The health of many Australian ecosystems is in steep decline. Replanting vast tracts of land with native vegetation will prevent species extinctions and help abate climate change – but which landscapes should be restored, and how much would it cost?
Our latest research sought answers to these questions. We devised a feasible plan to restore 30% of native vegetation cover across almost all degraded ecosystems on Australia’s marginal farming land.
By spending A$2 billion – about 0.1% of Australia’s gross domestic product – each year for about 30 years, we could restore 13 million hectares of degraded land without affecting food production or urban areas.
Such cost-effective solutions must be implemented now if we’re to pull our landscapes back from the brink. This bold vision would transform the way we manage our landscapes, help Australia become a net-zero nation and create jobs in regional communities.
Native vegetation cover must be restored across vast tracts of Australia. Shutterstock
An ambitious agenda
Since European settlement, large areas of Australia’s native vegetation have been progressively cleared for agriculture and urban settlements. Australia’s environment remains under mounting pressure from land clearing, altered fire regimes and invasive species.
Our research shows that about one-fifth of Australia’s ecosystems have less than 30% coverage of healthy native vegetation. Below 30%, ecosystem services and biodiversity sharply declines. We calculate that 13 million hectares of land must be restored to reach the 30% threshold.
Targeted restoration of degraded ecosystems on less profitable agricultural land has enormous potential to alleviate these problems. Farmers can continue to produce valuable crops on their prime land, while rebuilding habitat and sequestering carbon on more marginal land.
Almost half of the land requiring restoration is Eucalypt woodlands and almost a fifth is Acacia forests and woodlands. Areas in most need are:
the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia
Central Queensland
Central West, Tablelands and Riverina areas of New South Wales
Western Victoria
the Eyre Peninsula and southeast South Australia.
Restoring native vegetation at selected sites would involve actions such as fencing to keep livestock away, pest removal, soil preparation and planting.
As well as direct restoration costs, our costings also included compensation payments to farmers and other landholders, for the cost of retiring the land from farming.
We identified the sites across Australia where revegetation would be most cost-effective. These are the places where land requires the least revegetation work and returns the lowest profit to farmers, thus minimising stewardship payments.
In practice, we recommend restoration sites be secured through voluntary arrangements with land holders.
Map showing cost-effective restoration sites in heavily degraded ecosystems across Australia, with examples of possible restoration sites or landscapes. Authors provided
Cost-effective conservation solutions
We estimate the required restoration would cost approximately A$2 billion annually for 30 years. To put this in perspective, it’s about 0.3% of the federal government’s annual spending last financial year and about 6% of what Australia spends annually on defence.
The restoration project would restore habitat and ecosystem services in our most degraded landscapes. It would expand threatened species’ habitat and re-establish ecosystem functions such as pollination and erosion control.
The revegetation would also help tackle climate change by drawing down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it. We estimate 913 million tonnes of greenhouse gases would be stored over 55 years.
After a decade of vegetation growth, 13 million tonnes would be stored annually – equal to 16% of the emissions reduction required under Australia’s Paris Agreement obligations.
We applied those figures to plausible carbon price scenarios where prices rise 5-10% per year from $15 per tonne, reaching $24-39 per tonne by 2030. If the carbon stored by the project was translated into carbon credits, the potential revenue could be between $12 billion and $46 billion.
The upper end of that estimate would more than cover the costs required to implement the plan. An intensive revegetation effort would also create jobs, mostly in rural areas.
The restoration plan would cost a fraction of Australia’s defence spending. Australian Defence Force
Success is possible
Australia’s environment laws have comprehensively failed to protect nature. This has been compounded by a lack of adequate funding for environmental management, threatened species protection and ecological restoration.
Without doubt, the national project we describe is ambitious. But existing projects are showing the way. In southwest Western Australia, for example, the Gondwana Link program has so far restored 13,500 hectares of marginal farmland, and also aims to connect 100,000 hectares of existing bushland.
Turning around the state of Australia’s environment requires big thinking and an even bigger government and public commitment. But as our research shows, restoring our degraded landscapes is both attainable and affordable.
Bonnie Mappin has received funding from the University of Queensland Research Scholarship and the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.
James Watson has received funding from Australian Research Council and the National Environmental Science Program. He sits on the science committees of BirdLife Australia and Bush Heritage Australia and a long-term science partnership with Wildlife Conservation Society.
Lesley Hughes has received funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a Councillor with the Climate Council of Australia, a Director of WWF-Australia, and a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.
For many of us, uncomfortable feelings can be “natural” responses to a “threat”. Our strong, primitive defence or “threat response” (sometimes called “fight, flight or freeze”) has enabled human beings to survive. This stress response is essential for survival against poisonous snakes, crocodiles and other dangerous situations.
As the pandemic hit last year, we were working on the Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future project, which aims to improve support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents experiencing complex trauma.
We asked ourselves whether the public health response to the pandemic can take into account people’s previous trauma.
Taking core concepts from our research and guiding principles, we identified 10 principles that may decrease stress or trauma by fostering a sense of security, well-being, confidence, hope and resilience.
1. Safety
The first priority of any emergency or “trauma-informed response” is to ensure physical safety from the immediate threat (like first aid principles). This includes the safety of people most at risk during lockdowns (for example, those experiencing family violence).
2. Connectedness and collaboration
Humans are social beings and being “connected” is another essential survival strategy that is more helpful to us in the pandemic than “fighting, fleeing, or freezing”.
However, looking after each other is our ticket out of here. We have seen this with the global scientific collaborations in the quest to create COVID-19 vaccines.
3. Compassion and caring
Acts of kindness, compassion and caring are needed more now than ever. Compassion and empathy promote well-being and we know social supports act as a buffer against difficult times.
Understanding stress and distress responses is an important way to “normalise” our feelings, and the actions of others.
4. Trust and transparency
Clear, compassionate action and transparent communication from governments are also important. These things increase a sense of safety and potential for people to follow public health advice.
Hiding information leads to distrust in government and the media. This can contribute to mistrust in COVID-19 responses and lead to non-compliance.
A lack of information and exposure to misinformation can also increase distress, and leave people vulnerable to conspiracists who target marginalised groups most at risk.
Public health approaches and messaging needs to be appropriate and sensitive to local contexts.
Communities need health messaging that draws on cultural strengths to increase trust and access to services, such as the way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled health organisations quickly mobilised to take control of the local response to COVID-19.
6. Commitment to equity and human rights
COVID-19 has not had the same impact on everyone.
Many people, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and refugee communities, are affected by historical and intergenerational trauma, racism, and ongoing socio-economic deprivation.
These things can be exacerbated in this current crisis. We must address the socio-cultural determinants that can impact people’s health, such as insecure work and housing, and focus on equity.
7. Good communication
Crisis communicationprinciples say messages are most likely to be effective when they are clear, credible and interactive, shared consistently, and targeted to community groups.
The media play a critical role here. Accessing trustworthy, reliable information through these channels is important so people know what action to take and where they can go for help.
8. Positive leadership
Good governance helps us feel safe.
It’s important for the government to be highly visible, provide regular updates and practical support, and help people understand and manage feelings of stress.
But we don’t just need leadership from politicians and officials. Local leaders also need to support their communities to process fear, grief and loss, and to help people understand the crisis will pass and there is hope.
Individual and community empowerment comes from having choice, voice, and control. This promotes the confidence to respond to an emergency, as well as resilience, hope and the ability to cope.
However, effective emergency responses must be embedded in well-functioning social systems, including emergency social and economic support and high-quality healthcare services everyone can access when needed.
Our next step will be to discuss these 10 principles with community members and public health experts in an October workshop, to develop a culturally responsive, trauma-informed, public health emergency framework for First Nations communities.
This pandemic is far from over and there is now a race to vaccinate communities that have been left behind as states open up. A trauma-informed public health emergency response is possible. And with cases due to rise just as the next bushfire and cyclone seasons arrive, we need one now.
Christina Heris worked with the Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future study on the sub-project “Developing a culturally responsive trauma-informed public health emergency response framework for First Nations families and communities during COVID-19”, funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council Centre for Research Excellence Australian Partnership for Preparedness Research on Infectious Disease Emergencies and Paul Ramsay Foundation: APPRISE Targeted responses to empower First Nations-led research on COVID-19.
Catherine Chamberlain receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (Career Development Fellowship). This research is funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council Centre for Research Excellence Australian Partnership for Preparedness Research on Infectious Disease Emergencies.
Cindy Woods worked with the Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future study and on the sub-project “Developing a culturally responsive trauma-informed public health emergency response framework for First Nations families and communities during COVID-19”, funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council Centre for Research Excellence Australian Partnership for Preparedness Research on Infectious Disease Emergencies and Paul Ramsay Foundation: APPRISE Targeted responses to empower First Nations-led research on COVID-19.
Helen Herrman has received funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council
Janine Mohamed receives funding from the Department of Health
Michelle Kennedy receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (Early Career Research Fellowship). She is affiliated with the Public Health Association Australia.
Shannon Bennetts has worked with the Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future study and is an investigator on the sub-project “Developing a culturally responsive trauma-informed public health emergency response framework for First Nations families and communities during COVID-19”, funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council Centre for Research Excellence Australian Partnership for Preparedness Research on Infectious Disease Emergencies and Paul Ramsay Foundation: APPRISE Targeted responses to empower First Nations-led research on COVID-19.
Simon Graham receives funding from the National Health & Medical Research Council (early career fellowship). The Centre for Research Excellence Australian Partnership for Preparedness Research on Infectious Disease Emergencies (APPRISE) is managed by the Peter Doherty Institute.
The pandemic has fundamentally altered every part of our lives, not least the time we spend on digital devices. For young people in particular, the blurred line between recreational and educational screen time presents new challenges we are only beginning to appreciate.
Even before COVID, there were concerns about screen time for children. A 2019-20 survey found four in five children were exceeding the current Ministry of Health recommendation of two hours’ recreational screen time a day. This was on top of screen time linked to learning.
With lockdowns and social restrictions now a new normal, it is increasingly difficult to disengage from screens. Children are growing up in a digital society, surrounded by a multitude of devices used for everything from social connection to learning and entertainment.
The boundaries between recreation, communication and learning are becoming less distinct. Screen time that may seem on the surface to be purely recreational can in reality be important for learning, supporting mental health and driving awareness of important issues.
YouTube, for example, can be both entertaining and educational. It is increasingly used in classes to supplement teaching. But it is also used in other ways, including to drive social change, as German star Rezo demonstrated with a viral climate change video that prompted sweeping public reforms.
Likewise the popular online game Minecraft has been shown to provide rich educational and social benefits. Even games like Roblox or Fortnite, where those benefits may be less apparent, still provide opportunities for rich social engagement and spaces for problem solving and experiential learning.
Play or education? Online games like Fortnite can be both. Shutterstock
Are official guidelines outdated?
This all presents an interesting dilemma: can we really fit screen time into discrete categories, and should we apply limits to some but not others?
This blurring of boundaries has led researchers from the University of Auckland’s Centre for Informed Futures – Koi Tū – to call for clearer and more detailed official screen time recommendations.
Specifically, they felt the current recommended limits failed to represent the variety of screen time students experience. This was supported by a review of the academic literature covering the impacts of screen time.
While research indicates a broad association between excessive screen time and a range of behavioural, learning and other problems, the results are far from conclusive and can generally be attributed to other factors.
The review also found the type of screen time is important: in many cases, negative effects were driven by passive screen use, whereas interactive use didn’t have the same impacts. In fact, the latter can have positive influences, such as better learning achievement and enhanced cognitive skills.
Getting the balance right
This suggests we need to reorient our views of screen time away from a blunt measure of time spent on screens and towards better understanding what children are really doing on those screens.
While balancing passive and interactive screen time is clearly important, so is finding ways to encourage and prioritise more socially and educationally productive online behaviour.
This should also guide the adoption of technology in schools. Rather than wholesale integration within every aspect of learning, devices should clearly add value or improve teaching and learning, not simply replace traditional practices.
The role of screen devices in classrooms is particularly relevant in light of New Zealand’s 2018 PISA results, which indicated children using devices in subjects like mathematics and science achieved lower scores than those who didn’t.
In August this year, the Ministry of Education responded by saying:
Digital devices have the potential to enhance learning, but there are few situations where this happens currently and many in which learning may be hindered.
Active versus passive time
It’s true there is considerable scepticism about the validity of the PISA tests, and wider research into the influence of screens in classrooms has shown mixed results.
Generally, however, we cannot claim a causal, linear relationship between use of devices and academic outcomes. Rather than assuming the PISA results indicate screen time is detrimental to learning, we need to consider how screens are actually being used in classes.
We need to focus on integrating technology that makes a difference and enhances learning. Students learn best when they are actively engaged and create and drive their own learning.
The same principles can apply to the use of digital devices – limiting passive consumption in favour of students being actively creative. This will open up new learning opportunities and provide students with authentic experiences.
For example, rather than students simply watching a YouTube clip to learn about the solar system, they might create their own augmented reality simulation, requiring them to apply their knowledge to correctly place, size and animate digital objects.
Rebalancing screen time in this way will help avoid the more negative consequences of these ubiquitous devices and highlight some of their unique advantages.
But this will require deeper and more critical thinking about what might be gained or lost in a world where engaging with digital technology is increasingly unavoidable.
Cheryl Brown receives funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment
Kathryn MacCallum does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage. You can sign up to NZ Politics Daily as well as New Zealand Political Roundup columns for free here.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vasso Apostolopoulos, Professor of Immunology and Associate Provost, Research Partnerships, Victoria University
As Australia strives to reach its national COVID vaccination targets, there’s unprecedented focus on the biological effects of vaccines.
While there’s an enormous amount of information available online, it’s increasingly difficult to discern truth from falsehood or even conspiracy.
A common myth of vaccines that has appeared in recent months is the accusation they remain active in the body for extended periods of time – a claim which has increased vaccine hesitancy in some people.
However, vaccines are cleared from your body in mere days or weeks. It’s the immune response against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that appears to last for a long time.
This isn’t due to the vaccines themselves remaining in the body. Instead, the vaccines stimulate our immune system and teach it how to respond if we’re ever exposed to the coronavirus.
Let’s explain.
How do vaccines work?
All vaccines, no matter the technology, have the same fundamental goal – to introduce the immune system to an infectious agent, without the risk that comes from disease.
The vaccine needs to follow a similar pathway a virus would have taken to produce an adequate immune response. Viruses enter our cells and use them to replicate themselves. So, the vaccines also need to be delivered in cells where proteins are produced, which mimics a component of the virus itself.
The COVID vaccines all do this by delivering information into our muscle cells, usually in our upper arm. They do this in different ways, such as using mRNA, like Pfizer’s and Moderna’s, or viral vectors, like AstraZeneca’s.
Regardless of the technology, the effect is similar. Our cells use the genetic template in the vaccine to produce the coronavirus’ spike protein, which is a part of the virus that helps it enter our cells. The spike protein is transported to the surface of the cell where it’s detected by the immune cells nearby.
There are also other specialised immune cells nearby, which take up the spike proteins and use them to inform more immune cells – targeting them specifically against COVID.
These immune cells include B cells, which produce antibodies, and T cells, which kill virus-infected cells. They then become long-lasting memory cells, which wait and monitor for the next time it sees a spike protein.
Once they’ve initiated the immune response, the vaccines themselves are rapidly broken down and cleared from the body.
The mRNA vaccines consist of a fatty shell, which encapsulates a group of mRNA particles – the genetic recipe for the spike protein. Once this enters a cell, the shell is degraded to harmless fats, and the mRNA is used by the cells to produce spike proteins.
Once the mRNA has been used to produce proteins, it’s broken down and cleared from the cell along with the rest of the mRNAs produced by the normal function of the cell.
In fact, mRNA is very fragile, with the most long lasting only able to survive for a few days. This is why the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have to be so carefully preserved at ultra-low temperatures.
The vector virus has all of its infectious components removed, so it’s unable to multiply or cause disease. Then a genetic template for the spike protein is inserted into the vector.
Once the vaccine is injected, the vector virus binds to your cells and inserts its genetic components, before the shell breaks down and is removed.
The viral machinery gets the genetic template into the control room of the cell, the nucleus, where it takes advantage of our normal protein building activity. The vaccine doesn’t cause any alteration to our DNA.
Normally, this would cause the cell to start producing more copies of the virus, but since this was all removed, all that’s produced is the spike protein.
The vaccines also stimulate your immune system to produce memory immune cells. This means even once antibody levels diminish, your immune system is ready to produce more antibodies and other immune cells to tackle the virus if you’re ever exposed to it.
Vasso Apostolopoulos COVID-19 research has received internal funding from Victoria University place-based Planetary Health research grant and from philanthropic donations.
Jack Feehan and Maja Husaric 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.
English is considered the language of international science. But our new research reveals how important scientific knowledge in other languages is going untapped. This oversight squanders opportunities to help improve the plight of the one million species facing extinction.
We reviewed almost 420,000 peer-reviewed papers on biodiversity conservation, published in 16 languages other than English. Many non-English-language papers provided evidence on the effectiveness of conservation measures, but they are often not disseminated to the wider scientific community.
History shows many valuable scientific breakthroughs were originally published in a language other than English. The structure of a Nobel Prize–winning antimalarial drug was first published in 1977 in simplified Chinese, as were many of the earliest papers on COVID-19.
Evidence-based conservation is crucial for tackling the Earth’s biodiversity crisis. Our research shows more effort is needed to transcend language barriers in science, maximising scientific contributions to conservation and helping save life on this planet.
Research findings in non-English papers can provide valuable insights. Shutterstock
Conservation game-changer
Most scientists speak English as a first or second language. And many academic reward programs are skewed towards getting published in international English-language journals.
But important evidence in biodiversity conservation is routinely generated by field conservationists and scientists who are less fluent in English. They often prefer publishing work in their first language – which for many, is not English.
More than one-third of scientific documents on biodiversity conservation are published in languages other than English. However, such knowledge is rarely used at the international level.
Take, for example, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Analysis of the IPBES biodiversity assessment reports has found 96% of references cited are written in English.
Clearly, tackling any global challenge, including the biodiversity crisis, hinges on tapping into the best available knowledge, whichever language it’s produced in. Our translatE project aims to overcome the language barriers to improve this information flow.
As part of the project, we screened 419,679 peer-reviewed papers published in 16 non-English languages between 1888 and 2020 across a wide range of fields. These spanned biodiversity, ecology, conservation biology, forestry and agricultural science, to name a few.
We found 1,234 papers across the 16 non-English languages that provided evidence on the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation interventions. To put this in perspective, the Conservation Evidence database, which documents global research into the effectiveness of conservation actions, holds 4,412 English-language papers.
The rate of publication of relevant studies is increasing over years in six non-English languages: French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and simplified Chinese.
Among the non-English-language studies we found were a Spanish study on alleviating conflicts between livestock farmers and endangered Andean mountain cats in northern Patagonia, and a Japanese study on the relocation of endangered Blakiston’s fish owls.
Such findings might have valuable insights for human-nature conflicts and threatened bird management in other parts of the world.
A Japanese study on Blakiston’s fish owls was among the relevant non-English papers the authors identified. Shutterstock
Most English-language evidence on what works in conservation relates to Europe and North America. In some highly biodiverse regions where conservation is needed most, such as Latin America, evidence is desperately lacking.
Research in languages other than English is especially common in regions where English-language studies are scarce, such as Latin America, Russia and East Asia (see figure below).
Many non-English studies also involve species for which studies in English are few or non-existent. Incorporating non-English studies would expand scientific knowledge into 12-25% more geographic areas and 5-32% more species.
The location of 1,203 non-English-language studies testing the effectiveness of conservation interventions, compared to English-language studies. Amano et al. (2021) Tapping into non-English-language science for the conservation of global biodiversity. PLOS Biology.
Tapping global knowledge
Making the best use of non-English-language science can be a quick, cost-effective way to fill gaps in English-language science.
Our research recommends more effort to synthesise non-English-language studies, and making this knowledge available in English so it can be disseminated to a global audience.
And research projects should seek to involve native speakers of different languages. For our research, we worked with 62 collaborators who, collectively, are native speakers of 17 languages.
To have the best chance of halting Earth’s extinction crisis, we must harness the skills, experience and knowledge of people from around the world.
We also urge wider disciplines to reassess the untapped potential of non-English science to address other global challenges.
Tatsuya Amano receives funding from the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT180100354) and the University of Queensland strategic funding.
The New South Wales government has released a draft plan to deal with feral horses roaming the fragile Kosciuszko National Park. While the plan offers some improvements, it remains seriously inadequate.
Feral horses trample endangered plant communities, destroy threatened species’ habitat and damage Aboriginal cultural heritage — all the while increasing in numbers. The draft plan would keep many horses in the national park, locking in ongoing environmental and cultural degradation.
The number of horses has grown dramatically in recent years under the Wild Horse Heritage Protection Act, which became law in 2018 and was championed by then NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro. He and others argued the horses were important to Australia’s history of pioneering, pastoralism and horse trapping, and were related to rural legends and literary works.
But the cultural heritage of an introduced species should not override the needs of a highly vulnerable alpine environment. Barilaro quit politics this week – and with the driving political force behind feral horse protection now gone, we have an 11th-hour chance to safeguard this significant national park.
What’s in the draft plan?
On the positive side, the draft plan aims to:
remove feral horses from 21% of the park
reduce feral horse numbers to 3,000 by 2027
prevent feral horses from invading new areas.
These are critical measures. As the draft plan notes, achieving them will need a set of carefully considered control methods, including ground shooting and putting down trapped horses.
Contrary to recent counter-productive management, reproductive-age females will no longer be released back into the park after being trapped.
But on the flip side, the plan will also:
allocate one third (32%) of the national park to feral horses
maintain 3,000 horses within the protected area in perpetuity
attempt to control horse numbers without using the most humane and cost-effective method: aerial shooting.
Aerial shooting is ruled out because of fears around losing social licence to remove horses from the park. But this may make it impossible to achieve effective horse control across rocky, difficult-to-access terrain.
It also means feral horse control will drag out over years. This will result in larger numbers of horses being culled, compared with completing a cull within one year. Maintaining 3,000 feral horses in this reserve means accepting the removal of at least 1,000 animals every two years in perpetuity, based on a conservative rate of population growth.
Over 14,000 horses, and rising
To understand the challenge, it’s important to understand the numbers. The chart below – using population data collected by ecologist Don Fletcher for a Reclaim Kosciuszko report – compares the number of feral horses in Kosciuszko National Park since 2000, with the number removed by trapping.
Error bars are 95% confidence limits. Don Driscoll, Author provided
The number of horses in Kosciuszko was last measured in November 2020 at just over 14,000.
With an the ongoing rate of increase of 18% per year and two years of population growth, numbers will have increased by 5,500. This means there’ll likely be almost 20,000 feral horses before control can start in 2022, under this plan.
The huge, growing number of horses roaming Kosciuszko combined with the likelihood of immigration from outside the park, is also the main reason fertility control cannot work. The draft report is therefore right to reject fertility control as a workable solution.
33 threatened species in greater peril
We are most concerned about the draft plan’s allocation of one third of the park to at least 3,000 feral horses, and likely many more given the limitations on control methods. These areas harbour important ecosystems and threatened species.
The overlapping distribution of feral horse retention areas under this draft plan, and threatened species. Desley Whisson, Author provided
Using publicly accessible data from NSW Bionet and Atlas of Living Australia, we estimate at least 33 threatened species live within the horse retention zone. About half of these are either already known to be impacted by feral horses or we suggest will likely be impacted because they’re vulnerable to trampling, grazing or habitat damage.
For example, the only place the critically endangered stocky galaxias – Australia’s most alpine-adapted fish – occurs is within the horse-retention area.
This hardy fish was recently rescued from bushfires and faces grave risks associated with the Snowy 2.0 scheme. It’s currently protected from feral horses thanks to a stock-exclusion fence, and the draft plan notes fencing is only a short-term solution.
The endangered Riek’s crayfish also has a restricted range within Kosciuszko. If horses are removed in the southern part of the park, as the draft plan outlines, then damage to their habitat will decline by 2027. But horses remain a threat to their habitats in the north.
Alpine sphagnum bogs and associated fens are a nationally threatened plant community with a stronghold in Kosciuszko. It is particularly vulnerable to impacts from feral horses, and we calculate 28% of its distribution in Kosciuszko will be inside the horse-retention zone.
Horses heritage value a non-sequitur
The draft plan’s main reason for keeping feral horses in the national park is to protect heritage values. However, the plan does not explain why heritage must be celebrated by keeping 3,000 feral horses in a national park.
In our view, while the horses have cultural heritage value to some, letting them continue to damage a fragile national park is an unacceptable trade-off.
Consider the recent Aboriginal cultural values report. It noted Indigenous Australians share similar heritage associations as skilled horse riders on farms since early colonial times. However, the report recommends acknowledging this heritage with information in a visitor centre.
Preservation of huts and interpretive signs are another way of acknowledging the heritage values of pastoralists past.
A social license
Research released this month surveyed 2,430 Australians and found 71% accept that feral animals can be culled to protect threatened species. As the researchers write, this sentiment is not fully reflected in existing policy and legislation.
Barilaro’s exit may be an opportunity for NSW politicians to capitalise on this social licence.
This draft plan is one step towards protecting our native species, natural places and Indigenous heritage, and will be open for submissions until November 2.
But if aerial culling was also on the table, those goals could be achieved with fewer horses culled and at lower cost.
Don Driscoll receives funding from the Herman Slade Foundation, OEH NSW Environmental Grants program, DELWP Vic, National Geographic, Rufford Foundation, WWF and Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, Australian Government Bushfire Recovery program. He is Director of the Centre of Integrative Ecology and Director of the TechnEcology Research Network at Deakin University. Don is a member of the Ecological Society of Australia and Society for Conservation Biology.
David M Watson receives funding from The Australian Research Council, the Hermon Slade Foundation and philanthropic support from Chris and Gina Grubb. His research is supported by The Australian Research and Data Commons, Charles Sturt University, Bush Heritage Australia, and collaborates with staff from Parks Victoria, Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. Professor of Ecology at Charles Sturt University, he is a member of the Ecology Society of Australia, Birdlife Australia and a founding member of the Slopes to Summit hub of the Great Eastern Ranges Initiative.
Desley Whisson receives funding from WWF, The Australian Government Bushfire Recovery Program, NSW Natural Resources Commission, and CSIRO. She is a member of the Society for Conservation Biology.
Maggie J Watson receives funding from the Institute of Land Water and Society, Charles Sturt University. She is a member of the Ecological Society of Australia and the Australian Society for Fish Biology.
If you’ve watched the Netflix sitcom The Chair you’ll remember the scene in which Professor Joan Hambling burns her student evaluations, after admitting she hadn’t read any of them since the 1980s. Many of us in academia whooped in delight when Professor Hambling lit that match.
We know exactly how she feels. For LGBTIQ+ people in particular, student experience or satisfaction surveys can be a source of distress as they provide students with an anonymous means to discriminate against and harass queer academics. At times, these surveys are little better than university-facilitated hate speech.
Adding salt to the wound is that universities then use these surveys to assess academics’ teaching performance, despite growing evidence they are not fit for this purpose. The University of New South Wales has even proposed to publish these survey results.
Researchshows student evaluations of teaching are not accurate measures of teaching effectiveness. Other research shows these surveys do not lead to higher teaching quality or better learning outcomes and are not trusted by students as a means of giving them a voice. In contrast, such surveys are linked to poorer teaching, grade inflation and to racism, sexism and homophobia.
A number of studies have shown grade satisfaction is a major factor in survey results – the higher the student’s grades the better the feedback they give. Students at prestigious universities are also more likely to positively rate their lecturers because the university and its courses are seen as “world class”. Most damningly, student evaluations are often little more than veiled bias about their lecturer’s personal traits, especially gender, race and sexuality.
Despite what she tells the chair of the department, Professor Joan Hambling has resisted reading her student evaluations.
Sharing the best and worst feedback
I recently asked a dozen academics from universities across Australia to share their worst and best student feedback stories. A common thread in these stories was students using the surveys to voice homophobic and transphobic sentiment. These are real student responses to questions about teaching quality:
I couldn’t concentrate because I couldn’t tell if the teacher was a man or woman.
I found it extremely frustrating that a lot of examples and theories all revolved around sexuality/gender/identification and how it affects him. Speaking to a number of students in this topic, a lot of us felt like it was over the top.
This lecturer has no empathy for students not supporting the LGBTQ ideology.
She looks like a man professor not a woman one.
He made me uncomfortable because gays and lesbianism are against my religion.
There are only two genders, men and women!
Some other comments were so offensive they were unpublishable.
There was also a strong thread of sexism. Research shows women receive lower ratings than male academics for doing the same thing. Women academics were judged harshly for being feminist or not conforming to stereotypical gender norms. One academic copped abuse for both in a single comment:
Question: Do you have any other comments to add about this teacher in this unit? Answer: You look like 13 year old boy but the brain of a woman power bullshit and your (sic) a germ.
The academic in question had a short, Pixie-style haircut at the time. Here we have the student’s perception of her gender non-conformity negatively impacting the academic’s teaching quality score.
These surveys provide two forms of so-called data, a numeric score and qualitative data in the form of student comments. To assess teaching performance, or to decide if an academic will be appointed or promoted, the numeric score alone is normally used. This means an academic given a poor score accompanied by a discriminatory comment is being evaluated without proper context.
That being said, neither the numeric score nor the comments necessarily reveal the student’s true motivation for the feedback. Students are discouraged from openly venting their racism, homophobia and sexism but this does not mean their attitudes change. They are just cleverer about how they express it. Anonymous surveys enable them to rate an academic harshly without having to justify the rating or say why.
Many responses have nothing to do with teaching
Research also shows students are often not even answering the question they are asked, as the comments above show. They often base their scores and comments – both positive and negative – on things outside the classroom and beyond the academic’s control. Here are some examples:
It would’ve been nice not to have to miss so many classes due to public holidays due to the classes being on a Monday.
Library access sometimes confusing – not everything available online.
IT help at this university is terrible, nothing ever works how it should and they never fix it.
One academic I contacted received a positive score and comment because of her wardrobe:
Question: What was good about the course?
Student comment: I like your shirts ?
Another academic received a low teaching quality score because the classroom did not have a nice view and the student found that depressing.
Although academics generally value and respect their students, it would be foolish to pretend that as a group they will give objective feedback with the sole aim of improving teaching. About one in ten students routinely cheats on their assessments. Half of British university students experience assault and harassment on campus from other students. Another UK study showed close to a quarter of LGBTIQ students had been a victim of homophobic harassment or discrimination, including threats of physical violence, at university.
Most students are good people, but enough harbour sexist, racist and homophobic views to distort survey outcomes.
Having positions of relative authority in the university system does not make LGBTIQ academics immune to homophobia on campus. If anything, they may feel like they have targets on their backs that force some back into the closet. Giving students an anonymous means to vent their bias and purposely harm academics’ careers and well-being just makes things worse.
Foregrounding student evaluations of teaching over other ways of assessing teaching performance — such as peer review and actual student learning outcomes — also leads some academics from vulnerable communities to self-censor in classes. Some queer academics, especially those on precarious casual contracts, try to be “less queer”. One non-binary academic adopted a “cisgender-friendly way of dressing” for the classroom after student comments. Having to wear more normative clothing made the academic feel they were “in a form of prison, wearing an inmate’s uniform”.
Obviously, having to hide who we are is not conducive to a productive teaching environment nor to our well-being.
Furthermore, for surveys to be statistically relevant and represent the majority attitudes of any given class the response rates need to be at 60% or higher – a benchmark routinely expected of survey data. Often students participate in these surveys at much lower rates. These low rates give a louder voice to those who wish to use the surveys to punish academics for their non-conformity to hetero-patriarchal values.
We already have better ways of assessing teaching quality and student learning, and ensuring those processes are authentic and fair. They’re called assessment outcomes.
In contrast, student evaluations of teaching are not fit for purpose and commonly discriminate against LGBTIQ+ and women academics. Perhaps Professor Hambling had valid reasons for burning her student feedback evaluations.
Pema Düddul 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.
CNSA Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center
Volcanic rocks collected from the Moon last year are about two billion years old — a billion years younger than the samples returned by previous missions. This new discovery means the Moon was volcanically active much more recently than experts had previously thought.
Remote images taken over the past few years had already suggested the Moon is home to much younger rocks than those previously brought back to Earth for direct study. Our research, published today in Science, confirms this fact for the first time.
The rock samples were collected by the Chinese National Space Agency during its Chang’e-5 mission in December 2020 — the first time anyone had collected rocks from the Moon since 1976.
During remote sessions with colleagues in China, our team at Curtin University helped determine the age of the lunar rock samples. The results, although long-expected, were exciting.
Previously, the youngest Moon rocks studied on Earth were samples collected by the Apollo and Luna missions in the 1960s and ‘70s, as well as lunar meteorites. All were at least three billion years old, leading geologists to surmise the Moon has not been volcanically active since then.
But after estimating the age of the new Moon rocks based on the rate of decay of radioactive elements in these samples, we determined these latest samples to be about two billion years old. This makes them the youngest volcanic rocks identified on the Moon so far.
The Chang’e-5 sample return capsule after landing on Earth, carrying the first Moon rocks collected since 1976. CNSA Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center
Not only is this the first direct confirmation rocks of this age exist on the Moon, it also confirms that our remote observation techniques work. That’s great news for experts studying other planets, especially Mars.
With China planning another Moon landing in 2024 as part of its Chang’e-6 mission, this research also puts Australia at the heart of the international collaboration to analyse the resulting samples.
The fact the Moon has younger volcanic rocks than we thought also means it must have had a relatively recent bout of internal heating that would have driven this volcanic activity. The challenge now is to explain how it happened.
In general, volcanic rocks (or “basalts”) are similar on various rocky planets and moons. But there are some key differences that make them unique. Lunar basalts probably form under hotter conditions, because water is more scarce on the Moon than here on Earth. The presence of water can change the temperature at which the rocks melt or solidify, and the hotter formation on the Moon can create subtle but crucial variations in the rocks’ chemical composition, relative to similar types of rocks on Earth.
A fragment of volcanic Moon rock, under high magnification. Beijing SHRIMP Center, Institute of Geology, CAGS
Many Moon rocks are very high in titanium, for example, which is never seen on Earth, although the rocks collected by Chang’e-5 have intermediate titanium levels.
Our focus will now turn to analysing more fragments to establish how much they vary in chemical composition. This will hopefully teach us more about the specific conditions under which these rocks formed, initially as volcanic magmas.
We still need to explain what heat source is responsible for the comparatively recent melting of the interior on the Moon, which formed the internal “lake” of magma associated with the volcanic activity, and why it has become cool and inert today.
Ultimately, this will help us improve age dating of the entire Solar system, unlocking more secrets from our cosmic neighbourhood.
Gretchen Benedix receives funding from The Australian Research Council.
Alexander Nemchin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The United States government is scheduled to hit its “debt ceiling” of US$28.4 billion on or around October 18.
The US debt ceiling isn’t like the limit on a credit card, which is imposed by the lender worried about the borrower’s ability to make payments.
Instead, it’s a form of self-delusion: a limit imposed by the borrower itself — the US government in the form of the Congress — in order to limit borrowing largely necessitated by decisions of the Congress.
This statement endorsed by a panel of leading US economists surveyed by the Chicago Booth school in 2013 sums up the absurdity of the requirement
because all federal spending and taxes must be approved by both houses of Congress and the executive branch, a separate debt ceiling that has to be increased periodically creates unneeded uncertainty and can potentially lead to worse fiscal outcomes
No-one knows what would happen if the Congress didn’t approve the regular increases in the debt ceiling made necessary by the programs it legislates. What does happen is that each increase gets approved at the last moment in a largely symbolic high stakes game of chicken.
If each increase wasn’t approved, the US might be unable to borrow to meet the payments on its debt and would default.
Or, and this was the basis of a contingency plan drawn up in 2011, it would delay payments for other things, such as contractors, staff, social security recipients and Medicare providers, in order to meet free up enough cash to ensure it continued to make payments on debts.
Either would scare the heck out of financial markets, as does the fact that both are evoked each time Congress goes through the charade of deciding whether or not to do what it has so far always done.
In an episode of Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant TV show The West Wing, staffer Annabeth Schott asks: “so this debt ceiling thing is routine, or the end of the world?”
White House press secretary Toby Ziegler replies: “Both.”
What would happen if the US breached the debt ceiling? Credit ratings agency Moody’s says if the government defaulted GDP could fall by close to 4%, six million jobs could be lost, mortgage and business interest rates would spike, and US$15 trillion would be wiped off the value of assets markets.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen described the sequence as “catastrophic”.
Will the US end up raising the debt ceiling once again? Almost certainly. But even a small probability of a catastrophe is an unnecessary risk.
The politics of the matter are that the Republicans seem to want Democrats to raise the debt ceiling without Republican votes, preserving it as a campaign issue.
Since Democrats only have 50 of the 60 votes in the Senate required to force a vote, it requires a workaround. It’ll probably happen, but it’s a dangerous game.
Down under, Australia flirted with this stupidity, then escaped it.
Australia’s brief debt ceiling
During the financial crisis of 2008-09, Labor introduced a debt ceiling as a way of signalling its seriousness about economic management.
I would have thought its success in saving Australia from a recession did the trick, but I’m just an economist.
In its wisdom Labor set the ceiling at A$75 billion.
Since deficits kept happening and flirting with a debt ceiling was bad news, Labor increased the ceiling to A$200 billion, then to A$250 billion, then A$300 billion.
And, just like the reckless Republicans in the United States, an opportunistic Coalition in Australia opposed each increase.
Then, shortly after the Coalition took office in 2013, newly minted Treasurer Joe Hockey proposed a really big increase, from A$300 billion to A$500 billion, to end the recurring charade.
Labor took the high road, said it wouldn’t oppose the sort of thing it would also have to do in government, and refused to play politics. The debt ceiling was abolished, and everyone lived happily ever after.
Actually, no. I made that up.
With the help of The Greens, Coalition Treasurer Joe Hockey abolished Australia’s debt ceiling. Lukas Coch/AAP
What Labor did was start making noises about opposing the increase. “I don’t believe he’s come anywhere near yet justifying that extraordinary increase to the debt limit,” said Labor’s (otherwise generally sensible) treasury spokesman Chris Bowen.
It was a journalist’s rather bold suggestion that provided the cut through. Peter Martin suggested Hockey bypass Labor and do a deal with the Greens to abolish the ceiling altogether.
Labor, realising its mistake, said it supported the deal and promised to treat sovereign default in the same bipartisan way that the two major parties deal with national security issues.
“Politics must stop at the door of sovereign default” the opposition leader said.
Actually, no. That didn’t happen either. Labor described the deal as “bizarre”.
The broader lesson
One takeaway is that Australia was right to remove a silly constraint that risked blowing up the economy for no good reason.
We should say no to debt ceilings.
But there’s a broader lesson. Politicians in this country should stop playing politics with issues on which they agree.
Labor should stop complaining about “debt and deficits”, given that if it had been in government it would have done much the same.
And the Coalition should knock off the hypocrisy on a range of issues including climate change where it is likely to end up endorsing the sort of policies it ridiculed when they came from Labor.
Electric cars were never going to end the weekend. The targets Australia puts forward at the Glasgow climate talks are likely to implicitly endorse the switch.
Our politics can be better, but only if our politicians are.
Richard Holden is President-elect of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Australia’s performing arts sector has long been recognised as an ecosystem. It is a community of artists, arts organisations and institutions, all affected by factors such as education and training, audiences, policy and revenues.
It comprises commercial organisations; not-for-profit, government subsidised companies; independent grassroots ventures and amateur groups making and touring creative works for audiences locally, nationally and internationally.
Every species in this ecology has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As we transit from crisis to recovery, and the dust settles on a post-COVID terrain, it’s likely we’ll see a mass exodus of despairing freelance workers leaving the sector for good.
The demise of small companies lacking the infrastructure to survive is also on the cards. A decimation of university theatre departments has already happened. Taken together, this paints a bleak future.
The sector has called for extra support for over a year. Theatre Network Australia proposes additional funding of $100 million over four years for the Australia Council and a targeted wage subsidy for workers in the performing arts who continue to suffer due to COVID-19.
For the top tier, hope is to hand. With swiftly rising vaccination rates, theatres in Sydney have been given the green light to open at 75% capacity. Big stage musicals Hamilton and Come from Away will reopen this month. Sydney Theatre Company will return in November with Julius Caesar, and plans to mount an international tour of The Picture of Dorian Gray, starring Eryn Jean Norvill, with commercial producers Michael Cassel Group.
Sydney Theatre Company have announced they will be touring The Picture of Dorian Gray – but the path forward for smaller companies will be much more rocky. Dan Boud/Sydney Theatre Company
Melbourne theatres remain closed until a “pathway” beyond the peak of the pandemic is settled, but there is clear hope theatres will open in the coming months. Melbourne Theatre Company has just announced its 2022 season to start in January.
These companies were able to weather the storms of 2020 and 2021. Many smaller companies and independent artists may not be so fortunate. With state borders still closed and lower vaccination rates in regional areas, the resumption of touring remains a long way off.
The end of the pandemic may be in sight. The pain for Australia’s theatre sector is only just beginning.
‘Caught in a rip’
The COVID-19 Arts Sustainability Fund was established by the federal government in June 2020, three months after COVID closed theatres and venues and halted touring, triggering unemployment – or significantly reduced employment – for the sector’s large base of freelance workers.
The $50 million fund remains open until May 2022 to provide “last resort” assistance to “significant” arts organisations at “imminent risk” of insolvency due to the pandemic.
A $5 million cash grant to the Melbourne Theatre Company is the latest lifeline from the fund to rescue one of our leading cultural organisations from going under. As the company’s executive director, Virgina Lovett, described it, the pandemic has been “like being caught in a rip”.
The term “imminent risk” evokes urgency: a clear and present danger.
Yet this language of pending disaster is a curious metaphor for the government to use, given the changes to Australia’s subsidised performing arts industry across the last seven years.
Melbourne Theatre Company recently received money earmarked for companies at ‘imminent risk’ due to the COVID crisis. Jo Duck/MTC
Federal government funding for the arts is less now than 2013 when the Labor government departed office. Australia lags in the OECD league table for spending on culture per percentage of GDP. In 2019, Australia ranked 25th in a field of 34 countries, spending just 0.9% of GDP on culture.
The reality is that COVID-19 just is another deadly blow to an arts ecology that has been endangered for a long time.
The bulk of the government’s COVID-19 response for the arts sector is its project-based, $200 million competitive grant fund, Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE).
So far, $160 million has been allocated to a mix of regional and metropolitan organisations; commercial and not-for-profit; touring, events, festivals and exhibitions. It is a much broader church of recipients than the typical roll call of Australia Council funding.
A devil in the detail is support for touring projects and initiatives in the regions: touring funding is of little use if it can’t quickly leverage return through buoyant ticket sales, and vaccination rates in regional areas will remain low for some time to come.
There will be an unmeasured – and perhaps immeasurable impact – on emerging and independent artists. In many cases, COVID has broken trajectories of creative development begun in childhood, developed through teenage years and honed in higher education.
Young emerging artists provide generational renewal to theatre: bringing ideas and energy into the rehearsal room as they find their voices as creators and collaborators.
But pathways for them to hone their craft have been drastically reduced. According to reporting by Julian Meyrick in The Monthly, Monash, Murdoch, La Trobe, Charles Sturt and Newcastle universities have “effectively closed their standalone drama programs”; the drama departments at Flinders and Wollongong have seen cuts to teaching hours and staffing respectively, while Queensland University of Technology and Federation University have seen class sizes increased.
A snapshot from drama at Flinders University
demonstrates the flow of graduates into theatre, TV, and film as writers, presenters, comics, directors, designers, and actors, but importantly, also as founders of new performance groups across the genres of circus, music, youth theatre and more.
Graduates forge diverse paths. Take the careers of Marion Potts, or Rachel Swain,
both graduates of theatre and performance studies at the University of Sydney. Potts is currently CEO at Performing Lines, producing contemporary works by independent artists. Her executive producer role follows a stellar directing career with long stints at STC (1995-99), Bell Shakespeare (2005-2010), and Malthouse Theatre (2010-2015) and as director of theatre at the Australia Council.
By contrast, Swain’s unique career traverses multimedia and intercultural dance theatre. She co-founded innovative physical theatre company Stalker and is now co-artistic director of contemporary dance company Marrugeku .
From our experience, if you teach a student physical theatre they may end up making puppets, starting a theatre company, or acting in television. Teach community cultural development and they are equipped to apply “design thinking” to theatre making or social innovation.
University theatre departments have traditionally been a pathway to the professional schools of acting, directing, and design – VCA, NIDA, WAAPA – but graduates infiltrate all areas of the creative industries because of the broad skills and theory our contemporary departments teach. Importantly, they are also the future generation of teachers.
Vital young and emerging artists will suffer from cuts to these courses, and an increasingly dire funding situation when they do graduate. This will lead to a fracturing of the generational rejuvenation of the theatre.
In July, the Australia Institute’s Creativity in Crisis report estimated over 90% “of artists, creators and businesses” do not receive public funding and so were unable to access arts relief measures.
Many of these artists are freelancers: in theatre this may mean they move between jobs at the major state theatre companies, smaller funded shows, and independent, self-produced productions. Support for these artists is not only crucial for independent theatre, but extends all the way up the food chain.
Shadow arts minister Tony Burke estimated when JobKeeper ended, just one in five arts workers were receiving the payment
A backstop for this pool of skilled workers, the Coronavirus Supplement Income, ended in April when the sector was rebooting. But renewed hard lockdown measures, first in NSW and then Victoria, have left these workers caught in a perfect storm.
For many freelance arts workers, prolonged interruption to their careers since March 2020 means a long absence from rehearsing, practising, collaborating and performing.
To avoid prolonged insecurity and precarity, many artists are establishing alternate income streams – often unconnected to their creative skills.
It is likely many will exit the sector for good.
Touring in a new world
Touring – within Australia and internationally – greatly increases the number of people a work can reach, providing ongoing employment for artists and creative workers.
A national survey in late 2020 found, the touring sector’s capacity was “stretched thin”.
Chris Bendall, the CEO of Critical Stages, a company that tours Australian productions, reports that during July and August,
performances were deferred or cancelled “on a near-daily basis”. The expense was compounded by “uncertainty and anxiety as borders closed mid-flight”, lockdowns occurred while touring parties were finishing bump-ins just hours before showtime, and “travel plans were re-routed … to avoid artists being locked out of their own states or forced into 14 days quarantine”. Most cancelled shows were in regional areas.
This is just one report – small or large, urban festival centre or regional venue –
it’s heartbreaking for everyone involved when the show can’t go on.
The long-term impacts of COVID-19 mean the same level of touring activity that happened before the pandemic cannot and will not resume. Future touring may well need to adopt new models such as hybrid live/digital delivery to increase audiences.
As part of this year’s Adelaide Fringe, for instance, performer Joanne Hartstone
live-streamed her show The Reichstag is Burning to 38 countries via the new digital theatre platform, Black Box Live, she co-developed. In August, Hartstone again streamed her show live to the Hollywood Fringe and the Edinburgh Fringe festivals.
The COVID-induced pivot to live streaming by theatre companies and solo performers is at least, giving rise to new skills development and the capacity for shows to be viewed live or on demand. Other post-COVID touring models include “slow touring”, where artists stay longer in a community to develop exchanges; and multiple casts to avoid border crossings. Both options are likely to incur higher expenses.
Julian Lewis, the artistic director and CEO of NORPA, a theatre company in Lismore, has called on all levels of government – local, state and federal – to develop policy supporting the complex, interconnected ecosystem of touring: those who produce, present, support and experience.
Entrenched neglect of the national performing arts ecology for nearly a decade has merely been compounded by the pandemic and inadequate emergency “lifelines”.
A raft of cultural policy recommendations from the Australia Institute
includes: expanding funding to community art organisations and artists; rebuilding arts education in primary and secondary schools; reversing Commonwealth funding cuts to university creative arts, media and humanities courses; and greatly expanding the number of three-year creative fellowships on offer from around 10 per annum to 300 per annum – mirroring the Australian Research Council’s annual fellowships for researchers.
For theatre this could mean a reset of once-in-a-lifetime magnitude. Improving working conditions for artists, strengthening the flow of new and emerging artists, and taking more theatre to regional and diverse communities.
It shouldn’t be a wishlist. It’s an opportunity to protect and grow our unique theatre culture.
Clare Irvine is currently affiliated with Catapult Choreographic Hub. She has worked for the Australia Council for the Arts and has been employed by a number of small-to-medium arts organisations in New South Wales.
Gillian Arrighi 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.
Bougainville community leader and MP Theonila Roka Matbob has received the Gwynne Skinner Human Rights Award in recognition of her outstanding work to hold mining giant Rio Tinto to account for the legacy of environmental devastation caused by its former Panguna mine.
Matbob, 31, is a traditional landowner from Makosi, just downstream from the mine.
She was one of 156 Bougainville residents, represented by the Human Rights Law Centre, who last year filed a human rights complaint against the company with the Australian government.
The complaint received global media attention and led to Rio Tinto publicly committing in July to fund an independent human rights and environmental impact assessment of the mine.
“I’m deeply honoured to receive this award on behalf of myself and my people,” Matbob said.
“We have been living with the disastrous impacts of Panguna for many years and the situation is getting worse. Our communities live surrounded by the vast mounds of waste left over from the mine, which continue to poison our rivers with copper.
“Kids get sick from the pollution. The farms and villages of communities downstream are being flooded with mine waste.
“Many people lack basic access to clean water.
Years of struggle “Now, after many years of struggle, at last we have an agreement with Rio Tinto to fund a proper investigation of these urgent problems to develop solutions.
“I would like to express my thanks to all those who have supported us to reach this point. But now is not the time to rest. Our work will continue until Rio Tinto has fully dealt with the disaster it left behind.”
Human Rights Law Centre legal director Keren Adams said that Matbob had worked tirelessly over the past few years to brings these issues to world attention and compel Rio Tinto to take responsibility for the devastating consequences.
“It is in large part thanks to her leadership and advocacy that the company has now taken the first important step towards addressing this legacy,” she said.
“At the same time as doing all this, Theonila ran for Parliament and was elected one of Bougainville’s youngest and only female MPs and subsequently made the Minister for Education. She is an inspirational human rights defender and a thoroughly deserving winner of the award.”
Matbob previously worked with the Human Rights Law Centre to document the stories of the communities affected by the mine, including from many inaccessible villages whose stories had rarely been heard.
This work led to the publication of the report After The Mine.
Featured in PJR She also featured in the documentary Ophir about Bougainville and also in the Pacific Journalism Review Frontline investigation by Wendy Bacon and Nicole Gooch published in the research journal last week.
Matbob will be presented with the award at a virtual ceremony on October 22.
Professor Gwynne Skinner was a professor of law at Willamette University in the United States who spent her career working at the forefront of efforts to develop greater accountability by companies for their human rights impacts.
The award was created by the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable to honour her legacy and recognise the work of individuals and organisations that have made significant contribution to corporate accountability.
The calls for New Zealanders to get vaccinated are becoming more urgent by the day as covid-19 embeds itself in the community.
Two people have now died in the latest outbreak, the number of daily cases remains in the double figures and the virus continues to spread outside Auckland.
The government has announced a nationwide immunisation push for October 16 — dubbed Super Saturday — but one of Auckland’s leading Māori vaccinators is questioning what it will achieve.
Te Whānau o Waipareira runs two mass vaccination centres, and has given tens of thousands of Aucklanders their Pfizer shots.
Chief executive John Tamihere said the first he heard of Super Saturday was when Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins announced it at a media conference, saying it would be like election day, with clinics open all day and into the night
Tamihere said that would not cut it when it came to getting vaccine stragglers.
“They won’t necessarily turn up, the ones they are endeavouring to target. We have to go out into the streets and take each suburb street by street and to do that you’ve got to know where you’re sending and deploying your resources,” Tamihere said.
More resources rather than big show “We would probably put a lot more resource into that campaign as opposed to big show days.”
Speaking at today’s government briefing, Director of Public Health Dr Caroline McElnay said seven of the new cases in Auckland were yet to be linked to earlier cases, all of the Waikato cases were linked.
There have now been 22 cases in Waikato in the current outbreak.
One previous community case has been reclassified as under investigation, bringing the total cases in the outbreak to 1448.
There were also two cases detected in MIQ reported today.
7000 receive drive-through dose But the recent six-day vaccination event at Vodafone Events Centre is being hailed a success after 7000 people received a drive-through dose.
Among them, many church members of the Assemblies of God Church of Sāmoa who know first-hand the harsh reality of the virus.
Church spokesperson Jerome Mika said the community was grieving.
He said many members had been vaccinated at the drive-through event in the past few days which was a success due to the many community groups that had supported it.
“Community willingness to be able to just support and encourage their family members to come and get vaccinated.”
The experts agree.
Māori and Pacific leaders a must Victoria University of Wellington immunologist Diane Sika-Paotonu said to be effective, any vaccination campaign must include Māori and Pacific leaders.
“They’re not just being called in right at the end to help make things work but rather they’re involved right from the outset at the design stage of any activities, events and interventions that are being planned.”
But one group argues they need the right information for that model to work.
Tamihere also heads the North Island’s Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency.
It is taking the Ministry of Health to court for refusing to hand over health data for all Māori that he said was vital to closing the “dangerous gap” in the vaccination rates.
It sits at just over 57 percent for a first dose compared with 81 percent of Pākehā.
“Tai Tokerau is way behind, the Bay of Plenty is way behind. These are Māori communities. It’s not that they’re stupid and dumb, it’s that they’re poorer and their priorities are different and it takes time to reach them.”
The Ministry of Health said it could not share the data because many of the people were not enrolled with Whānau Ora so officials were not authorised to hand it over.
The ministry will release information today on the most and least vaccinated suburbs in the country.
Yesterday 63,000 people were vaccinated as rates climb again after a month long dip.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Brother Frater Anton Syufi of the Papua’s Order of Saint Augustine (OSA) has been arrested by the Jayapura city district police for wearing a banned Morning Star (BK) independence flag T-shirt while watching a soccer match between Papua and East Nusa Tenggara at Indonesia’s National Games at Mandala Stadium.
This was conveyed by Frater Kristianus Sasior, also from the OSA, who assisted Brother Syufi at the Jayapura district police.
Syufi, who was arrested at 4 am last Sunday and detained until 7 pm, was finally released at 10 pm because police did not find any other issues to charge him with.
The Morning Star flag of West Papua … outlawed. Image: SIBC
“The police said he was detained because he wore a BK T-shirt. The police said that he was disturbing the Papua PON XX [20th National Games], said Brother Sasior.
“There is a prohibition on wearing things with the BK design. Brother Frater Anton did not [show] it intentionally because he was wearing two layers of clothing.
“When his favourite team won he jumped up and down and opened his outer shirt so police saw the costume underneath with the BK design.
“He was summoned and taken to Jayapura city district police. The police said they were still waiting for the head of the intelligence unit to arrive so we were [also] still waiting”, explained Sasior when contacted by Suara Papua by phone from Sorong.
A similar story was conveyed by Evenisus Kowawin who said that Syufi was detained for wearing the Morning Star T-shirt while watching the soccer match.
“Frater Anton was arrested because he wore a BK shirt. Police saw the shirt then dragged him out, interrogated him then took him to the district police. He’s currently still at the police [station],” explained Kowawin.
The announcement this week that New Zealand will introduce a vaccination certificate by November is welcome news. Whether by “carrot” or “stick”, vaccination rates must keep climbing, as it is now likely case numbers will climb under alert level 3 conditions in Auckland.
We’ve seen a growing number of mystery cases over the past couple of weeks – people testing positive after going to hospital for non-covid reasons, or from essential worker surveillance testing.
These cases suggest there is a significant amount of undetected community transmission, and that makes it much harder to stamp out.
While the slight easing of restrictions announced on Tuesday may or may not accelerate the growth in cases, it is unlikely to slow it.
To some extent this is a semantic argument. Elimination has been defined as “zero tolerance” for community transmission, as opposed to zero cases. The fact that New Zealand was able to get to zero cases for much of the past 18 months has inevitably come to define what elimination has meant in practice.
Before vaccines were widely available, having zero cases was crucial in allowing us to enjoy level 1 freedoms.
But New Zealand is now transitioning into a new phase of the pandemic, and this was always going to happen. Borders can’t remain closed forever and the virus was always going to arrive sooner or later.
Return to tougher restrictions still a possibility In an ideal world, our border defences would have kept delta out and New Zealand would have been able to stay at alert level 1 until the vaccine rollout was complete.
But the delta outbreak has forced our hand to some extent.
Whether another week or two at level 4 would have been enough to eliminate this outbreak is impossible to know. Given the outbreak is spreading in very difficult-to-reach communities, stamping out every chain of transmission is extremely challenging.
As we shift from an elimination to a suppression strategy, the country will have to tread a very narrow path to avoid overwhelming our hospitals and throwing our at-risk populations under the bus.
We are now relying on a combination of restrictions and immunity through vaccination to prevent cases growing too rapidly. As vaccination rates increase, restrictions can be progressively eased.
But if we relax too much, there is a risk the number of hospitalisations could start to spiral out of control. When the R number is above 1, cases will continue to grow relentlessly until either more immunity or tougher restrictions bring it back under 1.
Getting vaccination rates up is crucial but will take time, so the government may yet be forced to tighten restrictions to protect our healthcare systems.
The vaccination advantage New Zealand was always going to have to grapple with these really tough decisions, though delta has forced us to do this earlier than we would have liked.
But our elimination strategy has given us has an important advantage – almost 70 percent of the total population has had at least one dose of the vaccine before experiencing any large-scale community transmission.
We still have a lot of work ahead, but having access to the vaccine before being exposed to the virus is a luxury people in most countries didn’t have.
Those ICU beds are normally full with patients with conditions other than covid-19.
The implications for the healthcare system are obvious. If New Zealand goes the way of Melbourne, harsher restrictions will probably be inevitable.
Not a white flag The more optimistic scenario is that a combination of restrictions, vaccination and contact tracing is just enough to keep a lid on the case numbers. It’s almost inevitable cases will increase. But if it isn’t too rapid and hospitals can meet the demand, it could tide us over until we have the high vaccine coverage we need.
And while vaccination rates are not yet high enough, they are still helping a lot, cutting the R number to around half what it would be with no vaccine.
The country is in a far better position now than it would have been if the Auckland outbreak had happened in May or June.
Everyone can do their bit by doing two things: help and encourage those around you to get vaccinated, and stick to the rules.
We have to keep community transmission rates low to keep pressure off our hospitals and help us get to the next step of the road map. Moving away from a literal interpretation of elimination does not mean waving a white flag.
It appears we are a nation of selfish malcontents for whom enough is never enough.
That is one of the conclusions I’ve been forced to draw after seven weeks of covid lockdown in Auckland. And, because my isolation has been broken only by a few medical appointments that are valid reasons for leaving my security-guarded community, I gain my impressions through our media and a diet containing a surfeit of opinion, some of it in the guise of news.
I am confronted daily by examples of peevish bleating, whining, and complaining. I hear demands for certainty where there can be none.
I hear commentators crying out for an end to level 4 then level 3 lockdown. They range from predictable nay-saying radio hosts like Mike Hosking, Heather du Plessis-Allan and Kerre McIvor to the unscientific Sir John Key, whose syndicated comments were the product of some yet-to-be-revealed stratagem by the former prime minister.
I see New Zealanders demanding that their right to return to this country be met NOW when it is obvious that the number of intending returnees far exceeds the country’s capacity to safely manage them.
I read of business demanding the ability to trade, and parents demanding to take their children to far-flung spots for the school holidays, when doing so risks undoing the constraint that has been put on the spread of the delta variant.
I am told the government is incompetent or that it has gone too hard, and that the police haven’t gone hard enough on gangs and followers of Brian Tamaki.
Nation of whingers? What else could I conclude but that we are a nation of whingers?
But I have also concluded that some of our news media are exhibiting signs of split personality: While devoting an extraordinary amount of time and space to the malcontents, they are also pursuing positive campaigns to get the eligible population vaccinated.
They also – thank goodness – show a willingness to accommodate the views of members of the medical and scientific community, whose opinions we so desperately need to hear.
The two positions are not, of course, mutually exclusive. Media have a duty to report dissent as well as the positives. However, while front page lead stories supporting efforts to contain the delta variant have far outweighed those that argue against them, I have a sense that this Winter Of Our Discontent emphasis is compromising the vax campaign by legitimising self-entitlement.
In my lockdown musings I have, however, reached one further conclusion that both saddens and frustrates me. It is the realisation that many of those who need to get the message to get vaccinated are beyond the reach of news media.
These are people who do not read newspapers, watch television news programmes, listen to radio news bulletins or access the online services that each provides. They have no idea what a “1pm stand-up” means.
They do not engage with news on any other basis than word-of-mouth or social media and the results are fragmented, selective, and often-as-not wrong. In other words, the commendable media campaigns to raise vaccination levels never reach them.
Getting to the marginalised Ways need to be found to get to this marginalised part of our community. Perhaps the answer is for the media to go on the road. A media roadshow visiting suburbs with which they seldom positively identify might have benefits beyond helping us to get closer to that magic 90 per cent vaccination target.
I was about to say I had reached another conclusion but that’s too strong a word for it. I have a suspicion that the Winter Of Our Discontent is not a reflection of widespread public opinion. I am led to that suspicion by two polls.
These suggest to me a greater level of resilience (and common sense) than negative media stories might indicate. It’s also manifested in the (admittedly limited) interactions I have with people these days.
That also might be reflected in a letter I read in The New Zealand Herald last week. It was in response to a story about a man who feared he would not be allowed to witness his wife giving birth to triplets in Auckland if he returned to Rotorua to work.
M.A. Hume of Mt Roskill, who admitted to being “old enough to remember the Second World War”, recalled a friend whose husband died at El Alamein without ever seeing his daughter and others who had not seen their families for four years and had no certainty of returning to them. “In those days,” the letter writer said, “huge sacrifices were commonplace.”
I would like to think that, today, most of us can muster that same sense of self-sacrifice and resolve. Given the announcements last weekend of rising cases in Auckland and a spread to the Waikato, we’ll need it.
Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications – covering both editorial and management roles – that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes a blog called Knightly Views where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
Those critiquing the dramatic fall of Gladys Berejiklian, who resigned when the Independent Commission Against Corruption announced it was investigating the probity of her conduct, have divided into two camps.
Some cast ICAC as the ogre that’s brought down a good leader, and a woman at that, over what seem to them relatively small matters.
Others argue propriety is paramount, regardless of the broader qualities of a leader, and Berejiklian’s position as NSW premier became untenable after her revelation last year of her relationship with a dodgy colleague.
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce portrayed ICAC as a rogue player that gets in the way of politicians.
“ICAC out of control means that the bureaucracy reigns supreme and politicians are basically terrified to do their job,” Joyce told Channel 7.
“Politicians at times have to make hard decisions. It’s not that they’re corrupt, they’re making decisions. There might be some disagreement with the bureaucracy, but that’s their right. That’s why people go to a ballot box and they see the name of politicians on the ballot paper, not the names of bureaucrats.”
Politicians’ decisions in some cases are made for improper reasons. And without sharp oversight, the voters may not be the wiser when they look at that ballot paper. Remember, it was the auditor-general who documented the egregious sports grants rorting.
With the Morrison government due within weeks to introduce its legislation for a federal integrity commission, Berejiklian’s resignation has brought into even sharper focus the powers and conduct of the bodies charged with investigating integrity in politics.
Morrison was blunt in his view about ICAC. “I’m sure there are millions of people who’ve seen what’s happened to Gladys Berejiklian, they’ll understand that’s a pretty good call not to follow that [ICAC] model,” he said.
Many people, however, will not think that’s such a “good call”.
We haven’t got the final version of the government’s integrity commission legislation. But the draft model put out by then attorney-general Christian Porter was spineless in its provisions relating to politicians and public servants. And it would take a major change of direction for the government to insert a significant spine when it makes its revisions.
The point is this: the government doesn’t really want an integrity commission. It has been dragged to it by political necessity.
In the draft model, the proposed commission has tough provisions covering the scrutiny of law enforcement bodies. But politicians, their staff and bureaucrats would be given heavy protections.
These would make it hard for allegations against them to reach investigators, limit what matters the body could probe, and ban public hearings during inquiries, as well as public reporting.
Under Morrison’s model, Berejiklian’s self-damning evidence of last year would not have been given in an open forum.
In a report released this week the Centre for Public Integrity, an independent think tank with a board of legal heavyweights, compared the government’s planned commission with others around the country and concluded that its public sector division “would be the weakest integrity commission in the country”.
The centre pointed out such a body wouldn’t, for instance, be able to investigate rorting in the sports grants scheme and commuter car parks project, the allegations of conflict of interest involving minister Angus Taylor’s family business, or claims about ex-ministers’ potential breaches of the ministerial code of conduct.
This list, however, does invite a knotty question. Should all alleged integrity breaches by politicians, staff and public servants be examined by the same body?
Gary Sturgess, who as cabinet secretary to the NSW Greiner government designed ICAC, argues for having one body to look at serious “corruption” allegations (with no special protections for the political class), and a separate one to deal with less serious alleged integrity breaches by public figures.
Sturgess warns against confusing corruption involving potential criminality with other (but still important) breaches. “Treat all politicians as crooks, and there is the danger that we will end up with less integrity in public office, not more,” he wrote in The Conversation this week.
In designing its model, the Morrison government has been more concerned about the political damage a robust body could do than about corruption and other integrity issues. It doesn’t want any more opportunity than presently exists for “scandals” to be probed.
Critics of having a federal body at all have in the past argued that “corruption” is found more often at state rather than federal level.
But there’s no doubt federal governments of both complexions, and individual politicians, will often be willing to subvert proper process when it’s expedient to do so – and if they think they can get away with it. And the role of donations in buying access to ministers and their offices involves serious integrity concerns. It doesn’t have to be a matter of cash in a brown paper bag.
Potential exposure of integrity breaches has the dual advantage of serving the public’s right to know and acting as a deterrent to bad behaviour.
But the fear that an integrity commission can be weaponised politically is legitimate. Strong protections are needed for those investigated and witnesses as well as a stringent arrangements for oversight of the commission’s activities.
Labor is promising a more robust model to cover the political class, including public hearings, wider access for those wanting to make allegations, and the ability for the commission to commence its own inquiries.
Retrospectivity is a contested area, with shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus saying the commission “has to be able to decide about matters that potentially, even though they occurred in the past, are having a current effect on the government of Australia”. The government says retrospectivity is a question of parameters and it is still working this through.
The government’s legislation may not have been passed by the election, given the tight timetable. Even if it has been, Labor will be committed to revisiting the model.
Either way, the national integrity commission is likely to be still a sharp point of contention when the voters go to the polls.
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.
Yesterday a colossal data leak from live streaming platform Twitch.tv was posted on controversial internet forum 4chan by an anonymous user. Twitch hosts millions of users who stream their daily activities to a combined audience of tens of millions of people.
The platform is used primarily to stream computer game-related content, although users can broadcast almost anything — from podcasts, to costume design, to music rehearsals and beach trips.
Although the full impact of the leak remains unclear, it appears to include the earnings of at least the top few thousand streamers, information about new software Twitch was designing, passwords and security data for streamers and viewers, and even the source code for the Twitch platform.
This might well be the largest and most comprehensive data leak on any major internet platform in history — amounting to about 125 gigabytes of data – but what will it mean for streamers, viewers, and Twitch itself?
I have researched Twitch for past six years, looking to understand its streamers, viewers, culture and economics. And although we’ve yet to uncover certain details about the leak — such as who is behind it and how the data was acquired – five potential impacts stand out.
Potential impacts
1) Trust in Twitch will surely be dented, although likely not completely destroyed, by this leak. While some streamers might not publicly express much dismay or frustration, and just change their passwords and move on, many will certainly be more vocal.
Many users will now be alarmed by account security risks. Twitch markets itself on the basis of trust and relative openness, selling the idea that streamers and viewers are not interacting with a company, but rather with friends. With a massive data leak, this message is now seriously challenged.
2) The leak will likely intensify the draw of other streaming platforms. One short-lived competitor to Twitch, Mixer, closed down last year. Mixer had secured a number of superstar streamers but failed to create the sort of community found on Twitch.
But if Twitch no longer seems secure, or if other platforms can offer more attractive terms, how many streamers might decide to make a move to the alternatives, such as YouTube Gaming?
3) The economy of Twitch is based on viewers giving money to streamers. These are mostly donations (one-off payments) or subscriptions (monthly payments). As such, most streamers make much of their money via many small payments from dedicated fans.
Although everyone knew top streamers had substantial incomes, the true scale of this is perhaps only now becoming clear to many viewers. The top dozens of streamers can bring in millions of dollars a year, while at least hundreds of others collect six-figure paychecks.
Twitch fans therefore might reduce their support of those who are already comfortably millionaires. On a large enough scale, the combined economic impacts could be significant. Twitch takes around half of the subscription payments, and a smaller portion of donations, so reduced income for streamers means reduced income for the platform as well.
4) The leak suggests Twitch is, or was, developing a competitor to the dominant gaming platform Steam, owned by Valve Corporation. Steam is currently the hub for most PC gaming, but has been criticised for monopolistic practices and challenged by competitors such as the Epic Games Store and itch.io.
New information in the leak might give Valve a significant advantage in countering Twitch’s offering before it even launches. In turn, might Twitch abandon the project altogether, or do the opposite and accelerate its release since there’s now no time to lose? Either way, this will impact games distribution and consumption in years to come.
Steam is a video game-distribution service that was started in 2003. Shutterstock
5) Lastly, this leak has probably been a serious wake-up call for all major digital platforms. Twitch is owned by Amazon, one of the largest and most influential internet companies on the planet. Yet, it was seemingly taken completely by surprise with this leak.
What went wrong in Amazon or Twitch’s multi-billion dollar systems to allow such an incident? There will likely be a serious reckoning for the company here, and one that comes on the heels of other recent controversies around Facebook, Twitter, OnlyFans and other internet giants, whose growth and profitability are driven by user-created content.
Is all lost?
Despite all of the above, this is far from a knock-out blow for Twitch. The platform dominates the live streaming space in most countries and has already seen off competitors.
Twitch is also rife with systems designed to boost user retention and discourage both streamers and viewers from moving to other websites. So much of (game) live streaming culture and practice is the same as Twitch culture and practice, and this gives the platform a strong incumbent advantage.
Still, precisely because Twitch has become such a central part of gaming culture, it can’t take such an attack lightly. It remains to be seen what the leak will mean for gaming, gamers, live streaming, and digital platforms as a whole in the coming months and years.
What is certain is that as Twitch’s allure takes hit after hit — with sexism, so-called “hate raids” and now a huge data leak — the platform may well have to fight for a future of live streaming dominance that, at one point, appeared quietly assured.
Mark R Johnson had been funded for Twitch and live streaming research by the UK “Digital Crucible” and by the Japanese “Hoso Bunka Foundation”. In neither case did the funder have any control over the direction or progress of the research, the findings, analyses, publications, etc.
This last week I watched Push: The Global Housing Crisis on Al Jazeera, featuring Leilani Farha, Canadian lawyer and former United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing. She is now leader of The Shift (the global movement to secure the human right to housing).
The central takeaway from this ‘Witness’ documentary is that the housing crisis is a global financial crisis (as opposed to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008).
The problem is essentially the concept of housing (and the real estate that it sits on) as more a form of financial wealth (‘financial wealth’ is an oxymoron, by the way; it means ‘wealth comprised of claims on wealth’) than a human right; as such, whether housing is occupied or not – or whether it is occupied by sojourners rather than residents – is incidental. In this financial view, all that matters is the dollar value attributed to assets, and that wealth is somehow generated through a bidding process that raises that dollar values of financial assets.
Managed Funds, especially Government (or government-mandated) Pension Funds
While we may emphasise the self-perceived entitlement culture of individual speculators in financial assets, the point of emphasised by Leilani Farha was the role of managed funds, which means that – indirectly – many of us, with savings ‘invested’ in these funds, are financial speculators without thinking of ourselves as such.
A particularly important class of managed funds is government funds, including and especially government pension funds. The worst kind of these funds would be the kind such as the New Zealand Superannuation Fund created by Roger Douglas in 1974 and thankfully disestablished by Robert Muldoon in 1976. The Canadian government pension fund is notorious in this regard. And New Zealand does have a smaller-scale government fund of this sort; it came to be known after its establishment in the 2000s as the ‘Cullen Fund’.
We can generalise here, by thinking of Sovereign Wealth Funds, many of which are classed as ‘pension funds’; and we can think of private managed funds – the mainstay of the financial industry – many of which (like KiwiSaver) are government partnerships with that industry. Governments, around the world, have a deep stake in the financialisation of real estate assets; both as governments, and in the private capacity (as speculators) of finance industry and technocratic and bureaucratic and elected elites. In the formal sense, as citizen holders of public equity, we are all speculators when government-directed funds are deployed in the speculative financial marketplace.
Yes, including the homeless and the underhoused among us; the deprivileged among us can still feel good that our unrealisable public equity increases as our housing and other material rights deteriorate. We own notional shares in the lands we are evicted from.
The way around this financialisation approach to ‘wealth management’ is the ‘pay-as-you go’ approach, which was last championed – in New Zealand – by Sir Robert Muldoon. New Zealand Superannuation is still largely funded – as it must be – out of current economic product; and not through the sale of financial assets that we hope can be converted by retirees into goods and services of a certain value. Further, pay-as-you-go is the essence of the Basic Universal Income, an income distribution mechanism based on democratic accounting standards (ie based on basic human rights); a mechanism that can form the basis for the re-engagement of the rapidly marginalising populations of each country in the world.
(The scandal of Covid19 is how the entitled minority of the world’s population has spread this virus to the disentitled – including the disengaged poor – infecting them, and killing them in numbers on a World War scale.)
Pandora Papers
Other stories this week underscore the conjoint problems of financialisation, inequality, and impoverishment. One such story is the release of the Pandora Papers’ leak to global media organisations.
These papers reveal a comprehensive story, not of illegality, but of uber-elite entitlement; of legal theft.
Control of price-appreciating financial assets, as revealed by these papers, is more than ‘mere’ tax avoidance. It is theft in the fullest sense of the word, in that it is increasing the claims of the entitled on the world’s finite economic output, thereby diminishing the claims of the disentitled, and pushing them into unsustainable survival practices. Financialisation is an entitlement mechanism, and it applies to both the demanders and the suppliers of financial products.
Entitlement is not only a problem of the uber-elite. Indeed, through our KiwiSaver accounts and the like, we all come to align ourselves to some degree with the highly entitled. Further, the highly entitled go well beyond the ‘one-percenters’; rather the top nine percent (or even the top nineteen percent) of the ’99-percenters’ tend to have an entitlement mindset towards property values and interest rates, even while blaming the conspicuous ‘one-percent’ for the world’s woes.
One test of entitlement culture is a person’s attitude to interest payments. People who believe that they are entitled to an interest ‘return’ on saved income over and above the inflation rate are people who believe that they are entitled, as a form of self-congratulation, to an increased share of the world’s goods and services. It was in medieval times clearly (and correctly) understood that it was sinful to ‘make money from money’. This is distinct from making a profit from investments, such as planting a crop, irrigating a field, retaining livestock for breeding, or learning a trade.
In reality, the ‘real rate of interest’ is sometimes positive; that’s when lenders (ie savers) are scarce and borrowers (including investors and willing governments) are abundant. Under those conditions – rare in the lifetimes of people alive today – a legitimate premium is payable to people holding rather than spending money. The reverse conditions are much more familiar – an abundance of unspent money, and an aversion to deficit financing – in which, naturally, the real rate of interest should be negative.
Indeed, it was the negative real rates of interest during the global Great Inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s, that rumbled the uber-entitled, and led to the global financialisation coup of the late 1970s and (in New Zealand) the 1980s; the world event that is commonly called the neoliberal revolution. Theft through financial chicanery has prospered ever since.
New Zealand’s Official Cash Rate (OCR)
The first raising of the OCR in New Zealand for several years is indicative of this entitled view that real interest rates (as an indicator of real financial returns) should always be above zero. As such, the management of interest rates is the illiberal intervention in the marketplace that is most used to support economic liberalism.
By and large, the New Zealand public falls for the argument that higher interest rates are needed to slow down the rate of increase of financial asset prices (eg of house prices). There is little evidence for this, and indeed the 2004-08 house price inflation was in large part a result of rising interest rates.
The problem is that genuine economic borrowers are discouraged by high or rising interest rates, and that rising interest rates make very little difference to speculative borrowers. Thus, when interest rates increase, increasing proportions of all borrowed funds are lent to acquire financial assets with a view to making returns through capital gain. (Capital gains’ taxes are rarely sufficient to offset this reality; the main driving force pushing money into speculation is reduced lending to the real economy.) This truth is clearly evident by a cursory inquiry into the behaviour of house prices during periods of rising real interest rates.
In addition to rising interest rates ‘inadvertently’ stimulating financialised markets, the countries which intervene to raise their interest rates the most find that their exchange rates increase, as foreign money increasingly treats domestic money as a speculative asset. While this currency appreciation may dampen inflation in these countries – while exacerbating inflation pressures in the countries with falling exchange rates – it also does much harm to the export industries of these countries. Export industries suffer the double whammy of higher borrowing costs and an appreciating exchange rate. Indeed, the aggressive raising of interest rates to engineer an appreciating exchange rate has all the entitlement hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme. (Just look at New Zealand in years such as 1987, 1995-97, and 2004-08. If you don’t believe me, look at Iceland in the years before 2008.)
We should note that if rising interest rates make any difference at all to the global rate of inflation, they indeed exacerbate rather than diminish inflation. The only proviso to this is that rising global interest rates also create global economic crises, such as 1929-31, 1979-82, 1989-93, 2000-01, 2005-08, and 2010-12. While rising global interest rates are inflationary – they raise business costs, including higher required rates of profit – global recessions are clearly deflationary. Higher interest rates only reduce inflation by creating recessions, an even worse problem.
Basic Principle
Consumption entitlements should be distributed as human rights, and not as greed premiums. They should be paid as we go, and not divvied out from greed funds. As it is, most entitlements are of the greedy, by the greedy, for the greedy. Inasmuch as we are incentivised to contribute to government-sponsored greed funds, most of us are a little bit greedy. We live in a greedocracy, not an economic democracy. A true democracy distributes public equity dividends – as the economy goes – as a human right.
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
“The cities are dead”, Australian Booksellers Association CEO Robbie Egan tells us, “and that has been brutal”.
For bookshops, the experience of the pandemic depends on their location: those in regional towns have flourished, while those in the business districts of our locked down cities have been “decimated” as one bookseller put it late last year.
Love for independent bookshops is a distinctive feature of Australian book culture. Bookshops have withstood many 21st century threats: the ubiquity of Amazon, its proprietary e-book software, divisions within the publishing industry over parallel importation restrictions, and social media’s theft of our precious leisure time from slower practices like reading.
While the number of independent bookshops in the United Kingdom experienced a steep decline in the early 2000s, Australian independent bookshops have proven resilient. In 2020, Australia had approximately 25% more independent bookshops than chain outlets like Dymocks and Collins.
When they closed for lockdowns in 2020, bookshops lost their advantage over their online counterparts. Suddenly, customers could no longer browse, and found it harder to chat to a well-read shop assistant. Still, with more time on our hands, book purchases increased. But reliant on click and collect or home delivery, independent bookshops struggled to compete with Amazon and its Australian equivalent Booktopia, whose sales soared.
COVID restrictions also prevented activities that usually support sales by introducing readers to books, including literary festivals and author-in-schools events.
We interviewed 18 independent booksellers in five states about their experience of the pandemic and their customers. It became clear that Australians love their independent bookshops for five main reasons:
1. Curated book choices
Our research with teenage readers finds that despite an abundance of online recommendations, many struggle to find a good book. Readers often look for novelty, but algorithms that determine online recommendations struggle to accommodate new titles and authors.
Independent booksellers stock books based on what they know about local readers and their own love of good quality books, rather than relying on sales trends. Our interviewees described enjoying “finding the little niche books” that will excite individual customers.
Usually, 50% of customers go into a bookshop “not having a book in mind at all”, says Egan, but wanting to browse. When customers lost this ability during lockdown, one bookseller reported that every sale his bookshop made was based on a personal recommendation.
2. A commitment to the local
Lockdowns saw people valuing and wanting to support their local communities, and independent booksellers return this commitment.
Knowing what books to stock and recommend for their customers, one interviewee told us, involves knowing what the customer is “like as a person, and what would inspire them”.
Some booksellers take pride in meeting a customer for the first time as a baby, and serving them throughout their lives: “our strategy is that we’ll keep ageing with the (young) customers we’ve got”.
Customers browsing at independent bookstore, Readings, in Melbourne’s Carlton pre-lockdown. SniperGirl/flickr, CC BY
3. An introduction to local authors and stories
Readers’ appreciation of local authors and stories has also flourished. Eight of the ten 2020 top-selling titles were by Australian authors.
Australian publishers rely on independent booksellers to connect local authors to readers. Many sales are “hyperlocal”: The F-Team by Punchbowl author Rawah Arja caused excitement at Lost in Books in the neighouring suburb of Fairfield, while Hannah Moloney’s The Good Life is loved by Fullers bookshop customers in Hobart.
4. ‘Slow leisure’
Both the act of browsing in the bookshop and reading are forms of slow leisure — activities that are rich because we invest time in them. One of the best things independent bookshops do for their customers is create a calm, inviting atmosphere for browsing without pressure to purchase.
During lockdowns, sales for the ABC’s Bluey titles boomed because families sought ways for their children to spend their days, out of childcare and schools, and off screens.
The Paperback bookstore. eddieddieddie/flickr, CC BY
5. Outlets for our emotions
Books provide an opportunity for vicarious experience of different kinds of emotion. Bookseller advice helps us find the books through which we can access these emotions.
In our quiet, locked down lives we now miss out on the full range of emotion: we may experience fear or frustration, but lack joy and excitement. Booksellers will recommend books not just based on genre or your previous reading, but also on mood. Lately, this has often meant finding “light reading”.
COVID-19 is an extraordinary disruptor to the book industry, but it isn’t all bad news. The pandemic has helped readers see clearly what it is that we love about our bookshops.
This project is funded by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the Australian Research Council (Project LP180100258).
Bronwyn Reddan receives funding from the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the Australian Research Council (Project LP180100258).
Leonie Rutherford receives funding from the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the Australian Research Council (Project LP180100258).
The CUAVA-1 satellite departs from the International Space Station.JAXA
The Australian-made space weather satellite CUAVA-1 was deployed into orbit from the International Space Station on Wednesday night. Launched to the space station in August aboard a SpaceX rocket, a major focus of this shoebox-sized CubeSat is to study what radiation from the Sun does to Earth’s atmosphere and electronic devices.
Space weather such as solar flares and changes in the solar wind affects Earth’s ionosphere (a layer of charged particles in the upper atmosphere). This in turn has an impact on long-distance radio communications and the orbits of some satellites, as well as creating fluctuations in the electromagnetic field that can wreak havoc with electronics in space and down to the ground.
The new satellite is the first designed and built by the Australian Research Council Training Centre for Cubesats, UAVs, and their Applications (or CUAVA for short). It carries payloads and technology demonstrators built by collaborators from the University of Sydney, Macquarie University, and UNSW-Sydney.
One of CUAVA-1’s aims is to help improve space weather forecasts, which are currently very limited. As well as its scientific mission, CUAVA-1 also represents a step towards the Australian Space Agency’s goal of growing the local space industry by 20,000 jobs by 2030.
Satellites and space weather
Exploded view of CUAVA-1 and its components and payloads. Tanned labels indicate Australian-made components. Xueliang Bai
While the Australian Space Agency was only formed in 2018, Australia has a long history in satellite research. In 2002, for example, FedSat was one of the first satellites in the world to carry a GPS receiver onboard.
Space-based GPS receivers today make it possible to routinely measure the atmosphere all around the world for weather monitoring and prediction. The Bureau of Meteorology and other weather forecasting agencies rely on space-based GPS data in their forecasting.
Space-based GPS receivers also make it possible to monitor the Earth’s ionosphere. From heights of about 80km to 1,000km, this layer of the atmosphere transitions from a gas of uncharged atoms and molecules to a gas of charged particles, both electrons and ions. (A gas of charged particles is also called a plasma.)
The ionosphere is the location of the beautiful auroral displays that are common at high latitudes during moderate geomagnetic storms, or “bad space weather”, but there is much more to it.
The ionosphere can cause difficulties for satellite positioning and navigation, but it is also sometimes useful, such as when ground-based radar and radio signals can be bounced off it to scan or communicate over the horizon.
Technological and infrastructure affected by space weather events. NASA
Why space weather is so hard to predict
Understanding the ionosphere is an important part of operational space weather forecasting. We know the ionosphere becomes highly irregular during severe geomagnetic storms. It disrupts radio signals that pass through it, and creates surges of electric current in power grids and pipelines.
What is space weather?
During severe geomagnetic storms, a large amount of energy is dumped into the Earth’s upper atmosphere near the north and south poles, while also changing currents and flows in the equatorial ionosphere.
This energy dissipates through the system, causing widespread changes throughout the upper atmosphere and altering high-altitude wind patterns above the equator hours later.
In contrast, X-rays and UV radiation from solar flares directly heat the atmosphere (above the ozone layer) above the equator and middle latitudes. These changes influence the amount of drag experienced in low-Earth orbit, making it difficult to predict the paths of satellites and space debris.
Even outside geomagnetic storms, there are “quiet-time” disturbances that affect GPS and other electronic systems.
At present, we can’t make accurate predictions of bad space weather beyond about three days ahead. And the flow-on effects of bad space weather on the Earth’s upper atmosphere, including GPS and communication disturbances and changes in satellite drag, are even harder to forecast ahead of time.
As a result, most space weather prediction agencies are restricted to “nowcasting”: observing the current state of space weather and projecting for the next few hours.
It will take a lot more science to understand the connection between the Sun and the Earth, how energy from the Sun dissipates through the Earth system, and how these system changes influence the technology we increasingly rely on for everyday life.
This means more research and more satellites, especially for the equatorial to mid-latitudes relevant to Australians (and indeed most people on Earth). We hope CUAVA-1 is a step towards a constellation of Australian space weather satellites that will play a key role in future space weather forecasting.
Brett Carter receives funding from the Australian Reseach Council. He and Iver Cairns acknowledge contributions from the ASPiRE team working on space weather prediction and science.
Iver Cairns receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Investment NSW. He and Brett Carter acknowledge contributions from the ASPiRE team working on space weather prediction and science.
Our research at the University of Canberra’s National Security Hub is investigating online influence operations targeting Australia, including its veteran community. This is a global problem and was one of many issues noted at this year’s International Terrorism and Social Media Conference in the UK.
For researchers like us, who focus on the wellness of veterans – particularly during the fallout from the military withdrawal from Afghanistan – such extremist groups present a complicated and dangerous threat to the community.
Transition to civilian life
The transition to civilian life can be a vulnerable time for many veterans. Rates of suicide, homelessness and incarceration are alarmingly high for Australian veterans.
Well-designed prevention programs may help deter recruitment by extremist groups hoping to take advantage of military skill and knowledge. Shutterstock
This, unfortunately, can make these veterans more vulnerable to appeals and influence by extremist groups offering the mateship and camaraderie now missing in their lives.
Such groups often promote a mission-based approach, which may attract those lacking the feeling of purpose they valued in military service.
There’s a risk this may lead to well-meaning veterans being enticed into participating in groups whose ideals they would normally have considered to be questionable.
A broader risk to the public
This is not a uniquely Australian issue.
Nearly one in five defendants in the prosecutions undertaken in response to the January 6 US Capitol attack had served in the military.
Escalation from participation in online forums to physically violent acts can happen quickly and sometimes without clear warning signs. These extremist groups aim to gain an already trained cohort of members who cannot only be immediately activated, but are also able to train others.
Those with military experience and training in combat, weaponry, or explosives are clear threats if radicalised by extremist groups. One study suggests some veterans tend to affiliate with such groups as instructors, rather than undertaking extremist acts themselves.
This group claims to be around 200-strong and is focused on “anti-vaccine” offensives, such as organising marches. In discussions on the group’s private Telegram account, however, it appears to be planning to escalate its activities.
Media reports suggest discussions on the platform even include awareness that currently serving military members may well become “enemy combatants” as a result of V4F’s actions. Not only are these “freedom defenders” anticipating a confrontation, they are prepared to fight their former brothers and sisters-in-arms to achieve their goals.
Veterans in Anglo democracies are being targeted by both overt and covert online influence campaigns using fake military profiles to connect with and deceive defence contractors and current and former military members.
Veterans are also ideal targets for international online influence operations encouraging promotion of particular political candidates, parties or ideologies. Many of these operations originate in Russia or China.
A duty of care
So, what duty of care does the Australian Defence Force owe to its members — and the community at large — to better prepare veterans for threats they may encounter when transitioning to civilian life?
Organisations such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (a collaboration between the technology industry, government, civil society, and academia) are actively engaged in monitoring and preventing violent extremist content and activity on online platforms.
But military members and their families would likely benefit from awareness and prevention programs designed specifically for the community — particularly if offered before they transition to civilian life.
Support should also be offered to assist and protect veterans seeking to leave such groups.
Well-designed prevention programs may help deter recruitment by extremist groups hoping to take advantage of military skills and knowledge, and could be offered as part of military exit processing.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone
you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Open Arms on 1800 011 046 or visit the Open Arms website.
Carli Kulmar has received funding from the Australian Defence Force for grey zone research.
Michael Jensen receives funding from the Australian Defence Force for research regarding grey zone activities targeting Australia
After Gladys Berejiklian’s resignation over an investigation by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), the debate about the federal government’s proposed – but weak – federal integrity commission is heating up.
Stephen Charles, a former Victorian judge who is a director of the Centre for Public Integrity, says the Coalition should totally rework its
draft model to give it real teeth in dealing with politicians and public servants.
Pointing out that under the government draft, investigations of politicians wouldn’t have public hearings, Charles asks, “What does that show you about the concern they have of their activities being exposed? And […] remember the hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars that this coalition has shown it is prepared to spend […] to its electoral advantage rather than in the interests of the public.”
“Australia is a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. Article 36 of that convention requires Australia to have an effective body to deal with corruption, and those of us who’ve been arguing for a national integrity body have been pointing to Australia’s failure to comply with its obligations under UNCAC for a long time now.”
Charles agrees with the need to prevent the integrity commission being used by political players for their own purposes. “These powers must not be allowed to be weaponised by […] the political party in power at the time.”
“The body should be under the control of the judicial system, which in this case would mean under the control of the federal court […] there should be an inspector, and next there should be a parliamentary committee which should have its activities under continual review.” With those protections, misuse could be prevented, Charles says.
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.
Early in the pandemic, scientists thought “convalescent plasma” might be a way to treat COVID-19.
By giving patients the plasma of people who had recovered (or convalesced) from COVID-19, the idea was this antibody-rich infusion would help their immune systems fight infection. It’s a strategy tried, with various degrees of success, for other infectious diseases, including Ebola.
But growing evidence, including an international study published this week, shows convalescent plasma does not save lives of people critically ill with COVID-19. The researchers concluded the therapy was “futile”.
Convalescent plasma is a blood product containing antibodies against an infectious pathogen (such as SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19). It comes from blood collected from people who have recovered from the infectious disease.
Scientists use a process called apheresis to separate the different blood components. Red and white cells, and platelets are removed leaving plasma, which is rich in antibodies.
The story of convalescent plasma therapy (or serum therapy) originates in the 1890s. This is when physician Emil von Behring infected horses with the bacteria that causes diphtheria.
Once the horses recovered, Behring collected their antibody-rich blood to treat humans with the disease. This led to him being awarded the first Nobel prize in physiology or medicine, in 1901.
Why has convalescent plasma been used to treat COVID?
Convalescent plasma has been used to treat infectious diseases for over a century. These include: scarlet fever, pneumonia, tetanus, diphtheria, mumps and chickenpox.
More recently, convalescent plasma has been investigated as a treatment for SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) and Ebola.
So early in the pandemic, researchers hoped convalescent plasma could be used to treat COVID-19 too.
By May this year more than 100 clinical trials had been conducted with convalescent plasma in people with COVID-19; about one-third of these studies had finished or were stopped early.
Earlier this year, the results of the United Kingdom’s landmark RECOVERY trial were reported. This investigated convalescent plasma therapy (compared to usual supportive care) in more than 10,000 people hospitalised with COVID-19.
Treatment did not reduce the risk of death (24% in both groups), with no difference in the number of patients who recovered (66% discharged from hospital in both groups) or who got worse (29% needed mechanical ventilation to support breathing in both groups).
So for people admitted to hospital with COVID-19, the researchers concluded convalescent plasma offered no benefit.
A Cochrane review, which was updated in May this year and evaluated all available trials, confirmed these results. These trials involved more than 40,000 people with moderate-to-severe COVID-19 who received convalescent plasma.
The review found the treatment had no effect on the risk of dying from COVID-19, did not reduce the risk of requiring hospitalisation nor the need for a ventilator to assist breathing when compared to placebo or standard care.
The results of the trial reported this week come from a major clinical trial involving about 2,000 hospitalised patients with moderate-to-severe COVID-19.
Patients were randomised to received convalescent plasma or usual care. All patients had access to other supportive medicines used in critically ill hospitalised people with COVID, such as dexamethasone and remdesivir.
The international team of investigators included those from Australia, Canada, UK and US.
Although the results and detailed analysis were published this week, the trial was halted in January. This is when the trial committee reviewed the interim results and reported “convalescent plasma was unlikely to be of benefit for patients with COVID-19 who require organ support in an intensive care unit”. So continuing the trial was considered futile.
Convalescent plasma treatment did not reduce the risk of death in hospital over the month after treatment (37.3% convalescent plasma treated, 38.4% usual care, not treated with convalescent plasma). The median number of days without the need for organ support (such as a mechanical ventilator or cardiac support) was 14 days in both groups. Serious adverse events were reported in 3.0% of people treated with convalescent plasma and only 1.3% in the usual care group.
Taken together, the weight of evidence now clearly demonstrates convalescent plasma is not a treatment option for people with mild, moderate or even severe COVID-19.
Where next for COVID-19 treatments?
While vaccinations remain the major strategy to prevent COVID-19, attention is now turning to some emerging and promising treatments to prevent COVID-19 worsening.
These include emerging antiviral treatments that may be used early in the disease, including monoclonal antibodies such as sotrovimab and AZD7442. Then there are potential oral antiviral medicines, such as molnupiravir and PF-07321332.
Andrew McLachlan receives research funding from the NHMRC and the Sydney Pharmacy School receives research scholarship funding from GSK for a PhD student under his supervision. Andrew has served as a paid consultant on Australian government committees related to medicines regulation. Andrew does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article.
Sophie Stocker receives funding from foundations which support medical research including Arthritis Australia, Heart Foundation and St Vincent’s Clinic Foundation.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thea van de Mortel, Professor, Nursing and Deputy Head (Learning & Teaching), School of Nursing and Midwifery, Griffith University
As NSW and Victoria speed toward target COVID vaccination rates and the associated relaxation of lockdown rules, many are considering a trip to the local pool in the near future.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has said “the COVID-19 virus does not transmit through water while swimming.”
And according to Dr Sylvie Briand, director of the WHO’s Department of Global Infectious Hazard Preparedness:
if you swim in a swimming pool or in a pond, you cannot get COVID-19 through the water.
But if you go to a crowded swimming pool, and are close to other people one or more of whom is infected, then you can be infected by them. So, that’s why even in swimming pools, it’s important to maintain physical distancing and take precautions.
Can I catch it in the change rooms?
Yes.
At the pool, the most likely place to catch COVID-19 is in the change room.
That’s because the main way current variants of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) spreads is via droplets and aerosols.
Droplets are larger exhaled particles that fall to the ground comparatively quickly, while aerosols are smaller particles that can hang in the air for longer and travel longer distances.
Your COVID risk is greater indoors than it is outdoors, where contaminated air is more likely to be whisked away on air currents.
The risk outdoors is also lower because ultraviolet radiation from the sun and higher temperatures in sunlit areas also tend to inactivate the virus, rendering it non-infectious.
You can reduce the risk of droplet and aerosol transmission by:
maintaining physical distancing. Stay at least two metres from non-household members
wearing a mask
keeping your time indoors to a minimum.
At the pool, the most likely place to catch COVID-19 is in the change rooms. Shutterstock
Can I catch it queuing up?
Yes.
The key risk here is in how close you are to a potentially infected person, so don’t stand near others if you are queuing for entry to the pool – or lining up at the canteen for some post-swim hot chips.
A View from Afar. In this week's episode Paul G. Buchanan and Selwyn Manning discuss rising concerns regarding Hindutva, a rightwing nationalistic movement originating from India.
A View from Afar
PODCAST: How Hindutva rightwing nationalism is concerning Indian communities around the world
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PODCAST: In this episode of A View from Afar political scientist Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning discuss how security threats present themselves in a multitude of forms. This week we look at a threat that mixes belief with nationalism. This threat is most obvious in its homeland where the movement was conceived.
But its devotees have migrated to countries all over the world. When confronted by others within their communities, they respond with threats that by degrees… become more sinister.
We are talking about Hindutva nationalism, a right wing movement which has its political epicentre in India.
In the United States of America, a network of universities had organised a virtual conference to discuss Hindutva’s rise. The Washington Post reported this month “the backlash was swift and staggering”.
It added: “Nearly a million emails were sent to universities in protest, the virtual event’s website was attacked and forced offline, organisers reached death and rape threats”, and pro-Modi government media in India said the event was “Hinduphobic and fostered hate against the community”. ref. Washington Post.
And in New Zealand – where this South Pacific nation suffered the tragedy known as the March 15 white supremacist attacks that killed 51 Muslim people while they met for Friday prayer – concerns are now emitting from within the vibrant Indian communities that Hindutva nationalism is growing.
As Stuff.co.nz reported this month, a professor at New Zealand’s Massey University, Mohan Dutta, has spoken out against Hindutva’s far right messages.
Professor Dutta has received hate messages relegating his concerns as promoting Hinduphobia.
Again as Stuff reported, Professor Dutta has received threats such as: “Bootlicker”, “brown servant”. “If you were in India you would be burnt… We should do anything in our power to stop him.” ref. Stuff.co.nz
So should we consider Hindutva as simply a right wing nationalistic political movement, with networks all over the world? Or does it pose a serious and growing threat to security?
—
You can comment on this debate by clicking on one of these social media channels and interacting in the social media’s comment area. Here are the links:
Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category. You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.
A View from Afar. In this week's episode Paul G. Buchanan and Selwyn Manning discuss rising concerns regarding Hindutva, a rightwing nationalistic movement originating from India.
LIVE PODCST: In this episode of A View from Afar political scientist Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning discuss how security threats present themselves in a multitude of forms. This week we look at a threat that mixes belief with nationalism. This threat is most obvious in its homeland where the movement was conceived.
But its devotees have migrated to countries all over the world. When confronted by others within their communities, they respond with threats that by degrees… become more sinister.
We are talking about Hindutva nationalism, a right wing movement which has its political epicentre in India.
In the United States of America, a network of universities had organised a virtual conference to discuss Hindutva’s rise. The Washington Post reported this month “the backlash was swift and staggering”.
It added: “Nearly a million emails were sent to universities in protest, the virtual event’s website was attacked and forced offline, organisers reached death and rape threats”, and pro-Modi government media in India said the event was “Hinduphobic and fostered hate against the community”. ref. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/03/india-us-universities-hindutva/
And in New Zealand – where this South Pacific nation suffered the tragedy known as the March 15 white supremacist attacks that killed 51 Muslim people while they met for Friday prayer – concerns are now emitting from within the vibrant Indian communities that Hindutva nationalism is growing.
As Stuff.co.nz reported this month, a professor at New Zealand’s Massey University, Mohan Dutta, has spoken out against Hindutva’s far right messages.
Professor Dutta has received hate messages relegating his concerns as promoting Hinduphobia.
Again as Stuff reported, Professor Dutta has received threats such as: “Bootlicker”, “brown servant”. “If you were in India you would be burnt… We should do anything in our power to stop him.”
So should we consider Hindutva as simply a right wing nationalistic political movement, with networks all over the world? Or does it pose a serious and growing threat to security?
And remember, if you are joining us live, we can include your comments in this programme.
Join Paul and Selwyn for this LIVE recording of this podcast and remember any comments you make while live can be included in this programme.
You can comment on this debate by clicking on one of these social media channels and interacting in the social media’s comment area. Here are the links:
Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category. You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage. You can sign up to NZ Politics Daily as well as New Zealand Political Roundup columns for free here.
Australians’ mental health has tended to decline during COVID-19 lockdowns. Record-high calls to helplines such as Lifeline suggest many are currently suffering.
Encouragingly, data from 2020 shows many Australians’ mental health improved once outbreaks were contained.
We synthesised more than 100 Australian studies and reports about COVID-19 and mental health, to explore who experienced poor mental health and why.
We found the pandemic had a greater impact on some Australians, including children and young people, First Nations people, women, and those experiencing mental or physical disabilities, unemployment or financial stress.
In other words, the pandemic magnified existing Australian mental health inequalities.
We also asked more than 2,000 Australians to describe the pandemic’s impact. People’s generous responses provided clues as to why some groups had poorer mental health.
Rather than fear of infection, Australians described how the pandemic “pressurised” personal triggers for poor mental health by worsening financial stress and reducing social support.
COVID restrictions were isolating and created additional financial stress. Shutterstock
Increased unemployment and financial stress
Australians who lost work had poorer mental health during the pandemic. Many reported these experiences were made worse by stigmatising messages about unemployment:
The government does not see that mental impact of being unemployed and getting the distinct feeling you are seen as scum. (woman, late-30s, NSW)
Increased financial stress was a primary reason for poorer pandemic mental health. Financial stress made dealing with lockdown restrictions more difficult, particularly for families:
Bills keep coming in, real estate agent asks for deferred rent to be repaid in full… daughter needs glasses, other daughter has anxiety and becomes depressed. (woman, 50s, Victoria)
For many, good mental health is closely linked to being able to house and provide for family.
Research showed the burden of stressful lockdown care, including homeschooling, fell primarily with women.
Women bore the brunt of care during lockdown. Shutterstock
On the positive side, receiving the temporary increased JobSeeker payments was associated with improved living standards and lower anxiety.
One person described how,
For the first time in years I was able to pay for essential medical treatment. (woman, 20s, NSW)
However, the removal of this payment was described as “crushing to your mental health” (woman, 20s, Tasmania).
Reduced social connection and support
Our review showed lockdowns and restrictions disrupted Australians’ social relationships and was a leading driver of anxiety and depression for young people in particular.
Restrictions meant they missed out on formative life experiences, such as transitioning to school or university.
Adults noted COVID-19 restrictions and isolation measures led to loneliness, loss and disconnection. Participants experienced this isolation across their various social roles:
Being single, the option of dating was eliminated. As a friend, the opportunity to connect with my nearest and dearest was altered. As an employee, I felt disconnected from my work and my colleagues. (woman, mid-20s, NSW)
A respondent with family interstate experienced “affected mental health”, as restrictions “separated me completely from my family and friends who live in Sydney” (woman, mid-20s, Victoria).
Our review showed increases in racial stigma occurred for First Nations and Asian Australians during the pandemic. Added to the stigma of unemployment described above, social stigma isolated people during the pandemic, likely straining mental health.
Stigma was a further strain on mental health. Shutterstock
National data showed, on average, loneliness reduced once restrictions eased.
However, this wasn’t the case for all. Several people with existing mental health issues described heightened social anxiety in the months after lockdown:
I feel much more emotionally fragile now (and) more socially anxious – being around a lot of people doesn’t feel normal anymore. (man, early-30s, Victoria)
I had a panic attack last week and couldn’t attend when I was supposed to attend my first in person class. (woman, early-20s, Victoria)
What can we do about it?
Our review revealed the pandemic negatively impacted some Australians’ mental health by disrupting their ability to maintain social roles and relationships that had provided a meaningful life structure pre-COVID.
Unemployment meant losing their employed “identity” and prevented them from economically supporting their families.
We need to continue to improve access to quality mental health care. Equally, policy changes outside of traditional “health” domains will also be important to our recovery.
Post-pandemic policies ensuring all Australians have enough income to thrive and are given opportunities to reconnect with meaningful work, education and community (for example, through education scholarships) will protect Australians’ mental health.
These are are essential for our transition into “living with covid”.
Maree Teesson directs The Matilda Centre and is Chair of Australia’s Mental Health Think Tank, she receives funding from NHMRC, PRF, Rotary, NSW government, BHP Foundation, Australian Government, Medical Research Future Fund, alongside other philanthropic and research bodies. She is a founding director of CLIMATESchools Pty Ltd.
Marc Stears directs the Sydney Policy Lab which receives funding from the Paul Ramsay Foundation, agencies of the NSW government, the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation, alongside other philanthropic bodies and service delivery groups.
Marlee Bower is affiliated with Australia’s Mental Health Think Tank as Academic Lead.
When we look at biological cells under a microscope, they’re usually not very colourful. Normally, to visualise them we have to artificially add colour — typically by staining. By doing so, we can see their shape and arrangement in a tissue and determine whether they’re healthy or not.
Sometimes, though, cell structure alone isn’t enough to accurately identify disease — which can lead to misdiagnosis and potentially fatal consequences for a patient. But what if there was a way to not only see the structure of cells, but also determine whether they are abnormal, simply by looking at their intrinsic colour under a microscope?
This was our team’s goal as we developed a new medical diagnostic tool called the NanoMslide. We modified a standard microscope slide to turn it into a powerful tool for breast cancer detection. Our research is published today in Nature.
Early detection is key
It’s estimated one in eight Australian women will be diagnosed with breast cancer by age 85. As with most cancers, catching the disease early is critical. However, an accurate diagnosis of the earliest stages of breast cancer requires identifying small numbers of diseased cells throughout a tissue, which can be incredibly challenging.
Human cancerous tissue, viewed through a microscope with the NanoMslide applied. Author provided Normal (non-cancerous) human tissue, viewed through a microscope with the NanoMslide applied. Author provided
The NanoMslide can manipulate light at the nanoscale, causing cells to “light up” with vivid colour contrast. This makes it easier to recognise potentially cancerous cells (or benign abnormalities) within the tissue.
By providing a way to instantly distinguish which cells could be cancerous, the tool may help to reduce current uncertainty around very early-stage breast cancer detection. With mammogram screening, distinguishing breast abnormalities from early breast cancers upon biopsy is very important, particularly as misdiagnosis rates can be as high as 15%.
Incorporating nanotechnology into medical diagnostics presents a number of challenges. It took us six years of development to ensure NanoMslide would work effectively. In the end it was a combination of cutting-edge nanofabrication, a significant amount of trial-and-error and a bit of good fortune that led to our breakthrough.
For decades, researchers have known cancer cells tend to interact with light in a way that’s different to healthy cells. This is due to a variety of factors, such as the distribution of protein inside the cell and differences in its overall shape.
The main challenge is these differences can be extremely subtle and can present in a variety of ways. Previous approaches to differentiating cancer cells (without using stains or labels) have tended to use specialised microscopy equipment, or complex techniques.
But these approaches are difficult to incorporate into existing pathology workflows and can require specialist training and knowledge. So we took a radically different approach.
Success with human tissue
Rather than focusing on developing a better microscope, we focused on improving the microscope slide instead.
By developing a special nanofabricated coating, we modified the surface of an ordinary microscope slide and transformed it into one huge sensor. What’s truly remarkable is the structures of the sensor are just a few hundred nanometres across, yet are repeated with amazing precision across an area of tens of centimetres, or more.
Maintaining this level of precision, which is necessary for reliable fabrication at this scale, has taken advances in nanofabrication techniques that have only become commercially available in the past six years.
The NanoMslide is a large sensor fitted with cutting-edge nanotechnology capabilities. Author provided
The sensor is activated by visible light. And when an object such as a tissue or single cell comes into contact with the sensor’s surface, colours are produced. It is this feature which we’ve been able to optimise to allow pathologists to detect cells that are likely cancerous, just by looking at them.
The dyes which are currently used to stain tissues (to visualise cell shape and architecture) normally present as one or two colours. The NanoMslide renders tissues in beautiful full-colour contrast, making it easier to differentiate multiple types of cell on a single slide.
For our study, we tested the slides with expert breast-cancer pathologists, using both a mouse model and patient tissue. By starting with a well-characterised small-animal model, our team of physicists, cancer researchers and breast pathologists was able to develop the technology further.
We eventually reached the point where we could be confident some of the specific colours visible were indicative of cancerous cells. This led to further pathology assessments with patient tissue, where there is more complexity to contend with in terms of diagnosis.
Yet, even in this more challenging setting, the NanoMslide performed strongly. It also outperformed some commercial biomarkers, which are used as an aid for borderline diagnoses (where cancer is difficult to tell apart from benign abnormalities).
Like going from black and white to colour television
Because the technology doesn’t rely on any special function, or specific molecular interactions, it could potentially be applied to other types of cancer — even other types of disease. Another application now being worked on is to examine the results of liquid biopsies, such as cheek swabs, for immediate point-of-care analysis.
In April, we were fortunate to benefit from the opening of a new instrument at the Australian National Fabrication Facility to enable the scaling-up of production. This means NanoMslide can be moved from small-scale to medium-scale manufacture, allowing us to explore a number of different applications, and produce the numbers of slides required for further clinical validation.
The technology could also be hugely beneficial to the growing digital-pathology space, where the vivid colours generated by NanoMslide could help develop next-generation artificial intelligence algorithms to identify signs of disease.
Brian Abbey receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC).
Belinda Parker receives funding from the DHHS, National Breast Cancer Foundation, Prostate Cancer Foundation Australia, Movember, and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Foundation.
The sweet, earthy fragrance of sandalwood oil has made it immensely popular in incense sticks, candles and perfumes. But its beautiful scent may also be its downfall – Australian sandalwood (Santalum spicatum) is facing extinction in the wild.
Despite this, the iconic outback tree is still being harvested in the wild in Western Australia where it’s considered a “forest product”, all to satisfy incense-burners and perfumeries.
Our research, published today, reveals the WA government has known for more than a century that sandalwood is over-harvested and is declining in numbers, with no new trees regenerating. We estimate 175 years of commercial harvesting may have decreased the population of wild sandalwood by as much as 90%.
Today, walking into most sandalwood communities is like walking into a palliative care hospice. There are only old folk there, most of them in terminal decline. There are no youngsters and there are certainly no babies.
It’s time to list sandalwood as a threatened species nationally, and start harvesting only from plantations to give these wild, centuries-old trees a fighting chance at survival.
Sandalwood is an extremely popular incense stick. Shutterstock
The tree behind the fragrance
Australian sandalwood, one of about 15 different species of sandalwood that grows across Oceania, is a highly valued economic resource as one of the main types of sandalwood traded internationally. But it’s also immensely important ecologically and culturally.
Aboriginal people have revered it for thousands of years, using it, for example, in smoking ceremonies and bush medicine. These uses take only small portions of the tree and do not endanger the plant, compared to commercial harvesting which kills the tree.
Ecologically, it’s a keystone resource in the arid outback, often flowering and fruiting when other plants are not. It attaches its roots to host plants such as acacias, enabling it to derive some of its nutrients and water from nearby trees and shrubs.
Sandalwood trees can live an estimated 250–300 years, and are capable of withstanding extremely harsh conditions. And yet, the species is extremely fragile in the first few years after germination.
Almost no new trees of sandalwood are growing in the wild. Richard McLellan, Author provided
Sandalwood populations have been slowly collapsing for decades from commercial harvesting, land clearing, fire, and grazing (by introduced herbivores such as goats, sheep, cows, rabbits, and camels, and some native species such as kangaroos).
The biggest problems are its lack of regeneration and the rapidly changing climate. Studies suggest there have been virtually no new trees emerging in most sandalwood populations for 60–100 years.
There are two main reasons for this. First, sandalwood has lost its seed dispersers, such as burrowing bettongs (small marsupials), which went extinct across most of their range about the same time sandalwood stopped recruiting.
Second, climate change. Sandalwood seeds will only germinate, establish, and survive as seedlings if they get three consecutive good years of rainfall. Under Australia’s increasingly variable rainfall conditions, that’s rarely happening.
Burrowing bettongs (or ‘boodies’ and ‘woylies’) are important seed dispersers for sandalwood, but their populations have declined dramatically since European settlement. Michael Hains/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC
The oil from this native plant is used in perfumes, soap, and moisturisers, and the heartwood “goes up in smoke” as incense in temples and homes, particularly throughout Asia.
The WA government currently harvests old-growth sandalwood trees almost exclusively from the wild, where the oldest trees have the best oil quality. Plantations do exist, but they are not yet being fully utilised to replace wild-sourced timber.
Our research delved into more than 100 scientific papers, unpublished theses, parliamentary reports and historical documents, and found scientists have repeatedly warned the WA government of the tree’s dire situation.
For example, a century ago (in 1921), in a report to the head of the WA Forests Department, Charles Lane-Poole, Forests Department official Geoffrey Drake-Brockman expressed fears sandalwood harvesting was sending the species extinct in the wild. He recommended the industry start harvesting from plantations instead, writing:
The State Government’s profit (from better managed harvesting) would enable the Forests Department to establish large plantations of sandalwood so that when the natural supplies cut out, the plantations would supply the market requirements.
Sandalwood being loaded onto a ship from Fremantle wharf in 1905. Battye Library/State Library of Western Australia, Author provided
Years later, in 1958, another report for the WA Forests Department warned:
The sandalwood tree is approaching extinction. The story of the geographical movement of the (sandalwood) industry across WA is the story of the rise and decline of the industry. All too commonly extinction followed exploitation.
Early in the industry’s history, fears were expressed as to the possibility of the future exhaustion of supplies of sandalwood […] Today, the sandalwood tree is approaching extinction […] Little hope of conservation and regeneration remains.
These are just two of scores of examples of warnings documented in our research, all of which have been ignored by successive WA governments. Scientists and others are still putting these same recommendations to the WA government.
Stockpiles of sandalwood being graded for export in the early 1900s. Battye Library/State Library of Western Australia, Author provided
It’s not too late to save it
Fortunately, sandalwood will not completely disappear as there are thousands of hectares of sandalwood in plantations in WA’s agricultural zone. The industry should urgently transition to only harvest from plantations, taking over-harvesting pressure off wild populations.
We urge the WA government to make that transition. The government must list sandalwood as an endangered species now (as it is in South Australia), before it declines to extinction in the wild, and protect and restore surviving populations in innovative programs with Aboriginal rangers and Traditional Owners.
And we urge you, the consumer, to find out more about any sandalwood you purchase.
Plantation-grown products are readily available and just as sweet smelling. Your support will help the industry transition away from wild-harvested plants that need all the help they can get.
Richard McLellan receives funding from Australian Government Research Training Program (ARTP), Herman Slade Foundation, and Australian Flora Foundation. He receives in-kind support from Bush Heritage Australia. He is a member of the Ecological Society of Australia, and a volunteer with Bush Heritage Australia.
David M Watson receives funding from The Australian Research Council, The Hermon Slade Foundation and philanthropic support from Chris and Gina Grubb. He is a member and former board member of Birdlife Australia and the Ecological Society of Australia
Kingsley Dixon is affiliated with the Linnean Society of London, The Royal Society of WA, Society for Ecological Restoration including the Australasian chapter, Wildflower Society of WA.
With nearly half of Australia’s population in lockdown, a lot of children and young people are still not attending face-to-face school.
In Melbourne students in year 12 go back to the classroom this week, and there are staggered return plans for the rest of the year levels. Preps and grades 1 and 2 will return part time in the following weeks. All students will return to the classroom full-time by November 5.
Regional Victorian students have a different schedule with all students back in the classroom full-time by October 26.
In New South Wales, students are set to return to class earlier than expected. Kindergarten, year 1 and year 12 students will return on October 18; years 2, 6 and 11 will return on October 25 and all other grades will resume on November 1.
But even with staggered return plans, many kids will still be learning from home if only part of the time.
If you’re overwhelmed, and your child is disengaged, have no fear. Your child likely still continued to learn, and will continue to do so, just in a different way.
But the majority of Australian students have done just fine. For instance, there has been little change in the NAPLAN average results in 2021 compared to 2019 in all states and territories, including Victoria, which had the longest period of remote schooling in 2020. This doesn’t mean every group succeeded, and there is evidence the learning of disadvantaged students suffered but perhaps less than would have been expected.
Some children’s mental health and well-being may have suffered due to extended uncertainty and lack of face-to-face contact with friends. This is especially so for senior students who have missed out on important events like school formals.
But we also know some children, including children with autism, reported being happier because they experienced less bullying and their learning needs were better met at home. And a report on children with disability found learning improved for many, to the extent some parents were thinking of doing it long term.
Many school students thrived in remote learning. Shutterstock
There are several explanations for remote learning being more successful than expected. Some schools have changed, perhaps permanently to accommodate different teaching and learning approaches.
The theory holds that learning happens when children find meaning in what they are learning about, learn collaboratively with others and have some relationships with the content and the people they are learning with. Deci and Ryan called these motivations to learn
competence, which is the feeling you can do something and be successful
autonomy, which is the feeling you have some control over your experiences
relatedness, which means experiencing positive relationships as part of the learning process.
You don’t need to do anything special to your home to make these three things happen for your children.
The natural flows of family life can provide an environment where children and young people are motivated to learn. Incidental conversation (while doing the washing up or cooking), interactions with siblings (reading to the baby), trying to solve problems (fixing a bike), writing to communicate (to a friend in Minecraft) all provide opportunities to learn new skills and take on new information.
Children are naturally curious. In fact, you have to work very hard to stop them learning.
So, what can you do to foster your child’s learning?
Unlike the classroom, it can be easier to facilitate individual children’s autonomous learning and interests at home. This is because children can have more freedom and flexibility in what they do and learning can be incidental.
By encouraging students to learn what they’re interested in, do research and find their own answers, Deci and Ryan’s work would suggest parents can support motivation and success.
Outside of the formal schooling program, this may involve a child researching a particular topic online or doing something practical like fixing something broken.
Where students are unwilling to do activities provided by the school, it may be possible to cover the same learning in a different way. For example, a student might be unwilling to do fractions on the computer or a worksheet but love cooking and be perfectly happy making a cake ¾ the size of the recipe.
If you had a conversation over the dishes about something they’re interested in, they’re still learning. The conversation could be about anything at all, the critical factor is that it interests your child.
If your child has learned how to crochet on YouTube, they’ve learned not only how to crochet but also how to learn – that’s competence.
If your child rang their grandfather to ask about the Vietnam War, they’ve collected first hand data on the war experience – that’s autonomy.
If you’re feeling burnt out and tired, you’re not alone. It shouldn’t be long now, keep doing what you’ve been doing and the kids will likely be all right.
The authors 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.
Ruth Hollick collection. State Library of Victoria
Recent television series Creamerie, a dark comedy from New Zealand where a pandemic quickly kills (almost) all men and male animals, revives the concept of an all-female society with a contemporary take on ideas raised by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) over 100 years ago.
Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) is the kind of novel mentioned by critics who dive into speculative fiction dealing with gender or utopia, but it rarely gets serious consideration as a literary work in its own right.
Authors of feminist dystopia in the mould of Creamerie and The Handmaid’s Tale do owe a debt to Herland, but the work itself was out of print for 60 years and is a scarce gem in libraries and bookstores alike.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman photographed around 1915, when she wrote and published Herland. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute
Perkins Gilman was an influential suffragette in America, and Herland was originally published as a serial in 1915 in The Forerunner, a monthly journal edited and written entirely by her for seven years. This is an extraordinary output for a single writer in any circumstances or era.
The book was published as a full-length work for the first time in 1979 by London based The Women’s Press Ltd. If not for the foresight of the feminist publisher, it might well have languished for more decades.
The novel is narrated by Vandyck Jennings, a sociologist out to learn all he can, and one of three men – alongside wealthy American Terry O. Nicholson who bankrolls the trip and Jeff Margrave, a smarmy doctor – who are on an adventure holiday into the wilderness of a continent resembling South America.
When their guides tell them about Herland, an isolated country devoid of men, they are keen to go and try their luck with the women; Terry aims to be “king of Ladyland”.
A land without men
Soon after their first journey, the men return so they are not beaten to “the good lookers” in “the bunch” by some other fellows. They take a small aircraft to map the forest, landing on a wide rock “quite out of sight of the interior”.
“They won’t find this in a hurry,” says Terry, even though the women had run out of their houses and watched them fly over: this is one of many subtle digs by the author foreshadowing the way the men underestimate the intelligence of the women.
The original 1979 cover.
The men scamper through the landscape, armed and dangerous, fuelled by the promise of lusty adventures and thoughts of fending off the men they know must be hidden somewhere, as they have seen babies and children on their flyover.
But there are no men. The explanation for 2,000 years of ongoing procreation comes a third of the way through the novel, where a chapter is dedicated to the history.
After escaping slavery in a harem and having “no-one left on this beautiful high garden land but a bunch of hysterical girls and some older slave women” there followed a decade of working together,
growing stronger and wiser and more and more mutually attached, and then a miracle happened — one of these young women bore a child. Of course they all thought there must be a man somewhere, but none was found. Then they decided it must be a direct gift from the gods, and placed the proud mother in the Temple of Maaia — their Goddess of Motherhood — under strict watch. And there, as years passed, this wonder-woman bore child after child, five of them — all girls.
The three men are captured and held in a “fortress” for six months under the watchful eye of older women they disparagingly dub “Colonels” — and kept well away from their trousers and any young women.
Clothed in the same tunic as all Herland residents, they learn the language and are quizzed about the lives of women in their own country. Here, they divulge “the poorest of all the women were driven into the labour market by necessity” and two-thirds are “loved, honoured, kept in the home to care for the children” but it is a “law of nature” the poorest have the most children.
The men “escape” under subtle observation and soon form bonds with the three young women they met up a tree on their arrival: Alima, Celis and Ellador.
By the end of the novel, Jeff is “thoroughly Herlandized” and all set to live with Celis in this utopia. The narrator, Van, marries Ellador and his social observations lead to some shifts in thinking (their story is the subject of the 1916 sequel, With Her in Ourland).
Wealthy misogynist Terry is intractable in his patriarchal attitudes. He is abusive to Alima, put on trial and expelled from Herland.
The Amazons
The 12 chapters of Herland are structured around topics (“A unique history”, “The girls of Herland”, “Their religions and our marriages”) that might easily be the titles of an anthropological work from the period.
The tone of the writing mimics an authoritative patriarchal voice. This is obviously intended to be ironic. The novel is darkly comic and filled with subtle digs at the male characters and the inequality faced by women in 1915, especially in response to work and economic disadvantage.
The concept of a female-led society has its roots in Ancient Greece, in the work of Homer who captured stories of Amazon warrior-women in Iliad. Amazon women like the fearsome Penthesilea, who battled Trojan warriors, feature in a range of Greek tales, where they are usually depicted as succumbing to the swords or charms of male protagonists like Achilles and Theseus.
The Amazons have been re-imagined by authors in many contexts since, featuring in art, literature — and Wonder Woman.
Herland pays homage to them, too. The legendary Amazons of Greek myth inhabited a remote homeland at the edge of the “world”; Herland seems to be located in an area resembling the Amazon.
Considering the geography of Herland is a well-forested triangle, the witty Perkins Gilman might also have been intending a symbolic connection with female anatomy.
The Yellow Wallpaper
In her time, Perkins Gilman’s ideas about the public role of women, prevalent male attitudes to women and the structure of the family were radically feminist.
This wasn’t the first work of hers which took up such ideas.
She is best known as author of The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), a short story narrated by a woman locked in an upstairs nursery by her husband — who is also her doctor — to treat a nervous condition with the “rest cure”. The rest cure was commonly prescribed to treat what we now call postpartum depression, which Perkins Gilman suffered for three years. It involved restriction of all activity, including reading and writing, while being confined to bed.
Deeply disturbing and gripping, The Yellow Wallpaper is an expose on the treatment of women by medical professionals and narrates the woman’s descent into madness in disturbing detail. Perkins Gilman’s own physician, Silas Weir Mitchell, read the story and, as she claimed, discarded the rest cure in response.
The Yellow Wallpaper predates Herland by a couple of decades, but in comparison, the writing in it is more loose and dynamic. Perhaps the first-person male protagonist in Herland was a less comfortable narrative position for the author, with her well entrenched feminist ideals. The writing in Herland is not as rich in motif and layers of meaning. Characterisation of the women in the novel lacks depth, but this may also be ironic.
Overwhelmingly, the purpose of this feminist classic is to critique the social and economic system thar restricted American (and other) women through limiting education, financial independence and life choices. As a novel, it reads as ideology-driven and a vehicle for women’s rights — but it is also very funny.Its ironies are still potent, and sadly valid.
Donna Mazza 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 her academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gary Sturgess, Professor of Public Service Delivery, Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG)
Bianca de Marchi/AAP
Gary Sturgess was director-general of NSW Premier Nick Greiner’s cabinet office in 1988 and the “architect” of ICAC.
There has been a great deal of commentary about the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in recent days, in light of Gladys Berejiklian’s resignation as premier of New South Wales. Much of this has been ill-informed, and some correction is required as the debate over a federal ICAC rolls on.
The NSW ICAC, the first anti-corruption agency in Australia, established in 1988, is an extraordinarily powerful organisation. This should never be taken for granted. It usually conducts its hearings in public. This results in considerable capacity to do harm to the reputations of innocent people, by a counsel assisting who ignores legal conventions or by headline-seeking journalists.
Those powers are not without precedent in this country. The NSW ICAC is simply a standing royal commission, albeit one that, for reasons of independence, sets its own terms of reference.
Other than in the fields of corruption prevention and education, it did not borrow from the Hong Kong agency that bears the same name. The HK ICAC operates with a great deal of secrecy, as has been pointed out, but it exercises extraordinary powers in secret, including detention without warrant. The NSW government did not want to follow this precedent.
And contrary to what one member of the Greiner cabinet has recently claimed, it was not cobbled together from precedents around the world. It was directly modelled on the royal commission, an institution that Australians know well, where there was an existing body of law and practice on which commissioners and courts could draw.
For the most part, royal commissions conduct their hearings in public and they publish reports that damage the reputations of named individuals. That is an onerous responsibility and mistakes are sometimes made. One could well understand the Australian public taking the view that the risks are too great and royal commissions should not be used in that way.
But we must be consistent. There were few complaints when Frank Costigan identified certain painters and dockers and their associates as criminals, or the more recent Hayne royal commission into banking and superannuation named and shamed company executives, shattering their careers.
Former NSW Premier Nick Greiner established ICAC in 1988. Later, he was one of its targets. Gill Allen/AAP
Given this history, why would politicians and public servants be singled out for different treatment? If there were to be a change to the NSW legislation, there would need to be commensurate change to the legislation governing royal commissions.
Some commentators seem to think the NSW ICAC makes findings of criminal guilt or innocence. Others have claimed the legislation creates an offence of corrupt conduct, with the NSW premier having “breached the ICAC Act”. Neither statement is correct. Nor is the ministerial code of conduct “a regulation that sits under the ICAC Act”.
ICAC is simply a commission of inquiry that investigates and reports. If it encounters potential breaches of the criminal law, it has an obligation to hand those matters over to the director of public prosecutions. But it is primarily charged with delivering a report, as other royal commissions do.
Sections 8 and 9 of the NSW act, which provide the meaning of “corrupt conduct”, were designed to define the scope of its powers. It would be unacceptable for the executive government to provide ICAC with terms of reference on a specific allegation. There used to be an old saying in NSW politics – you don’t establish a royal commission if you don’t already know the answer – reflecting the ability of governments to limit political damage by drafting narrow terms of reference.
Section 8 is very wide – it covers a long list of corruption offences, both statutory and common law. But section 9, as originally framed, limited the scope of ICAC’s powers to matters that were already a criminal offence, a disciplinary offence or reasonable grounds for dismissal. The reason for these limitations was to avoid ICAC becoming a morals tribunal, making up standards of its own, or imposing standards retrospectively after a process of scandalisation had resulted in the emergence of new values.
That changed with the addition of section 9d in 1994, following the Supreme Court’s decision in the Greiner case. Parliament extended the scope of corrupt conduct, and so ICAC’s powers, to a substantial breach of a ministerial code of conduct.
Ministerial codes are not primarily about restating the criminal law. They are standards designed to ensure collective responsibility prevails for as long as possible, and that ministerial colleagues believe they can trust one another.
This amendment, initiated by the Liberal-National government of the day, substantially changed the role and function of ICAC. It shifted the focus away from criminal breaches of public trust to incorporate much less serious lapses. The result is that a body charged with exposing corruption, bearing a title that announces that it is charged with exposing corruption, is also responsible for investigating lapses in integrity that fall well short of criminality.
This is directly relevant to the current debate over a federal integrity commission. Senator Helen Haines’s bill borrows the wording of the relevant section from the NSW Act, although it extends the definition to include “a civil liability”. It’s a strange addition that would give this body powers to investigate matters that have nothing at all to do with integrity. This is guaranteed to result in confusion in the minds of the general public, and some journalists and commentators, who will confuse civil litigation, an unintended conflict of interest or a mere breach of convention with criminality.
There is a need for an ongoing anti-corruption body in NSW, to deal with those public officials like Eddie Obeid who flout the law. There is also a need for an integrity commissioner or a committee on standards in public life, utterly distinct from ICAC, to deal with less serious integrity issues, where conventions can be agreed on in a bipartisan way, and grown-up conversations can be had about the ethics that should apply in public life.
Confuse the two and treat all politicians as crooks, and there is the danger that we will end up with less integrity in public office, not more.
Gary Sturgess is employed by ANZSOG which is funded by the national and state governments of Australia and New Zealand. He has conducted numerous government inquiries and served on government committees over the years.
He holds the NSW Premier’s Chair in Public Service Delivery at ANZSOG, which is funded by the NSW government, but is otherwise independent of government.
On Wednesday the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority wrote to each of Australia’s home lenders asking them to make it just a little bit harder for Australians to get mortgage.
The letter, addressed to so-called authorised deposit-taking institutions, asked them to adopt a serviceability buffer “at least 3.0 percentage points over the loan interest rate”.
What that means is they’ll have to grant loans only where they believe the borrowers can afford to keep making payments should their mortgage rates climb three percentage points.
At the moment new variable loans are typically offered something close to 2.8%. The new requirement will prevent lenders from offering such a loan unless the borrower can cope with an increase to 5.8%.
The previous buffer, in place for some years, was 2.5%.
APRA believes the change will cut the maximum amount available to a typical borrower by about 5%.
But it says given that many borrowers borrow much less than the maximum, the overall impact on housing credit growth should be “fairly modest”.
Aimed at debt rather than home prices
APRA says it is not trying to target the level of housing prices, and it looks as if it isn’t (yet) concerned that lending standards are lax, but it wants to ensure “borrowers are well-equipped to service their debts under a range of scenarios”.
Its announcement says increases in the share of heavily indebted borrowers mean “medium-term risks to financial stability are building”.
More than one in five new loans approved in the June quarter were at more than six times the borrowers’ income. As prices have surged, borrowers have pushed themselves deeper into debt in order to get a foothold in the market.
The reasonable benchmark for lending was once considered to be between three and four times the borrower’s income. But as interest rates have fallen and prices have climbed, borrowers have been increasingly prepared to extend themselves.
APRA says with the economy expected to bounce back as lockdowns end, the balance of risks meant “stronger serviceability standards are warranted”.
The boosted serviceability requirement will also increase the resilience of borrowers to higher interest rates, should they come. Not that the Reserve Bank says they will come for some years; as it tells it, most probably not until 2024.
Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe has indicated rates shouldn’t need to rise until 2024.
APRA is taking out insurance.
With global inflation pressures building, there is a risk not only that rates climb go earlier than the Reserve Bank is signalling, but that the increases will be substantial, given how far rates are below normal.
While this might be part of the impact, APRA’s objective is to reduce the vulnerability of individual borrowers and banks themselves to an increase in interest rates down the track.
The biggest impact on the most leveraged borrowers.
The most leveraged borrowers tend to be first home buyers and investors. APRA believes investors will be affected the most because first home buyers tend to be “more constrained by the size of their deposit”.
Investors are more leveraged and often have multiple loans to which the new requirement will be applied.
Insurance, for 2022
So far, investors have been less prominent than usual in the market upturn.
APRA seems to think this is about to change. Investors stayed away when home prices began climbing late last year, but returned to the market this year and have been increasingly active.
Unchecked, low interest rates combined with Australia’s favourable taxation treatment of property investment could drive a new wave of investor-driven demand well into 2022.
Low interest rates are making low-yielding real estate extremely attractive.
APRA may be preparing itself for twin threats it sees around the corner – a new wave of investor-driven home price inflation, and the first increase in official interest in more than a decade.
Warren Hogan ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
The Australian government has pre-purchased 300,000 courses of an experimental antiviral oral drug called molnupiravir.
Interim results announced by the company, US pharmaceutical Merck, show the drug halved the number of patients who ended up in hospital due to COVID. No patient who took the drug died from the virus.
But the drug isn’t yet available for dispensing from pharmacies because it hasn’t received approval from Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
If approved it can be used in the community to prevent patients with mild symptoms from developing more severe disease.
Until then, there will be no legal, effective and safe treatments that people with COVID can take at home to keep them out of hospital. As such, we need to continue our push to get maximum vaccination coverage within the community.
Molnupiravir is an experimental antiviral drug that acts against a range of respiratory viruses, including the virus that causes COVID.
For COVID, the instructions for creating more virus are contained in the virus’ RNA. This RNA needs to be read and copied to make new virus particles.
Molnupiravir works by disrupting the replication of the virus. It does this by mimicking two natural compounds called cytidine and uridine that are needed to make RNA. When the body tries to replicate the virus it incorporates molnupiravir into the RNA structure instead of versions of cytidine and uridine. The result is the accumulation of mutations in the virus RNA which then prevent it from causing illness.
This type of technology isn’t new. In fact, we have been using chemotherapy drugs that mimic RNA and DNA ingredients for over 50 years. One drug, called fluorouracil works by preventing DNA production inside cancer cells by mimicking the DNA ingredient thymine.
Results of the clinical trial
Last week Merck announced interim results of a phase 3 clinical trial of molnupiravir.
The company found the drug significantly reduced the risk of hospitalisation or death in patients who took the drug when compared with patients who took a placebo treatment. In fact, the results were so good, an independent data monitoring committee recommended the trial be stopped early.
Overall, the drug reduced hospitalisations and deaths by around 50%. While 14.1% of patients who took placebo ended up in hospital, only 7.3% of molnupiravir patients had the same outcome.
The results were even better with regard to the death rates. No patient who took molnupiravir died, while eight patients in the placebo group did die.
Importantly, while the clinical trial demonstrated efficacy of the drug, it was also able to show molnupiravir is safe. The rate of side effects was nearly the same in both the molnupiravir and placebo groups. Earlier clinical trials found there are no serious side effects with the drug. The most common, mild effects were headache and diarrhea.
We have to wait for the full data to be released and checked in order to be fully confident in the drug. But the results seem to indicate molnupiravir may be useful for the early treatment of COVID to prevent the development of serious disease and hospitalisation.
How it will be used
Molnupiravir will be able to be taken orally by patients at home after they receive a prescription from their doctor.
A course of treatment will be eight 200 milligram capsules a day for five days; four capsules in the morning and four capsules in the afternoon. A patient can choose whether they want to take the medicine with or without food, as it doesn’t appear to affect the medicine in the body.
It’s unclear whether a positive COVID test will be required before a prescription can be issued. This is something that will be decided by the TGA.
Associate Professor Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and a member of the Australasian Pharmaceutical Science Association. Nial is science director of the medicinal cannabis company Canngea Pty Ltd, a board member of the Australian Medicinal Cannabis Association, and a Standards Australia committee member for sunscreen agents.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is in the process of working through another mountain of documents showing how the rich and powerful use the global financial system to hide their wealth and avoid taxes.
Commenting on the 13 million financial and tax documents comprising the Paradise Papers in 2017, we wrote that “governments have not learnt their lesson and taken action”.
Four years later here we are again. Some progress has been made on the critical reforms needed – in particular, eliminating the secrecy that shrouds tax havens – but there’s still more to do.
Systemic issues
In sorting through these new documents, journalists have quite reasonably tended to focus on the “easy connections” and “known individuals”. This work has identified at least 956 companies with more than 336 beneficiaries who are “high-level politicians and public officials”.
This includes Vladimir Putin’s mistress allegedly having assets worth US$100 million, Jordan’s King Abdullah II using offshore companies to buy three Malibu mansions for US$70 million, and the 11-year-old son of Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev owning nine waterfront mansions in Dubai worth US$44 million.
Also on the list of 35 current and former national leaders, including Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš, Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and former British prime minister Tony Blair.
But as juicy as these stories are, we should not be distracted from the systemic issues that lead to the wealthy using offshore legal entities and accounts. It’s not always nefarious or illicit.
In the Pandora Papers are arrangements that, with incomplete information, may appear suspect but may be quite legitimate.
An example might be the 81 trust structures established in the US state of South Dakota and at least 100 more in various other US states where trust disclosures, especially about beneficial ownership, are not mandatory. To properly assess these transactions we really need more information.
The use of complex business structures, involving countries with high levels of secrecy, may be done to facilitate tax avoidance. But it might also be “asset protection”.
Weak property rights
In countries with weak property rights and unreliable judicial systems, even those who accrue wealth legitimately can fear losing it.
This creates a demand for assets held in other countries (preferably secretly) and a legal system that protects ownership of those assets. It also likely explains why 3.3 million of the 6.9 million documents in this latest leak relate to offices located in Hong Kong.
An analysis of these documents recognising the relative strength of property rights in the countries where individuals, or their businesses, are based would be interesting — and not just as an “academic” exercise.
In many countries, particularly developing countries, weak property rights contribute to lack of capital for economic development by creating incentives for the legitimately wealthy to use offshore accounts and assets.
This suggests a critical need to enhance property rights in these countries.
Weak legal systems also facilitate wealth accumulation through corruption or exploitation.
Unfinished business
Five years ago when discussing the revelations from the Panama Papers, we suggested the first thing the global community needed to do was require the public disclosure of country-by-country reporting of company tax affairs by all tax authorities. This idea (known as CbCR) emerged from OECD and G20 recommendations made about the time of the Luxembourg Leaks in 2014.
About 100 countries have adopted the CbCR policy, at least in part. The problem is that in too many cases – such as Australia and the US – the disclosures are only to the tax authority, not to the public.
In 2017 we also recommended all countries have public registers of beneficial ownership of all entities.
There has also been some progress on this. Significant pressure has been applied to tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions such as the Bahamas and Switzerland. But more is needed.
In Australia, for example, the Paradise Papers led to the government floating the idea of a public register of beneficial ownership, but this was shut down soon after. In the US, states such Delaware and South Dakota are still “secrecy jurisdictions”.
Some progress has been made in making tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions more transparent. But many would say the progress has been mainly benefited wealthy countries, helping them increase tax revenue and to be seen to be doing something to fight corruption, while still allowing corruption to flourish in poorer nations.
Until countries such as the US and Australia embrace the reforms that have been on the table since LuxLeaks, expect further document leaks with similar results in the next five years.
The authors 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.
An 1817 painting by Joseph Lycett, depicting First Nation peoples cooking and eating whale meat.National Library of Australia, Author provided
Review: True to the Land: A History of Food in Australia by Paul van Reyk (Reaktion Books)
Paul van Reyk’s True to the Land: A History of Food in Australia ambitiously evaluates the foodways of this land over 65,000 years. A Sydney-based food writer, van Reyk is also a regular presenter and administrator of the symposium of Australian Gastronomy.
The bulk of rigorous food research in Australia is conducted through university PhD theses, and in recent years several monographs have been published by food historians on the food practices here. This book weaves the history of Indigenous Australians with that of settlers and migrants.
A chronologically organised social history, it is skilfully structured through empirical evidence and ably builds on the work of prominent Australian food historians. In a series of themes spread over ten chapters, van Reyk includes primary sources from newspapers, exploration accounts, early cookery books and women’s magazines. The volume is amply illustrated with maps, recipes, anecdotes and photographs from the archives.
True to the Land, more than any other food history of Australia, re-evaluates previous accepted knowledge about Indigenous Australians on a range of issues including land use, food sovereignty and food security.
Throughout this book the author constantly reminds us of the ways in which Indigenous Australians contribute to our foodways (the eating habits and culinary practices of a community). He writes,
[Aboriginal Australians] were actively involved in agriculture and aquaculture, were managing food stock for sustainability and had developed sophisticated strategies for turning fire, a significant environmental hazard, into a powerful tool for resource management. The consequences of this act of possession reverberate through the rest of this book.
The first two chapters discusses the lie of the land in geographical and historical terms. This premises the starting point of the food history of the continent when the First Peoples migrated to the Australian mainland.
Van Reyk, as with other scholars in recent years, asserts that Aboriginal people developed deliberate strategies in resource management of the land. There were controlled burn-offs, careful harvests of food from plants, the sea and other waterways. Importantly too, surplus food was stored for later use, in protected locations such as trees, caves or buried in sand.
The Budj Bim eel traps in Lake Condah, Victoria. Budj Bim/AAP
Gold and Chinese food
From the period 1788 to 1850, van Reyk details the rudimentary food practices of British colonists in New South Wales, and, the establishment of settlements and colonies in other parts of Australia.
Cooking was done on open fire until permanent homes were built. Colonists and settlers initially supplemented their European diet with native flora and fauna. Colonial land grab caused conflict resulting in the killing of Aboriginal men, women and children.
One outcome of the displacement of Aboriginal peoples and land exploration was the discovery of gold. A direct consequence of the gold rush years, between 1851 to 1899 was the increase in population in the cities and towns associated with the goldfields. European populations prospered and dining out was possible. The gold boom also attracted Chinese workers to Australia; this gave rise to the first Chinese food being sold to the public.
Van Reyk pinpoints the ebb and flow of the nation’s economic life between 1900 to 1945 through the years of federation, the two world wars and the interwar years. The publication of cookery books for home cooks began at this time. As the nation prospered, Aboriginal people were coerced to work on farms and as domestic servants on little remuneration.
The Chiko Roll: an Australian version of the Chinese Spring Roll. Author provided
Aboriginal labour and the stolen generation
Discussing Aboriginal labour and the stolen generation, the author points out that while cookery books and other records
offer insights into the domestic lives of Australian women as home makers, what they don’t tell is the stories of the thousands of Aboriginal women and girls forced into domestic service during these years.
Among other topics examined in the years spanning between 1946 and 1979, are the contributions to the culinary landscape by European postwar migrants and the Asianisation of Australian foodways.
The emergence of modern Australian cuisine took hold from the 1980s to the 1990s, with rising affluence. The concluding chapter identifies current environmental and sustainable concerns of foodways in the nation and food insecurity among Aboriginal Australians.
I have two minor criticisms. One, it would enhance this book if there was more engagement with secondary sources pertinent to food historiography. I temper this though by saying that the readability of this book for the general reader is achieved without overuse of theory and jargon. The other criticism is that not all authors cited are in the index. These two points in no way detract from what is a brilliantly structured and well-researched book.
I highly recommend True to the Land to the general public, university students of food history, school teachers and academics. This food history is also relevant to researchers on Australian history, colonial history and cultural and social histories.
Cecilia Leong-Salobir 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.
We have more than five senses. What you might think of as your sense of “touch” is actually a range of different sensory pathways that allow you to distinguish various types of mechanical forces, to detect changes in temperature, and to feel pain.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, announced this week, went to US physiologist David Julius and Lebanese-born researcher Ardem Patapoutian, for revealing the mechanisms that underpin these various sensations of touch. So how do these mechanisms work?
Our brains constantly process vast amounts of tactile and thermal information from our environment. As your hand wraps around your coffee cup in the morning, you can sense whether the coffee is too hot, just right for drinking, or has gone cold. You can feel the weight of the cup in your hand and the smoothness of its surface, and sense the positioning of your arm as you move to take a sip.
To make sense of all these stimuli, our bodies need to convert external environmental information into biological signals. This process begins at nerve cell endings in our skin.
On the surface of these nerve cells are specialised molecules called “ion channels” that can open in response to an environmental stimulus, resulting in a localised electrical signal. This signal can then be amplified into an electrical impulse that is transmitted via nerve cells to our brain, where it is interpreted as a sensation.
We can sense the heat of a cup of coffee, as well as the position of our arm as we move to take a sip. Clay Banks/Unsplash, CC BY-SA
Julius and Patapoutian made separate and equally significant contributions to our understanding of exactly which types of ion channels can act as sensory receptors.
In 1997, Julius and his team identified the first known receptor for heat, by investigating how cells respond to capsaicin, the chemical that causes the burning sensation when we eat hot chillies.
Their research identified an ion channel known as TRPV1 as the receptor activated by capsaicin. What’s more, they demonstrated this receptor is also activated by high temperatures that we perceive as painful.
Subsequentresearch has identified other members of the same family of ion channels that are each activated by a distinct temperature range. Thus, to sense different temperatures, our bodies use separate receptors to distinguish between painful or damaging heat or cold, and to sense moderate changes in temperature.
More than two decades later, in 2010, Patapoutian finally identified one of the receptors that responds to mechanical forces, enabling our sense of touch. He and his team identified a receptor molecule that responds to pressure, by using a fine probe to make tiny indentations in laboratory-cultured cells.
They named the ion channel PIEZO1, from the Greek word for pressure. They went on to demonstrate that a second ion channel, PIEZO2, is also required for our nerve cells to sense touch. When the surface of a sensory nerve cell is indented, both these receptor molecules change shape, initiating an electrical impulse.
What’s more, PIEZO2 receptors not only enable a sense of touch but also signal mechanical information from within our bodies. They thus allow us to detect stretching in our limbs so we can control our movement, and signal when our lungs are fully inflated or our bladder is full.
Research is still ongoing to discover whether our nerve cells have other mechanically activated ion channels that help us perceive our environment in other ways.
So when you next take a sip of hot coffee, or feel a cool breeze on your face, imagine those tiny receptor molecules in your nerve endings, working hard to deliver those signals to your brain so you can enjoy the world around you.
Kate Poole receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia) and the Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development (US Airforce Office of Scientific Research)
Having noted these points of optimism, there are these following regional outbreaks, apparent from these two charts:
Caribbean, especially, now, the British Caribbean, which includes continental Guyana and Belize. Much of this group (including Guyana) participate in the West Indies cricket team. Two others in West Indies Cricket, Jamaica and Trinidad/Tobago, are also highly covid-active. We may include Bermuda in this British Caribbean group. Cuba should be noted here; it has been a Covid19 leader in the Caribbean for some time now.
Balkans. As a region (and Peru aside) the Balkans are the worst affected by Covid19 deaths per capita.
Russia and the Caucasus. Russia, Armenia and Georgia show up. Ukraine will soon do so. Belarus, which has has been in the death zone for a while, has just started a big new outbreak. Azerbaijan is just getting over its September outbreak.
Baltic States. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia all feature in my first chart above. These are in the European Union. Lithuania and Estonia have vaccination rates comparable with New Zealand.
Greater Malaysia. The outbreak in Malaysia these last few months has a very long tail. Brunei also shows in both charts. More concerning, Singapore , which now shows on one of the above charts, has just commenced its biggest outbreak ever, after a year of being a Covid19 poster-child.
South Pacific. We see New Caledonia prominent on the charts. French Polynesia and Fiji still feature. French Polynesia stopped counting cases. And of course, Australia and New Zealand, while not yet prominent in the league table charts shown, are on the wax after having both seemed to be coming out of their August/September outbreaks. Oceanian populations were particularly vulnerable to respiratory infections, this southern winter.
Others to note. The United Kingdom and Isle of Man are still showing in the ‘cases’ chart. So is Israel. These are well vaccinated, so not so prominent in the death league. But waning vaccine immunisation is likely to be a factor here. And the United States continues to show up in the death league; its mish-mash of public health measures and vaccine resistance will both be contributing factors here.
Looking at the situation in Aotearoa New Zealand today, I would like to see the whole of the North Island except Wellington moved to Public Health Emergency level 2.9 (which rounds to 3, so counts as ‘lockdown’), which is effectively what Auckland is in now. We can have a domestic land border on the Wellington sides of Otaki and Featherston. Wellington can move down to ordinary Level 2, and the South Island to Level 1.
Re domestic air travel, we need domestic red flights and green flights. Green flights would only be within the South Island, and between Wellington and the South Island.
The vaccination push needs to focus on provincial cities, towns and townships. There are vastly more difficult-to-access people in New Zealand’s North Island provinces than our politicians and bureaucrats realise. Just considering Māori regional population growth – thanks to the housing induced exodus from Auckland over the last decade, and to a return migration of Māori from Australia – true Māori vaccination rates in the North Island hinterland are even lower than quoted statistics reveal.
Viruses are better census-takers than are the New Zealand central government bureaucracies.
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
