Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

Several times this week, protesters have forced Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to abandon events aimed to support the COVID vaccination rollout.

Over the past few weeks, thousands have gathered, in breach of COVID restrictions and public health measures, to protest against lockdowns and vaccination mandates. The PM has described such protests as “obviously illegal” and “morally wrong”.

As Delta infections rise and several professions now face mandatory vaccination as part of the drive to get to 90% vaccination rates, protests will likely expand.

But so will penalties for intentional breaches of COVID orders as amendments come into effect this month. A person who intentionally fails to comply with restrictions could face fines of up to NZ$12,000 (up from $4,000) or six months in prison. The maximum fine for failing to wear a mask where it is mandatory rises to $4,000 (from $300).

The importance of protests

Protesting is part of Aotearoa’s identity. New Zealanders have protested against poverty, war, nuclear weapons, gender inequality and the loss of Māori land and customary rights. Several protests — including those against the 1981 Springbok tour — have divided the nation.

Although there is no specific right to protest in law, protesting is a manifestation of rights to freedom of movement, association and peaceful assembly. Globally, these rights are protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 and the ensuing framework of human rights treaties. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 guarantees these rights.

But despite the legal underpinnings of the right to protest, specific protest actions must be in accordance with the law. They must not be unduly disorderly, violent or unsafe.

Read more:
COVID-19 ‘freedom’ rallies actually undermine liberty – here’s why

No right to disorderly protest

The restrictions on the right to protest can be seen in the criminalisation of certain conduct. For example, if someone behaves offensively in a public place, they could face a $1,000 fine. Indecent or obscene words can cost up to $500.

The fine could go to $2,000 and three months in prison if the behaviour becomes disorderly by acting or encouraging others to behave in a riotous, threatening or violent manner.

Threatening a police officer, or committing an actual assault, could result in a $6,000 fine or six months in prison. Common assault on other citizens carries the same penalty. Causing wilful damage to property could cost a protester up to $2,000, the same as graffiti. Obstructing a public road without the correct authority can result in a $1,000 fine.

Even excessive noise or burning the national flag, if done in a particularly offensive way intended to dishonour it, could have repercussions for the protester.

Limits on crowd sizes

COVID rules also currently restrict the right to peaceful assembly. These restrictions have been justified by the need to protect public health, which is recognised in international law. However, any such restrictive measures must be specifically aimed at preventing disease.

While New Zealand’s alert level 4 was very strict, alert level 3 is a little more liberal. Currently, Aucklanders are still expected to stay home, with exceptions for those who can’t work from home. Most events can’t proceed, except for ten-person gatherings at weddings, civil unions, funerals and tangihanga.

From next week, when restrictions are expected to ease further, Aucklanders will enjoy the freedom of larger outdoor gatherings of up to 25 people. Some shops will also reopen.

The question now is how authorities should respond to growing protests, some of which may involve illegal activity, in terms of breaching the above orders. The guiding principles for the police are that they must act to ensure public support and confidence, remain independent and impartial and act professionally, ethically and with integrity.

Read more:
Public protest or selfish ratbaggery? Why free speech doesn’t give you the right to endanger other people’s health

The importance of restraint

With any intervention to uphold the law, the police must consider keeping the peace and maintaining public safety as well as reassuring the community.

In Australia, some COVID protests have gotten out of hand and police responded with rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray. With very few exceptions, this approach is absolutely wrong. The guiding principle must be maximum restraint in the use of force when confronting protests.

The emphasis must be on de-escalation of tense and volatile situations. The decision to intervene should only be taken at the highest level of the police force, when there is no other means to protect the public order from an imminent risk of violence.

This is not to say those who break the laws should not be brought to justice. They should — but after the event, not during it. Although rules may be broken, non-aggressive crowds of protesters should not be unnecessarily dispersed.

The current tactic of identifying those who break the rules and bringing them to justice later for their illegal activity is correct and appropriate for a country that values the importance of protests, as well as law and order.

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.

– ref. Protesting during a pandemic: New Zealand’s balancing act between a long tradition of protests and COVID rules – https://theconversation.com/protesting-during-a-pandemic-new-zealands-balancing-act-between-a-long-tradition-of-protests-and-covid-rules-171104

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Grayson Cooke, Associate Professor, Chair of Creative Arts, Southern Cross University

Clouds have been objects of reverie and wonder throughout human history, inspiring art and imagination, and of course warning of extreme weather events.

Clouds are also central players in Earth’s climate. They move water around the globe, reflect sunlight and interact with radiation emitted by the Earth, and in so doing can both cool and warm the planet.

How clouds react as the planet heats up is a matter of serious concern. As the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report reiterates, we sit on the brink of a precipice in terms of our ability to slow or halt the global heating humans are causing.

Climate scientists study clouds closely, but translating scientific findings into forms that catch the public imagination is not always an easy task. Our new film, Path 99, uses satellite imagery and the tools of art and science to show clouds in a spectacular new light.

Satellites, clouds and invalid data

Remote sensing satellite data is produced by a very large multinational effort, and it makes an immense contribution to our knowledge of the world. Meteorology, geoscience and climate science all rely on satellite data.

But we can gain even more from this data if we explore it via the creative arts. When we bring knowledge to life through imagination and feeling, we can create new ways of experiencing, understanding and responding to our planet.

Read more:
Curious Kids: where do clouds come from and why do they have different shapes?

Path 99 – which launches next week at the New Zealand International Film Festival – uses satellite images of clouds over Australia to highlight the importance of clouds to climate. Designed to be viewed on the domed screen of a planetarium with an enveloping electronic soundtrack, it combines art, science and Earth.

We used data from two satellites, America’s Landsat 8 and Japan’s Himawari 8, made available by Geoscience Australia and the Digital Earth Australia program, and the Bureau of Meteorology.

Landsat 8 is an Earth observation satellite mainly used for monitoring environmental conditions at ground level. Its orbit takes it over the poles while the planet spins beneath it, which means it can view the entire globe over the course of a 16-day cycle of 233 orbits or “paths”. The track running down the centre of Australia is path 99, hence the film’s title.

Read more:
An artist’s surreal view of Australia – created from satellite data captured 700km above Earth

For geoscientists, clouds are an obstruction to the view of the land from orbit. They use software to comb through satellite data pixel by pixel, identifying and removing clouds and other atmospheric noise to obtain clear images.

At any given time, clouds cover around two-thirds of Earth, so what the scientists sift out creates a vast archive of “invalid data” – a multi-year record of incredible cloud formations.

Our project focuses on this “invalid data”, showing the clouds, cloud shadow and gauzy fragments of land that are deemed unusable for scientific Earth observation.

A scientist’s waste can be an artist’s treasure. Projects like ours, combining art and science, show what can be gained when we look at the aesthetic qualities of the objects of scientific enquiry from a more human-centred perspective.

Clouds in a new light

Landsat 8’s sensor records what is known as “multi-spectral” imagery. This is data recorded in “bands” that isolate specific parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, from visible light to the near infrared.

Scientists use the infrared bands to study plants and water. When we used them to render clouds, we discovered startling colours, textures and forms.

The dramatic shift in colouration that results from mapping the infrared bands into the visible spectrum, turning shades of white and grey into highly coloured tableaux, translates clouds into something radically unexpected.

Scientifically speaking, the coloured images reveal the remarkable spectral complexity of clouds, in terms of which wavelengths of sunlight they reflect and which they absorb. The variations in colour reflect wide ranges of cloud temperatures, densities, and heights, as well as the presence or absence of dust and other aerosol particles.

Tracing vapour

The Himawari 8 satellite sits in a geostationary orbit high above a point on the equator just north of Papua New Guinea. Its field of view allows it to record multi-spectral images of much of the Asia-Pacific region every 10 minutes, including several infrared bands used to track gases and other particles in the atmosphere.

In the video clips shown in this article, Path 99 uses bands designed to show the transport of water vapour around the planet. This allows us to see Australia’s clouds in their wider context, as part of the massive circulations that distribute thermal energy around the Earth.

Heads in the clouds

As modern human existence increasingly transforms the Earth, its atmosphere and climate, we need new ways to understand, represent and address this impact.

Cloud behaviours are vital clues to the extent of the changes in climate and weather. Now more than ever, we should all have our heads in the clouds.

Read more:
Artists are not at the negotiating table at COP26 but art is everywhere. What can they accomplish through their work?

This project has been produced with the support of Geoscience Australia and Digital Earth Australia, and with the assistance of resources from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) which is supported by the Australian Government.

Christian Jakob receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

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

– ref. Clouds in a new light: rejected satellite data gives a fresh view of our floating companions – https://theconversation.com/clouds-in-a-new-light-rejected-satellite-data-gives-a-fresh-view-of-our-floating-companions-168373

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Cunneen, Senior Lecturer in English and Literacy Education, Student Success and LANTITE coordinator, University of Canberra

At the start of each university year, we ask first-year students a question: how many have been told by their secondary teachers not to use Wikipedia? Without fail, nearly every hand shoots up. Wikipedia offers free and reliable information instantly. So why do teachers almost universally distrust it?

Wikipedia has community-enforced policies on neutrality, reliability and notability. This means all information “must be presented accurately and without bias”; sources must come from a third party; and a Wikipedia article is notable and should be created if there has been “third-party coverage of the topic in reliable sources”.

Wikipedia is free, non-profit, and has been operating for over two decades, making it an internet success story. At a time when it’s increasingly difficult to separate truth from falsehood, Wikipedia is an accessible tool for fact-checking and fighting misinformation.

Why is Wikipedia so reliable?

Many teachers point out that anyone can edit a Wikipedia page, not just experts on the subject. But this doesn’t make Wikipedia’s information unreliable. It’s virtually impossible, for instance, for conspiracies to remain published on Wikipedia.

Read more:
On the job with a ‘Wikipedian in residence’

For popular articles, Wikipedia’s online community of volunteers, administrators and bots ensure edits are based on reliable citations. Popular articles are reviewed thousands of times. Some media experts, such as Amy Bruckman, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s computing centre, argue that because of this painstaking process, a highly-edited article on Wikipedia might be the most reliable source of information ever created.

Traditional academic articles – the most common source of scientific evidence – are typically only peer-reviewed by up to three people and then never edited again.

Read more:
Explainer: what is peer review?

Less frequently edited articles on Wikipedia might be less reliable than popular ones. But it’s easy to find out how an article has been created and modified on Wikipedia. All modifications to an article are archived in its “history” page. Disputes between editors about the article’s content are documented in its “talk” page.

To use Wikipedia effectively, school students need to be taught to find and analyse these pages of an article, so they can quickly assess the article’s reliability.

Is information on Wikipedia too shallow?

Many teachers also argue the information on Wikipedia is too basic, particularly for tertiary students. This argument supposes all fact-checking must involve deep engagement. But this is not best practice for conducting initial investigation into a subject online. Deep research needs to come later, once the validity of the source has been established.

Still, some teachers are horrified by the idea students need to be taught to assess information quickly and superficially. If you look up the general capabilities in the Australian Curriculum, you will find “critical and creative thinking” encourages deep, broad reflection. Educators who conflate “critical” and “media” literacy may be inclined to believe analysis of online material must be slow and thorough.

Yet the reality is we live in an “attention economy” where everyone and everything on the internet is vying for our attention. Our time is precious, so engaging deeply with spurious online content, and potentially falling down misinformation rabbit holes, wastes a most valuable commodity – our attention.

Wikipedia can be a tool for better media literacy

Research suggests Australian children are not getting sufficient instruction in spotting fake news. Only one in five young Australians in 2020 reported having a lesson during the past year that helped them decide whether news stories could be trusted.

Our students clearly need more media literacy education, and Wikipedia can be a good media literacy instrument. One way is to use it is with “lateral reading”. This means when faced with an unfamiliar online claim, students should leave the web page they’re on and open a new browser tab. They can then investigate what trusted sources say about the claim.

Read more:
We live in an age of ‘fake news’. But Australian children are not learning enough about media literacy

Wikipedia is the perfect classroom resource for this purpose, even for primary-aged students. When first encountering unfamiliar information, students can be encouraged to go to the relevant Wikipedia page to check reliability. If the unknown information isn’t verifiable, they can discard it and move on.

More experienced fact-checkers can also beeline to the authoritative references at the bottom of each Wikipedia article.

In the future, we hope first-year university students enter our classrooms already understanding the value of Wikipedia. This will mean a widespread cultural shift has taken place in Australian primary and secondary schools. In a time of climate change and pandemics, everyone needs to be able to separate fact from fiction. Wikipedia can be part of the remedy.

Rachel Cunneen has received grants from the ACT Education Directorate; The University of Canberra and the US Embassy (Aust).

Mathieu O’Neil has received grants from the ACT Education Directorate; The University of Canberra and the US Embassy (Aust). He is affiliated with the Digital Commons Policy Council.

– ref. Students are told not to use Wikipedia for research. But it’s a trustworthy source – https://theconversation.com/students-are-told-not-to-use-wikipedia-for-research-but-its-a-trustworthy-source-168834

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

Here’s a story from the Bible. As far as I know, it’s the first reported instance of the branch of economics known as “implementation theory”.

It’s from the First Book of Kings, Chapter 3, starting at Verse 16.

Two women came before King Solomon with two babies, one dead and one alive.

Each claimed the live boy was her son, and the dead boy belonged to the other.

Then the king said, “Bring me a sword.” So they brought a sword for the king. He then gave an order: “Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other.”

The woman whose son was alive was deeply moved out of love for him and said to the king, “Please, my lord, give her the living baby, don’t kill him!”

The other said, “neither I nor you shall have him, cut him in two!”

Then Solomon gave his ruling:

Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother.

Implementation theory asks the following question: given a social objective, can we design a game or “mechanism” whose predicted outcome is desirable?

If you think that sounds broad, you are right. A social objective could be almost anything: what public goods to provide, whom to elect, what our environmental or defence policy should be, how to pay for things.

Solomon pioneered “implementation theory”

This suggests a tantalising possibility. Maybe some central authority, a “mechanism designer” like King Solomon could construct a series of questions for the parties involved that would lead us to the best outcome for society.

Solomon might have begun the practice, but the formal study of it began with another wise person, Eric Maskin, in 1977. He went on, three decades later, to win the Nobel Prize for his work.

Read more:
Economic theories that have changed us: game theory

Maskin spoke about “social choice functions”. A social choice function is a sort-of formula that takes as an input all the relevant attributes of the people in a society and gives as an output the best social choice.

You could envisage one where the output was the best environmental policy and the best way to pay for it and the input was all the views in society.

But Maskin discovered that only certain types of problems can be solved this way.

It’s less easy than Solomon made it look

Among the problems that cannot be solved this way are those where decisions have distributional consequences, such as whether to build a road which will leave some people better off and and some people relatively worse off.

Another problem is while a mechanism might implement a desirable outcome, it might not be the only desirable outcome. In the language of economics, it might be an equilibrium, but not the only equilibrium.

Later economists have helped. John Moore and Raphael Repullo showed that by allowing for sequential rather than simultaneous announcements by players, it is possible to resolve both of these limitations: We are able to implement any social choice function as a unique equilibrium. Wow!

But there’s progress

If that sounds too good to be true it kind of is. With co-authors, I have shown that sequential mechanisms might not properly work if there is even a tiny amount of incomplete information shared between the players.

Ernst Fehr, Mike Powell and Tom Wilkening have shown that a lot depends on what is observable.

In an attempt to get social choice functions with sequential announcements to work, I and others have proposed a new type of mechanism that is impervious to incomplete information and to some departures from rationality.

Read more:
The legacy of John Nash and his equilibrium theory

I am not saying we can construct mechanisms to solve all public policy questions.

What I am saying is the work done so far provides important lessons.

1. People need incentives to reveal their private information. If we expect people to provide information needed for making better public policy, we need to make it in their interests to reveal it.

2. For policy to be robust it needs to be simple. Complicated policy (just like complicated implementation mechanisms) can be “gamed” to deliver the wrong result.

3. We should be modest about what a central Solomon-like authority can do. Central rulers can be powerful, but they often have less information than what is dispersed in society, and have to respect the decision-making processes of others.

Editor’s note: This has been Richard Holden’s 300th contribution to The Conversation.

Richard Holden is president-elect of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

– ref. Vital Signs: Borrowing from King Solomon, economists are getting closer to working out how good leaders can make good decisions – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-borrowing-from-king-solomon-economists-are-getting-closer-to-working-out-how-good-leaders-can-make-good-decisions-171106

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lydia Edwards, Fashion historian, Edith Cowan University

More famous men are wearing dresses: from actor Billy Porter on the red carpet to singer-songwriter Harry Styles on the cover of Vogue. They have prompted much commentary, both positive and negative, leading fashion commentators to ask if frocks might become a regular part of men’s sartorial landscape.

At this year’s Met Gala, racing car driver Lewis Hamilton wore a white lace dress over a black suit and singer Troye Sivan wore a simple black gown. More recently, rapper Lil Nas X wore a purple suit with a matching train to the MTV Video Music Awards and a Cinderella-style gown at an earlier award ceremony.

The trend signifies a return to ancient sartorial norms, when more androgynous clothing was accepted and, indeed, required.

Such clothes were not “dresses” as we understand them today: the dress is a garment that has become indelibly “feminine”. But could skirts and dresses become mainstream garb for 21st century men beyond these celebrity trailblazers?

Our contemporary construct of masculinity is, of course, relatively recent. Until the early 20th century, boys and girls wore dresses until boys were “breeched” (put into breeches or “short trousers”) at around seven years old.

Pink was a manly colour, and it was almost impossible to tell boy and girl toddlers apart.

Read more:
Girlie or girl power? Breast cancer and the cult(ure) of pink

Androgynous frocks

Before the 15th century, much clothing for men and women was fairly androgynous, particularly outside Europe – where in many cultures this continues today.

Japanese kimono are robes with only subtle hints at gender difference. In parts of North Africa, the jellabiya – a long, loose robe perfect for the warm climate – is worn daily by men and women.

Ancient Egyptian men, including pharaohs, wore the schenti, a wrap skirt similar to a kilt. This garment was so practical and versatile it remained popular for over 2,000 years.

Ancient Greece and Rome saw universal wearing of the tunica, a simple gown that was shorter and looser for men, but constructed the same way for both sexes.

The elite wore longer chiton and toga, which could be more elaborately accessorised to indicate the wearer’s gender. In these societies, the higher a man was on the social ladder, the longer his gown.

Divided garments (not then known as “trousers”) were generally worn only by soldiers and the working class. To ancient Greeks and Romans, leg coverings were more representative of the barbarian than powerful, civilised men.

From 800 AD, bifurcated (divided, two-legged) styles slowly emerged in the Christian world, propagated by the medieval emperor Charlemagne as a way of linking physicality and aggression with new European concepts of “manliness”. Such garments later came to symbolise (male) control and authority.

This was a gradual process, however. In medieval Europe, men and women wore long, layered clothing and tunics until the slow advent of tailoring in the 1400s. Even armour, the most “macho” of male attire, could still feature a metal “skirt” pleated similarly to contemporary tunics.

From the 15th century on, shorter tunics took hold for men, beneath which they could wear hose or stockings and, later, breeches.

Aside from brief outlier trends, (for example the lampooned and short-lived “petticoat breeches”) men’s hemlines continued to move north.

The advent of stockings and a codpiece and, until the 1820s, relatively tight-fitting pants for men, acted as a non-verbal reminder of their political and economic power.

This was in stark contrast to the treatment of women’s legs, which as one writer put it in 1818:

although dressed, are […] immediately connected with parts which are not, and which decency strictly conceals from view.

Repression of expression

Women fought for a long time to wear trousers, making discreet strides in the adoption of bloomers as underwear in the 19th century. While gradually accepted as trouser-wearers in the early 20th century (and in the professional realm from the late 1960s), the same freedom of clothing choice has not been given to men.

For women, wearing trousers represented physical freedom, making certain jobs – and therefore, financial freedom – easier. Men do not have that same need, in a practical sense, to adopt dresses.

Arguably, a dress does not make any aspect of life easier, but it does allow an individual to express themselves in different ways. Restricting this suggests repression of far more than physical movement.

It could be argued that since the 18th century, (in the west at least), men have played second fiddle to women in terms of glamour and excitement in clothing. Contrary to popular belief, it was generally women who imposed what we now see as extravagant and restrictive sartorial customs, such as the cage crinoline. For many women, fashion was the one area of life over which they had some control.

Read more:
From ‘macaronis’ to mohawks, men’s fashion has always been political

During the 19th century, an era famously described by psychologist Carl Flugel as the “great male renunciation” of brilliant fashion, men had eye-wateringly little choice of garments compared to women. The monopoly of the (male) suit has perhaps been a result of this one-sidedness. Promoting dresses for men could redress the imbalance.

Fitting dresses to men

If dresses are to become a genuine part of menswear once again, we need first to establish what differences, if any, there will be with women’s. How will the fit be determined? How will they be worn?

This is not necessarily the same as producing androgynous or gender fluid clothes. It is about dresses that will allow men, who wish it, to still feel masculine – as trousers can make women feel feminine.

While fashion slacks were often made to conform to a woman’s body (putting aside utilitarian and wartime uniforms) there seem to be very few dresses made exclusively for the male physique.

Billy Porter’s velvet tuxedo gown worn to the 2019 Oscars was an exception. A hybrid male and female garment, it used black to create a link to contemporary womenswear, and men’s traditional evening wear. Crafted by designer Christian Siriano, it consisted of a tuxedo-style bodice with voluminous, ballgown skirt.

Read more:
And the best penguin Oscar … a closer look at the tuxedo

This dress was elite rather than mainstream fashion, created exclusively for Porter. Styles’ ethereal Gucci number on the Vogue cover is likewise hardly accessible to the everyday consumer, demanding a high level of confidence to pull off.

The same can be said of frocks and frock-spirations chosen by at the 2021 Emmys and Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness at the Creative Arts Emmys in 2018.

As Oscar Wilde put it when discussing women’s dress reform in the 1880s:

If the divided skirt is to be of any positive value, it must give up all idea of being identical in appearance with an ordinary skirt … [it must] … sacrifice its foolish frills and flounces.

Perhaps men’s dresses should aim for that same end: not to masquerade as anything else, but to take on a life of their own as new, separate garments.

A viable option?

Examples such as Porter’s and Styles’ frocks prompt intrigued debate. Other examples of men wearing dresses are usually associated with transvestism or those undergoing gender reassignment.

Huge progress over the past few decades has made their visibility and acceptance far more widespread, along with gender fluid and queer identity becoming a regular part of the fashion landscape, thanks to designers such as Harris Reed, Telfar Clemens and Charles Jeffrey Loverboy. Each, in their own way, are creating and championing fluid fashion, showing the world how it can be done.

However, we are not yet at the point where most men would consider a dress a viable option, or where a man wearing a dress would not provoke assumptions around sexuality or gender identity. We also seem to be at a crossroads in terms of how men in dresses are received by different communities.

A controversy arose earlier this year when cisgender man, the rapper Kid Cudi, performed on Saturday Night Live wearing a dress intended to pay tribute to Kurt Cobain.

In 1993, Cobain had boldly donned a similarly patterned, but shorter frock on the cover of The Face magazine, attracting considerable backlash.

In 2021, wearing a fuller, longer, more classically “feminine” style, Cudi was met largely with praise. However, some commentators – particularly those from the LGBTQI community – felt his choice was nothing but a “costume” worn by a performer.

Some pointed out that what was a publicity stunt for him amounted to a “life and death” decision, for which trans people have been severely bullied. The reality is that however casually a man might wear a dress, and whatever his motivations for doing so, the choice is fraught with political, emotional and social ramifications. It will be commented on and judged, positively or negatively.

Earlier this year, singer Post Malone’s stylist Catherine Hahn put the singer in a dress, another tribute to Cobain.

The success of this outfit inspired her to create “a unisex dress that could be worn every day. To work, to school, to skateboard in, or on a date.” The result is a calf-length, oversized plaid shirt that recalls 90s grunge styles and certainly offers a fun, fresh, casual option for men.

However, it is still unisex, rather than aimed specifically at men. Its shirt-like cut makes it a familiar, non-threatening segue for those wishing to experiment with dresses. This style is the closest we have seen to a potentially mainstream, workable male frock option.

Dresses are likely to remain a novelty for many men, a defiant show of bravery and individuality akin to the female pioneers of the rational and aesthetic dress movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Mind you, during this pandemic, there has been a surge in male skirt designs by the likes of Burberry and Stefan Cooke.

Many of these take inspiration from the traditional “man skirt”, the kilt. But longer, calf-length, pleated and A-line examples have been championed too. More men may have felt comfortable experimenting with a skirt or dress during the privacy of lockdown.

The year 2020 was a seismic shift in life as well as fashion. But given the highly gendered and ingrained nature of clothing codes, it seems unlikely we will see men’s dresses go mainstream anytime soon.

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

– ref. Friday essay: will the perfect men’s dress ever exist – and would men wear it? – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-will-the-perfect-mens-dress-ever-exist-and-would-men-wear-it-170112

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

When Scott Morrison fronted the travelling media at a stopover in Dubai on his way home, he looked drained. Here was a man in need of a steaming hot bath, and a big political reset.

He’s presumably had the opportunity for the former; he and his advisers will be mulling over the latter for a long while yet. It’s not an easy assignment, especially when it involves issues of integrity.

The “character” question is important in politics. In recent political history, it was part of the downfall of then Labor leader Mark Latham, who had appeared a strong prospect in the lead-up to the 2004 election.

Morrison has long been regarded as a slippery political player. The imbroglio with the French, in which Emmanuel Macron branded him a liar and he responded with a leaked Macron text, has further tarnished Morrison’s personal reputation – even accepting Australians won’t be inclined to side with France.

Labor is banking on these events playing into the negatives about Morrison that are already in some voters’ minds. Anthony Albanese said: “The only thing that the prime minister has accomplished on this trip is proving that he can’t be trusted”.

To adapt a line from Morrison’s climate policy mantra, the issue is not the “if” or “when” he needs to move forward, but the “how”.

With next year’s election rushing towards him, Morrison personally is no longer a clear asset for the government, as he was in 2019. It may be that, if the Coalition wins another term, it will be more in spite of him than because of him.

The Coalition normally wants “trust” to be a part of its pitch to voters. But how to do this, when the tag “liar” has been pinned onto its leader?

It’s difficult, although not impossible on the history. Immediately before he called the 2004 election, John Howard’s integrity had been freshly disputed in a hangover from the 2001 “children overboard” affair. That didn’t stop him making “trust” the centrepiece when he announced the poll. “Who do you trust to keep interest rates low?” he asked.

Read more:
View from The Hill: A battered Scott Morrison proclaims it’s time to ‘move on’

“Trust” can operate at more than one level. A voter might regard a leader as someone loose with the truth, but still trust him or her over the alternative to manage the economy or national security. It becomes a matter of which “trust” issue weighs more heavily with the electorate.

On the economic front, this government can expect to have a strong story for its election pitch. The September-quarter numbers, when they come, will show the economy having gone backwards because of the lockdowns, but the quarters that follow are looking good.

Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe said this week: “As vaccination rates increase even further and restrictions are eased, the economy is expected to bounce back relatively quickly”. Growth of 3% is forecast over 2021, with 5.5½% and 2.5% over the following two years. Lowe did add the obvious uncertainty – “the possibility of a further setback on the health front”.

The government can argue that, in economic terms, it sustained the community through the pandemic and therefore can be trusted on economic management.

But it may regard the “trust” ground in general as too treacherous, especially as linking “trust” and “politicians” raises a horse laugh in the community these days. “Who do you regard as more competent to manage the economy?” might avoid the hazards of having Morrison campaigning on “trust”.

The prime minister no doubt would like to rope in “national security” as a pillar of his election pitch and he would have thought the trilateral AUKUS agreement with the United States and the United Kingdom provided the ideal platform.

But, important as AUKUS is, relying on it in political terms has become more problematic. Not only does that take Morrison back to the fracas with the French, but there are increasing questions over the much-vaunted promise of nuclear-powered submarines.

All we have is an 18-month consultation process for these boats. We don’t know whether the design would come from the US or the UK. We do know the first sub wouldn’t appear for nearly two decades.

Given the Coalition’s abysmal performance over most of its term on submarines, some of the initial shine has gone off this deal, although it retains the public support of Labor.

Read more:
View from The Hill: How will Macron’s ‘pants on fire’ claim about Morrison play in the focus groups?

More generally, Labor is sticking close to the government on security issues, denying it a fight.

Ironically, the issue that was predicted to cause Morrison trouble on his trip – the government’s lacklustre commitment on climate policy for COP26 – turned out to be the least of his problems.

Australia’s policy didn’t impress, but that was overshadowed by the more general and important disappointments at the conference.

So, the political strategists will now be asking, where does this leave the climate issue for the election?

Still potent, one would guess, but lacking some of the sharpness it had before Glasgow – both because that focal point will have passed and because the conference, which is still running, isn’t as ground-breaking as many hoped.

Labor would be savvy to position its climate policy as somewhat more ambitious than Morrison’s but not too much more.

On the government side the Nationals, having reluctantly climbed on board for net-zero in 2050, are already feeling heat in Queensland. They need the government to pull out all stops to announce soon the trade-offs they were promised.

Morrison’s troubles strengthen the case for him to wait until May for the election and launch it off the back of an April budget.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg pointed on Thursday to an expected pre-poll budget. Asked on Sky to confirm there’d be a budget before the election he said, “Well, the prime minister’s spoken in those terms”.

Read more:
‘I don’t think, I know’ – what makes Macron’s comments about Morrison so extraordinary and so worrying

This would be the third election in a row that effectively started with a budget. That worked for Morrison in 2019; it didn’t go so well for Malcolm Turnbull in 2016, when he lost a swag of seats.

A budget – if received well – can usefully frame the campaign. If the economic outlook is rosy, as it looks like it may be, a pre-election budget can emphasise that. It can be used to put new policy in the most positive light (the wrinkles may only emerge later).

Another budget would give more prominence to Frydenberg, which would be an advantage if Morrison is tracking as damaged.

An April budget could also be a challenge for Labor, potentially forcing it into a more reactive position.

But while the arguments are strong for using a budget as the campaign’s start, there can be risks – one of them being that if there’s a sudden change of circumstances the government can’t delay – it has run out of time. And as Morrison’s trip showed so graphically, politics is always about 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.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: If the government is re-elected it may be in spite of Scott Morrison rather than because of him – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-if-the-government-is-re-elected-it-may-be-in-spite-of-scott-morrison-rather-than-because-of-him-171213

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

So the Parrot, as H. G. Nelson called him, has been pushed off his perch, Sky News having refused to renew his contract.

Over 36 years, Alan Jones became one of the most powerful, divisive and socially destructive voices the Australian media has ever produced.

At the same time, in rating terms, he became a phenomenon. In April 2020, he achieved his 226th ratings win in the Sydney breakfast time slot, a performance that has never been equalled and probably never will be.

It was an accomplishment built on three foundations. He was articulate in the red-blooded language of conservative outrage that his listeners felt but could not put into words. He had an unerring instinct for the issues that would inflame them, and he persuaded them that he was their champion in the corridors of power.

His broadcasting career began in 1985 when he joined Radio 2UE in Sydney as its mornings host. He moved to the breakfast shift in 1988 and soon took it to number one.

In 2001, he moved from 2UE to 2GB, taking a large slice of his audience with him and making that station number one in the Sydney breakfast market, a position it has recently regained after slipping briefly when Jones left in May 2020.
For a long time, he was politically untouchable.

In 1999, he was caught up in what became known as the cash-for-comment scandal. His evidence to the ensuing Australian Broadcasting Authority inquiry was dismissed by the counsel assisting, Julian Burnside, QC, as defying belief.

Read more:
The times suited him, then passed him by: the Alan Jones radio era comes to an end

In 2000, the inquiry made adverse findings against him.

Politically, he remained untouched. Within a few weeks, he was hosting an event for John Howard, who was then prime minister, and in 2001, he was dining with the Labor premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, to discuss government policy.

The following week, Carr dispatched his police minister-designate, Michael Costa, to Jones’ home to discuss law-and-order policy.

For his part, Howard used Jones’ program to reach that audience segment known as “Howard’s battlers”, occupants of what Jones called Struggle Street, of which Sydney’s western suburbs have a plentiful number and where Jones rated strongly.

To the extent he was able to put the issues of this audience directly to the likes of Howard and Carr, Jones was indeed a voice for the otherwise voiceless in the corridors of power. Whether this had any effect on voting intentions is another question.

Author and social researcher Rebecca Huntley has written that after 15 years of research, she had not found Jones to be any more influential with voters than ABC Radio or The Sydney Morning Herald. She concluded:

For a long time at 2GB, he was commercially untouchable, too.

In 2005, he was found by the Australian Communications and Media Authority to have breached the radio code of practice by inciting violence against people of Middle Eastern ethnicity in a series of incendiary broadcasts leading up to the race riots at Cronulla Beach that year.

The ACMA characteristically decided it was sufficient to enter into a “dialogue” with 2GB.

In 2012, he said Julia Gillard, who was then prime minister, should be put in a chaff bag, taken out to sea and dumped. At about the same time, he made a speech to the Sydney University Liberal Club in which he said Gillard’s recently deceased father had “died of shame” at the lies her daughter told.

In the aftermath of this, social media pressure on big advertisers such as Harvey Norman, Big W and Mercedes-Benz was so intense that Jones’ employer, Macquarie Radio, suspended all advertising on the show to take the pressure off them.

In 2019, Jones told Scott Morrison, who had by then become known as the “2GB prime minister”, to shove a sock down the throat of New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern. Jones was outraged Ardern had said Australia would have to answer to the nations of the Pacific on climate change.

This time, advertisers boycotted the Jones show in droves, costing 2GB an estimated 50% of the show’s revenue.

Macquarie Radio was getting sick of him. In addition to these advertising losses, in 2018, he had cost the network $3.75 million in a defamation action brought against it by four brothers whom Jones had wrongly accused of causing the deaths of people in Grantham, near Toowoomba, during the Queensland floods of 2011.

In May 2020, he retired from 2GB, but was snapped up Sky News amid great fanfare for a personal nightly spot at 8pm.

His ratings were poor. He routinely came fourth behind other Sky-at-Night luminaries such as Andrew Bolt, Paul Murray and Peta Credlin.

The COVID-19 disinformation he routinely spread on the program was a factor in Sky’s being suspended by YouTube for seven days in early August.

Shortly before that, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph had dropped his column, which he had also used to spread COVID disinformation.

Whatever his talents, and however impressive his record, he has been a canker on Australian democracy.

Finally he seems to have run out of platforms, not because of the harm he has done to the social fabric but because he is no longer rating well and bringing in big advertising dollars.

That is the way it was always going to end.

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

– ref. The last squawk? Alan Jones finally seems to have nowhere to go – https://theconversation.com/the-last-squawk-alan-jones-finally-seems-to-have-nowhere-to-go-171212

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Newman, Professorial Fellow in Psychiatry, The University of Melbourne

Four-year-old Cleo Smith was found by Western Australian police earlier this week, 18 days after going missing from a remote campsite.

Being taken and removed from one’s family is a significantly traumatic event for any child. It disrupts their entire world.

Children are dependent on their families and attachment figures for their sense of security and support. Sudden loss of these important relationships can result in fear, a sense of abandonment and confusion. Children left alone can become withdrawn and depressed and have little understanding of why this has happened to them.

There can be long-term effects, such as memories of the fearful experience, sleep disruption and anxiety. Some children will have difficultly rebuilding their sense of security and trust.

As a child psychiatrist who’s researched trauma, I’m interested in how we can ensure such children recover.

Family members, the media and the public also need to avoid certain actions or behaviours that could re-traumatise the child.

How can the child recover?

The first priority after finding the child is to immediately re-establish a sense of safety and stability, and to reunite them with their family.

The most important thing is to avoid intrusive, probing questioning straight away as this can be frightening and distressing. It’s a normal response for the child to try and not think about what they’ve just been through.

They will take their own time before they’re able to share details of their experiences, and will need considerable support and care to do this.

Intrusive questioning may re-traumatise the child. For survivors of trauma, being asked to focus on their memories and experiences of fear can be distressing and bring back the terror of the experience, particularly if they’re not ready to think about the events.

Police forces have skilled interviewers who understand and avoid this when recovering a child, and perform the interviews gradually.

There are open questions about any other sort of trauma Cleo may have experienced, but for now we don’t have any information on this. We might never know all the details and we need to respect the family’s right to privacy.

Some children might benefit from counselling, particularly if they have severe anxiety symptoms or have been held for a long time.

Children held for a long time often become dependent on their captor for survival, as they adapt to their situation and attempt to survive. It’s a very strange and traumatising position for the child to be in and may take a long time to recover from.

Over time, it’s important for attachment figures such as parents and carers to allow children to express fears in a gentle way.

Children may have “disguised anxieties”. They may develop fear about some other thing or event, for example storms or dogs, because they’re expressing anxiety about the traumatic event in a disguised way.

Adults should listen, not probe

Caregivers need to be guided by the child’s willingness to disclose, and when.

The response to trauma varies considerably. Some children tell parents or carers a lot about the experience at first. Others may disclose small details little by little over time, while some may not speak about details for months or years.

Parents or carers need to let the child speak at their own pace and be guided by the child’s level of anxiety. The aim is to give the child a safe space to speak to trusted people who can support them.

When they do start talking about their experience, adults must listen carefully and validate their feelings. Adults should reassure the child that he or she is safe now. It’s not a good idea to probe.

Believing what the child says is crucial.

Read more:
‘It’s real to them, so adults should listen’: what children want you to know to help them feel safe

Let’s not get carried away with speculation

We don’t know what the long-term consequences for Cleo will be. This will depend on what she’s been exposed to, which we don’t know yet. And we don’t always get a sense of closure – this isn’t as important as working on the best way to support her recovery.

The media should avoid premature comment and speculation on what might have occurred. The media currently have no idea what kind of person the suspect is and shouldn’t speculate on his behaviours and motives.

It’s also not helpful for the media to focus on extreme ideas about risk to children at the hands of predatory offenders.

Read more:
Missing and found: understanding the privacy needs of missing people

As the public, we shouldn’t speculate about the circumstances either or prejudge those involved. Police are methodical and thorough in their work and will need time to piece together the story of what may have happened.

The local community, and many members of the public, are likely to be anxious and fearful. A missing child strikes at the core of our desire to care for children. This may have negative impacts on community trust and relationships.

If this was random act, there’s the potential for ongoing fear. And it’s potentially more scary than the stereotypes we think of, such as a planned attack by a ring of perpetrators. A random attack is harder to make sense of, terrifying and unsettling.

Parents need support, too

Cleo’s parents, and any parents in a similar situation, have been through a horrendous ordeal.

They have the vital role of helping a child feel safe again, so they also need support to do this.

All parents may feel increased anxiety about child safety in the face of this event. Children may also hear about Cleo’s experience and worry this could happen to them. Fear is contagious when such a traumatic event impacts a community.

If parents are worried about their child showing trauma or anxiety symptoms, they should speak to GP who can refer to a psychologist or psychiatrist if more support is needed.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

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

– ref. When missing children return: how can we avoid adding to Cleo Smith’s trauma? – https://theconversation.com/when-missing-children-return-how-can-we-avoid-adding-to-cleo-smiths-trauma-171200

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Graves, Distinguished Professor of Genetics and Vice Chancellor’s Fellow, La Trobe University

Virgin birth – which involves the development of an unfertilised egg – has preoccupied humans for aeons. And although it can’t happen in mammals, it does seem to be possible in other animals with backbones (vertebrates), such as birds and lizards.

A recent paper led by researchers from San Diego Zoo in the United States reports two fatherless male chicks raised in a program to save the Californian condor from extinction. Could the species be restored by a single surviving female?

Sexual reproduction is fundamental in all vertebrates. Normally it requires an egg from a female to be fertilised by a sperm from a male, so each parent contributes one copy of the genome.

Violation of this rule, as for the fatherless condor chicks, tells us a lot about why sexual reproduction is such a good biological strategy – as well as how sex works in all animals, including humans.

How the fatherless chicks were identified

The magnificent California condor, a type of vulture, is the largest flying bird in North America. In 1982 the species declined to a population of just 22 individuals, sparking an ambitious captive breeding program led by San Diego Zoo which has seen numbers start to grow.

With so few birds, the team had to be careful not to choose parents that were closely related, as a lack of genetic variation would produce less vigorous offspring and steepen the slide to extinction.

The researchers conducted a detailed genetic study of the birds to avoid this, using DNA markers that were specific for condors and which varied between individual birds. They collected feathers, blood and eggshells from nearly 1,000 birds over 30 years.

By analysing these data, they established parentage, confirming that half the DNA markers in each chick came from a female and half from a male, as you’d expect. They continued to follow the fates of hundreds of captive-bred chicks in the colony, and after releasing them into the wild.

But there was something unusual about two male chicks, as detailed in the recent paper. These chicks, which hatched several years apart from eggs laid by different females, had DNA markers that all came from the female parent. There was no trace of markers from the male she’d been paired with.

Virgin birth

The development of unfertilised eggs is called “parthenogenesis” (from Greek words that literally mean “virgin creation”). It’s quite common in insects and other invertebrates like aphids and starfish, and can be accomplished by several different mechanisms. But it’s very rare in vertebrates.

There have been reports of parthenogenesis in fish and reptiles that were housed without males. In Tennessee, a lonely female Komodo dragon held in captivity for many years gave up on finding a mate and produced three viable offspring on her own. So did a female python and a boa, although these parthenogenic offspring all died early.

Some lizards, however, have adopted parthenogenesis as a way of life. There are female-only species in Australia and the US in which females lay eggs carrying only combinations of their own genes.

Parthenogenesis also happens in domesticated chickens and turkeys raised in the absence of a male, but the embryo usually dies. There are only a few reports of fatherless male turkeys that made it to adulthood, and just one or two that produced sperm.

How does it happen?

In birds, parthenogenisis always results from an egg cell carrying a single copy of the genome (haploid). Eggs are made in the ovary of a female by a special sort of cell division called meiosis, which shuffles up the genome and also halves the chromosome number. Sperm cells are made by the same process in the testis of a male.

Normally an egg cell and a sperm cell fuse (fertilisation), incorporating both parents genomes and restoring the usual (diploid) number of chromosomes.

But in parthenogenesis, the egg cell is not fertilised. Instead, it achieves a diploid state either by fusing with another cell from the same division — which is normally jettisoned — or by replicating its genome without the cell being divided.

So rather than getting one genome from the mother and a different one from the father, the resulting egg only has a subset of the mother’s genes in a double dose.

Fatherless birds will always be male

Condors, like other birds, determine sex by Z and W sex chromosomes. These work in the opposite way to the human XX (female) and XY (male) system, in which the SRY gene on the Y chromosome determines maleness.

However, in birds males are ZZ and females are ZW. Sex is determined by the dosage of a gene (DMRT1) on the Z chromosome. The ZZ combination has two copies of the DMRT1 gene and makes a male, whereas the ZW combination has only one copy and makes a female.

Read more:
How birds become male or female, and occasionally both

Haploid egg cells receive either a Z or a W from the ZW mother. Their diploid derivatives will therefore be ZZ (normal male) or WW (dead). The reason WW embryos can’t develop is because the W chromosome contains hardly any genes, whereas the Z chromosome has 900 genes which are vital for development.

Fatherless chicks must therefore be ZZ males, as was observed.

Why virgin birth fails

Is it possible an endangered bird species such as the condor could be resuscitated from a lone female survivor, by hatching a fatherless male chick and breeding with it?

Well not quite. It turns out parthenogens (fatherless animals) don’t do so well. Neither of the two fatherless condors produced offspring of their own. One died before reaching sexual maturity and the other was weak and submissive – making it a poor prospect for fatherhood.

In chickens and turkeys, parthenogenesis produces either dead embryos or weak hatchlings. Even female-only lizard species, though they seem robust, are generally the product of a recent blending of two species which messed up meiosis and left them no other option. These species don’t seem to last long.

Why do parthenogens do so poorly? The answer goes to the core of a fundamental biological question. That is: why do we have sex at all? You’d think it would be more efficient for the mother’s genome to be simply handed down to her clonal offspring without bothering about meiosis.

Variation is key

But the evidence says it’s not healthy to have a genome consisting entirely of the mother’s genes. Genetic variation is all-important in the health of an individual and its species. Mixing the gene variants from male and female parents is vital.

Read more:
These sex-starved creatures scavenge new genes from other pondlife

In diploid offspring with two parental genomes, good variants can cover for mutants. Individuals that inherit genes only from the mother may have two copies of a maternal mutant gene that weakens them – without a healthy version from a male parent to compensate.

Variation also helps protect populations from deadly viruses, bacteria and parasites. Meiosis and fertilisation provide many rearrangements of different gene variants, which can baffle pathogens. Without this added protection, pathogens could run amok in a population of clones, and a genetically similar population would not contain resistant animals.

So the ability of condor females to hatch chicks without a father is unlikely to save the species. On the bright side, human efforts have now led to hundreds of females – and males – flying the Californian skies.

Jenny Graves receives funding from the Australian Research Council

– ref. The endangered condor surprised researchers by producing fatherless chicks. Could ‘virgin birth’ rescue the species? – https://theconversation.com/the-endangered-condor-surprised-researchers-by-producing-fatherless-chicks-could-virgin-birth-rescue-the-species-170965

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cathy Foley, Australia’s Chief Scientist, Office of the Chief Scientist

The role played by University of Sydney Professor Edward Holmes in the COVID pandemic is already the stuff of legend. His decision to tweet the genome of SARS-CoV-2 on January 11 2020, making the data freely available to everyone, sparked urgent work in labs around the world to develop a test and a vaccine.

Within days, the first diagnostic tests were available, and that weekend, scientists at Moderna and Pfizer are reported to have downloaded the genome and set to work on their mRNA vaccines, bringing a new technology to medicine in record time.

But it is the deeper story I find most exciting. It is a story of excellent, painstaking research over many years, as the scientific community developed an understanding of genomics and virus behaviour, built a record of genetic sequences, and developed techniques to intervene at the tiniest scales.

This foundational work meant that when the pandemic struck, science was ready. Reports began to appear of a novel coronavirus causing illness in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of December 2019; Holmes’s tweet detailing the full genome of the virus was posted less than a fortnight later.

Read more:
4 of our greatest achievements in vaccine science (that led to COVID vaccines)

It is also a story of scientific expertise and confidence. While most of the world was coming to terms with the concept of a coronavirus, Holmes and other experts realised immediately what they were dealing with, and knew their first obligation was to share the information so researchers and their industry colleagues could go to work.

And it is a story of collaboration. As Holmes has pointed out, he would not have had the genome to share without deep scientific relationships. That day, he was on the phone with a colleague in China, Zhang Yongzhen, who held the genome information, and another in Edinburgh, who helped prepare the data for release.

A prizewinning effort

The lessons for scientific endeavour are clear, and Holmes is now the deserved recipient of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science, presented at a virtual event last night.

The pandemic has demonstrated the vital importance of global research collaborations and open sharing of findings, which makes science faster, more efficient and more accurate.

More than 400,000 papers have been written on COVID. Their open publication has allowed the development of vaccines and therapeutics at breakneck speed, saving millions of lives. The pandemic has highlighted the benefits of making research findings openly available for researchers, policy-makers, educators and others, and I am now championing an open-access approach for Australia.

One of the welcome aspects of the Prime Minister’s Science Prizes is the recognition it gives to great science teaching, which plays a crucial role in inspiring our young people to start on that path towards a scientific career. This year’s awards celebrated the work of Scott Graham, who has inspired students at Barker College in Hornsby, NSW, to study agriculture, and Megan Hayes, a STEM specialist at Mudgeeraba Creek State School in Queensland.

Four other scientists were recognised at the awards, all of whom demonstrate the drive that underpins great science and propels its practitioners to find ways to benefit the community.

Professor Sherene Loi, a medical oncologist at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, was recognised for her world-leading breast-cancer research that led to the development of a biomarker that is now routine in breast-cancer diagnosis in many countries.

Dr Keith Bannister, a research engineer with CSIRO Space and Astronomy, modified the CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder radio telescope to increase the detection rate of “fast radio bursts”. These mysterious bursts of intense energy from distant galaxies last just milliseconds but can release as much energy as the Sun emits in decades.

Bannister designed and built a system to preserve the data from the CSIRO’s radio telescope, and to track the source of the bursts.

Read more:
A brief history: what we know so far about fast radio bursts across the universe

Associate Professor Michael Bowen, at the University of Sydney, discovered a molecule with potential for treating brain disorders and tackling the opioid epidemic. This has led to a world-first clinical trial, now starting in Australia.

Also at the University of Sydney, Professor Anthony Weiss was recognised for developing and commercialising a natural “squirtable” skin-repair product, based on the protein that gives human tissue its elasticity. A spin-off company he founded has now been sold to one of the world’s largest biopharmaceutical companies for A$334 million.

The achievements of these scientists are so important to Australia, as are the efforts of the many researchers and technologists who sit behind them doing foundational work that builds over years, and collaborating in teams to tackle the difficult problems that are part and parcel of scientific discovery and impact.

Their achievements give me confidence we will solve today’s great challenges as we place science at the heart of efforts to tackle climate resilience, respond to the pandemic, and build the high-tech industries of the future.

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

– ref. Professor who tweeted the coronavirus genome, paving the way for new vaccines, scoops major Australian science award – https://theconversation.com/professor-who-tweeted-the-coronavirus-genome-paving-the-way-for-new-vaccines-scoops-major-australian-science-award-171208

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susanna Trnka, Associate Professor, University of Auckland

The recent announcement of a new Ministry for Disabled People is a watershed moment for people living with disabilities in Aotearoa New Zealand.

It comes none too soon, as COVID-19 has affected disability communities badly. Lockdown, particularly at levels 3 and 4, has put many disabled people in a nefarious catch-22. The very measures put in place to protect them are also often responsible for exacerbating their health conditions.

In our research we document the views of young New Zealanders with central nervous system disorders such as celebral palsy, chronic pain or illness, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Our findings show repeatedly that young people with disabilities would like to have a greater voice in determining policies and services — and in identifying what their needs actually are.

Throughout the pandemic, the government has emphasised the need to protect the vulnerable, including those with underlying health issues and disabilities. But, overwhelmingly, the messaging has been to non-disabled people about the needs of the disabled population. Very little space has been made for the voices of the vulnerable.

Disability rights activists and scholars have long argued people with disabilities are as limited by society’s perceptions of their impairments as by the impairments themselves.

They are often restricted from being fully able to participate in their own care because society takes being able-bodied for granted. Curbs on pavements that don’t allow for easy wheelchair access are just one obvious example.

Read more:
How pandemic responses neglected disabled people’s rights

Disabling the disabled

During the pandemic, it has become evident how social priorities further disable people with disabilities. Some of the provisions necessary for large-scale lockdowns — such as remote learning and working from home — are the very same disability activists have spent years, if not decades, campaigning for.

When the abled-bodied required these services, there was widespread mobilisation to shift education, corporate and other working environments and conferences online.

Another evident gap is the impact of long-term lockdowns on health and well-being. There is now a well-documented backlog of healthcare provision, including in physiotherapy, occupational therapy and surgeries. While this has widespread implications for all New Zealanders, it is particularly detrimental to individuals with disabilities who often rely on such services more urgently.

Read more:
Only one fifth of school students with disability had enough support during the remote learning period

One of the young people we spoke with suffers from a central nervous system disorder that causes severe body-wide chronic pain and generalised weakness on her right side. She said the delay in treatments such as physiotherapy has made her physical conditions much harder to bear while also causing her to worry about possible long-term deterioration.

Others mentioned repeated delays of care for chronic pain. Appointments were sometimes put off for more than three months.

The consequences included not only ongoing physical pain but also not being able to take part in activities like exercise, drawing or gaming. Previously, such activities helped take the edge off living through lockdown.

Towards a new normal

Our interviews and online observations also revealed lockdowns have doubled the mental health burden for many disabled youth, adding to or intensifying existing issues on top of other disabilities.

Their social media posts frequently note frustration over the suspension of regular services. Some wonder if they can’t access care because they aren’t currently “manic or psychotic” enough. One said there seemed to be a widely held assumption people can somehow “put crisis aside during lockdown”.

Many we spoke to were also unaware of the reinstatement, in late October, of health services including physiotherapy, occupational therapy and dental therapy in regions currently under alert level 3 restrictions. This suggests better communication is needed.

We are not suggesting lockdowns are not justifiable. But their cost should be more openly discussed and better managed. We also need to hear from a range of people, including those in whose name these measures are being promoted.

Hopefully the new Ministry for Disabled People will be an avenue for this kind of engagement.

But these changes must permeate more broadly as part of looking at ways we can all be protected from COVID while also trying to mitigate disadvantage falling too heavily on those who are already struggling.

Any much-vaunted “return to normal” must include a rethinking of what normality is. The previous status quo required significant improvements, particularly for the disabled community. Let’s hope the new normal includes and values the complexity of individuals with disabilities.

Susanna Trnka is the Principal Investigator on a Marsden project on youth and wellbeing, funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand. The grant also funded Luca Muir’s research.

Luca Muir is a disabilities rights activist and a graduate student in social anthropology at the University of Auckland.

– ref. A new ministry sets out to improve services and accessibility for New Zealanders living with disabilities – https://theconversation.com/a-new-ministry-sets-out-to-improve-services-and-accessibility-for-new-zealanders-living-with-disabilities-171099

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Bainton, Associate Professor, The University of Queensland

As the world shifts to renewable energy and fossil fuel industries close down, what will happen to the local workforce, communities and businesses that depend on them?

This week, at the global climate summit in Glasgow, business, government, and civil society leaders discussed how a “just transition” can help address the social challenges ahead. The term “just transition” is about prioritising decent work and quality jobs for displaced workers as coal mines, oil refineries, power plants and more, are rapidly phased out.

But, as we explain in our recent research paper, the idea of a just transition needs to expand. Many new mines will be required to meet demand for minerals used in clean energy infrastructure. And these mines may come with enormous impacts, including new forms of inequality, social exclusion, and impacts on land and natural resources.

If we fail to balance the social impacts of climate change with responsible climate action, we risk substituting one kind of harm for another – and this would be a disaster of another kind.

Justice in the energy transition

The world will need vast amounts of minerals and metals for clean technology, including iron ore for wind and solar power infrastructure, copper for electrification systems, and nickel for battery storage.

The mines for these energy transition minerals are likely to be deeper, lower grade, more energy and water-intensive, and built on Indigenous peoples’ lands. They will produce more mine waste and more hazardous tailings (mining residue).

Installing new renewable energy projects, such as solar and wind farms, will also cause social and environmental impacts. These projects need large areas of land, which can limit the rights of Indigenous peoples.

Read more:
Why most Aboriginal people have little say over clean energy projects planned for their land

The International Energy Agency predicts the combined revenues from critical minerals will overtake fossil fuels before 2040. Given this soaring demand, governments will be under pressure to attract investment, and approve new mines.

This will seriously test community consultation and processes for obtaining free, prior and informed consent from Indigenous peoples.

Big new mines also carry the potential to leave costly mining legacies. The historical problem of environmental clean-up and abandoned mines is an issue worldwide, as mined rocks can seep acid and heavy metals into waterways for decades. Building more mines would add to this problem.

We’ve already seen big impacts from mining energy transition minerals in, for example, Australia. At McArthur River, Traditional Owners continue to oppose the environmental and social impacts of lead and zinc mining to the nearby township of Borroloola, including the leaking of potentially harmful contaminants and smouldering waste rock.

Some countries are scrambling to secure the materials they need to transition their energy systems. China for instance has a monopoly on the production of rare-earth elements, such as neodymium, which are essential for renewable technologies like wind turbines and electric vehicles.

The uncertainty in the supply of these minerals could trigger new geopolitical conflicts, putting the era of open competition on global commodities markets under pressure. This could reduce transparency, and further increase human rights risks in supply chains.

A just transition must work to avoid these kind of sacrifice zones in remote mining communities and along global supply chains in the name of climate action.

Expanding the idea is gaining traction

A just transition was first proposed by the trade union movement in the 1970s. It was also mentioned in the preamble to the Paris Agreement and reaffirmed in the 2018 Silesia Declaration.

Read more:
Land, culture, livelihood: what Indigenous people stand to lose from climate ‘solutions’

The roundtable at Glasgow this week was a milestone, as it put the full scope of a just transition on the COP agenda. In opening the roundtable, former Irish president and climate justice campaigner Mary Robinson said the energy transition should uphold human rights, gender equality and the rights of workers everywhere.

Likewise, Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, said climate action should enable workers and communities to thrive with new jobs in a socially inclusive green economy. This underpins calls for a Green New Deal across the world.

And the Institute for Human Rights and Business, which convened the roundtable this week, plans to host a just transition event at every future COP.

So what do we need to do?

It’s taken decades to get the social impacts of climate change on the global agenda. Now, we must put greater focus on the social impacts of climate action.

The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights is an important place to start. This is an essential instrument to help all companies – mining, renewable technology and finance – take responsibility for their social and environmental impacts.

Read more:
COP26: a four-minute guide by a climate scientist

The principles require businesses to conduct human rights due diligence to avoid harming workers, local communities and people further down the renewables supply chain. This requires companies to understand where they may infringe on the rights of others, and act on these findings.

This is similar to the idea of climatising human rights, where powerful parties are held legally accountable for their climate impacts and actions.

The European Union is considering mandatory human rights due diligence laws, compelling businesses to assess the social and human rights impacts of climate action whether they’re extracting minerals or building renewable energy projects. This would be an important step towards climatising human rights.

These initiatives provide a platform for change. What’s missing is real action to carry them forward and achieve justice across all aspects of the energy transition.

That’s why tracking progress will be vital. The World Benchmarking Alliance has launched a just transitions assessment tool, and its findings were damning. It showed high-emitting companies are not using their influence to protect people, manage social impacts and advocate for a just transition.

This needs to change, urgently, as increased rates of extraction under the stress of climate change will create new patterns of harm.

This story is part of The Conversation’s coverage of COP26, the Glasgow climate conference, by experts from around the world.

Amid a rising tide of climate news and stories, The Conversation is here to clear the air and make sure you get information you can trust. Read more of our U.S. and global coverage.

Deanna is chief investigator of an ARC Linkage grant on public-private inquiries in mining; member of the International Council of Mining and Metals independent expert review panel; and trustee and member of the international advisory council for the Institute for Human Rights and Business. She is Director of the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining (CSRM) at The University of Queensland (UQ). CSRM conducts applied research with communities, governments, and mining companies.

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

– ref. More clean energy means more mines – we shouldn’t sacrifice communities in the name of climate action – https://theconversation.com/more-clean-energy-means-more-mines-we-shouldnt-sacrifice-communities-in-the-name-of-climate-action-170938

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthony Jorm, Professor emeritus, The University of Melbourne

Two major reports on mental health and suicide released this week suggest two very different solutions to preventing suicides.

One, from the House of Representatives Select Committee on Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, recommends putting more resources into the mental health workforce. This includes recruiting and training more health professionals.

This might sound commendable, but I argue the evidence shows this is unlikely to work.

The other report, from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) released today, provides the latest data on suicide and self-harm. This report makes no recommendations about preventing suicide. However, it identifies child abuse and neglect as a major modifiable risk factor for suicide right across the lifespan.

This approach to preventing suicide, involving removing the underlying causes, has more evidence to back it. Yet this was barely mentioned in the select committee report.

Read more:
We asked 9,000 Australians about their mental health needs post-COVID — this is what they want

More health workers unlikely to reduce suicide

In my own submission to the select committee report, I argued increasing treatment resources is unlikely to reduce rates of suicide.

Over the past 15 years or so, Australia has substantially increased spending on mental health services and expanded the mental health workforce considerably.

However, the suicide rate has been trending upward over this period. The AIHW report noted that between 2003 and 2019, the loss of life due to suicide increased by 13%.

It could be argued suicide would have risen even more over this period without the increase in services or the increase in services has not been sufficient to meet demand.

However, an examination of long-term suicide trends in Australia over three decades show no evidence various implemented service innovations and mental health policies have had any impact.

While it might be expected treating mental health problems with talk therapy or medication would reduce suicide deaths, there is very little evidence from randomised trials to support a reduction in suicide as a result of treatment.

A major limitation of any attempt to reduce suicide is that suicidal feelings often arise relatively quickly in response to overwhelming events. These include relationship breakdown, loss of a job, financial crisis or trouble with the law.

Suicidal actions can also be impulsive. This may be particularly the case for males and is more likely when the person has been using alcohol. In such circumstances, if a mental health professional was present, they may be able to support the person and prevent a suicide.

However, in practice, it is unlikely a professional will be present when a crisis occurs. This is why it is important everyone in the community has basic suicide prevention skills, as they may be in the best position to provide support on the spot.

Read more:
How to ask someone you’re worried about if they’re thinking of suicide

Could preventing child abuse and neglect work?

The AIHW estimates child abuse and neglect account for around a third of the burden of suicide and self-harm in females and around a quarter in males. “Burden” refers to the combined effects of suicide and self-harm on years of life lost and disability.

However, this is only a theoretical calculation based on what would occur if child abuse and neglect could be eliminated. The AIHW report does not suggest how Australia could go about reducing, let alone eliminating, this risk factor.

Read more:
Complex trauma: how abuse and neglect can have life-long effects

Reducing child abuse and neglect sounds like a difficult task and any benefits for suicide prevention would take decades to see.

However, there is evidence it is possible to reduce this and other childhood adversities that increase risk for suicide.

The Centre for Research Excellence in Childhood Adversity and Mental Health, with which I am affiliated, has reviewed the international evidence.

We found high-quality evidence for a number of interventions to reduce these adversities or lessen their impact on children.

To find out which interventions would best suit Australia’s needs, we convened a panel of experts and sought their consensus on national priorities.

The experts’ recommendations included:

• training programs to improve the quality of parenting

• home visiting programs where a nurse visits at-risk families with young children

• school programs to prevent bullying

• psychological therapies for children exposed to trauma.

These programs can work in various ways to protect children. These include improving the capacity of parents to care for themselves and their children, reducing adverse events such as bullying, and reducing the impact of adversities once they have occurred.

Read more:
Treating a child’s mental illness sometimes means getting the whole family involved

Where to next for suicide prevention?

On the surface, training more mental health professionals and providing more services seems a plausible approach to preventing suicide that is relatively easy to implement. However, the evidence does not support this actually works.

There is no one approach of achieving a lasting reduction in suicide in Australia. The causes of suicide are complex and require a multi-pronged solution.

However, reducing childhood adversities is part of the solution that has been neglected. Australia needs to give it greater priority.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Anthony Jorm holds a National Health and Medical Research Council Investigator Grant. He is a Chief Investigator on the Centre for Research Excellence on Childhood Adversity and Mental Health which receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council and Beyond Blue. He is also an unpaid Director of Mental Health First Aid International, Editor-in-Chief of Mental Health & Prevention, Chair of the Research Committee of Prevention United and a member of the Alliance for the Prevention of Mental Disorders.

– ref. Recruiting more mental health workers won’t stop suicides. Preventing child abuse and neglect will – https://theconversation.com/recruiting-more-mental-health-workers-wont-stop-suicides-preventing-child-abuse-and-neglect-will-171110

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pep Canadell, Chief research scientist, Climate Science Centre, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere; and Executive Director, Global Carbon Project, CSIRO

Global carbon dioxide emissions have bounced back after COVID-19 restrictions and are likely to reach close to pre-pandemic levels this year, our analysis released today has found.

The troubling finding comes as world leaders meet at the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow in a last-ditch bid to keep dangerous global warming at bay. The analysis was undertaken by the Global Carbon Project, a consortium of scientists from around the world who produce, collect and analyse global greenhouse gas information.

The fast recovery in CO₂ emissions, following last year’s sharp drop, should come as no surprise. The world’s strong economic rebound has created a surge in demand for energy, and the global energy system is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

Most concerning is the long-term upward trends of CO₂ emissions from oil and gas, and this year’s growth in coal emissions, which together are far from trending towards net-zero by 2050.

The global emissions picture

Global CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels dropped by 5.4% in 2020, compared to the previous year. But they are set to increase by about 4.9% above 2020 levels this year, reaching 36.4 billion tonnes. This brings them almost back to 2019 levels.

We can expect another 2.9 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions this year from the net effect of everything we do to the land, including deforestation, degradation and re-vegetation.

This brings us to a total of 39.4 billion tonnes of CO₂ to be emitted by the end of this year.

The fast growth in emissions matches the corresponding large increase in energy demand as the global economy opens up, with the help of US$17.2 trillion in economic stimulus packages around the world.

CO₂ emissions from all fossil fuel types (coal, oil and natural gas) grew this year, with emissions from coal and natural gas set to grow more in 2021 than they fell in 2020.

Emissions from global coal use were declining before the pandemic hit in early 2020 but they surged back this year. Emissions from global gas use have returned to the rising trend seen before the pandemic.

CO₂ emissions from global oil use remain well below pre-pandemic levels but are expected to increase in coming years as road transport and aviation recover from COVID-related restrictions.

Nations leading the emissions charge

Emissions from China have recovered faster than other countries. It’s among the few countries where emissions grew in 2020 (by 1.4%) followed by a projected growth of 4% this year.

Taking these two years together, CO₂ emissions from China in 2021 are projected to be 5.5% above 2019 levels, reaching 11.1 billion tonnes. China accounted for 31% of global emissions in 2020.

Coal emissions in China are estimated to grow by 2.4% this year. If realised, it would match what was thought to be China’s peak coal emissions in 2013.

India’s CO₂ emissions are projected to grow even faster than China’s this year at 12.6%, after a 7.3% fall last year. Emissions this year are set to be 4.4% above 2019 levels – reaching 2.7 billion tonnes. India accounted for 7% of global emissions in 2020.

Emissions from both the US and European Union are projected to rise 7.6% this year. It would lead to emissions that are, respectively, 3.7% and 4.2% below 2019 levels.

US and EU, respectively, accounted for 14% and 7% of global emissions in 2020.

Emissions in the rest of the world (including all international transport, particularly aviation) are projected to rise 2.9% this year, but remain 4.2% below 2019 levels. Together, these countries represent 59% of global emissions.

The remaining carbon budget

The relatively large changes in annual emissions over the past two years have had no discernible effect in the speed at which CO₂ accumulates in the atmosphere.

CO₂ concentrations, and associated global warming, are driven by the accumulation of greenhouse gases – particularly CO₂ – since the beginning of the industrial era. This accumulation has accelerated in recent decades.

To stop further global warming, global CO₂ emissions must stop or reach net-zero – the latter meaning that any remaining CO₂ emissions would have to be compensated for by removing an equivalent amount from the atmosphere.

Carbon budgets are a useful way of measuring how much CO₂ can be emitted for a given level of global warming. In our latest analysis, we updated the carbon budget outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in August this year.

From the beginning of 2022, the world can emit an additional 420 billion tonnes of CO₂ to limit global warming to 1.5℃, or 11 years of emissions at this year’s rate.

To limit global warming to 2℃, the world can emit an additional 1,270 billion tonnes of CO₂ – or 32 years of emissions at the current rate.

These budgets are the compass to net-zero emissions. Consistent with the pledge by many countries to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, CO₂ emissions need to decline by 1.4 billion tonnes each year, on average.

This is an amount comparable to the drop during 2020, of 1.9 billion tonnes. This fact highlights the extraordinary challenge ahead and the need to increase short- and long-term commitments to drive down global emissions.

Pep Canadell receives funding from the Australian National Environmental Science Program – Climate Systems Hub.

Corinne Le Quéré receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nos. 821003 (4C) and 776810 (VERIFY), from the UN Natural Environment Research Council under grant NE/P021417/1 (SONATA) and NE/V011103/1 (Frontiers), and from the UK Royal Society under grant RPR1191063 (Research Professorship.

Glen Peters receives funding from European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nos. 821003 (4C), 776810 (VERIFY), 820846 (PARIS REINFORCE), and 958927 (CoCO2).

Pierre Friedlingstein receives funding from the European Commission Horizon 2020 (H2020) 4C project.

Robbie Andrew receives funding from European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nos. 821003 (4C), 776810 (VERIFY), 958927 (CoCO2).

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

– ref. Global emissions almost back to pre-pandemic levels after unprecedented drop in 2020, new analysis shows – https://theconversation.com/global-emissions-almost-back-to-pre-pandemic-levels-after-unprecedented-drop-in-2020-new-analysis-shows-170866

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Pryke, Honorary Research Associate, University of Sydney

Marvel’s Eternals will likely divide audiences into two groups: those who wish to tease out the mythical and comic book influences in Chloé Zhao’s modern epic, and those who prefer to enjoy the spectacle. This review takes the first approach, yet the film offers much to entertain both types of viewer.

Eternals explores new horizons in the Marvel Universe, both in its god-like protagonists, and in the inclusivity of its casting and plot-lines.

Shifting the franchise’s focus from mortals with extraordinary abilities and/or superpowers (such as Iron Man or Black Panther, the Eternals are new breed of Earth-defenders: a group of immortal (or at least, impressively enduring) superheroes often mistaken for deities.

But while they are new to the Marvel universe, they could more accurately be described as the (very) old guard.

An early origin story

Classical myths play a shaping role in many modern superhero stories, a trend that continues in Eternals.

Thena (Angelina Jolie) is associated with the Greek goddess of warfare, Athena. Sersi (Gemma Chan) aligns with the enchantress from Homer’s Odyssey, Circe. Ikaris (Richard Madden) parallels the flying (and falling) Icarus from Cretan myth.

The first Eternals comic book was released in 1976. There, the Eternals and their enemies, the war-mongering Deviants, arrived from distant galaxies in ancient times and were viewed with awe by their puny Earthling relatives.

As the comic goes, the battles between Eternals and Deviants (continued in the film) were translated into the legends of numerous ancient cultures.

As per the self-mythology of the Eternals, it is not that these characters are inspired by Ancient Greek legends, but that Ancient Greek legends were inspired by them.

Read more:
Guide to the Classics: Homer’s Odyssey

The first ancient Near Eastern Marvel superhero

The film opens with ten Eternals, clad in colourful cosmic activewear, establishing their role as planetary protectors in Mesopotamia around 7000 BCE.

Ancient Mesopotamia (roughly located in modern-day Iraq) was home to many early developments in civilisation, such as writing, agriculture, and even some of the earliest known literary “superheroes”: the legendary king Lugalbanda, for example, was divinely gifted with superspeed.

The character of Gilgamesh in Eternals is the first ancient Near Eastern hero with a leading role in a Marvel film.

In myth, Gilgamesh is the heroic protagonist of the world’s oldest known epic. The ancient story follows the journey of the heroic young king as he adventures to the edges of the world in search of fame and immortality.

Eternals gives further nods to Mesopotamian myth. There is speculation from fans that Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) could represent the deity Kingu, from the Babylonian myth, Enuma Elish. In this myth, the primary deity Marduk battles the primordial ocean goddess, Tiamat.

Indeed, even Tiamat herself – or Tiamut in the film – counts among the heroes’ adversaries in Eternals.

A scene where the Eternals battle Deviants before the famous Ishtar Gate in ancient Babylon beautifully captures the largely untapped cinematic potential of the Mesopotamian world.

Don Lee’s Gilgamesh is a delight, well reflecting the brawny charm of the ancient hero as he smashes his way through crowds of Deviants with the same strength used to defeat the Stone Ones and the Bull of Heaven in the original epic.

Read more:
Guide to the classics: the Epic of Gilgamesh

A journey worth taking

The presence of a Mesopotamian legend and Korean superhero are just two of the “firsts” seen in Eternals. Others include the first openly gay superhero in the franchise (Phastos, played by Brian Tyree Henry), and a superhero who is hearing impaired (Lauren Ridloff’s Makkari).

The presence of same-sex relationships and characters with disabilities are common to many ancient myths and modern comics (Hawkeye of Avengers fame is portrayed with a hearing impairment in many comics). Here, Eternals’ Phastos is identified through his technical skills with Hephaestos, the Greek god of metalwork. In Classical myth, Hephaestos is depicted with a physical diability, walking with a limp.

Interestingly, metal work may have been a common occupation for people with physical disabilities in ancient Near Eastern culture — reflecting the interplay between history, myth, and popular culture common to the superhero genre.

Indeed, the film’s increased inclusivity brings it into closer alignment with both its ancient and modern sources.

For myth and comic book buffs, there is plenty to explore in Eternals. The film’s use of on-location shooting helps create a universe that feels broader and deeper than many before. The journey of Madden’s Ikaris reflects the typically creative recycling of ancient legends found in the comics.

Like speedy Makkari (whose character aligns with the messenger deity, Mercury known for his winged shoes), Ikaris’ power of flight is shared by his mythical counterpart Icarus – but it’s a power that must be used wisely.

Fans of the Gilgamesh epic will note his tendencies to take power naps and fight celestial bulls are adapted from ancient legend.

For those seeking pure entertainment, Eternals offers an inviting – at times spectacular – step into a world that is at once both old and new.

Eternals is in cinemas from today.

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

– ref. Eternals is something entirely new for Marvel – and entirely ancient in its origins – https://theconversation.com/eternals-is-something-entirely-new-for-marvel-and-entirely-ancient-in-its-origins-170953

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joshua Chou, Senior lecturer, University of Technology Sydney

Last month the Australian Space Agency announced plans to send an Australian-made rover to the Moon by as early as 2026, under a deal with NASA. The rover will collect lunar soil containing oxygen, which could eventually be used to support human life in space.

Although the deal with NASA made headlines, a separate mission conducted by private companies in Australia and Canada, in conjunction with the University of Technology Sydney, may see Australian technology hunting water on the Moon as soon as mid-2024.

If all goes according to plan, it will be the first rover with Australian-made components to make it to the Moon.

Roving in search of water

The ten-kilogram rover, measuring 60x60x50cm, will be launched on board the Hakuto lander made by ispace, a lunar robotic exploration company based in Japan.

The rover itself, also built by ispace, will have an integrated robotic arm created by the private companies Stardust Technologies (based in Canada) and Australia’s EXPLOR Space Technology (of which I am one of the founders).

Using cameras and sensors, the arm will collect high-resolution visual and haptic data to be sent back to the mission control centre at the University of Technology Sydney.

It will also collect information on the physical and chemical composition of lunar dust, soil and rocks — specifically with a goal of finding water. We know water is present within the Moon’s soil, but we have yet to find a way to extract it for practical use.

Read more:
Water on the Moon: research unveils its type and abundance – boosting exploration plans

The big push now is to identify regions on the Moon where water sources are more abundant, and which can deliver more usable water for human consumption, sample processing, mining operations and food growth.

This would also set the foundation for the establishment of a manned Moon base, which could serve as a transit station for further space exploration (including on Mars).

Moon-grade materials

Once the Hakuto lander takes off, the first challenge will be to ensure it lands successfully with the rover intact. The rover will have to survive an extreme environment on the lunar surface.

As the moon rotates relative to the Sun, it experiences day and night cycles, just like Earth. But one day on the Moon lasts 29.5 Earth days. And surface temperatures shift dramatically during this time, reaching up to 127℃ during the day and falling as low as -173℃ at night.

The rover and robotic arm will also need to withstand the effects of space radiation, vibrations during launch, shock from the launch and landing, and exposure to dust and water.

At the same time, the arm must be light enough to conduct advanced manoeuvres, such as grabbing and collecting moon rocks. Advanced space-grade aluminium developed in Australia will help protect it from damage.

The team behind the mission is currently in the process of testing different designs of the robotic arm, and figuring out the best way to integrate it with the rover. It will be tested together with the rover at a new lunar test bed, at the EXPLOR Space Technologies facility in New South Wales.

Like the one used by NASA, this test bed can mimic the physical and chemical conditions on the Moon. It will be critical to determining whether the rover can stay mobile and continue to function under different environmental stressors.

Step into your astronaut boots

The rover will also send back data that allows people on Earth to experience the Moon with virtual reality (VR) goggles and a sensor glove. Haptic data collected back by the robotic arm will essentially let us “feel” anything the arm touches on the lunar surface.

We plan to make the experience available as a free app — and hope it inspires future generations of space explorers.

Read more:
So a helicopter flew on Mars for the first time. A space physicist explains why that’s such a big deal

Joshua Chou is the co-founder of EXPLOR Space Technologies.

– ref. Australia is putting a rover on the Moon in 2024 to search for water – https://theconversation.com/australia-is-putting-a-rover-on-the-moon-in-2024-to-search-for-water-170097

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Judith Brett, Emeritus Professor of Politics, La Trobe University

Remember Scott Morrison’s promise in May 2019: “You vote for me, you’ll get me. You vote for Bill Shorten and you’ll get Bill Shorten.” As well as attacking Shorten, Morrison was also signalling that the rules around the Liberal leadership had changed. Shortly after Morrison came through the middle of Peter Dutton and Malcolm Turnbull to become PM, the federal parliamentary Liberal Party changed the rules for selecting the leader. The person who led the party to electoral victory would lead it to the next election, so was now immune from the challenges and simple majorities that had unseated Tony Abbott and Turnbull.

This was the subtext. The main text was you don’t want Bill. To be sure, we didn’t get Bill, but now it seems that instead of the man himself, we’ve got Barnaby Joyce and the government’s climate policy was outsourced to the Nationals Party room.

It reminds me of 1963 when Arthur Calwell and Gough Whitlam, then the leader and deputy leader of the federal Labor Party, were photographed after midnight, waiting under a street light outside the Hotel Kingston for the federal executive to determine Labor’s policy on US bases. Before Whitlam reformed the party, policy was made in the organisational wing by the federal executive with no automatic representation of the parliamentary leadership. The 36 Faceless Men, journalist Alan Reid called them, and the term took off.

When then-Prime Minister Robert Menzies called a snap election a few months later, he pilloried Calwell as a man who took instruction from others, and so, was unfit to be Australia’s prime minister. Today we have a prime minister so lacking in authority and conviction that his emissions reduction policy depended on the outcome of Nationals’ Party meetings on not one but two Sunday afternoons.

As I have said many times, the National Party, and the Country Party before it, wields far more power than its electoral support warrants. It did do especially well at the 2019 election, winning around 10% of the vote, with which it won 16 lower house seats. It also provides the deputy prime minister, the deputy speaker, and, with Keith Pitt’s return to Cabinet, five Cabinet ministers. Its vote was about the same as the Greens, who have one lonely voice in the House of Reps. Thanks goodness for the Senate, where the proportional voting system gives the Greens representation that more truly reflects their support in the electorate – they have nine senators to try to hold back the more egregious of the government’s legislation and probe its actions.

Read more:
Want to understand how the Coalition works? Take a look at climate policy

Why won’t Anthony Albanese now say, “You vote for Morrison, you get Barnaby. You vote for me, you get me”? And why won’t he say it over and over and over? Like Abbott did with the brutal retail politics of calling the Gillard government’s price on carbon a tax, when, as Peta Credlin later admitted, it wasn’t one at all. “It took Abbott about six months to cut through,” she said, “but when he cut through, Gillard was gone”.

Albanese desperately needs some cut-through lines, to up his public profile, to simplify the political contest, and to land some blows on Morrison. The Nationals’ grandstanding should be a gift. It plays into two already existing doubts about Morrison: his capacity to lead, and his focus on electoral strategy rather than national problems.

The Nationals, with six Queenslanders, two Victorians and eight from New South Wales, are a party of the eastern states. There are no Nationals members from South Australia, Tasmania or Western Australia. This plays into the suspicion many already have that Morrison is the prime minister for New South Wales, an impression reinforced by his decision to live in Sydney in Kirribili House rather than the Lodge in Canberra.

Then there are the 38,000 or so coal miners we hear so much about, whose jobs are at risk if we move too fast to reduce our emissions. About as many people have already lost their jobs in universities over the past two years because the COVID pandemic stopped international students, and the government did nothing as the university sector shrank. The most obvious explanation for this difference is that people in universities are less likely to vote for the Coalition than the coal miners, with little consideration of their contributions to the national interest.

So, Labor and Albanese have plenty of opportunity to channel anger towards Morrison. Why are they so reluctant? I have been thinking a lot about anger in politics lately. In the book of essays I have just published, Doing Politics: Writing on Public Life, I pay tribute to the profound influence of Alan Davies and Graham Little from the University of Melbourne Politics Department on my thinking about politics. Davies and Little looked to psychoanalysis to help understand politics. Both wrote about emotions in public life, their risks and opportunities and the way they come in sets: fear, anger and paranoia; envy and resentment; pathos and compassion; guilt and denial; hope, possibility and delusion. The book includes a series of essays on our most recent leaders, and all draw on their wisdom.

Read more:
Labor’s wicked problem: how to win back Queensland

Since John Howard’s time as prime minister, the Liberals have specialised in the politics of fear and anger, fear of being over-run by refugees, of others getting what you deserve, and of change; and anger at anyone who opposed them. And they have succeeded, again and again, at turning fear and anger against Labor, such as at the last election when they whipped up fear of Labor’s policies on franking credits, negative gearing, electric cars and an ambitious climate target. It was negative campaigning and it worked enough to get the government back across the line.

Labor is not shy of negative campaigning, as in the 2016 “Mediscare” campaign, but it is more uneasy with anger. At present, Albanese seems mired in the politics of pathos, with the oft-repeated story of his childhood upbringing by a single mum in council housing, and his unfulfillable promise that there will be no one left behind. What he needs is some anger and to direct it at Morrison; to play the man like Morrison did against Shorten.

I can understand why he might be reluctant to do this. For many of us, anger is not a comfortable emotion. But anger has big advantages for a campaigning politician – its energy and its illusion of conviction – especially if it can be condensed into cut-through slogans and images. The emotions are not skilled workers, as the fictional poet Ern Malley so wisely observed, especially when they are abroad in public life. They need to be handled with black and white gloves to be effective. Morrison the electoral strategist knows this. Albanese needs to learn, and fast. If he cuts through, Morrison is gone.

A collection of Judith Brett’s essays, Doing Politics: Writing on Public Life, went on sale last week through Text Publishing.

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

– ref. It’s time for Anthony Albanese to get angry – https://theconversation.com/its-time-for-anthony-albanese-to-get-angry-170771

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graeme Orr, Professor of Law, The University of Queensland

The Morrison government is pushing legislation to mandate voter ID at polling places. Contrary to some critics, what it proposes will not create US-style “voter suppression”. But it is still an unnecessary idea at an inappropriate time.

Countries like Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom (until now at least) do not require electors to show ID to vote. Many other systems do.

Insecurity about security is a conservative trope. So it is natural for political conservatives, temperamentally, to favour voter ID, with the argument being it is an “integrity” measure. Social democrats, on the other hand, are more trusting and concerned to ensure everyone can and does vote.

The Australian proposal lists an array of documents as acceptable ID. Photo ID such as a driver’s licence is not mandatory; a credit card or utility bill would suffice. “Documents” in law now include electronic records, which is important given how few people receive paper utility bills.

If an elector does not bring ID, or it is rejected (say for a misspelled name), they are to be offered a “provisional” vote. That is a rigmarole involving extra forms and delays. But it is a buffer – imagine a remote voter driving an hour to a polling station having forgotten their wallet.

Young people, the very elderly and Indigenous people are all less likely to have such ID. To address the latter, a document from an Indigenous land council or similar agency will also count. When the LNP in Queensland briefly introduced voter ID in 2013-15, it was clear remote electors were more likely to have problems with ID.

Read more:
Who’s Liberal? What’s Labor? New bill to give established parties control of their names is full of holes

Cost in the time of COVID

The UK Cabinet Office estimates voter ID there will cost in the order of £20 million (A$36.7 million) per election. That is for mandatory photo ID. The direct cost in Australia will be less, if not insignificant. The Australian Electoral Commission will need to mail proof of enrolment to each elector as one form of ID.

There are also indirect costs. The most obvious is in training – and trying to ensure consistency among tens of thousands of casual poll workers. Inevitably, some forms of ID will be accepted in some polling places and not others. Think of bills on cracked mobile screens, or cards with minor differences to the name on the electoral roll.

Most of all, with Australia reopening, COVID will be spreading across states that have never had a real wave. Voter ID will add to processing time for millions of electors. Those whose ID is rejected will have to join separate queues to make a fussy “declaration” vote.

Finally, those declaration votes enter a black box. Unlike some US states, electors are not told whether their provisional vote was ever accepted into the count. This in itself will hamper, not enhance, trust.

One group of electors will not need to produce ID: postal voters. Asking (predominantly older) postal voters to scan or copy ID is a step too far, as they already sign and witness forms to vote.

What does the Constitution say?

On voting “rights”, next to nothing. But in 2007, the High Court implied a universal franchise for Australian citizens. Then, in 2010, it struck down the early closing of electoral rolls as an undue burden on the ability to vote.

In doing so, it said parliament cannot impose such burdens without evidence. The “evidence” to support voter ID is the intuition that voters should produce ID. The benefit of voter ID is said to be enhancing perceptions of integrity.

This may be a fair call in the abstract. Yet in reality, Australia has high levels of trust in our independent and thorough electoral processes. Any lack of trust buzzes around parties as hierarchical entities, their funding and accountability, not electoral administration.

Perceptions of risk can also be circular, if not manipulated. By playing up integrity risks, regardless of actual evidence, you can generate concerns that you then use to justify new rules. (We also see this in debates about electoral donations.)

As long as the law allows electors without ID to cast a declaration vote without excessive palaver, the High Court will not veto voter ID. In any event, the law cannot be challenged before it is implemented. Any plaintiff claiming to be affected before the election will likely be rebuffed with “go and organise ID”.

Read more:
From robo calls to spam texts: annoying campaign tricks that are legal

Voter ID cuts across compulsory voting

Most of all, voter ID is a dull idea in a country that has required people to enrol to vote for 110 years, and to turn out to vote since 1924.

Quite why we need voter ID is not clear. Most European countries do. But they have national ID cards. That is, every citizen, equally, has official ID. Such ID is something liberals in Australia fought against.

Ultimately, electoral integrity comes from having the most thorough roll and the highest turnout possible. Australia has a good record here, thanks to compulsion and direct enrolment laws.

Short of evidence of rogue electors impersonating other voters, voter ID is an unnecessary bureaucratic requirement, at an inappropriate point in a pandemic.

Graeme Orr has held various ARC grants in the field of electoral law, and does pro bono work on voting rights and reform in the law of politics (eg currently with Australians Voting Abroad and the Australian Republican Movement).

– ref. Voter ID is a bad idea. Here’s why – https://theconversation.com/voter-id-is-a-bad-idea-heres-why-170777

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fiona Armstrong, Executive Director, Climate and Health Alliance; Honorary Associate, Department of Public Health, La Trobe University

Australia finally has a net zero plan at the Commonwealth level. But so far, health hasn’t been factored into Australia’s national climate response. The federal government has yet to announce plans specific to the sector or, more broadly, the health of Australians.

This is despite experts warning climate inaction is putting lives at risk and could overwhelm our health system, and Australia’s health sector accounting for 7% of the country’s carbon emissions.

Countries are expected to arrive in Glasgow for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP26, with dramatically scaled up commitments to those they pledged in Paris in 2015.

And health is clearly on the agenda. The UK government has announced a COP26 Health Programme, calling on governments to commit to climate resilience and low-carbon health systems.

But when it comes to how the health sector is affected by, and contributes to, emissions, Australia’s response is missing in action.

Australia’s report card

The COP26 Health Programme’s rationale is that climate change is driving poorer health outcomes, increasing deaths, and health inequities.

But health systems are well placed to be a significant part of the solution and can:

• motivate stronger global ambition to reduce emissions

• help protect people from negative impacts of climate change

• and make a substantial contribution to reducing national and global emissions.

Australia is one of the most climate-vulnerable places on Earth. A hotter and more hostile climate spells dangers for the human population as well as the natural world. Extreme heat is impacting worker productivity, affecting outdoor community and sporting activities, and driving critical workforces, like doctors, away from the Northern Territory.

Health impacts of bushfires and smoke pollution and other extreme weather drives up demand for urgent health care. And as we have seen, infectious diseases like COVID can render our societies inoperable.

Novel viruses and infectious diseases like COVID are expected to increase in a warming world, and made even more likely due to human-caused destruction of natural environments (to feed our unsustainable appetite for “growth”) that otherwise provide a buffer against disease.

And as we now know, when health-care systems are struggling to manage a crisis like COVID, many other health problems get ignored, leading to worsening health outcomes from other causes.

Read more:
Coronavirus is a wake-up call: our war with the environment is leading to pandemics

A recent analysis of Australian policy reveals little recognition at the Commonwealth level of the health impacts of climate change. Policy action is only just getting under way at state and territory level.

The federal government’s net zero by 2050 pamphlet, The Australian Way, doesn’t address the risks and opportunities for the health sector, despite its significant contribution to national emissions. This emission contribution is largely from public and private hospitals, which have huge energy demands, largely met by coal-powered electricity. Also, the production of pharmaceuticals is extremely energy intensive.

Australia’s failure to address the health impacts of climate change in its climate plan recently scored it 0/15 compared to other countries by the Global Climate and Health Alliance ahead of COP26.

The Australian government had not integrated health into its climate policies on any of the five measures: health impacts, health in adaptation measures, health co-benefits, economics and finance, or overall.

Australia’s update to the National Climate Resilience and Climate Adaptation Strategy (released quietly, ahead of COP26) mentions health and well-being. But it firmly hands responsibility to state, territory and local governments.

So far, the Queensland government has led the way. It developed a Human Health and Wellbeing Climate Adaptation Plan in 2018, offering high level guidance for managing the health risks of climate change and realising the benefits of climate action.

Victoria recently released a draft Health and Human Services Adaptation Action Plan, as part of its commitments under the state’s Climate Change Act.

In Western Australia, a year-long Climate and Health Inquiry led to a comprehensive 2020 report. Climate action is necessary, the McGowan government said, “for health system sustainability and [because] the benefits of change far outweigh costs when health is factored in”. Implementation is yet to commence.

New South Wales supports human health and social impact research at the University of Sydney, but is yet to release an adaptation plan or strategy.

Other states have announced initiatives but no state-wide plans, yet.

Read more:
Australia needs a national approach to combat the health effects of climate change

Change from the ground up

Despite an absence of guiding policy, the vast majority of public hospitals and health services in Australia have joined Global Green and Healthy Hospitals. This is an international network of health institutions working to reduce their carbon and environmental footprint. Queensland Health, Victorian Department of Health and the ACT Health Directorate are also members.

Without the national coordination called for by health groups, this could lead to a fragmented approach, limit effective adaptation and likely drive up costs.

Last week, over 50 health groups offered over 175 recommendations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in ways that protect and promote health and well-being. They include legislating a 75% cut in emissions by 2030, rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and transport, and decarbonising health care by 2035.

While federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said the federal government’s plan is “good for health”, health stakeholders are less convinced.

Most countries now have national climate and health plans.

A leadership vacuum

The recent COP26 Health Roundtable for Australian, New Zealand and Fiji health ministries was attended by seven of the eight states and territories – Tasmania and the federal government didn’t attend.

The roundtable aimed to encourage national and subnational governments to make commitments to developing climate-health adaptation plans and low carbon and sustainable health care.

Fiji has made such commitments, which will be announced in Glasgow by World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus on November 9. But none of Australia’s state, territory or national representatives have yet made the pledge.

The global health community is watching closely. Some 450 organisations, representing 45 million health workers in 102 countries, signed a letter sent to all national leaders attending COP26 calling for health to be included in all national climate plans.

The WHO has released a report, The Health Argument for Climate Action, with a set of ten priority actions for governments.

These include:

• aligning climate and public health commitments in their COVID recovery plans

• putting health at the centre of the global climate talks

• and prioritising climate interventions that deliver the largest health, social and economic gains.

We hope the Australian government, and all leaders in Glasgow, are listening.

Fiona Armstrong is the Executive Director of the Climate and Health Alliance. Climate and Health Alliance receives funding from Lord Mayors Charitable Foundation and Health Care Without Harm, and has previously had grants from Australian Communities Foundation and Community Impact Foundation.

– ref. Health care contributes 7% to Australia’s carbon emissions – but health is missing from our COP26 plan – https://theconversation.com/health-care-contributes-7-to-australias-carbon-emissions-but-health-is-missing-from-our-cop26-plan-170624

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Hales, Director Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, Griffith University

In the first major deal of the Glasgow climate summit, more than 100 nations have pledged to end, and reverse, deforestation by 2030. As the declaration states, forests store vast amounts of carbon dioxide and are essential to stop global warming beyond 1.5℃ this century.

This new pledge is an example of so-called “nature-based solutions” – using ecosystem restoration and protection, better forest management and forest plantations to tackle climate change. Research suggests, if done appropriately, they could provide 30–40% of the CO₂ reductions required by 2030.

But these approaches should not take away from the need to stop burning fossil fuels. There’s also a glaring omission in the new declaration: no mention of the need for Indigenous people to give our/their prior informed consent, or be the decision makers on our/their own land.

This is significant, because some nature-based solutions can negatively affect Indigenous people around the world. For this reason, more than 250 organisations, networks and movements have signed a new statement against nature-based solutions, calling them nature-based “dispossessions”, and a scam.

Indigenous people should have a seat at the table in Glasgow, and a voice in decisions about our/their lands. The best pathway forward for Indigenous people is to manage carbon projects themselves. This is true self determination.

Disrupting livelihood and culture

Indigenous people manage or have tenure rights over at least 38 million square kilometres in 87 countries on all inhabited continents. This represents over a quarter of the world’s land surface, intersecting about 40% of all land-based protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes.

And yet, disadvantage is still widespread. International carbon policies such as nature-based climate schemes continue to contribute to a variety of poverties.

Examples abound. Take, for instance, the REDD+ program which operates under the auspices of the United Nations. It aims to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, such as through sustainable management of forests to increase carbon stocks.

A review in 2018 revealed how REDD+ projects disrupted local peoples’ livelihoods and culture in various ways. The more serious impacts included:

• creating food insecurity by reducing the availability of agricultural land

• loss of land through shifts in land tenure and forest management to outside corporations

• unfair consent processes which do not include all people affected by projects

• the clearing of forest to make way for monoculture plantations with higher carbon storage

• limited formal frameworks to maintain local livelihoods and biodiversity.

Read more:
‘The pigs can smell man’: how decimation of Borneo’s ancient rainforests threatens hunters and the hunted

Indigenous people must benefit

Less than 1% of climate finance from developed nations supports Indigenous and local community tenure security and forest management.

But research suggests securing the rights of Indigenous People to our/their homelands would help conserve more carbon in the territories under our/their control. Land managed by Indigenous people tends to have lower rates of deforestation and store more carbon than lands managed or owned by non-Indigenous People.

Under a best-case scenario, First Nations ownership of land would be recognised under law. Projects should be designed to acknowledge Indigenous participation and priorities. And the practices should draw on western science and Indigenous science and knowledge.

And when nature-based solutions are proposed, land tenure issues need to be resolved, and Indigenous rights need to be respected. These are the preconditions that lead to benefits for both Indigenous people and the climate.

The Aboriginal Carbon Foundation in Australia is an excellent example of such a scheme. It involves savanna fire management projects in northern Australia to reduce the frequency and extent of late dry season fires. This results in fewer greenhouse-gas emissions and more carbon stored in dead organic matter.

Core benefits are developed by Traditional Owners and later verified. They include:

• improved social ties as community members work together on projects using a peer-to-peer framework

• elders sharing traditional ecological knowledge with young people

• Indigenous-led land management that protects the environment, rock art and sacred sites

• meaningful employment that aligns with the interests and values of Traditional Owners

• increased pride and self-esteem of Indigenous people.

Read more:
Indigenous expertise is reducing bushfires in northern Australia. It’s time to consider similar approaches for other disasters

The real culprit

Indigenous people are not just vulnerable to the effects of climate change solutions, they can also be disproportionately affected by climate change itself. Traditional Owners often live on lands directly affected by climate change and can also lack the social and economic infrastructure to ensure resilience to respond to these changes.

This underscores why Indigenous people should be at the centre of decision-making about climate change and solutions to address it.

Recognition of this need is slowly growing. But more needs to be done – including enshrining the rights of Indigenous people in Paris Agreement rules governing carbon trading.

Read more:
Why UNESCO’s ‘nature based solutions’ to water problems won’t work in Africa

What’s more, the high cost of global travel and accommodation and restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic hinders the attendance of First Nations leaders at international talks.

A Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform was formalised at COP21 in Paris. But it remains to be seen whether this will influence negotiations at COP26.

Finally, while nature-based solutions have the potential to be an important response to reducing human-caused emissions, they are fraught with danger. The real culpability for climate change lies with nations and regions that burn large amounts of fossil fuels.

First Nations people should not be forced to carry the burden of climate action. Instead, world leaders must prioritise reducing CO₂ emissions at their source.

At the same time, they must recognise the rights and interests of Indigenous people and guarantee climate solutions are determined by Traditional Owners on our/their land.

Joint first authorship is ascribed to all listed authors.

Tim Cadman has been part of ARC funded projects investigating the integrity of climate change policy. He provides advice to community and not-for-profit organisations on forest policy as part of his academic service obligations.

Rowan Foley and Toni Hay do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Land, culture, livelihood: what Indigenous people stand to lose from climate ‘solutions’ – https://theconversation.com/land-culture-livelihood-what-indigenous-people-stand-to-lose-from-climate-solutions-170083

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Teresa Senserrick, Professor, Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety – Queensland (CARRS-Q), Queensland University of Technology

Human behaviour is complex. And yet approaches to road safety education are commonly far too simple, especially for young drivers. They are not only inexperienced but also biologically wired to be among those most at risk of crashing.

It is time to explore a new, more proactive approach to driver education.

Currently, we focus on teaching young people about major crash risks. Then we tell them not to take those risks. Should we really be surprised this does little to reduce the problem?

Common risks for young drivers include speeding and driving while tired. They are also more likely to be distracted by mobile phones or an array of other secondary tasks that take their eyes – and minds – away from the road.

Young drivers are not alone in taking risks. They see them on the road every day, often among their own family members and social circles, which normalises such behaviour. However, coupled with their lack of experience, such risks are much more likely to result in a crash for the young driver.

Transport accident hospitalisation rates are highest for young drivers

Read more:
Despite lockdowns, 1,142 Australians, including 66 kids, died on our roads in the past year. Here’s what we need to do

Is it realistic to expect we can predict and plan ahead to never become fatigued while driving? How many of us refuse all phone use while driving? In today’s highly connected world, why do we expect this of young drivers?

Why then does youth road safety education often simply adopt a “just don’t do it” message?

Some risks are inevitable

In other fields of youth health, education has long moved on from such an approach. It has progressed to teaching young people strategies both to avoid taking risks and to reduce harm if the risk does occur. Some risks are even considered inevitable.

An example of such a shift in approach is the move from “just say no” to safe sex education around the 1970s. Some feared this would lead to young people having sex earlier. Not only were these concerns unfounded, but research continues to show a link between sex education and lower rates of teenage pregnancies.

This approach is known as risk or harm reduction, or minimisation. It is well recognised in relation to risky alcohol and other drug use. Think of needle exchange programs, safe injecting rooms and, more recently, pill testing. Initiatives like these receive mixed support but are shown to reduce harm.

Read more:
Here’s why doctors are backing pill testing at music festivals across Australia

Harm-reduction approaches are evident in many other road safety measures that allow for margins of error. These include demerit point systems for offences and vehicle technologies that activate only after a certain threshold is exceeded. These include speed alerts, seatbelt reminders, feedback to stay inside the lane and phone-blocking apps.

In fact, allowing for human-made risks is a tenet of systems engineering. If risk can’t be eliminated, then systems are re-engineered to at least transform or reduce the risk of harm to an acceptable level.

How would harm reduction work for young drivers?

Many experienced drivers compensate for risky driving conditions by slowing down and leaving a greater gap to the traffic ahead – even if they don’t consciously realise this.

There is clear, physics-based evidence these compensating behaviours reduce crash risk. The result is a wider view of the road environment so drivers can see any potential hazards early. They also have more time and space to react to any hazards.

A harm-reduction approach to driver education would still emphasise avoiding key risks. However, it would also challenge young people to reflect on their own “inevitable risks”. Will they never be tempted to speed when running late for work? Will they obey every road rule, even when they see others breaking them? Would any of their answers be different if certain friends or family members were their passengers?

Read more:
Not as simple as ‘no means no’: what young people need to know about consent

If not able to eliminate the risk, young people would be challenged to identify strategies they would be willing and able to apply to reduce potential negative consequences of the risk. Slowing down and increasing following distances are key responses to many risks.

Other more tailored options include interacting with a phone only while stopped at traffic lights rather than when moving – albeit still teaching that this is not risk-free.

Time for a fresh approach

Some might argue harm-reduction approaches to driver education are too risky. We know the casualties in young driver crashes are more often their passengers or other road users rather than the young driver. However, we also know road risks cluster with other youth risks and harm reduction works to reduce negative outcomes from these other risks.

Current approaches are not working, or at least not well enough. Young drivers remain persistently over-represented in road trauma statistics, despite decades of attention. Without any evidenced-based research on harm-reduction approaches to road safety, the potential benefits as well as risks remain unknown.

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

– ref. ‘Just say no’ doesn’t work for teen sex and drug use, so why rely on it for young driver education? – https://theconversation.com/just-say-no-doesnt-work-for-teen-sex-and-drug-use-so-why-rely-on-it-for-young-driver-education-169371

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christiaan De Beukelaer, Senior Lecturer, The University of Melbourne

At COP26 in Glasgow, a public artwork intervention stands at Govan Graving Docks, directly opposite the main delegate zone. Still/Moving’s unmissable NO NEW WORLDS is a text and light-based piece that alternates between nine iterations of the three words in its title.

As artist Leonie Hampton explains, the re-writable quality of NO NEW WORLDS

embodies the idea that if we want to change the future, we need to address the stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future.

This artwork echoes and responds to David Buckland’s powerful Cape Farewell project, done for the Paris COP21 in 2015, in which “Another World is Possible” was projected onto a melting iceberg.

It perfectly sums up the tensions playing out between broader society and the world leaders visiting this conference, and is a desperate plea for substantive political commitments to action.

Art is now a permanent fixture at UN climate conferences. In Paris, ArtCOP21 saw some 400 events that took place in 46 countries. This year, the artists’ presence is gathered in the Climate Fringe, its title referencing the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Climate Fringe, its organisers claim, is “run by civil society for civil society”, and the in-person events are joined by an online hub with community-generated content including lectures, exhibitions, public artworks, film screenings and poetry readings.

But what can art accomplish at a high-stakes political meeting? Everything and nothing, depending on whom you ask.

An existential threat

Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, a poet and Climate Envoy of the Marshall Islands is currently reporting from Glasgow for Yahoo. She is no stranger to climate activism. At COP21 in Paris, she recited her poem 2 Degrees, explaining, in no uncertain terms, what difference half a degree would make for her peoples’ survival and sovereignty.

For those unfamiliar with the arcane theatrics of climate diplomacy, voices like hers are crucial to understanding what’s at stake. But artists are not at the negotiating table. They’re not actually making the decisions. So what can they hope to accomplish?

Artists can raise awareness, making complex scientific reports accessible and tangible.

For instance, Waanyi artist Judy Watson’s painting, australian mean temperature anomaly (2021), washes statistical bar graphs with an expressive, regenerative and hopeful hue of green to reference the regrowth of K’gari (Fraser Island) following the Black Summer bushfires. At Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art’s recent show On Fire, Watson’s work sat in contrast to a lump of coal on a plinth.

Artists do more than simply tell us there’s a problem. They can add nuance to the complex web of interconnected issues we face. They can tell stories about loss, about possibility and transformation, inside and beyond the art world.

Some, like the Brandalism collective, aim to influence political action. After Australia’s devastating Black Summer fires in 2019-2020, they created How’s the Serenity?, a guerrilla art intervention with posters linking the fires, climate change, and political inaction. These posters were pasted up as caustic “anti-advertising” across Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

In Glasgow and other towns and cities across the UK and Europe, billboard campaigns target the greenwashing propaganda of COP’s principal sponsor NatWest. Hundreds more unsanctioned satirical posters have taken over bus stops and billboards, targeting corporate carbon offsetting schemes and the questionable climate policies of Barclays, Shell and HSBC.

These interventions are pungent reminders of the existential challenge we face.

A journey, not a destination

But while they may highlight the threats, these artworks don’t quite help us to imagine pathways to a sustainable future.

One problem is that the challenges of climate change have been reduced to a handful of simplified proxies. We should not exceed 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – though we have reached 420ppm and remain on a frightening upward trajectory.

We should keep global warming below 1.5 degrees – but most recent policies are still projected to lead to a 2.9 degree increase.

We must meet a “net-zero” target by 2050. But what do such abstractions and distant targets mean for our daily lives?

Read more:
Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap

Climate artists also face another dilemma.

Climate-related apocalyptic art now speaks to audiences largely familiar with global warming’s threats and projected impacts. Though at its best still starkly confronting, such art is heavily “message-laden”. Often saying little new, it is increasingly banal and, paradoxically, begins to naturalise the awful future it wishes to avert.

Alternatively, arcadian images of a climate-safe future seem in deep denial about the turbulence of the coming transition. Contending futures have become increasingly difficult to construct visually, and to rally people behind or against.

We believe the way forward for climate art is not to imagine our fatalistic or idyllic futures, but instead to sketch out pathways that can get us there.

Without Molly Crabapple’s rapid-fire captivating drawings, visualising and making accessible Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s complex proposal for a Green New Deal, would people have listened? Would they have understood?

On Friday 5 November, in the fringes of the COP, artists collective Julie’s Bicycle is hosting The Missing Link. This event “explores the vital role that arts and culture must play in climate transformation”, and will give attendees online from all over the world a handle on this issue.

At their best, artists are still uniquely able to add meaning and generate empathy and perspective to the tangled web of climate discourse. In doing so, they help imagine and illuminate the complex and ultimately radical voyage we’re on together.

Christiaan De Beukelaer receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the ClimateWorks Foundation. He previously received funding from the European Cultural Foundation, the European Science Foundation, and the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

Peter Christoff was a Chair and board member of the arts organisation, CLIMARTE.

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

– ref. Artists are not at the negotiating table at COP26 but art is everywhere. What can they accomplish through their work? – https://theconversation.com/artists-are-not-at-the-negotiating-table-at-cop26-but-art-is-everywhere-what-can-they-accomplish-through-their-work-170786

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

Having endured a shocking shellacking over the last few days, Scott Morrison declared at a news conference en route for home that “it’s important now that we all just move on”.

Easier said than done, when the French have just delivered another blast at your integrity, via their ambassador’s uncompromising speech at the National Press Club, Malcolm Turnbull has branded you a well-known liar, and your week away has been a clear net negative.

But one thing we can bank on. Morrison will jut out his jaw and plough ahead. This prime minister has the thickest of political skins, and he is facing the fight of his life in a few months.

He showed again in his Wednesday remarks to the travelling media that he will admit no mistakes or miscalculations in his dealings with the French, even in relation to the leaking of a text Emmanuel Macron sent him just prior to the cancellation of the French submarine contract.

In the message, two days before the announcement, Macros asked: “Should I expect good or bad news for our joint submarines ambitions?” The text was put out to reinforce Morrison’s argument that the French knew the contract was on life support. (The French suggest it showed the opposite.)

Disclosure of another leader’s private communication is hardly the done thing diplomatically. But Morrison isn’t fussed by such niceties and was unrepentant when pressed about it.

“Claims had been made and those claims were refuted, ” he said bluntly.

“What is needed now is for us to all just get on with it. I mean, that’s what is most important to the Australian people. That the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia get on with the historic agreement that we came to, to deliver an incredibly important capability for Australia, to keep Australians safe and to defend and protect Australia.”

Asked what he was going to do to try to repair the rift with France Morrison said “I’m going to move on and get the job done”.

Read more:
‘I don’t think, I know’ – what makes Macron’s comments about Morrison so extraordinary and so worrying

In his Wednesday speech, ambassador Jean-Pierre Thébault emphasised the depth of the partnership between the two countries that had been represented by the now aborted submarine deal, arguing it went well beyond a commercial contract, including the provision of highly sensitive technology.

He repeated the earlier French line that the Australian action had been “a stab in the back” to France, and pointed to recent evidence by Australian departmental and military figures to Senate estimates that rejected widespread media reports the project had run off the rails with big cost overruns.

Thébault suggested, indeed, that dark arts had been at work.

“We had questioned the Australian government several times over the years about the false or misleading allegations which were regularly made, with scarce official reaction. We were told that such things ‘do occur in Australia’, are ‘normal’, ‘do go away’ and ‘have to be managed solely by Defence’.

“But in light of the subsequent events, the question now arises legitimately: why was it impossible earlier to state the naked truth, as was done just some days ago, on record, during Senate estimates? This would have set the record straight and stopped the smear campaign,” Thébault said.

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“In retrospect, knowing what we know for sure today, about the relentless conduct in parallel of an alternative plan, some had a direct interest to sabotage the public support and understanding for the Attack class program,” he said.

“The Attack class program, despite the allegations made in this intensive smearing campaign, was in fact not at all a ‘troubled’ program.

“The Attack class program has been intentionally vilified to become an easy scapegoat, to justify a change of footing that was long time in the making,” the ambassador claimed.

How much more damage the French can do Australia remains to be seen, especially as France takes over the presidency of the Council of the EU in January. The French say it is up to the Australian government to come up with “substantial proposals” to repair the relationship but it is hard to see it mending for a long time, and probably never with Morrison.

It would be interesting to see if tensions would ease at all if there were a change of government, given that Labor, while strongly criticising Morrison’s handling of the French, has supported the AUKUS agreement and said Australia was within its rights to cancel the contract.

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Australia’s refusal to sign a global methane pledge exposes flaws in the term ‘net-zero’

Morrison would reckon that in terms of domestic politics, the rapidly moving news cycle will relatively quickly overtake the publicity around the French onslaught.

As for Turnbull’s attack, he will hope the public put that into the context of the former PM having become one of his harshest and most constant critics.

When he’s back on Australian soil, Morrison can be expected to deploy two tactics.

Insisting he’s now fully explained what happened with the French, he is likely to try to shut down further questioning on the matter as much as he can.

And he will play up his portrayal of himself as doing whatever is necessary as the custodian of the security of Australians.

That’s the essence of the “moving on” strategy.

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

– ref. View from The Hill: A battered Scott Morrison proclaims it’s time to ‘move on’ – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-a-battered-scott-morrison-proclaims-its-time-to-move-on-171127

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

As well as Michelle Grattan’s usual interviews with experts and politicians about the news of the day, Politics with Michelle Grattan now includes “Word from The Hill”, where all things political will be discussed with members of The Conversation’s politics team.

Scott Morrison’s trip to the G20 summit in Rome and COP26 in Glasgow, from which he returns early Thursday, was overshadowed by the drama of French President Emmanuel Macron declaring the PM a liar, arising from the circumstances surrounding the cancellation of the French submarine contract.

After Macron’s extraordinary attack, made on the sidelines of the G20, the Australian government retaliated by leaking a private text from Macron to Morrison, which further infuriated the French.

In Glasgow, Morrison delivered the 2050 net zero commitment that caused the Nationals such angst, and gave Prince Charles a rapid-fire briefing on Australia’s climate policy, just in case the royal had missed it.

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

– ref. Word from The Hill: Scott Morrison’s trip blown up by French grenade – https://theconversation.com/word-from-the-hill-scott-morrisons-trip-blown-up-by-french-grenade-171121

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Howden, Director, ANU Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, Australian National University

Overnight at the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, more than 90 nations signed a global pledge led by the United States and United Kingdom to cut methane emissions. However, Australia was not among them.

China, Russia, India and Iran also declined to sign the pledge, which aims to slash methane emissions by 30% before 2030.

Methane is emitted in coal and gas production, from livestock and other agricultural activity, and when organic waste breaks down in landfill.

Almost half of Australia’s annual methane emissions come from the agriculture sector. Defending the federal government’s decision, Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor said Australia had pledged net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and would not set specific targets for each sector.

Days out from COP26, National Party leader Barnaby Joyce had claimed signing the pledge would be a disaster for coal mining and agriculture, saying “the only way you can get your 30% by 2030 reduction in methane on 2020 levels would be to grab a rifle and go out and start shooting your cattle”.

Australia’s position on the pledge is inconsistent with methane reductions the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says are required to keep Earth below 1.5℃ warming this century.

The debate also highlights how the shorthand phrase “net-zero emissions” conceals and distorts the real challenges in avoiding dangerous climate change.

It focuses attention on the wrong time frame for action – the next decade is far more important for climate action than 2050. It also addresses the means of action – emissions reduction – rather than the desired goal, which is to avoid dangerous climate change.

And importantly, simply through delaying action, the world could feasibly reduce emissions to net-zero by 2050, but still fail to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement – keeping average global temperature rise below either 1.5℃ or 2℃ this century.

Read more:
COP26: a global methane pledge is great – but only if it doesn’t distract us from CO₂ cuts

Net-zero is both too much, and not enough

The IPCC report released in August painted a clear picture of how different trajectories for various greenhouse gases translate to global temperature increases.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions last a very long time in the atmosphere so they accumulate. Consequently, net CO₂ emissions need to decline sharply as soon as possible if we’re to limit temperatures to 1.5℃ or 2℃ above pre-industrial levels.

However, CO₂ emissions not only need to reach net-zero – the IPCC says CO₂ emissions need to go “net-negative”. This will require a massive scaling up of methods and technologies to remove existing CO₂ in the atmosphere.

In other words, when it comes to CO₂, net-zero is not enough. It is a way point, not the end point.

So how do we remove CO₂ from the atmosphere? Some methods, such as mass tree planting, are already widely implemented. Some are difficult to implement at scale, such as substantial increases in soil carbon.

Others are in the exploratory stages including incorporating captured CO₂ into building products and high-value materials or in the ocean.

Each option has advantages, disadvantages and limits. The “net-zero by 2050” terminology obscures this complexity. It also conceals the need for crucial discussions about feasibility, governance and support for research and development that’s needed now.

Meanwhile, the situation is quite different for shorter-lived gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. In those cases, going all the way to net-zero is not needed to meet the Paris goals.

According to the IPCC report, an illustrative scenario consistent with 1.5℃ warming would involve methane emission reductions of about 30% by 2030, 50% by 2050 and just over 60% by 2100.

This is consistent with the global methane pledge signed at COP26 overnight. For nitrous oxide, the illustrative reductions would be about 30% by 2050.

So, for methane and nitrous oxide, net-zero is too much.

Read more:
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Targets based on science

It should be noted, to keep temperatures to 1.5℃, there are many possible combinations of emission-reduction trajectories for various greenhouse gases. The extent to which CO₂, methane or nitrous oxide is reduced is interchangeable and the final mix will be a function of political decisions.

A clear and integrated assessment of the economic, environmental and social consequences of different emission-reduction pathways is needed to inform those decisions. Without that, inefficient and inequitable economic responses may result.

For example, methane (from livestock) and nitrous oxide (from fertiliser use) make up a high proportion of agriculture emissions. But options for completely stopping these emissions are limited.

Farmers could offset their emissions by planting trees or rehabilitating vegetation on their properties to increase carbon stores. But this would prevent them from selling those emissions reductions on carbon markets, thus removing a potential source of farm income.

So an economy-wide target of net-zero for all key greenhouse gases might mean agriculture must make far more effort in emissions reduction, at much greater cost, than other sectors which largely emit CO₂ and where decarbonisation options are more readily available.

New Zealand has recognised this, and treats agricultural emissions separately.

Carving agriculture out of national emissions-reduction goals would place a greater requirement to act onto other sectors. For example, emission reductions in the transport sector may have to be greater than otherwise, to compensate for the lack of progress in agriculture.

But is isolating agriculture from emission reductions necessary? A recent study assessed new emission reduction options for livestock, including several approaches that together may reduce emissions at the rate required by the methane pledge. They involve more efficient production, technological advances, changes in demand for livestock-related products and land-based carbon storage.

These are approaches already being adopted by industry groups and farmers.

Towards ‘Paris-aligned’

Targets for methane and nitrous oxide reductions should be set using the IPCC science – and don’t have to be set at net-zero. That would leave sectors emitting these gases with a feasible (but still challenging) pathway to reducing emissions in line with the Paris goals.

And where appropriate, we should start describing effective climate action as being “Paris-aligned”. Clearly, over-use of the term “net-zero emissions” misdirects attention from where it’s needed.

Read more:
The clock is ticking on net-zero, farmers must not get a free pass

Mark Howden is affiliated with CO2 Value Australia, a not-for-profit corporation with a mission to promote the development and deployment of sustainable industrial solutions which transform captured CO2 into useful products.

– ref. Australia’s refusal to sign a global methane pledge exposes flaws in the term ‘net-zero’ – https://theconversation.com/australias-refusal-to-sign-a-global-methane-pledge-exposes-flaws-in-the-term-net-zero-170944

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Griffith University

Fourteen months after it was announced, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications and the Arts has handed down its report, “Sculpting A National Cultural Plan”, on Australia’s cultural and creative industries and institutions.

Labor finished six years in government in 2013 with the launch of Creative Australia, our last national cultural policy. The Coalition finishes an eight year stretch with a call to think about developing one. Still, a plan for a plan is better than no plan at all.

The 205-page document is broken into six sections. They cover the composition of the cultural sector, approaches to evaluating it, the impact of COVID-19 on artists and organisations (spoiler alert, it isn’t good), and the problem of arts education in schools (and, glancingly, at a tertiary level).

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As befits an investigative inquiry, the report devotes considerable space to describing what the sector does and communicating the views of those who work in it. There is frequent quotation from 352 submissions, and responses to a related survey.

A useful tip: read “Appendix F. Labor Members – Additional Comments” first. It raises the issues the rest of the report avoids, particularly around two institutions crucial to any cultural plan of national scope, the Australia Council for the Arts and the ABC.

Light on calls for action

There are five terms of reference, and some are addressed in more detail than others. The first two are the most crucial: culture’s “direct and indirect economic benefits and employment opportunities”, and its “non-economic benefits [that] enhance community, social well-being and … Australia’s national identity”.

The terms were provided by the Minister for Communications, and it is not the job of the committee to contest them.

Even so, both their order and wording is restrictive. Slicing culture into economic and non-economic benefits is a binary with limited policy application. Making the former the primary lens has a reductive effect on all discussion thereafter.

In respect of Australian cultural policy’s three favoured key terms – they seem on perpetual rotation – there is a return to the limelight for “access” (74 mentions), while “innovation”, a preoccupation of the Turnbull government slips to a supporting role (46 mentions), and “excellence”, dominant in the years when George Brandis ran the portfolio, becomes a spear-carrier (4 mentions).

Submissions show a diverse mix of people, organisations and art forms. A New Approach (ANA) is the think tank most frequently cited though (50+ mentions), and its comments often have headline status.

Read more:
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The report’s 22 recommendations can be divided into three categories: restorations, bespoke suggestions, and calls for further action.

The first are welcome, though in rejoicing at the return of the word “arts” to the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications, or the resumption of ABS cultural and creative satellite accounts (dedicated statistics on the sector’s activities) we should remember who removed them.

The bespoke suggestions are interesting, even when their impact is not immediately apparent (an app for information on arts events) or their implementation likely to be contested (20% of local revenue for streaming services to be spent on local content).

The calls for action are light-on, even by the standards of a broad-ranging report. Discussion of the national identity aspects of Australian culture is thin, for example. This leaves the report at a disadvantage when considering the non-economic benefits of the arts – the ones most people regard as synonymous with them.

Apart from the awkwardness of talking about culture in this displaced way (do we refer to the “non-economic benefits of the health system”?), it leaves the report looking truncated and partisan.

Apolitical

There is discussion of culture’s contribution to our mental health, but not our political health; to social cohesion but not social change. The arts come across as soft-edged, catering to emotional needs like “confidence” and “hope” rather than intellectual ones, like insight and truth.

On the economic side, there are lots of figures, but it is hard to know how to parse them. They are sourced in different ways by different agencies, and append different production contexts (literary publishing vs. performing arts vs. digital games). The report swings between terms: “culture”, “creative industries”, “cultural and creative industries” – all “otherwise known as the arts”.

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The aggregate figure of $111.7 billion of culture’s annual economic contribution is repeated, though according to the ABS, 50% of this is “non-cultural”, involving computing, industrial design, fashion and retail. The “arts industry”, including broadcast and electronic media, is far smaller, just $14 billion.

Such definitional slippages suggest these metrics are more ritual offerings to the ideological gods than a serious guide to policy-making.

Here, ANA should be careful how it manages relations with the government. Uncritically adopting an econometric mind-set is unwise, as is insistent reference to a “middle Australia” that has little sociological substance to it. To the extent ANA mirrors the report’s “market first” assumptions, it aligns with the Coalition’s view of the cultural sector.

Business-speak, with one exception

The exception – and it stands out markedly – is the report’s discussion of, and proposals for, Indigenous arts and culture.

There is not the same division of the economic and non-economic, and respect is afforded culture’s intrinsic worth. (“Country, culture and community are, for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, intrinsically linked and the well-being and success of one depends on the health of the other”.)

The closest the report comes to adopting this holistic tone elsewhere is in reference to heritage institutions and their “important preservation and curation service”. Though even here, there is a rapid shift to focusing on spill-overs (“enhancing well-being, fostering shared values [and] supporting social cohesion”).

The 10-person committee has two Coalition chairs and a Coalition majority of six to four. This is reflected in the report’s language of business-speak, used not only to describe what the sector does but to validate it. Thus the report is firmly “inside the box” of 40 years of neoliberal prescriptions on small government, culture-as-enterprise and value-as-money.

That said, the committee has a number of members on it with diverse backgrounds and interesting pre-Parliamentary experience. It is not a collection of the usual suspects.

This raises the question of whether the report’s “market first” perspective comes from the committee or from the sector itself, which, after 40 years of being told its value is to be measured in dollars now believes it.

The report cites some challenges to this viewpoint, but they feel muted. The suspicion is that what was once a rhetoric of convenience is now a self-view. It is, for example, a very bad idea to call in the Productivity Commission to consider “arrangements which govern funding of artistic programs” (one report recommendation) given its traditional hostility to all forms of producer subsidy and its perennial muddling of equity and efficiency issues.

Likewise omitting the Australia Council and the ABC from detailed discussion should flash a warning light. Much government policy-making now involves vested interest lobbying and ministerial fiat, as the Grattan Institute’s ex-chief executive, John Daley (who has worked with ANA) noted in a recent report on removing barriers to policy reform.

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“It’s goodbye Whitlam, hello pork-barrel” a colleague said to us recently. How then should we greet a report that says nothing about the public sector or intermediary cultural agencies established precisely to avoid such political control of arts and culture?

Julian Meyrick made a written submission and supplementary submission to the inquiry, and also gave oral evidence to it.

Justin O’Connor receives funding from The Australian Research Council.

– ref. Slippery definitions and alarming silences: a parliamentary inquiry into the creative industries gives us a plan for a plan – https://theconversation.com/slippery-definitions-and-alarming-silences-a-parliamentary-inquiry-into-the-creative-industries-gives-us-a-plan-for-a-plan-170963

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Prue Clarke, Research Fellow at the Centre for Media Transition and head of New Narratives, a US-based not-for-profit newsroom and media development organisation working in low income countries., University of Technology Sydney

When ABC chair Ita Buttrose told a National Press Club lunch earlier this year that the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol could be blamed on the lack of a “well-funded public broadcaster”, she echoed a dangerous misunderstanding about the American media landscape.

In fact, America’s public broadcasters are better funded than Australia’s, and the rise of Trumpism led to a golden age of journalism in the United States.

The January 6 insurrection happened in spite of excellent journalism. Australian policymakers and media leaders need a more sophisticated understanding of America’s information ecosystem if they’re to counter the same forces here.

A different definition of ‘public funding’

The US has two public broadcast systems. The biggest of them – National Public Radio – attracts an audience of 57 million each week. One in five US adults gets their political news from NPR. That is the seventh-largest audience of any news organisation in any medium in the US.

If you’ve ever listened to This American Life, Serial or Radio Lab – among the most downloaded podcasts ever – you’re part of the American public radio audience.

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NPR staff would agree with Buttrose that they need more funding, but not in the way she means. US public radio has nearly twice the budget of the entire ABC, with US$1.3 billion (AUD$1.8 billion) in annual revenue for NPR, the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) and the 123 largest local public radio stations.

Annual revenue for public TV in the US is smaller at $US690 million (A$927 million). Still, 16% of all US adults get their political news from the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), comparable to the BBC audience in the US.

The depth of NPR funding shows in deeply reported programs such as Morning Edition and The New Yorker Radio Hour, which feature experienced journalists (some of whom have been on the same beat for decades). Solid resources underpin shows that are dense with field recordings and interviews with real people across America and from 17 international bureaus.

NPR has also funded a spring of innovative, popular podcasts such as Invisibilia and In the Dark, which are finding large global audiences.

A different definition of ‘public broadcaster’

Buttrose’s narrow definition of “public broadcaster” is based on how much money comes directly from government.

NPR’s coalition of 1,000+ content makers and stations receives only 12% of its funding directly from the government. But the bulk of funding still comes from taxpayers. Public radio stations are structured as not-for-profits and all contributions are tax deductible. Nearly 40% of their funding comes directly from audience members, while another 10% comes from foundations.

“Corporate sponsorships” from carefully vetted companies – which are also mostly tax deductible – make up 19% of NPR’s funding.

Read more:
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In 2019, individual donations to the top 123 public radio stations totalled $US430 million (A$593 million) from 2.35 million listeners. The average listener contribution was $US183 (A$250).

Those are still taxpayer dollars – money diverted from government coffers where it might have been used on education, health care or infrastructure. But by making news media donations tax deductible, the US government allows audiences to decide which public interest journalism they want to support with their tax money, if any at all.

That, in turn, gives news media that qualify for tax-deductible status a strong incentive to reach as big an audience as possible with content that is so trusted, valuable and engaging, people want to pay to help keep it alive.

It’s the same case Guardian Australia has made to persuade 170,000 readers to voluntarily contribute to keep its content free for all.

This is not necessarily an argument to change the ABC funding model in Australia. (The ABC only accepts money from government – and none from donors – in the belief this protects it from influence.) Australia also has a more dispersed population and smaller news media market, which is highly vulnerable to foreign competition.

It is an argument for a more sophisticated understanding of the options available to all public interest media as they battle for financial survival.

Like NPR, Australian not-for-profit media should have access to tax-deductible status. Among content makers, only The Conversation, Australian Associated Press and the Judith Neilson Institute have made their way through the opaque and subjective government approval process.

The ACCC and a coalition of media and politicians have advocated for this change, but it has yet to gain parliamentary support.

A pioneer in reader-revenue business models

This audience revenue-driven business model made NPR a pioneer in the world of media “community building”, which has gone mainstream as advertising revenue has shrunk. Successful media businesses are now working hard to replicate NPR’s success in persuading audiences to pay.

Jad Abumrad, creator of the groundbreaking public radio program Radio Lab, explained the concept to my class at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York in 2015.

Build audience trust and engagement with authenticity, he said. Tell stories that are driven by real people, with language that is accessible to all. Reporter diversity is key to ensuring stories engage with a broad audience. Be transparent about the reporting process and funding (financial statements including staff salaries are published online).

Like all American public radio journalists I’ve met, he had no envy of the government-funded model for public broadcasters. Audience funding makes journalists answerable and responsive to their audiences, he said, and he liked it that way. It has also protected NPR from government pressure.

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A golden age of journalism is not enough to stop extremism

In truth, the rise of Trumpism has been a gift to American journalism in important ways. President Donald Trump’s attacks on the press and democracy itself unleashed a flood of funding from audiences and philanthropists, who saw quality journalism as their best defence against authoritarianism.

The New York Times quadrupled its subscriptions to eight million, while The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have each grown to more than three million subscribers.

The rise of Trumpism was rooted in America’s decades-long lack of investment in education, healthcare and a social safety net. The resulting inequality was fanned by right-wing media and voices on social media.

Those same forces have driven a big rise in far-right politics in Europe and the UK, in spite of government-funded broadcasters and strong social welfare nets. And, as the pandemic has made clear, social-media-driven, right-wing extremism and growing inequality are alive in Australia, too.

Australia will need strong media to combat this rise. A more nuanced understanding of what’s happening in the US media ecosystem is a critical place to start.

Prue Clarke heads a not-for-profit media development organisation that receives funding from foundations and governments not mentioned in this article including the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, German Development Cooperation, Australian Aid, American Jewish World Service. She is a contributor to National Public Radio.

– ref. America’s public broadcasters are thriving – here’s what Australian media can learn from them – https://theconversation.com/americas-public-broadcasters-are-thriving-heres-what-australian-media-can-learn-from-them-170361