain degree of subscription to, and connection to and engagement, with the online fora to realise the degree to which this has gone — and gone in a very bad way.”
He said people only present “in front of the Beehive” could be “fooled into thinking that this is about balloons and children …. and good vibes.”
Dr Hattotuwa wanted to know who, from the protest and their supporters, could “distance themselves, disavow and decry the violent ideation online”.
“Those two things, we haven’t seen to date.”
RNZ has spoken to a number of protesters in recent days, and asked if they thought it was okay to be in a crowd that was not necessarily as peaceful as it preaches.
There are signs targeting politicians, media and scientists.
Some did not like that there were death threats. One woman said those people “needed to go” and another said it was “terrible” to get personal and attack politicians.
Others not bothered But others were not bothered (“That’s all around us mate, that’s every day. You can go to Auckland or Christchurch, or a little town – Eketahuna, you don’t know who’s around.”) or said the threats did not exist (“We haven’t seen anything like that. Everyone’s peaceful, when you go inside there, all you feel is love, all you feel is the emotion of the passion of the people.”).
These fractures appear to be growing in the increasingly individualised crowd and disinformation researcher Byron Clark said it was “becoming a free-for-all”.
Police have acknowledged there was no real leadership, and Clark said there was also more conflicting information and ideas among protesters.
“It makes it very difficult because it means that there’s not really anyone who police can negotiate with or if any politicians were to come out and meet the protesters, there’s not really anyone who can truly claim to represent them.”
He said people were being influenced on mainstream social media, like YouTube and Facebook, before migrating to platforms with less moderation, like Telegram and Rumble.
“So I think social media has been been slow to act and it’s the case now of we probably can’t put that genie back in the bottle. And we have to find other ways to deal with the issue of misinformation online,” Clark said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has flatly opposed the bid led by tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes to buy Australia’s biggest energy company AGL and spend A$20 billion switching it to renewables. This includes closing its coal power stations by 2030. As Morrison stated this week:
We need to ensure that our coal-fired generation of electricity runs to its life, because if it doesn’t, electricity prices go up, they don’t go down.
Likewise, AGL has dismissed the plan as “unrealistic”. But are they right? Would closing AGL’s three coal power stations by 2030 push up prices and bring chaos to the National Electricity Market (NEM)?
No. In fact, there’s already chaos in the NEM due to increasingly early and disorderly coal retirements. The government should welcome the plan to takeover AGL, because it addresses failures in the market and entails a more orderly tranformation process.
There’s already chaos
The bid, made alongside Brookfield Partners, came just days after Origin Energy brought forward the closure date of Eraring, Australia’s largest coal station, by seven years. It was the latest in a string of early coal closure announcements, and yet there remains no national plan to manage early retirements like this.
Instead, it’s up to each commercial entity to decide when to close. This means coal generators have no obligation to guarantee reliability beyond providing notice of retirement plans over the short term – five years in Victoria, or three and a half years elsewhere in the NEM.
As the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has pointed out, owners can technically comply with the notice period while withdrawing generation capacity from the market. Even more chaotically, generators can run down maintenance spending when they’re getting ready to close down, which further reduces reliability.
Eraring coal plant’s closure has been brought forward by seven years. Shutterstock
The NEM was designed to be an “energy only market” – the market signal that retirements are due is supposed to encourage investors to build new generators. Unfortunately, this market design has failed.
Part of the failure stems from the NEM’s design, and partly from the federal government’s failure to implement either a strong climate policy or a coal retirement plan. This adds up to an environment of bad investment.
For example, in its latest update of the NEM database, AEMO lists 130 gigawatts of prospective solar, wind and solar projects, but only 6.6 gigawatts of these are committed for development in the next 10 years.
The Brookfield/Cannon-Brookes plan addresses some of these market failures.
First, it provides a notice period of closure of about eight years, longer than is required by law. That gives a signal to the market and improves energy planning by governments and AEMO.
Second, the new AGL would carry all the risk because it must continue to supply electricity to millions of customers. The new owners of AGL would have to provide enough electricity to cover this load, in real time, or they’ll have to buy that supply from their competitors.
This incentive will mean the owners will build new generation. More renewable energy, which has zero marginal cost, will help reduce the wholesale electricity price, not just for those customers but for all consumers.
Can renewables fill the gap so quickly?
The short answer is yes. Coal generators provide around three quarters of the electricity in NSW alone, so replacing it entails a transformation of the grid. There are plans to do exactly that, at the intergovernmental and NSW levels.
So it’s strange the prime minister seems not to have confidence in these plans, given his government has agreed to and funded them both.
First, there’s a nationally agreed Integrated System Plan, which is designed by AEMO with extensive consultation across government and industry. The latest draft plan predicts Australia is on track to see 14 gigawatts of coal retire by 2030 and all coal gone by 2040.
AEMO doesn’t predict any shortfall of supply over that time, as long as new transmission is built to carry the electricity from the new fleets of solar, wind, hydro and batteries.
Second, NSW has its own plan: the Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap. This will accelerate construction of Australia’s first Renewable Energy Zone, and is co-funded by the federal government.
One of the key challenges is to replace the “security” gap as coal retires. Coal power stations maintain the frequency and voltage of the grid. These security services can be thought of as the “quality” of the electricity purchased. You need sufficient quantity and quality of supply to run our devices, from laptops to smelters. Still, Australia Institute research last year confirmed that batteries and renewable energy can provide such security services, and do it cost effectively.
Solar, wind and battery projects can be built much faster than conventional generators. Elon Musk famously built the biggest battery in the world in South Australia, within 100 days in 2017.
Australia’s rooftop solar is the world’s cheapest. Shutterstock
What might be in store for a new AGL? Self-reliance
We don’t yet know what new resources the new AGL would invest under a Brookfield/Cannon-Brookes ownership. I believe the most exciting and innovative part of the bid might well be that much of the new investment is in consumer assets.
Australian households could lead the world in decarbonisation by doing it themselves, according to research supported by Cannon-Brookes, published last year by Dr Saul Griffith and Rewiring Australia.
Houses can generate a quarter of what they need with rooftop solar. In Australia, rooftop solar in Australia is the cheapest in the world, at a couple of cents per kilowatt-hour. Batteries allow them to soak up excess solar during the day and use it at night.
If households also replace their car with an electric vehicle and replace gas appliances with electric ones, it’s possible to reach zero emissions and do it this decade.
The research found it becomes cost effective for households to electrify by around 2025. Mike Cannon-Brookes has already made investments in companies working in this electrification space.
What this might mean for a modern AGL is that much of the A$20 billion it would invest to replace coal might be finance packages to pay for households to ditch fossil energy entirely, and become partially self-reliant from their own solar.
If the new AGL could align the interests of its consumers and the climate, it would achieve more than just shutting old coal clunkers.
In Australia, on any given day, about 43,000 children have a parent in prison.
We have to use the word “about”, as there is no official process to identify this group of children. There is no specific oversight and no special supports. Despite the state removing their parent, there is no government department responsible for them.
A new parliamentary inquiry has been set to try and fix this. It cannot come soon enough.
Parents in prison
Researchers estimate around half of the adults who end up in prison are parents. So when an adult is arrested and imprisoned, there is a good chance they are somebody’s parent.
A Victorian parliamentary inquiry into children of imprisoned parents was announced just before Christmas last year, after lobbying by independent MP Rod Barton. The report is due by July 2022.
An inquiry into the children of imprisoned parents is due to report in the middle of the year. Brendan Esposito/AAP
There are some things we already know about children who have a parent in jail. Our recent researchinto restricted family contact during COVID found children’s mental health suffered considerably as a result of separation from a parent.
We also know they face immediate risks due to the loss of their parent at arrest or imprisonment, such as homelessness, or feelings of abandonment. They are more likely to suffer long-term issues, including poorer health and educational outcomes and increased behavioural and emotional problems.
We also know that a parent who goes to jail is more likely to have experienced their own childhood trauma, been involved in family violence, and have higher levels of mental health problems, substance abuse, and disability.
Combined with family separation, these can have an indelible impact on their children. Living with poverty, stress and instability, alongside stigma and a lack of community understanding and support are common occurrences.
Children ignored
In 2015 research with colleagues, we looked at existing policies around arrest, sentencing and imprisonment, and spoke with parents in prison, as well as police, magistrates and legal representatives.
It was clear that children are not taken into account by the adult justice system, from the time of their parent’s arrest, through to their release from prison. There are no processes or protocols to consider or support children, and professional staff are not guided or obliged to respond.
Most children are cared for informally, within their nuclear or extended families. These carers carry many additional burdens and costs, with no recognition or formal support.
So this means basic food and shelter are not guaranteed for these children at the point of parental arrest and sentencing. Although some officials go far beyond their prescribed role to ensure the well-being of children, this is haphazard at best. As one police officer told us during a recent study:
there’s no notice up in the custody area ‘does your offender have children?’. The question remains, why not?
Decades of warning
For more than 20 years, researchers have been calling for governments to identify and meet the needs of these children and families. These calls have been echoed by a 1997 NSW parliamentary committee and a 2005 report to the South Australian attorney-general’s department.
Most children with a parent in prison are cared for informally by a family member.great. Joe Castro/AAP
We have seen positive moves in other service sectors (such as mental health, alcohol and drug services and family violence) towards a more “child aware” approach. This begins with a basic recognition that adult service users are often parents, and their dependent children are indirectly part of that adult service system. The next steps have been to educate staffin those services about “seeing” and including their needs in their work.
In other countries, including the United States, England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Sweden and Norway there have been innovations during arrests and in prisons. For example, in Sweden, when arrested, people are asked about any child or care arrangements. This provides children with a basic minimum standard of care at a time when they need it most.
Meanwhile, Australia’s criminal justice sector is lagging behind, despite repeated warnings. We need to catch up.
Catherine Flynn has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Victorian Department of Justice, and not-for-profit organisation SHINE for Kids, for research in the area of criminal justice, prisons and family impact.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thea van de Mortel, Professor, Nursing and Deputy Head (Learning & Teaching), School of Nursing and Midwifery, Griffith University
Although mask mandates are lifting in some states, many people will continue to wear masks to protect themselves and others from the more transmissible Omicron variant.
For instance, they might be visiting a loved one in hospital, travelling on a plane or bus, or still need to wear one at work in hospitality or retail.
Any mask is better than none. However, a type of mask known as a respirator is more effective at preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) than a cloth or surgical mask, provided you use it properly.
Here is a practical guide to getting the most out of your respirator.
Respirators are designed to fit your face closely to help prevent you breathing in airborne particles through the gaps around the edges.
They are made of a plastic with an electrostatic charge that repels viral particles, preventing at least 95% of particles from getting through.
They are made to a specific manufacturing standard. Depending on where they are certified, they may be called N95 (in the USA), P2 (Australia or New Zealand), FFP2 (Europe), KF94 (Korea) or KN95 (China).
Some have a cup shape; others look like a duck bill due to the way they stick out.
Who can use a respirator?
Adults can use respirators but the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not recommend them for children. That’s because they are not designed for smaller face sizes so may not provide full protection.
Facial hair, unfortunately, interferes with the fit. That’s because the edge of the respirator cannot form a tight seal around the face and chin.
If you don’t want to remove your beard or moustache, use a surgical mask. Or you can double mask by wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask.
Which respirator is best?
This depends on personal preference and size. Try a few different types to find one that fits well. P2 respirators found in hardware stores are often in larger sizes that suit men. Chemists sell others that might better suit a smaller face.
Avoid a false sense of security when wearing respirators, as they won’t have been professionally “fit tested” the way they would be for health workers.
When buying respirators online, look out for counterfeitproducts. For example, avoid individual respirators with unmarked packaging, or boxes with an FDA logo, as use of the logo to market products is prohibited. The box should include the manufacturer’s name and address.
place one elastic loop at the top of your head, near the crown, and the other at the base, below your ears. Make sure the straps lay flat, are not twisted and are not criss-crossed
One elastic loop goes at the top of the head, the other at the base. CDC
adjust the flexible strip across your nose and cheeks, pressing on each side of the nose with the fingertips of both hands to mould it to your face
check the edges to make sure there are no creases or hair stuck under the edge
perform a “fit check”. Take a quick deep breath in, which should cause the respirator to suck inwards. Then breathe out, which should re-inflate it. If your glasses fog up, if you feel air coming in or going out around the edges, or the respirator does not suck in, there is not a good seal. Try repositioning it and “fit check” again
sanitise your hands after putting on your respirator. Once on, avoid touching the front, which may be contaminated. If you do, sanitise your hands again.
Can I re-use them?
While respirators are labelled for single use, they can be reused outside health-care settings with care:
the more you reuse a respirator the more likely it is to fail because the wear on the elastic straps causes a poorer fit or components break. Most are good for at least five wears but some can go for at least 20
have several on the go and alternate them on different days. Store each one after use in its own paper bag, to allow it to dry out between uses
remove the respirator if it gets wet. When removing, touch only the straps. Move the respirator away from your face so you don’t contaminate your skin or hair
when the respirator loses its fit, gets damaged or has been used too often, pop it in the bin.
don’t store it in a plastic bag as it will not dry out between uses.
Respirators reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2 but will not stop it alone. It is essential to stay home if unwell, get fully vaccinated, physically distance where possible, regularly wash or sanitise your hands, and if coughing or sneezing, do so into your elbow.
Thea van de Mortel teaches into the graduate Infection Prevention and Control program at Griffith University.
Peta-Anne Zimmerman is a Board Director of the Australasian College for Infection Prevention and Control, Co-Director of the Collaborative for the Advancement of Infection Prevention and Control, and is the Program Advisor of the Griffith University Graduate Infection Prevention and Control Programs.
Rabbits are an enormous problem for Australian ecosystems – they’re a major threat to 322 species of plants and animals already at risk of extinction. This is more than double the number of species threatened by cats and foxes.
To keep rabbit numbers down, many land managers roll out rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus, a powerful biocontrol. Land managers play a crucial role in conserving the environment and managing pest species – their involvement is essential to the success of many conservation programs.
But our new research finds around three quarters of land managers who reported releasing the biocontrol don’t follow the recommended guidelines, and release it during the peak rabbit breeding period. This potentially leads to the population actually increasing as young rabbits build an immunity to the virus.
It’s highly likely this widespread inappropriate use has substantial environmental and economic consequences. Rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus must be released strategically with caution, or the good intentions of land managers may have terrible outcomes.
They prevent the long-term regeneration of trees and shrubs by continually eating young seedlings. This has immense flow-on effects for the availability of food and shelter for other animals, such as the dusky hopping mouse, plains mouse and crest-tailed mulgara, and their ability to avoid predators.
Reductions in rabbit numbers after 1950 have been estimated to benefit the agricultural industry to the tune of A$1 billion annually. However, the damage they wreak still costs Australian agriculture an estimated A$200 million annually.
Grazing competition from rabbits has been attributed to the decline of southern hairy-nosed wombats. David Taggart, Author provided
Good intentions but bad outcomes
Two major viral rabbit biocontrols have been introduced to Australia: myxomatosis (introduced in 1950) and rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (introduced in 1995). Both viruses have proven to be highly effective in reducing Australia’s rabbit numbers.
They now circulate naturally in Australia and continue to reduce rabbit numbers across the entire country, resulting in enormous environmental and economic benefits. Land managers can intentionally release rabbit haemorrhagic disease to help reduce rabbit numbers at more local scales, such as on a farm. But it’s crucial the biocontrol is released at the right time.
In young rabbits, less than 10weeksold or so, rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus is not lethal. Instead, infection in this cohort primes their immune system and leaves them with life-long immunity to the virus.
It’s therefore recommended to not release rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus when young rabbits are present, as this increased immunity will make the rabbit population harder to control in future.
Rabbits have taken a severe toll on native wildlife since they were introduced to Australia in 1859. Shutterstock
So when are young rabbits present?
The colloquial term “breed like rabbits” has a lot of truth to it. Rabbits can breed year-round, but their breeding predominately follows the availability of green grass. This is because green grass is higher in protein than dry grass, which benefits both lactating female rabbits and developing young.
In southern Australia, studies on rabbit breeding patterns show they usually breed continuously between May and October. Only in the severest of droughts do they not breed during this period.
When we account for the duration of rabbit pregnancy (28-31 days) and that young rabbits up to 10 weeks old aren’t killed by the biocontrol, we can generally expect young rabbits to be continuously present between July and December.
As a result, rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus should not be released between July and December.
And yet, our new research shows 47% of all biocontrol supply and 74% of reported releases occurs during this major anticipated rabbit breeding season, when the risk of immunising young rabbits is greatest. In fact, we found unseasonal biocontrol use in all states except Tasmania and the ACT where the data were insufficient.
This is a major problem, as the young rabbits’ life-longimmunity will lead to their increased survival and recruitment into the breeding population. This was confirmed experimentally in a study last year on European rabbits, which showed releasing a very similar virus during the breeding season does indeed lead to the increased survival of young rabbits.
Rabbits don’t breed in only the severest of droughts in Australia. Shutterstock
Where do we go from here?
The management of rabbits, or any pest species, must be strategic and given appropriate critical thought. If this isn’t done, negative consequences can and do occur. The last thing we want is to make our problem worse.
In the case of rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus and rabbit management, we must consider restricting access to the virus, either with seasonal restrictions or restricting its use to people who are highly specialised and trained.
We must also practice integrated pest management. This is where no single management technique is considered a silver bullet, and land managers employ a range of measures to achieve the optimal outcome. When managing rabbits at local scales, we should more strongly consider other management techniques, such as the removal of warrens, burrows or above-ground harbor, trapping, fencing, warren fumigation, shooting or poison baiting.
Many pest animals and plants are managed worldwide for both environmental and economic reasons, and land managers are often encouraged to contribute, and asked to follow implementation guidelines. Our study is a warning to other conservation activities – land managers must follow these important guidelines or they may see problems get worse.
Pat Taggart works for the Department of Primary Industries NSW and receives funding from the Centre for Invasive Species Solutions, and the Federal Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment.
PODCAST: Buchanan + Manning on Sanctions and Global Bipolarity
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A View from Afar – In this podcast, political scientist Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning discuss whether sanctions will be effective in deterring Russian president Vladimir Putin from a full invasion of Ukraine and indeed cause Russian military to return to the Russian side of the Ukraine border.
Or, alternatively, does the Russian Federation now have a momentum and the support of a coalition of authoritarian governments that will render sanctions ineffective?
Are we witnessing the advent of what we will call: the progression of global bipolarity?
You can comment on this debate by clicking on one of these social media channels and interacting in the social media’s comment area. Here are the links:
Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category. You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.
There is no shortage of speculation about what Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to do with the vast Russian military force now virtually encircling Ukraine, and why he has amassed it.
Its sheer size – the largest combat force assembled in Europe since the second world war – suggests a maximalist approach: erasing the humiliation of the Soviet Union’s breakup 30 years ago with a massive, bloody and swift invasion of Ukraine on multiple fronts.
Indeed, a full-scale attack looks increasingly imminent with an estimated 80% of Russian forces now in combat-ready position and separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine formally requesting help combating what they falsely claim is aggression from the Ukrainian military.
Others see it differently, believing Putin will be content with his gains so far. Some also consider Russia’s recognition of the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine as signalling a muscular warning to Western leaders who have repeatedly ignored Russian security concerns.
Another view suggests Putin will opt for a hybrid strategy similar to Russia’s playbook in its 2008 war with Georgia: threatening to use force, formally recognising breakaway provinces, and destroying its adversary’s military – but stopping short of actual conquest.
Putin’s anger laid bare
Who is right? Each scenario is feasible, but the question of how to interpret Russian motives became clearer after Putin’s bizarre February 22 meeting with his Security Council in Moscow.
At the meeting, he humiliated Russian spy chief Sergei Naryshkin for forgetting the script and supporting the incorporation of Donetsk and Luhansk directly into Russia, instead of just recognising their independence.
The meeting was a pre-recorded charade. Even the time shown on Putin’s own watch suggested the signing ceremony to recognise the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk had occurred before the meeting with his chiefs had even started.
But it was Putin’s angry speech afterwards that made clear just how personal this conflict might be.
He opined at length that Ukraine was a “colony with a puppet regime” and had no right to exist. It recalled Putin’s 2021 essay bemoaning the collapse of the USSR and claiming Russia and Ukraine were one people, hence denying Ukrainians sovereignty and identity.
His speech this week also included the false claim that Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin created Ukraine, praise for strongman Joseph Stalin, and the fanciful charge that Ukraine would seek to develop nuclear weapons.
In doing so, Putin resembled more a Russian ultranationalist with a shaky grasp of history than a pragmatic master strategist.
A personal mission to rewrite history
The charade could be dismissed as domestic posturing – a president in absolute command appealing to the patriotic urges of a population wary of conflict. But Putin seems to regard it as his personal mission to rewrite the history of the end of the Cold War.
In fact, his massive troop build-up on Ukraine’s borders (about 60% of Russia’s total combat power) undercuts his perceived concerns over NATO and a potential Western invasion of Russia.
This has required him to shift whole garrisons, including from near the border with Estonia and Latvia, both of which are NATO members.
He has also decreed the 30,000 Russian military personnel in Belarus will stay there indefinitely, ensuring Minsk also remains tightly bound to Moscow. This effectively adds new territory where Putin can station military forces and even potentially nuclear weapons.
A Ukrainian soldier near the front line in a section of Luhansk controlled by pro-Russian militants. ZURAB KURTSIKIDZE/EPA
Putin has calculated the economic risks
All of this indicates the conflict in Ukraine is more about expanding Russia’s territorial footprint than about the much-hyped NATO threat. In fact, it is deliberately pushing closer to NATO. And this has implications for how Putin is likely to calculate risk.
First, Putin knows NATO will not fight for Ukraine.
Second, he would have gamed out the potential costs of Western sanctions and attempts to distract him with “off-ramps” to avoid conflict. Putin’s tactic of reducing gas supplies over the last six months, encouraging EU members to deplete their reserves during winter, is evidence his plan has been in the works for some time.
Demonstrators protest outside the Russian Embassy in London. Alberto Pezzali/AP
So, too, has been his approach to diplomacy. Putin’s seeming willingness to negotiate over Ukraine has clearly been a pretence, given his refusal to budge on key issues and his swift discarding of the Minsk agreements over the future status of the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Third, Russia previously adapted to sanctions the West imposed after its invasion of Crimea in 2014 by divesting from dollars into gold and building a large sovereign wealth fund. This will provide some insulation from new sanctions imposed by Western countries this week.
Putin may well calculate he will be able to ride out even a tough US and EU package. That already includes total blocks on Russian banks, Germany’s delayed certification of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, and hints from the Biden administration that tough export controls will be next.
If Putin is undeterred by economic pressure, what about political and military risks?
It makes little sense for him to stop at securing Donetsk and Luhansk as they stand today, which is why he chose to recognise the far larger territory the separatists claim but don’t yet control.
It also provides numerous opportunities for false-flag “provocations”, since 70% of the territory the separatists have claimed is currently held by the Ukrainian military.
But it is doubtful whether Putin would even see this as a victory.
For one thing, he could have recognised Donetsk and Luhansk months, if not years ago. For another, he did not need to surround Ukraine with virtually every offensive military asset he has – including mobile missile launchers, tanks, special forces and civilian control units – just to secure the two small breakaway regions.
If Ukraine is as personal for Putin as he is signalling, and his appetite for risk as high as his actions indicate, the West must assume he has loftier ambitions than the five-day war with Georgia in 2008.
That means taking decisive coercive steps in response to Russia’s aggression. At the very least, the West will need a blisteringly tough sanctions package aimed at crippling the Russian economy.
It will also need to arm Ukraine and provide technical, on-the-ground expertise, and provide signals and other intelligence to the Ukrainian armed forces.
Providing this type of support will inevitably allow Putin to claim the West pushed him into a broader war, and plenty will believe him.
But all the signs indicate that is what he wanted anyway. It is therefore vital for the sake of Western credibility – and for the Ukrainians set to suffer once again from Putin’s expansionist urges – to ensure such behaviour does not come without significant costs.
Matthew Sussex has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Lowy Institute, ASPI, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, the Carnegie Foundation and the Australian Department of Defence.
Many older Australian women face insecure futures. Those who are single, divorced or widowed are much more likely to suffer poverty, housing stress and homelessness.
They are financially vulnerable because they are more likely to have worked in low-wage jobs, are more likely to have worked part-time or casually, and are more likely to have taken long breaks from paid employment to care for others.
In later life, women experience the full consequences of lower lifetime earnings, typically finding themselves with less super than men and in many cases missing the opportunity to buy a house or losing the half share in a home they had.
Women who have separated by age 65 are three times as likely as still married-women to rent, and they have two-thirds the assets of separated men.
Home ownership matters in retirement
The home is typically a family’s biggest asset. When couples split, one or both partners often lack the equity to buy a new home.
Only 34% of the women who separate and lose their home manage to purchase another one within five years, and only 44% manage it within ten years.
Many older women who rent have more than enough savings for a deposit but can’t buy because they won’t stay in the workforce long enough to pay off the mortgage by the time they retire.
This condemns many to poverty. Nearly half of retired renters live in poverty, including 63% of the retired single women who rent.
That’s because retirees with mortgages spend less and less as they pay them down whereas rents keep going up.
The typical outright owner aged over 65 spends just 5% of income on housing, compared to nearly 30% for the typical renter.
Under our proposal the federal government would co-purchase up to 30% of the value of the home, taking up to 30% of any capital gains when it is eventually sold.
Limits would include a requirement for buyers to have at least a 5% deposit, be earning less than $60,000 for singles and $90,000 for couples, and to buy a property priced below the median for their city or region.
The government would not charge rent or interest in exchange for its 30% stake.
However, purchasers would be required to cover all costs associated with buying and selling the home including conveyancing and stamp duty and ongoing costs such as council rates and maintenance.
The scheme should start with a trial of 5,000 places.
Although not aimed specifically at separated older women, they would be among those most likely to benefit.
Shared equity would reduce the size of the loan many women need to take out to buy a home, making it possible to pay it off by retirement, including by using some of their super.
Women that lose their home during a separation could use the government’s 30% stake to quickly get back into the market.
The targeted scheme we propose should have a modest impact on home prices.
Even if it were to eventually offer 10,000 shared equity loans a year, with each buyer purchasing a $500,000 home, it would only add at most $5 billion in housing demand each year to a $9 trillion market, and probably less.
The direct cost would be small – $220 million over the first four years.
In fact, the scheme might be a net positive for the budget in the long term, if house prices rise faster than the interest rate on government debt.
Existing state schemes, such as WA’s Keystart, have turned a profit.
It shouldn’t be a substitute
Shared equity is no substitute for governments taking the tough decisions needed to make housing more affordable, such as loosening planning laws and winding back housing tax breaks such as negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount.
And the federal government should assist older women already renting in poverty with a 40% boost to Commonwealth Rent Assistance, and a further increase to JobSeeker.
But the scheme we are proposing would keep the dream of home ownership alive for many older women.
Grattan Institute began with contributions to its endowment of $15 million from each of the Federal and Victorian Governments, $4 million from BHP Billiton, and $1 million from NAB. In order to safeguard its independence, Grattan Institute’s board controls this endowment. The funds are invested and contribute to funding Grattan Institute’s activities. Grattan Institute also receives funding from corporates, foundations, and individuals to support its general activities, as disclosed on its website.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the threats and violence against news media by protesters during the 16-day anti-covid-19 vaccine mandates occupation of Parliament grounds, and called for prosecutions of those responsible.
The media are among favourite targets of some of the 500 or so protesters still camped in front of the Parliament building, known as the Beehive, after arriving from various parts of the country in “freedom convoys” akin to those causing chaos in parts of Canada for the past month, reports the Paris-based media freedom watchdog in a statement today.
The violence against journalists trying to cover the protest had included being regularly pelted with tennis balls with such not-very-subtle insults as “terrorists” and “paedophiles” written on them, said RSF.
“Media = Fake News” and “Media is the virus” are typical of the slogans on the countless signs outside protesters’ tents.
Journalists who approach have also been greeted with drawings of gallows and nooses, as well as insults and threats of violence – to the point that most of them now have bodyguards, says Mark Stevens, head of news at Stuff, New Zealand’s leading news website.
“They’ve had gear smashed, been punched and belted with umbrellas,” he wrote. “Many reporters have been harassed […], including one threatened with their home being burned down.”
The violence has not been limited to Wellington.
In New Plymouth, an angry crowd tried to storm the offices of the local newspaper, Stuff’s Taranaki Daily News, two weeks ago, as reported by Mediawatch. Some of the protesters even managed to breach the newspaper’s secured doors and attack members of the staff.
“After the police intervened, [conspiracy theorist] Brett Power urged the protesters to return in order to hold the editor ‘accountable for crimes’ — meaning the newspaper’s failure to report their protests in the way they wanted,” the RSF statement said.
“The verbal and physical violence against journalists is accompanied by extremely shocking online hate messages.”
Stuff’s chief political reporter Henry Cooke tweeted an example of the threats he had received on social media:
i prefer the old “sleep with one eye open” thing personally, one has to get SOME sleep pic.twitter.com/wxh5x83Dsx
Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk, said: “The virulence of the threats against journalists by demonstrators, and the constant violence to which they have been subjected since the start of these protests are not acceptable in a democracy.”
He called on authorities to “not allow these disgraceful acts to go unpunished. There is a danger that journalists will no longer be able to calmly cover these protests, opening the way to a flood of misinformation.”
In a recent article, Kristin Hall, a reporter for 1News, described her dismay at discovering the level of “distaste for the press” among protesters who regarded the mainstream media as nothing more than “a bunch of liars”.
“People have asked me why I’m not covering the protests while I’m in the middle of interviewing them,” she wrote.
A Wellington Facebook page publisher attacked at the protest, as reported by 1News. Image: 1News screenshot APR
‘Headlocks, punches’ Protester mistrust is no longer limited to mainstream media regarded as accomplices of a system imposing pandemic-related restrictions, as Graham Bloxham — a Wellington resident who runs the Wellington Live Community local news page on Facebook – found to his cost when he went to interview one of the protest organisers on February 18.
“We just wanted to show people that it is peaceful … then bang. They just yelled and whacked. They were just all on me and they basically beat me and my cameraman to a pulp,” he told 1News.
“Headlocks, punches… they were really violent.”
Protesters have been asking me all week for “evidence” of volatility towards the Wellington public so here it is. https://t.co/mhJNcXlMrF
A photo of a dozen Nazi war criminals being hanged at the end of the Second World War has been circulating on social media popular with the protesters for the past few days, accompanied by the comment: “Photograph of hangings at Nuremberg, Germany. Members of the media, who lied and misled the German people, were executed.” Definitely not subtle.
Attacks against journalists have rarely or never been as virulent as this in New Zealand, which is ranked 8th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2021 World Press Freedom Index.
Henry Cooke reported an apology from some of the protesters over the “treatment” of some journalists, but incidents have continued to be reported.
Group of protest groups apologise for denying media access to Parliament grounds – but now ask we go through a liaison officer before turning up. pic.twitter.com/MIgksDJ50O
As New Zealand’s Omicron outbreak accelerates, with new community infections doubling every few days, the rising number of child cases is a reminder of the challenge to protect the health and well-being of children during a public health emergency.
COVID-19 affects children directly and indirectly, through impacts on children themselves, or their families and communities. Although children generally have a mild illness of COVID-19, there can be rare but serious outcomes and research is underway to understand potential longer-term effects on children.
Children can also be bereaved by COVID-19 and experience distress when they pass the infection on to a family member. The pandemic also widens inequities. International and local evidence shows that without urgent action, the impacts of the Omicron outbreak in New Zealand will be hardest on those with the least resources.
But not all impacts are directly from the virus. During an active outbreak the loss of in-person school time and the well-being protections schools provide can have a significant impact. This simultaneous negative impact on health, well-being and education is what we can expect to see as the outbreak progresses.
We need to minimise these harms by taking a proactive approach centred on children and their whānau, rather than on the school system. A whānau-centred system aims to keep children connected and safe during a public health emergency, whether they are at school or at home.
Current policy for the Omicron outbreak is that closing schools is the last resort. However, this policy creates dilemmas for families with health concerns and may put paediatric services under high pressure because each layer of COVID-19 protection available to adults has significant gaps for children.
Since the start of the vaccine rollout to 5-11-year-olds on January 17, 48% of all children in this age group have received one vaccine dose. But the rollout remains highly unequal: 71% of Māori and 60% of Pasifika children have not yet received their first dose.
Furthermore, 12-17-year-olds are not eligible for boosters, and children under five are not eligible for any COVID-19 vaccines.
Although good progress has been made, it will be some months before a healthy standard of ventilation, air filtration and carbon dioxide (CO₂) monitoring can be available in all classrooms, particularly as the weather gets cooler.
Highly effective face masks (KF94) are not readily available in child sizes in New Zealand and masks are not required at all for students in Years 1-3 and the staff supporting them.
The capacity to stay home is not equitably distributed, and can be particularly difficult for low-income families and essential workers.
In New Zealand, loss of face-to-face school time can have multiple adverse impacts on children because so much responsibility for children’s well-being is devolved to schools, including a caretaker function for working parents.
This dependence on face-to-face school time has meant families are making difficult decisions between protecting children’s education and their and other family members’ health, particularly when they have underlying health conditions.
We propose a pivot to a whānau-centred — not school-centred — approach to protect the well-being of children in this outbreak. Protections need to be accessible to all children wherever they are, allowing them to move seamlessly between school and home, depending on health and family circumstances and the local evolution of the outbreak.
Māori and iwi organisations mobilised quickly and effectively to support their communities during the pandemic and earlier public health emergencies such as the Canterbury earthquakes.
The depth of experience and expertise available in communities can deliver the type of response that will identify available resources (and gaps) and connect children and their families to these protections. Enhanced actions at a national and community level should include :
ensuring equitable access to protection from infection, including vaccines, high-grade masks, ventilation and filtration in school buildings, and paid sick leave for caregivers
resourcing community organisations to build networks of social and practical support to enable children to stay home safely, including ensuring food security, support for mental distress, access to routine vaccinations, and providing neighbourhood outdoor activities to maintain children’s social contacts
prioritising equipment and support for schools in areas with high proportions of low-income families and essential workers where children may need to remain at school through the outbreak
recognising that children are not an isolated population and need to be protected through a national COVID-19 mitigation strategy that aims to reduce inequities of infection in all age groups
developing and implementing an integrated infectious diseases strategy for winter 2022 to control COVID-19 and other infections expected to return with open borders and currently reduced uptake of routine childhood vaccinations.
From evidence to action
The government has a duty of care under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. New Zealand ratified this convention in 1993 and is due to be examined on its progress on children’s rights later in 2022.
Centring child rights is essential to safeguard resources to protect all tamariki, particularly those with existing acute or chronic health conditions and disabilities.
To assess progress and guide action we need a national data framework so that we can monitor an array of direct and indirect impacts on children and identify what is working well and what could be improved. The framework must include the voices of children and whānau so that the system captures what is important for well-being, not just what is easy to measure.
Data sovereignty is an important aspect of child data and must be considered in terms of use and access, particularly for Indigenous communities. For both government and community “end-users” of child data there needs to be a clear pathway from information to action.
Finally, we need to embed these changes to protect children beyond the Omicron outbreak, during future variant outbreaks, epidemics and other disruptive population health emergencies. Policies and communities that keep children safe in all settings should be a lasting legacy of the pandemic.
I would like to acknowledge the input from the following colleagues: Nick Wilson, Carmen Timu-Parata, Belinda Tuari-Toma, Jennifer Summers, Cheryl Davies, Constanza Jackson, Julie Bennett and Michael Baker.
Amanda Kvalsvig receives funding from the Health Research Council of New Zealand for infectious diseases research.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage. You can sign up to NZ Politics Daily as well as New Zealand Political Roundup columns for free here.
The Morrison government has clearly signalled its intention to make “national security” a key issue in this year’s federal election. It has repeatedly attacked the Labor opposition on issues including foreign interference, asylum seekers and defence spending. It places all of these issues under the “national security” umbrella.
Defence Minister Peter Dutton has even gone so far as to declare the Chinese administration would prefer an Albanese government, suggesting it would find his politics more to their liking.
The government’s concerted scare campaign received immediate backlash. Experts described it as “reckless” and a strategy “that serves only China”.
Despite the government’s efforts, Guardian polling shows a majority of voters trust Labor over the Coalition to handle our relationship with China.
Since the second world war, “national security” has generally referred to military threats. The term was enshrined in Australian legislation with the outbreak of war in 1939, and cemented in the US at the beginning of the Cold War.
Today, the term “national security” invokes an ambiguous foreign threat. It is often exploited to deflect public scrutiny and provide political cover for unpopular policies. In 2019, for example, the Coalition government and Senator Jacqui Lambie cited “national security” risks to justify repealing a law that allowed refugees to be transferred to Australia for medical treatment.
“National security” has become so enmeshed with threats of invasion, espionage and terrorism that it’s easy to forget the term has a longer and more cosmopolitan history.
Political use of the term ‘national security’ skyrocketed after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US. Mitch Gerber/STAR MAX/IPx/AP/AAP
A long and murky history
Bookended by the Great Depression and the second world war, Australians in the 1930s were concerned about different kinds of “national security”. While military and strategic framings were widespread, national security was also deployed to:
This diversity of use helps us distil what “national security” has meant to Australians. In all the contexts, there were consistent themes: safety, well-being, durability and a long-term future.
In the 1935 New South Wales state election, the leader of a breakaway Labor faction, Jack Lang, promised social programs that would raise the standard of living and provide
the national happiness and comfort that can only come from national security.
By 1937, Country Party leader Earle Page also seized on the term to refer to social and economic issues:
The best guarantee for national security is a substantial population of contented and prosperous people.
In other words, national security was very much linked with the social and economic conditions of everyday Australians.
The diversity of uses of “national security” in the 1930s has parallels in the range of threats Australians face today. These include job insecurity, housing, poverty, family violence, climate change and the ongoing effects of COVID-19 on Australian health, food supply, the economy and society.
During the Great Depression, politicians such as Jack Lang used ‘national security’ to talk about poverty, work and education. National Archives of Australia
Just as in the 1930s, the health of Australians today “will lay the foundations of national security and progress in the future”. Taking a broader view of Australian “national security” reveals how narrow military framings distract from the lack of a clear vision for social, economic, environmental and political security as we head into the third year of the pandemic.
Ugly undertones
A key element of understanding the meaning of “national security” is analysing who is included and excluded in the word “national”. One of the most common framings of “national security” in the 1930s was wrapped up in identity: Australian values, ideals and way of life.
In newspapers and in the parliament, security was pinned on the White Australia Policy protecting a racially homogenous national identity.
These anxieties about identity as security are mirrored today. The Morrison government plays on longstanding threads of racism, xenophobia and fears of invasion to invoke security threats.
“National security” is too often used to conjure up amorphous threats beyond our shores, without fully explaining the dangers allegedly posed to Australians. It seems well past time the term “security” took on a broader, more sophisticated meaning, encompassing the health, safety and well-being of the nation.
Mia Martin Hobbs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
