This week’s excruciating case of a prime minister being beholden to a rogue section of his own Cabinet over climate policy has again drawn attention to the arcane nature of Coalition arrangements.
While the numbers eventually fell his way, a policy U-turn that Scott Morrison regarded as politically existential was for a time hostage to a famously mercurial party room of which he was not a member, and over which he could exercise net-zero influence.
In the end, both won. Morrison got his 2050 target but without any promise to cut methane output as sought by the US and Europe. There was also no interim (2030) pledge.
These exclusions make Morrison’s announcement essentially gestural rather than a substantive policy shift.
The government has since made a virtue of this fact, arguing its 2050 target will be achieved within existing policy settings and without the need for legislation.
Such inter-party dependencies make obvious numerical sense in a system of compulsory two-party-preferred voting. In the case of the Coalition, it has enabled it to deny Labor a parliamentary majority in all but one federal election since 1993.
Scott Morrison appeared without the junior Coalition partner to announce the government’s climate policy. Lukas Coch/AAP
However, this success has come at the cost of ceding disproportionate power to a bit player that commands only a sliver of the nation-wide vote and promotes policies widely divergent from majority public sentiment.
According to the latest survey by Nine’s Resolve Political Monitor released on Wednesday, Labor’s primary vote sits at 34% and the Liberal Party (absent the Nats) is just a shade higher at 35%.
Interestingly, with the Nationals added on, the Coalition vote is a mere 2% higher, at 37%.
At the last election, Labor secured a primary vote of 33.34% nation-wide.
The Liberal Party (in its own name) came in at less than 30% in 2019, although this total excludes the Queensland tally where the two conservative parties form a single entity, the Liberal-National Party (LNP).
The total Coalition share of primary votes for Liberals and Nationals in 2019 was 41.44%, whereas the respective Labor and Greens first-preference tallies of 33.34% and 10.40% amounted to 43.74%.
On the face of it, this suggests Labor could do as well out of the Greens as the Liberals do out of the Nationals.
But the key difference is that while the Nationals provide brand difference from the Liberals in the regions where they operate exclusively, the city-centric Greens largely cannibalise Labor’s urban-progressive vote.
The Liberal-Nationals carve-up of the electoral map is more analogous to the Qantas-Jetstar arrangement, where the full-service carrier established a cheaper no-frills service under different branding.
Both are airlines, but different branding freed up the Qantas subsidiary to go after an economy market segment against Virgin and other lower-cost operators without confusing the presentation and pricing structure of its major brand.
Another difference is the existence of a formalised Coalition, the precise terms of which are set out in a secret power-sharing agreement that confers a sizeable proportion of the jewels of office on the junior partner.
This includes the deputy prime ministership and additional cabinet posts (currently there are four) plus other outer-ministry portfolios, and undisclosed undertakings on policy.
So codified are these arrangements that the Liberal prime minister of the day does not have a say over who represents the Nationals is in his (or her) own cabinet.
Barnaby Joyce’s return to the Nationals leadership in June 2021 is a case in point. His move on the hapless but co-operative former deputy PM Michael McCormack came as a shock to Morrison, who was out of the country at the time.
Despite being deputy prime minister in the Coalition government, Michael McCormack’s removal at the hands of Barnaby Joyce in June 2020 came as a shock to Scott Morrison. Lukas Coch/AAP
Joyce had left the ministry in February 2018 in disrepute, well before Morrison’s ascension to the prime ministership.
The two have not appeared together in a press conference since Joyce’s return.
In the aftermath of the Turnbull government’s razor-thin 2016 election win, Joyce, in his first stint as Nationals leader, was quizzed as to what the Coalition Agreement would cover. In a triumph of hubris over accountability, he boasted:
The first aspiration is that the agreement remains confidential. That’s aspiration one, two, three, four, five and six.
The deployment of tailored messaging between city and bush is central to the Nationals’ success, and therefore to Coalition success.
It is a capacity Labor, as a single, largely metropolitan party, lacks.
Indeed, then leader Bill Shorten was criticised in the 2019 election campaign for inconsistent messaging or so-called audience shopping, for stressing green credentials in Melbourne and a more pro-coalmining stance in Queensland.
While it is too early to tell, in the few days since grudging Nationals support for the net-zero by 2050 target was secured, several conflicting messages have emerged on the conservative side.
Key Nationals, such as Matt Canavan, have openly declared their intention to campaign against net-zero.
Almost immediately it became known that Joyce himself was personally against Morrison’s 2050 carbon neutrality pledge, but had lost the debate in the party room.
Presumably this is bad for Joyce and the Nationals. But perhaps not. On the one hand, it makes him look lame and ineffective as a leader, incapable of carrying his small 21-strong party room.
On the other, Joyce’s reputed antipathy to climate virtue-signalling (as the conservative right characterises it) allows the Nationals as a party to continue casting doubt on the primacy of emissions reduction among government priorities when communicating with its electoral base.
Tellingly, the only concrete thing to come so far from the net-zero retreat was the immediate promotion of the trenchant fossil-fuel booster, Resources and Energy Minister Keith Pitt. He moved from the outer ministry into the Cabinet.
Mark Kenny 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.
Popular culture has plenty of examples of people sabotaging their romantic relationships.
In the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, Kat says she has no interest in romantic engagements. Then Patrick asks about her dating style:
You disappoint them from the start and then you’re covered, right?
But as the plot develops, we learn this is Kat’s way of protecting herself, to cope with the trauma of a previous relationship.
Other people move through relationships searching for “the one”, making quick assessments of their romantic partners.
In the TV series The Mindy Project, Mindy is a successful obstetrician and gynaecologist with poor relationship skills. She has a trail of relationship failures, and partners who did not measure up. She is looking for the “perfect” love story with unrealistic expectations.
Jacob moves through sexual partners night after night to avoid a serious commitment, in the movie Crazy, Stupid, Love.
Another example is Jacob in the movie Crazy, Stupid, Love. He quickly moves through sexual partners night after night to avoid a serious commitment.
In the same movie, we meet Cal and Emily, who stayed in a marriage long term but had become complacent. This caused them to split, but once they started to work on themselves, they found a way to reconnect.
My team and I define relationship sabotage as self-defeating attitudes and behaviours in (and out of) relationships. These stop relationships succeeding, or lead people to give up on them, justifying why these relationships fail.
Most importantly, relationship sabotage is a self-protection strategy for a win-win outcome.
For example, you might feel you win if the relationship survives despite your defensive strategies. Alternatively, if the relationship fails, your beliefs and choice to protect yourself are validated.
Why do we do this?
Why do we sabotage love?
We found people sabotage their relationships mainly because of fear. This is despite wanting an intimate relationship.
However, fear responses are not always visible or easy to identify. This is because our emotions are layered to protect us. Fear is a vulnerable (and core) emotion, which is commonly hidden beneath surface (or secondary) emotions, such as defensiveness.
Recognise any of these patterns?
Relationship sabotage is not a “one off” moment in a relationship. It happens when fear triggers patterns of responses from one relationship to the next.
My research highlights three main patterns of attitudes and behaviours to look out for.
Defensiveness
Defensiveness, such as being angry or aggressive, is a counter-attack to a perceived threat. People who are defensive are motivated by wanting to validate themselves; they are looking to prove themselves right and protect their self-esteem.
Threats that trigger defensiveness are a previous relationship trauma, difficulty with self-esteem, loss of hope, the possibility of getting hurt again, and fear of failure, rejection, abandonment and commitment. However, defensiveness is an instinctive response that sometimes makes sense.
People can believe relationships often end up in “heart break”. One research participant was tired of being criticised and having their feelings misunderstood:
I protect myself from getting hurt in a romantic relationship by putting up all of my walls and not letting go of my guard.
Trust difficulty
Having difficulty trusting others involves struggling to believe romantic partners and perhaps feeling jealous of their attention to others. People who feel this way might not feel safe and avoid feeling vulnerable in relationships.
This is often a result of past experiences of having trust betrayed, or expecting to be betrayed. Betrayals could be as a result of small deceptions (a white lie) or bigger deceptions (infidelity).
People explained choosing not to trust, or being unable to trust, was a way of avoiding being hurt again. One research participant said:
I no longer trust my romantic partners 100%. I will always be thinking about what I would do if they left or cheated, so I never get fully invested.
Lack of relationship skills
This is when someone has limited insight or awareness into destructive tendencies in relationships. This may be a result of poor relationship
role models, or negative interactions and outcomes from previous relationships.
What used to hold me back was lack of experience, poor relationship examples (from my parents), and my own immaturity.
But relationship skills can be learned. Healthy relationships can help foster relationship skills and in turn lessen the effects of defensiveness and trust difficulty.
The cost of relationship sabotage
Relationship sabotage does not necessarily end relationships. This depends on whether these patterns are long term.
For singles, relationship sabotage might prevent you from starting a relationship in the first place. For people in relationships, a long-term effect of repeatedly using self-defensive strategies might be to see your fears turn into reality, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Difficulties in intimate relationships are among the top main reasons for seeking counselling. Such difficulties are also significant contributors to anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts.
insight: we need to know who we are first, and the “baggage” we bring to relationships. Be honest with yourself and your partner about your fears and what you might be struggling with
expectations: we need to manage our expectations of romantic engagements. Understand what you can realistically expect of yourself and your partners
collaboration: you need to collaborate with your partner to implement strategies to maintain a healthy relationship. This means learning how to communicate better (across all topics, while being honest) and showing flexibility and understanding, especially when dealing with conflict.
Above all, believe you can have healthy relationships and deserve to be loved.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Raquel Peel 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.
This week, the Morrison government finally released its plan to get Australia to net-zero emissions by 2050.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese was quick to dismiss the Coalition policy, describing it as a mere “vibe” with “nothing new” in it. His climate spokesperson Chris Bowen added
I’ve seen more detail in a fortune cookie.
These are fair comments. But Labor’s climate policy is also light on detail and the party won’t announce its full climate plan until after international climate talks in Glasgow, which finish on November 12.
What do we know about Labor’s policy so far? Will it be environmentally effective and fair?
No 2030 target
Global warming cannot exceed 1.5℃ this century if we hope to avoid catastrophic climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change) predicts global warming is on track for 2.7℃. We really do need to act fast.
Labor is not due to announce its full climate plan until Glasgow is over. Lukas Coch/AAP
Yet the ALP has no current plans to increase Australia’s 2030 emission reduction target. The party took a target of 45% below 2005 levels to the 2019 election. But this was short of what scientists have been calling for.
The Climate Council’s estimate for an appropriate climate target for Australia at the time was a 65% reduction. Today, they argue we can, and should, reach for a 75% reduction by 2030.
Australia’s 2030 target is important because “net-zero” is vague in the abstract – it basically means a managed balance between sources and sinks of carbon. We need to know what parts of the carbon cycle, and which industries, technologies, and groups of people are involved, and how.
Towards a green industrial strategy
The ALP has been signalling it wants to focus on labour issues at the heart of decarbonisation. As Bowen frequently observes, “good energy policy is good employment policy”.
After the tortuous carbon price debate of the Rudd-Gillard years and Labor’s shock defeat at the 2019 election, Albanese has announced a renewed focus on policies to promote a green “industrial revolution”. More recently, he has joined labour economists in arguing the pandemic exposes the Australian economy to fragile global supply chains.
Labor has proposed a A$15 billion national reconstruction fund for economic diversification and advanced manufacturing, including renewables.
Energy transition involves job losses in fossil-fuel based electricity generation and related mines and transport. There are significant opportunities for new employment in new green tech industries, but they don’t magically appear in the places jobs are being lost.
So any shift to a green industry policy should be meticulously planned and targeted to specific locations.
Supporting transitions in electricity and transport
Thanks to the renewable energy boom, electricity market decarbonisation is underway. Labor says it’s committed to underwriting the transition.
The ALP’s “rewiring the nation” policy commits A$20 billion to rebuild and modernise the grid, in line with a plan by the Australian Energy Market Operator. Labor is also proposing a public institution called Rewiring the Nation Corporation that may reintroduce some public ownership in the sector. For households and distributed energy off the grid, it promises more support for community batteries.
Labor has pledged $200 million over three years to make electric cars more affordable. Mick Tsikas/AAP
The ALP has also committed to more vocational training and a scheme for apprentice electricians to gain renewable energy skills. But we need more detail on how they propose to govern transition in the most affected regions.
It’s unclear if Labor still intends to create the Just Transition Authority announced under Bill Shorten’s leadership. These kinds of independent authorities are important for negotiating redundancy and retraining programmes and economic diversity initiatives in hard hit regions.
Transport systems are on the verge of a major transition too. The ALP has a tariff removal policy to make electric vehicles more affordable. It proposes to work with the unions and the sector to develop manufacturing capacity. But it could be doing more, for instance, through pollution standards or mandating large manufacturers meet targets for electric vehicle sales.
What about food and fuel?
All of this makes sense. But if net-zero is to become more than just a slogan, emissions reduction is urgently needed in other sectors such as agriculture and mining.
Decarbonising these sectors will be challenging in an economic, practical and political sense.
Agriculture contributed about 15% to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2019. Trevor Collens/AAP
Labor’s policies to reduce emissions in the agriculture sector have focused on land carbon offsetting. Under this approach, farmers are encouraged to maintain vegetation and adopt farming practices that lead to more carbon being stored in soil and plants. This activity could be rewarded in the form of “credits” sold to polluting firms looking to compensate for (or “offset”) their ongoing emissions.
The Gillard government established the Carbon Farming Initiative as a voluntary land offset scheme linked to the short-lived compliance emissions trading scheme. This continued under the Coalition’s Direct Action Plan as a combined competitive grant programme and way to offset emissions under the Safeguard Mechanism which which sets a (loose) limit on the most polluting firms in Australia.
Both Labor and Coalition’s approaches to land carbon are a light touch. Offsets should not be heavily relied on to reach net-zero.
Meanwhile, Labor has never properly addressed the future of our export mineral and energy industries. Australia’s coal and gas exports will be exposed as trading partners such as South Korea, Japan and China pursue net-zero emissions targets.
And Labor will be under ongoing pressure from environmentalists and Indigenous groups who have long been calling for major reforms to both cultural heritage and environmental protection laws.
Capping pollution
Labor has said it will not seek an economy-wide carbon price instrument, like it had during the Gillard government. This means it will need other ways to legislate and regulate for emissions reductions. One possibility is to strengthen the existing “safeguard mechanism” without building a carbon market. In its current form, the mechanism has allowed big polluters to increase their emissions, but that could be changed.
If Labor went down that route, it would also need a separate policy to deal with emissions from agriculture. Effective climate policy doesn’t have to be top-down economy-wide carbon price. Sector-by-sector industrial policy and regulation could be a more realistic way to create incentives for innovation.
Looming election
The federal election due early next year is shaping up as another “climate election”.
We urgently need a government with vision for what jobs and livelihoods will look like in a decade of green industrial transformations. Labor is offering some new industrial details, but the emissions target and plans for mining and regional communities are vague.
We need the details in Albanese’s climate policy fortune cookie soon.
Rebecca Pearse receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
In mid October, the New South Wales government’s top beaureacrats urged new Premier Dominic Perrottet to push for “an aggressive resumption of immigration levels” to spur post-pandemic economic recovery.
Industry seized on this as the answer to skills shortages that have resulted from Australia’s border closures. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry called for a near doubling of the skilled migration program, to around 200,000 annually over the next five years.
In the same week, the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) released a report that showed a 35% increase in the number of Australians enrolled in courses linked to apprenticeships and traineeships, compared to the start of the pandemic. But the news seemed to fly under the radar.
This significant rise in training may not satisfy those who want a quick solution to the skills shortages. But growth in Australia’s vocational education and training sector is a more sustainable way of filling the gaps.
Where are the skills shortages?
Earlier this year, a NSW and federal government report suggested increased skilled migration would be a big part of Australia’s future success after a pandemic-induced fall in migration and population growth.
More recently, Infrastructure Australia anticipated skilled job shortages could rise to around 100,000 by 2023. It argued Australians needed an urgent skilled migration program but that some skills shortages were likely to persist in the significant post-COVID infrastructure boost.
A June 2021 ABS survey showed more than a quarter (27%) of Australian businesses were having difficulty finding qualified staff. Among the skilled trades, these were mainly in hospitality, sales, transportation, construction and mining.
But there are many issues with relying on migration to fix these, beyond a decrease in international travel due to COVID.
Migration not the magic bullet
Demographer Liz Allen has argued the migration effort may be problematic due to more aggressive international competition to attract needed workers, such as in health care, and Australia’s reduced attractiveness as a destination.
Also, the upcoming longer waiting periods for new Australian migrants to access welfare payments can make similar destinations like Canada and New Zealand more attractive.
Meanwhile, an aggressive migration strategy may not be politically palatable. Research shows only 19% of voters agreed with the government’s long-term migration target. The rest supported lower levels, including 28% who wanted nil net migration.
Another argument made by the likes of Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe is that a lower population leads to tightening of labour markets, fewer unemployed and employers improving wages and conditions causing employment participation rates to rise.
So, what’s a better way to fill the skills gap?
Apprenticeships and traineeships on the rise
Apprenticeships and traineeships enable individuals to work and learn on the job while they complete a nationally recognised qualification.
The NCVER report (quarterly, to March 2021) shows 329,585 apprentices and trainees were in training, an annual growth rate of 20.7%.
Commencements in traineeships and apprenticeships increased by 28.5% to 186,745. Of significance are increases such as 45.1% in the 25-44 years group and 58.2% in the over 45 years group. This raises the possibility they are re-training or upskilling, perhaps precipitated by the pandemic.
The growth rate in commencements was approximately the same in trades and non-trades. In trades, technical staff in IT, engineering and science recorded the greatest growth rate. In non-trades, this was for managerial/professional and administrative roles. These are some of the roles identified as being in current shortage or expected to be in strong future demand.
More Australians training up since pandemic
One reason for this increase is that during the pandemic, federal and state governments increased spending in re-skilling initiatives. Government programs included the Boosting Apprenticeships Commencements program (and its expansion) and JobTrainer, which gave 17-24 years looking for work a way to study a course in high-demand sectors for free or by paying a low fee.
Another reason may be that a record number of people meeting the shock of the pandemic have either quit their job or are thinking about doing so in developed economies. More than 19 million US workers have quit their jobs since April 2021.
Recent ABS unemployment data shows fewer Australians are applying for jobs or participating in the workforce. In September 2021, the participation rate fell by 333,000 people and hit a 15-month low, with just 64.5% of people aged 15 and over currently working or actively looking for work.
These data suggest some Australians, whether voluntarily or not, are enrolling in VET courses to retrain themselves for new jobs.
Can domestic training solve the skills shortage?
There is growing evidence the increase in apprentices and trainees will help alleviate skills shortages in sectors of the economy flexible enough to take them on — and patient enough to see them trained through the system. Traditionally, these are sectors which have been more exposed to market volatility such as mining and construction.
A recent Grattan Institute report suggests most skills shortages in a market economy are likely to be temporary. It argues our flexible labour market and relatively demand-driven higher education and VET sectors should lead to increased supply of most in-demand skills over time.
A federal report estimates that to make up for skills shortages caused by an ageing population, there needs to be an annual migrant inflow of as much as 400,000. This is much higher than what employers are calling for. This means even with migration intakes, there is still a key role for domestic training to make up the projected skills gaps.
But for this to happen, the momentum in skills system innovation recommended in the Joyce Review — to ensure the VET sector can keep up with rapidly changing industry needs — should be accelerated.
The federal government will need to continue working with states and territories, the training sector and industry on VET reform to ensure it is ready for the technological and demographic changes to work. For example, the fourth industrial revolution is disrupting traditional Australian jobs and workers are growing increasingly worried they will be displaced by technology.
It is unlikely earlier efforts to meet the requirements of these skills (such as by sending employees overseas to train at Industry 4.0 centres of excellence) will be as easy as before. Our research has shown that besides human capital (knowledge that exists in individuals), innovation in Australia is also driven by social capital (knowledge that exists in groups and networks), which is harder to import.
Hence the need for Australia to develop adequate self-reliance in skills that cannot be easily imported.
If the trend of apprenticeship and traineeship commencements continues to rise to where they were about a decade ago, this may help address the skills shortages. This will still be in the medium to long term as it takes time for people to be trained and qualified.
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.
Across Australia, the rate of imprisonment has climbed by about 25% in the past decade, over a time in which the rate of offending has dived 18%.
How can it be that we have less crime but more people in prison?
It’s the conundrum at the heart of a Productivity Commission research paper released this morning entitled Australia’s Prison Dilemma.
This graph presented in the report uses homicides as an indicator of trends in the incidence of violent crime because almost all homicides are reported to police.
Homicides and imprisonment per 100,000 Australians
Number of prisoners per 100 000 population aged 18 years and over, number of homicides per 100 000 persons. Productivity Commission
The apparent fall in imprisonment during the pandemic may not last. It appears to be due to COVID-related decisions to release more unsentenced prisoners on bail, and slowdowns in court processing during lockdowns.
Competing explanations
One obvious – but incorrect – explanation for rising imprisonment at a time of falling crime might be that rising prison numbers are deterring crime. But the best evidence from Australia and overseas shows little if any such connection.
Another might be that “tough on bail” laws are leading to more people being held in prison awaiting trial. Even if some are later found not guilty or are not sentenced to prison, such a change could push up prison numbers while total crime is falling.
Or it might be that “tough on crime” policies are making us send people to prison for crimes that previously would have led to a fine or suspended sentence.
Or we might have increased sentences – imposing more time for the same crime.
Our research finds the correct answer is “all of the above”, with the key driver across Australia being changes that are “tough on crime”.
The biggest drivers of increased prisoner numbers across Australia are the chance that a person who is found guilty is imprisoned and the length of the term.
Both have been increased by new policies that mandate prison sentences for certain crimes, eliminate suspended sentences, and make it harder to get parole.
Toughness is understandable
The changes might be appropriate. Perpetrators of violent crime can destroy lives, and they make up almost 60% of the prison population.
However, a lot of prisoners have committed more minor offences with little risk of harm to others. Over one third of prisoners have sentences of less than six months and 60 per cent have been in prison before.
Many of the repeat prisoners are stuck on a treadmill of prison, minor crime, prison with untreated drug or alcohol problems, untreated mental illness, and few if any employment prospects.
Locking up low level offenders just to have them churn through prison again and again is costly.
Toughness is expensive
On average, we find imprisonment costs taxpayers about A$120,000 per prisoner per year – about $5.2 billion in total.
We find that if Australia’s imprisonment rate had remained steady, rather than climbing for twenty years, the saving in prison costs would approach $13.5 billion.
And we find that if we could focus on alternatives for just the 1% of prisoners who create the least risk to society we would save about $45 million per year.
Australia already uses alternatives such as home detention with electronic monitoring, and diversion programs where offenders receive community-based treatment for their addiction or illness.
The alternatives are cheap
These alternatives save money. Community corrections programs cost one-tenth of prison terms.
They can also lead to better outcomes, for both the offender and for society, by getting prisoners off the prison-crime-prison treadmill.
They do heighten some risks, but a careful choice of the offenders offered the alternatives along with strong supervision using modern technology, and the knowledge that prison awaits those for whom the alternatives don’t work means the risks can be kept small.
Adopting these alternatives requires evidence about what works and buy-in.
The existing evidence base is poor. Our report highlights a range of evidence-based alternatives from here and overseas, but many are never evaluated.
The alternatives need to be fair and just – not only to the offenders but also to the victims. But for low-level offenders caught on a prison-crime-prison treadmill, “tough on crime” means “tough on the taxpayer”. We ought to be able to do better.
Stephen King is a Commissioner with the Australian Productivity Commission.
Fireworks at the Sydney Opera House in 2001: the two symbols on the bridge are the Rainbow Serpent and the Star of Federation.Russell McPhedran/AAP
Prior to colonisation there were approximately 250 different Aboriginal languages spoken by some 500 clans throughout Australia. Each clan possessed numerous Dreaming stories, depicting how the land was traversed and marked by the Ancestral Beings, who created land-forms, people, animals, plants and celestial stars.
Their experiences, and often the consequences of their actions, formed the basis for Aboriginal kinship systems, laws, ways of caring for Country and connecting to land.
These ancestors are not relegated to the past, for their presence is still felt at sacred sites, and they are still responsible for providing the resources that sustain the clan. Some Aboriginal people maintain their connection to these powerful beings by continuing to perform the songs and dances they gave them, and marking their bodies and objects with their sacred designs.
Thus Aboriginal cultures are necessarily rich with symbolism. Towards the end of the 20th century, Aboriginal culture was increasingly being called upon to provide a symbol of nation – representing Australia as a whole – by groups of non-Indigenous Australians who believed it offered a depth and richness of symbolic meaning that more conventional symbols had lost (or perhaps had never had).
The most widely known Ancestral Being is the Rainbow Serpent, or Rainbow Snake, the English names for the figure that appears in the Dreamings of many different Aboriginal language groups across the continent.
A mural of the Rainbow Serpent in the NSW town of Bourke, pictured in 2015. Mick Tsikas/AAP
It features as an important creator figure, guardian of sacred places, bringer of monsoonal rains and storms, bestower of powers upon healers and rainmakers, or a dangerous creature that punishes people who violate laws, or dwells in waterholes threatening to swallow unwary passers-by, to name just a few incarnations.
It is also strongly connected with fertility, both human and ecological. In all
of its guises and geographies the Rainbow Serpent is associated with
water, an essential resource, and the rainbow, whose shimmering light
and curved form reflects the scales and body of the snake. The rainbow
is also an important bridge between the water and the sky, the sky yet
another resting place for the Rainbow Serpent.
The Rainbow Serpent is associated with water and the rainbow. shutterstock
Just one of the many Rainbow Serpents who travelled the land
is Yingarna, whose story is told by Kunwinjku-speaking people from
western Arnhem Land. In one of many stories she was said to be the first Rainbow Serpent, and all of creation burst from her body. The Kunwinjku also possess Dreaming stories about Yingarna’s child, Ngalyod, who is associated with the “potentially destructive power of the storms and the plenty of the wet seasons”.
The immense power that Yingarna and Ngalyod have is both creative and destructive: these Rainbow Serpents are not simply benevolent symbols of unity, but can also be threatening, so their resting places should be avoided. This menacing aspect has been symbolised in Dick Nguleingulei Murrumurru’s painting from the National Museum of Australia’s collection, which depicts Yingarna with
terrible crocodile’s teeth and tail, and a round, emu-like body capable of holding all she has swallowed.
The idea of the Rainbow Serpent as a composite of many other animals and even plants appeared elsewhere; western Arnhem Land rock paintings portray Rainbow Serpents with the head of a kangaroo, body of a snake, tail of a barramundi, and yam-shaped protrusions from the body. The oldest of these rock paintings have been dated to 6000 years, supporting the argument that Rainbow Serpent stories are among the world’s oldest continuous religious traditions.
This makes it especially useful as a national symbol, claiming
for modern Australia both universality and longevity.
For Aboriginal people the Rainbow Serpent is not relegated to the past and time of creation, but remains an awesome source of power that shapes the contemporary world. When Cyclone Tracy devastated the city of Darwin in 1974, local Aboriginal people interpreted it as a “warning to stop neglecting their traditional law and associated rituals”, and succumbing to the temptations of “lawless” city
life.
Attaching meaning
Non-Indigenous Australians have known stories about other Rainbow
Serpents since colonial times. Francis Armstrong, the first government
interpreter of the Swan River Colony (now Perth), recorded an account
of the Waugal (also spelled Wagyl), a Noongar Rainbow Serpent, in 1836,
seven years after the establishment of the settlement. He observed that
there were
certain large round stones, in different parts of the Colony,
which they [Noongar people] believe to be the eggs laid by the waugal … On passing such stones, they are in the habit of making a bed for it, of
the rushes of the blackboy [balga, grass tree or Xanthorrhoea preissii].
This was because, according to Noongar elder Clarrie Isaacs, the Waugal
had created the Swan River and all its associated waterholes, and “has the
power of life and death over Aborigines and demands the respect due to
it”.
However, despite noticing the reverence that the Noongar paid these
stones, the settlers still removed them from their place, indicating that
they accorded them no significance.
This instance suggests the difficulty
of translating the symbolic significance of an object and story across
cultures, especially when there is such disparity in power relations. But
in addition it reveals the way the very land contained symbolic meaning
for Indigenous people, whereas for the increasingly utilitarian colonisers
the land was reduced to little more than an economic resource.
The Rainbow Serpent, then, means different things for Indigenous
and non-Indigenous Australians. Armstrong’s example demonstrates
that in the early period it was considered a mere curiosity and
disregarded, for the colonists were busy transforming and re-purposing
the land.
Conflicting attitudes about the Waugal arose again in the 1980s when the state government wanted to redevelop the site of the Old Swan Brewery, also known as Goonininup, a resting place of the Rainbow Serpent.
Perth’s Old Swan Brewery is a resting place of the Rainbow Serpent. Harry and Rowena Kennedy/flickr, CC BY-NC
Again, a century and a half later, few non-Indigenous Western Australians sympathised with Noongar protests, and received the idea of the Waugal with great scepticism. Isaacs attempted to find equivalences in European systems of belief:
They say because when they drive past the site that because they
cannot see some sort of ridiculous fire breathing dragon-like creature
poking its Loch Ness Monster-like head from the waters that it does
not exist. It is as ridiculous as myself making an assertion that God
is actually a large white man sitting on a throne atop some puffy
clouds.
But the developers ignored inconvenient arguments about religious
symbolism, preferring a more self-interestedly rational interpretation
which, according to cultural studies scholar John Fielder, demonstrates the imperial nature
of Western rationality, where our logic renders all other logics as
essentially illogical, irrational – not to be thought of as logic at all.
The Noongar saw the Waugal as a “spiritual being”, while their opponents
saw the Waugal as “some wildly primitive superstition” and the Noongar
themselves as troublemakers.
‘Domesticated’
However, non-Indigenous Australians have attached a range of
other meanings to the Rainbow Serpent, for the most part far from
hostile. This is partly due to the influence of anthropologists who, in the
early 20th century, became interested in what they called “myth”.
Anthropologist AR Radcliffe-Brown compiled a survey of stories from different Aboriginal language groups across Australia, and concluded
that the Rainbow Serpent occupied “the position of a deity”. Despite
noticing many differences in these stories, Radcliffe-Brown assumed that there was just a single Rainbow Serpent, and that it was akin to a god, “the most important nature-deity”. It was a view that greatly influenced non-Indigenous Australian understandings.
Taken out of the particular contexts of each language group’s
Dreamings, the Rainbow Serpent has been stripped of its numerous
ambivalent symbolisms and iconographic forms, and frequently
reduced to a singular entity – a benevolent mother/creator-figure in
the form of a brightly coloured snake.
Perhaps this is in part due to the snake’s particular morphology; it is easy to imagine its enormous sinuous body carving out the rivers and creeks in the ancient “Dreamtime” (as it used to be described), whereas the meaning of the multiple symbolisms and composite form of Yingarna, Ngalyod and other Rainbow Serpents discussed by Aboriginal clans eludes outsiders.
It could be argued that this new rendering as a benevolent snake is a process of intellectual colonisation, for the settlers have domesticated the Rainbow Serpent, making it comprehensible and palatable to Western ideas. It was a case of non-Indigenous Australia connecting to Aboriginality only on a disembodied and superficial aesthetic level rather than at a level of deep understanding.
In the 1970s, celebrated Australian artist Sidney Nolan painted two large
murals depicting Rainbow Serpents. Snake, a 45-metre long mosaic was said to be Nolan’s “homage to Australia’s Aborigines”.
Snake by Australian artist Sidney Nolan, at the Museum of Old and New Art, in Hobart, Tasmania. Wikimedia Commons
The second work, Little Snake was inspired by the sight of the Central Australian desert blooming after years of drought. Nolan used the Rainbow Serpent to represent “the magical power of water that brings
life from a state of stasis”.
It is this “domesticated” image of the giant brightly coloured snake with which Australians are probably most familiar, and which would prove most suitable for representing the Australian nation as a whole.
A commonplace symbol
Since then, images of Rainbow Serpents have slithered across school walls and community murals in suburbs and towns throughout the nation, at least those with large Indigenous or left-leaning populations.
The education system has taken the Rainbow Serpent to its widest audience. For many young Australians the Rainbow Serpent has been packaged as an Indigenous fairytale. From the 1970s, Australian children have read illustrated books depicting the life and adventures of the Rainbow Serpent.
The Rainbow Serpent features in many children’s books. goodreads
By the 1990s, children could paint their own Rainbow Serpent designs during NAIDOC Week, Harmony Day, or other events celebrating Australia’s multiculturalism. For adult Australians, the Rainbow Serpent has a number of other connotations. Tourists have been able to buy prints, T-shirts, books and jewellery or even underpants decorated with the great snake’s sinuous form, as an exotic souvenir of Australia.
Walkers and leisure-seekers can photograph, sit on or picnic by large public sculptures of the snake in public spaces, where it was intended to acknowledge and commemorate Aboriginal people. And since 1997 New Agers, ravers and ecotourists can come from “across the globe to dance a common dream” at the annual Rainbow Serpent Festival in Lexton, central Victoria, to camp and dance, but also learn from local Dja Dja Wurrung and Wadawurrung peoples and other Indigenous people from the Pacific and north America.
The New Age market has been one of the most avid consumers of the Rainbow
Serpent symbol, reading in it positive messages about the earth and
people’s spiritual relationship with it. Anthropologist Sallie Anderson has noticed that:
The authors of many New Age books on Aboriginal culture and spirituality pick and choose characteristics from ethnographic descriptions of various rainbow serpent myths that seemingly support their comparisons with the Kundalini, electromagnetism, Vishnu, fertility and death, vibration and energy sources and various other themes.
The Rainbow Serpent Festival, 2019. Raimbow Tomcat, Wikimedia Commons
The Rainbow Serpent’s winding form and brilliant colours have become a commonplace symbol within Australian pedagogical, cultural, economic and built environments.
This widespread familiarity with the image, and the apparent tangibility of the concept in its domesticated and aestheticised form, has led to it being understood as a preeminent symbol of Aboriginal identity, especially apparent in public
events celebrating the centenary of Federation.
The turn of the century saw a groundswell of interest in Aboriginal
people and their place in Australia. The first year of the new millennium
was supposed to mark the end of the ten-year journey towards
reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia.
In June 2000, hundreds of thousands had participated in the Walk for Reconciliation
and in September Australians cheered for Indigenous athlete Cathy
Freeman at the Sydney Olympics. These milestones meant that a feelgood emblem of the newly reconciled nation was needed for 2001, when Australia’s national identity was celebrated in the centenary of Federation. The Rainbow Serpent was called into service.
On 1 January 2001 the Journey of a Nation – Centenary of Federation parade through the streets of Sydney included a float shaped like a huge coiled snake, with dancers wearing costumes decorated with Rainbow Serpents designed by Bundjalung artist Bronwyn Bancroft.
Rainbow Serpent mural created by teacher Jenny Noble and the children of Rosebank School, New South Wales, 2000. Rosebank Public School
Then, at Canberra’s 2001 Floriade festival, the Rainbow Serpent again
appeared, this time in the “Century in bloom” display. On this
“floral walk through the decades”, viewers passed through plantings of
humble vegetables representing the hardships of the Depression and
beds of flowers planted in the shapes of the German Iron Cross and
the Japanese Rising Sun, indicating World War II.
The 1970s were represented by a display of tulips and native flora planted in the design of the Rainbow Serpent, ostensibly symbolising “Australia’s Aboriginal
heritage”. These examples suggest that the Rainbow Serpent was used
by the event organisers as a metonym for Aboriginality, so audiences
could embrace Aboriginal peoples’ place within Australia’s national
identity.
However, the Rainbow Serpent was also used to symbolise Australia as a whole, and not just its Indigenous peoples. In Sydney’s annual New Year’s Eve fireworks display, the grand finale is always the lighting of the mystery symbol that adorns the eastern side of the city’s beloved Harbour Bridge. In 2001 that symbol was the Rainbow Serpent, depicted alongside the Federation Star. The maxim of that
year’s show was “100 years as a nation, thousands of years as a land”.
Thus the Rainbow Serpent was used to give modern Australia an
ancient past, and, in conjunction with the star, was appropriated to
represent Australia.
The use of the Rainbow Serpent was no doubt well intentioned, but this plainly benevolent and amorphous meaning was far removed from that connoted by the original, highly ambivalent Rainbow Serpents of the Dreaming.
A Rainbow Serpent mural in Sydney. Newtown graffiti/Flickr, CC BY-SA
Aboriginal people have also adopted new symbolic meanings for the Rainbow Serpents. Due to the history of colonisation and the emergence of Indigenous political organisations and media, Aboriginal societies have become more mixed and cosmopolitan, and a pan-Aboriginal identity has emerged.
Instead of identifying solely with one’s clan or language group, Aboriginal people have formed a community that encompasses the entire continent. As such, they have needed to develop their own symbols to represent this new pan-identity, and the ubiquity of the Rainbow Serpent in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous societies makes it well placed to act as “a symbol of unity … amongst urban Aborigines”.
The image of the Rainbow Serpent has been used in a number of ways. The Rainbow Serpent has provided a logo for Aboriginal corporations such as the Northern Land Council. Victoria’s Rumbalara Oral Health Centre depicted the Rainbow Serpent as dental floss, “twisting through
an orange tangled web, which represents plaque on teeth”.
For the Aboriginal community of Moree, it was a symbol of unity when they constructed a 17-metre long Rainbow Serpent for the Black + White + Pink Reconciliation Float, entered in the 1999 Mardi Gras parade.
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (left) is presented with a bark painting of the Rainbow Serpent by Gagadju Aboriginal elder Alfred Nayinggul (centre) and Michael Bangalang (2nd right) during a visit to Kakadu National Park in 2010. David Hancock/AAP
Inscribing new meaning
The Rainbow Serpent has been an important symbol in Aboriginal societies for thousands of years, and by the start of the 21st century it was also a recognised symbol for the wider Australian society. In making that transition it lost its particular “traditional” meanings of creation, water and fertility, and its ambiguous combination of creative and destructive forces.
Although it has not featured much on the national stage as a symbol since the Federation centenary in 2001, it remains a potent symbol of local Aboriginal community spirit and reconciliation. For example, Bundjalung artist John Robinson’s
Rainbow Serpent artwork was installed at a shopping centre in East Maitland, New South Wales to celebrate 2018’s Reconciliation Week.
In 2019 a Rainbow Serpent water feature designed by a collective of Kamilaroi women artists was commissioned for the Gunnedah Civic Centre, and the Perth Royal Show showcased a public performance by Noongar elder Walter McGuire, featuring a “35m long Wagyl inflatable creation … illuminated by the colours of the rainbow”.
It is evident then, that the supple skin of the Rainbow Serpent continues to provide an ideal canvas for inscribing new meanings and symbolisms for both
Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
This is an edited extract from Symbols of Australia: Imagining a Nation, edited by Melissa Harper and Richard White, published by NewSouth Books. Footnotes for this article can be found in the book.
Shino Konishi receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
In the press gallery at Parliament House, there’s a bell that years ago was rung regularly to alert journalists to press conferences and statements. Email has made it an anachronism.
But shortly before 8am on Thursday Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce appeared in the gallery, looking rather agitated, and personally rang the bell.
Joyce was there to lay an ownership claim to the exclusion of a methane reduction pledge from the 2050 net-zero climate plan Scott Morrison announced on Tuesday. “One of the key reasons that the Nationals went in to bat has become so clearly evident today,” Joyce declared.
This followed a report in The Australian, briefed by the office of Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor, rejecting the United States push for a 30% reduction by 2030 of methane emissions (produced by cows burping, gas extraction, and the like).
Taylor apparently had been onto the methane exclusion issue for some time. Later on Thursday Morrison said the government never had any intention of agreeing to the reduction. He also rejected Joyce’s confusing claim there was an agriculture carve out from the climate plan.
Who gets political “branding rights” on the treatment of methane was just the latest pinch point in the fallout from Tuesday’s announcement.
Much doubt has been created by the government’s failure to release the plan’s modelling, which Morrison says will be out in a few weeks – that is, after COP26 is well and truly behind him.
An industry department official told a Senate estimates committee the material was being put into digestible shape.
“As the plan was only finalised on Tuesday, we need to make sure we have written that technical work up. The actual modelling, of course, had been finalised at that point.
“But the write-up of that – we just need to take a little bit of extra time to make sure that it’s written clearly and able to be presented well to the Australian public,” Jo Evans, a deputy secretary in the department, said.
Meanwhile most of the trade-offs the Nationals have received for their reluctant support continue to remain a mystery.
Joyce, who became acting prime minister after Morrison departed on Thursday night for the G20 in Rome followed by COP26 in Glasgow, is likely to announce certain measures while he’s in the spotlight.
But others are to be in the budget update at the end of the year, presented as election commitments, or in next year’s budget if that occurs before the election.
Some of these unknown measures still have to be brought forward as cabinet submissions and go through the formal bureaucratic hoops, including being costed.
That shows how unsatisfactory the process has been – the government had months to deal with net-zero, settling things with the minor Coalition partner and finalising the trade-offs.
More importantly from the Nationals’ standpoint, they’re left exposed as they return to their electorates now parliament has risen for a three-week break. When they meet their constituents, they are not able to produce the suite of benefits they obtained in return for their policy sign-up.
For Morrison the 2050 policy is an attempted barnacle-removing process, for both the Glasgow conference and the election. The Nationals, in contrast, see it adding to their barnacles.
The rejection of the requested methane cuts is another indication of the general weakness of the Australian plan. For all the struggle to land it, the plan is a bare minimum and will be seen as such in Glasgow.
Domestically, given the flaws and inadequacies, the plan is not likely to win votes for the government; rather, it is designed to stem the loss of them to Labor and independents in the “leafy” southern seats.
We’ve yet to see Labor’s alternative but one would think independent candidates will still have plenty of scope to stake out ground on the climate issue.
Earlier this week Morrison made some comments that set off speculation he planned a May poll, as opposed to a March-April one.
A May election would give the time for another budget, with the opportunities that brought.
Whether the election is in May or March, Morrison is already in campaign mode.
In this week’s Newspoll, the government is on the back foot, trailing 46-54% on the two-party vote. Regardless, both sides regard the battle as open.
Despite the election being so near, Labor hasn’t broken out of a trot. Albanese’s strategy is to leave the attention on the government and, more generally, to keep Labor a small target in policy terms. On the logic of its wider approach Labor could be expected to be cautious in the policy it issues on climate change, although it is still debating its position, expected to be released before Christmas.
Albanese has been heavily influenced, negatively, by his predecessor Bill Shorten’s approach before the 2019 election, when Labor put forward an extensive and radical bag of policies.
The big target approach was seen to have scared off voters. Whether the small target will encourage people to vote Labor is hard to judge. The danger for the opposition is that, in the absence of a leader who is a drawcard, many people might be inclined to stick with the status quo.
Without the prospect of much substantive and highly differentiated policy being contested, the seat-by-seat campaigning will be especially significant at this election. Voters think local to a greater extent than they used to.
On Thursday the government introduced controversial legislation to require voters to produce ID at the polling booth. Labor and some in the welfare sector warn this will discourage the disadvantaged, including Indigenous people, from voting. The government says there would be plenty of protections – a range of identification could be used, including a Medicare card, and a person without identification would be allowed to cast a vote, with his or her identity checked later.
Given the widespread demand for identification for all sorts of things in our community, the requirement for ID when voting is not unreasonable. But it seems a solution in search of a problem, because voter fraud hasn’t been a feature of federal elections.
And it reflects distorted priorities that this legislation has been introduced before we see the bill for the long-awaited national integrity commission.
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.
In a few days world leaders will descend on Glasgow for the United Nations climate change talks. Much depends on it. We know climate change is already happening, and nowhere is the damage more stark than in Australia’s southwest.
The southwest of Western Australia has been identified as a global drying hotspot. Since 1970, winter rainfall has declined up to 20%, river flows have plummeted and heatwaves spanning water and land have intensified.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns this will continue as emissions rise and the climate warms.
Discussion of Australian ecosystems vulnerable to climate change often focuses on the Great Barrier Reef, as well as our rainforests and alpine regions. But for southwest Western Australia, climate change is also an existential threat.
The region’s wildlife and plants are so distinctive and important, it was listed as Australia’s first global biodiversity hotspot. Species include thousands of endemic plant species and animals such as the quokka, numbat and honey possum. Most freshwater species and around 80% of marine species, including 24 shark species, live nowhere else on Earth.
They evolved in isolation over millions of years, walled off from the rest of Australia by desert. But climate heating means this remarkable biological richness is now imperilled – a threat that will only increase unless the world takes action.
Hooker’s Banksia is an iconic West Australian species. Dr Joe Fontaine, Author provided
Hotter and drier
Southwest WA runs roughly from Kalbarri to Esperance, and is known for its Mediterranean climate with very hot and dry summers and most rainfall in winter.
But every decade since the 1970s, the region’s summertime maximum temperatures have risen 0.1-0.3℃, and winter rainfall has fallen 10-20 millimetres.
Decadal trends in winter precipitation. Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
And remarkably, a 1℃ increase in the average global temperature over the last century has already more than doubled the days over 40℃ in Perth.
Annual number of days over 40° at Perth Airport during historic times (1910-1939) and current times (1989-2018). Author provided
This trend is set to continue. Almost all climate models project a further drop in winter rainfall of up to 30% across most of the southwest by 2100, under a high emissions scenario.
The southwest already has very hot days in summer, thanks to heat brought from the desert’s easterly winds. As climate change worsens, these winds are projected to get more intense, bringing still more heat.
Drying threatens wildlife, wine and wheat
Annual rainfall in the southwest has fallen by a fifth since 1970. That might not sound dangerous, but the drop means river flows have already fallen by an alarming 70%.
It means many rivers and lakes now dry out through summer and autumn, causing major problems for freshwater biodiversity. For example, the number of invertebrate species in 17 lakes in WA’s wheatbelt fell from over 300 to just over 100 between 1998 and 2011.
The loss of water has even killed off common river invertebrates, such as the endemic Western Darner dragonfly, with most now found only in the last few streams that flow year round. The drying also makes it very hard for animals and birds to find water.
Most native freshwater fish in the southwest are now officially considered “threatened”. As river flow falls to a trickle, fish can no longer migrate to spawn, and it’s only a short march from there to extinction. To protect remaining freshwater species we must develop perennial water refuges in places such as farm dams.
Smooth Marron moving as a group in a reservoir. Dr Stephen Beatty, Author provided
The story on land is also alarming, with intensifying heatwaves and chronic drought. This was particularly dire in 2010/2011, when all ecosystems in the southwest suffered from a deadly drought and heatwave combination.
What does that look like on the ground? Think beetle swarms taking advantage of forest dieback, a sudden die off of endangered Carnaby’s Black Cockatoos, and the deaths of one in five shrubs and trees. Long term, the flowering rates of banksias have declined by 50%, which threatens their survival as well as the honey industry.
For agriculture, the picture is mixed. Aided by innovation and better varieties, wheat yields in the southwest have actually increased since the 1970s, despite the drop in rainfall.
But how long can farmers stay ahead of the drying? If global emissions aren’t drastically reduced, droughts in the region will keep getting worse.
Increased heating and drying will also likely threaten Margaret River’s famed wine region, although the state’s northern wine regions will be the first at risk.
Hotter seas, destructive marine heatwaves
The seas around the southwest are another climate change hotspot, warming faster than 90% of the global ocean since the middle of last century. Ocean temperatures off Perth have risen by an average of 0.1-0.3℃ per decade, and are now almost 1℃ warmer than 40 years ago.
The waters off the southwest are part of the Great Southern Reef, a temperate marine biodiversity hotspot. Many species of seaweeds, seagrasses, invertebrates, reef fish, seabirds and mammals live nowhere else on the planet.
As the waters warm, species move south. Warm-water species move in and cool-water species flee to escape the heat. Once cool-water species reach the southern coast, there’s nowhere colder to go. They can’t survive in the deep sea, and are at risk of going extinct.
Temperature anomalies over land and ocean in March 2011. Scientific Reports, Author provided
Marine heatwaves are now striking alongside this long-term warming trend. In 2011, a combination of weak winds, water absorbing the local heat from the air, and an unusually strong flow of the warm Leeuwin Current led to the infamous marine heatwave known as Ningaloo Nino.
Over eight weeks, ocean temperatures soared by more than 5℃ above the long-term maximum. Coral bleached in the state’s north, fish died en masse, 34% of seagrass died in Shark Bay, and kelp forests along 100km of WA’s coast were wiped out.
Following the heatwave came sudden distribution changes for species like sharks, turtles and many reef fish. Little penguins starved to death because their usual food sources were no longer there.
Recreational and commercial fisheries were forced to close to protect ailing stocks. Some of these fisheries have not recovered 10 years later, while others are only now reopening.
This is just the start. Projections suggest the southwest could be in a permanent state of marine heatwave within 20-40 years, compared to the second half of the 20th century.
Reef in Kalbarri before (left) and after (right) the 2011 Ningaloo Nino. Dense kelp covered reefs before the heatwave. Afterwards, kelp died and the reefs were covered by sediment and turf algae. Professor Thomas Wernberg, Author provided
Nature in the southwest cannot adapt to these rapid changes. The only way to stem the damage to nature and humans is to stop greenhouse gas emissions.
Australia must take responsibility for its emissions and show ambition beyond the weak promise of net-zero by 2050, and commit to real 2030 targets consistent with the Paris climate treaty.
Otherwise, we will witness the collapse of one of Australia’s biological treasures in real time.
Jatin Kala receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment New South Wales
Belinda Robson receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Lotterywest.
Joe Fontaine receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Stephen Beatty receives funding from a broad range of government and non-government agencies for research to better understand the threats to freshwater biodiversity. He is also affiliated with the Australian Society for Fish Biology.
Thomas Wernberg receives funding from The Australian Research Council, The Schmidt Marine Technology Partners and the Institute of Marine Research.
Corporate Australia has of late become a strong voice for more action on climate change. Earlier this month the Business Council of Australia, which represents the nation’s 100 biggest companies, declared its support for the federal government committing to halving its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and net zero emissions by 2050.
“Business is leading,” says the report arguing this case. “Domestic and international companies are rapidly adopting net zero and ambitious internal decarbonisation targets.”
That report goes on to say that among the top 200 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange – the ASX 200 – net-zero commitments in the past year have “more than tripled” to about 50 companies and that this represents about half the ASX200’s total market capitalisation.
Our research on Autralia’s 150 biggest public companies supports the Business Council’s claim that commitments are growing. But there’s still a long way to go in showing evidence of tangible progress.
Based on disclosures made in companies’ 2020 annual reports, our research shows 17 reported having achieved carbon neutrality while 46 have either declared commitment or an intention to achieve net zero emissions.
Of those 46 companies aiming for net zero, 38 declared commitment to achieving net zero by 2050 and 15 of them disclosed their intention to become carbon neutral by 2030. Another eight companies did not set a time frame (which arguably makes the commitment meaningless).
That means just 55 have committed to zero emissions by 2050.
These findings on corporate climate action are part of a broader research project by RMIT University and CPA Australia into action by Australian companies on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
This framework of 17 goals was adopted by the United Nations in 2015 to provide a uniform approach to defining and measuring progress on things such as eliminating poverty and discrimination, improving health and well-being, and achieving economic progress without harming the environment.
Each of the goals has a set of targets to measure achievement by 2030 (there are a total of 196 targets). On the goal of climate action (SDG13), one of the five targets is to integrate climate change measures into policies, strategies and planning.
The SDGs were originally intended for governments. But business committing and acting on them is fundamental for the transformational investments and new markets needed to promote more sustainable practices.
We have been monitoring the extent of corporate Australia’s commitment to the SDGs since 2018, based on disclosures in their annual reports. In particular we have been interested in evidence these commitments are meaningful, through companies having mechanisms to measure and report on what they have achieved.
Commitments growing, but KPIs lacking
The good news is that recognition and disclosure is growing. In 2018 just 56 of the ASX 150 (37%) mentioned the Sustainable Development Goals in their annual reports. In 2019 it was 72 (48%). In 2020 it was 94 (62%).
Statements on commitments, however, are not meaningful unless supported by evidence of actual progress. This requires having a plan to turn a commitment into an achievement, setting key performance indicators (KPIs), measuring success (or failure) and reporting on results.
On these things far less progress has been made. The number of companies aligning their KPIs with SDG targets has increased from two (1.3%) in 2018, to five (3.3%) in 2019, and 14 (9.3%) in 2020.
Including colourful SDG graphics in annual reports and having senior executives making public commitments is one thing. But without reporting on the actual measures to turn a commitment into actual progress, companies can easily be accused of lack of transparency or even green washing.
For corporate Australia to really claim the mantle of leading on climate action, our major companies must also lead in setting clear goals and timelines, defining measurements by which they will rate their success, and being fully transparent in reporting their progress.
Renzo Mori Junior has previously received funding for research projects from governments, foundations, non-for-profit organisations and companies.
Hui Situ works for both RMIT University and Cardiff University during the time of conducting this project – SDG disclosure in Australia.
Nava Subramaniam has previously received funding for research projects from governments, foundations, non-for-profit organisations and companies.”
Sophia Ji has previously received funding for research projects from governments, foundations, non-for-profit organisations and companies.
Suraiyah Akbar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne
AAP/Mick Tsikas
A federal Resolve poll for Nine newspapers, conducted October 21-24 from a sample of 1,603, gave the Coalition 37% of the primary vote (down two since September), Labor 34% (up three), the Greens 11% (up one), One Nation 3% (down one) and independents 9% (steady).
As usual with Resolve, no two-party estimate was given, and independents are likely to be greatly overstated owing to people who are unsure who to vote for parking their votes. I have previously criticised Resolve for these issues.
Analyst Kevin Bonham estimated a two-party preferred of 52-48 to Labor, a three point gain for Labor since September.
In my Newspoll article on Monday, I was sceptical of Newspoll having Labor ahead by 54-46, given that the end of lockdowns in Sydney and Melbourne was expected to help the Coalition. But since then, there’s also been poll movement to Labor in Resolve, Essential and Morgan.
The Resolve poll report made much of the Nationals’ vote falling two points to 3%, while the Liberal vote was up one to 35%, with rounding explaining the Coalition’s two-point slide. The drop for the Nationals has been attributed to their negotiations with the Liberals over Australia having a zero carbon emissions target by 2050.
I am dubious that average voters have been following the negotiations at all closely. However, a big negative for the Coalition is the prominent role played by deputy PM and Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce.
In a July Resolve poll, Joyce had dismal ratings of 45% negative, 16% positive (net -29). It is likely that the more Joyce is in the limelight, the worse the Coalition will perform.
It seems the more visible Barnaby Joyce is, the weaker the Coalitions polling is. AAP/Lukas Coch
Other Resolve questions
47% (down two since September) rated Scott Morrison’s performance good in recent weeks, and 43% (down two) rated it poor, for an unchanged net approval of +4. Anthony Albanese’s net approval was up six points to -10. Morrison led as preferred PM by 44-26 (45-26 in September).
8% said they were prepared to accept a significant personal cost to reduce Australia’s emissions and 43% a small personal cost. 8% said they wouldn’t pay but others should, and 27% wouldn’t pay and didn’t think others should either.
7% of respondents thought the general public was doing more than its fair share at combatting climate change, 38% its fair share and 34% less. But when asked about how respondents rated their personal contribution, 13% said more, 57% fair share and just 15% less.
By 62-11, voters supported net zero emissions by 2050, and by 57-13 they supported a more ambitious target by 2030. Support for both measures increased two to five points from September.
Despite the slump for the Coalition in voting intentions, the Liberals and Morrison extended their lead over Labor and Albanese to 45-23 on economic management (42-24 in September). The Liberals also led on COVID by 40-22 (37-24 previously).
Essential and Morgan voting intentions
Essential occasionally releases voting intentions for all polls it conducted during the last few months. The Guardian reported Thursday that Labor led by 53-47 in this week’s Essential, its best position for this reporting period. The Coalition’s best was a 50-50 tie in September. Clive Palmer’s UAP was at 5% in the latest poll, ahead of One Nation’s 3%.
A Morgan poll, conducted October 16-17 and 23-24 from a sample of nearly 2,800, gave Labor a 54-46 lead, a one point gain for Labor since early October. Primary votes were 36.5% Coalition (down one), 35% Labor (down one), 13.5% Greens (up two), 3.5% One Nation (up 0.5) and 11.5% for all Others (down 0.5).
Essential: premiers’ ratings
This week’s Essential poll used an expanded sample size of about 440 in both SA and WA to enable ratings for those state premiers to be based on a good sample.
WA Labor Premier Mark McGowan came top with an 82-13 approval rating. He was followed by Queensland Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk (66-27), SA Liberal Premier Steven Marshall (61-27), new NSW Liberal Premier Dominic Perrottet (47-28) and Victorian Labor Premier Daniel Andrews (52-40).
WA Premier Mark McGowan continues to enjoy very high approval ratings. AAP/Richard Wainwright
By 46-31, voters gave the federal government a good rating on handling COVID (45-30 last fortnight). The NSW government’s good rating was up two to 57%, but the Victorian government was down three to 43% and for some reason the Queensland government tumbled nine points to 59% good.
37% thought immigration levels over the past ten years have been too high, 16% too low and 36% about right (56-12 for too high in January 2019). 35% thought setting a more ambitious emissions reduction target would have the most positive long-term effect on jobs, 29% a net zero target by 2050 and 14% not setting any targets.
Redbridge conducted polls of the federal NSW seats of Banks, Lindsay and Macquarie from an overall sample of 1,201 during the week of September 13. Across the three seats, primary votes were 32% Liberal, 31% Labor, 19% UAP and 9% Greens.
The pollster gave the two party as 53-47 to Labor, but the Liberals would be doing better than that on these primary votes. The Poll Bludger said UAP had just 3.1% across these three seats in 2019, with the Liberals winning by a combined 53.7-46.3.
Core inflation highest since December 2015
In the ABS September quarter inflation report released Wednesday, headline inflation was 0.8% for the September quarter and 3.0% for the year to September. Owing to a rebound in the September quarter 2020 following COVID-caused deflation in the June quarter 2020, headline annual inflation was down 0.2% as last year’s September quarter disappeared from the calculation.
The ABS also reports trimmed mean and weighted median inflation, and both these measures of core inflation increased by 0.7% in the September quarter, and increased to 2.1% in the year to September from 1.6% in the year to June. Both measures are at their highest since December 2015.
Labor still well ahead in Victoria
A Victorian state Resolve poll for The Age gave Labor 38% of the primary vote (down two since August), the Coalition 34% (down one), the Greens 10% (steady) and independents 11% (up two). The Poll Bludger estimated 55-45 to Labor, a one point gain for the Coalition.
Andrews led Liberal leader Matthew Guy as preferred premier by 45-32, but this is a large improvement for Guy on the previous Liberal leader Michael O’Brien, who trailed Andrews by 24-50. This poll was conducted with the federal Resolve polls in the past two months from a sample of 1,105.
At least 57% said they always complied with four health measures, but it is likely non-compliance is higher as people don’t want to admit this to a pollster. By 63-20, voters supported the Victorian government’s vaccine mandates.
There are likely to be two more in Strathfield and Holsworthy. In Strathfield (Labor by 5.0%), former Labor leader Jodi McKay is resigning. In Holsworthy (Liberal by 3.3%), incumbent Liberal Melanie Gibbons will contest Liberal preselection for the federal seat of Hughes, held by Liberal turned UAP Craig Kelly.
No byelection dates have been set yet, and the Bega and Holsworthy byelections would not be held until much later as current incumbents are contesting federal preselections. Bega Liberal Andrew Constance is contesting federal Labor-held Gilmore.
Adrian Beaumont 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 climate crisis threatens all life on our planet. Even the people who a few years ago were shouting from the rooftops that it was all a hoax have suddenly acknowledged the need for urgent action.
But Australia’s response remains the worst in the developed world. As a result, lawyers have commenced multiple legal proceedings as a way of bringing change.
With their crops flooded with salt water and their sacred sites disappearing under the waves, a group of Torres Strait Islanders this week brought a class action lawsuit against the Australian government.
Two First Nations Elders, Pabai Pabai and Paul Kabai, will argue in court that the Australian government has a duty to cut greenhouse gas emissions to ensure their homeland and their people are not harmed by the climate crisis.
The class action follows another case brought against Environment Minister Sussan Ley by a group of eight children, led by Anjali Sharma. The group attempted to stop the minister from approving a proposed coal mine extension in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales.
has a duty to take reasonable care to avoid causing personal injury to the children when deciding […] to approve or not approve the coal mine expansion.
This groundbreaking decision set an important precedent and has clearly emboldened the Torres Strait Islands elders to demand the Australian government take urgent action to protect their homes, culture and food sources.
The basis for the Torres Strait islanders’ claims
Mr Pabai and Mr Kabai’s class action is based on the famous Urgenda case in the Netherlands, in which more than 800 plaintiffs argued the Dutch government had an obligation to protect its citizens from climate change. That case was successful and forced the Dutch government to take action to reduce the Netherlands’ greenhouse emissions.
However, there is an important difference between the suits. While the Dutch courts concluded the Dutch government was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, we have no such rights protections in Australia. Environmental groups here are forced to use the common law instead.
To complicate matters, the Morrison government is trying to overturn the Sharma decision by appealing it to the full Federal Court and possibly the High Court, a process that is expected to take a further two years.
For lawyers, it is fascinating to see, in real time, how the law of negligence – which developed from a 1932 Scottish case of a woman who ingested a snail in a bottle of ginger beer – is being stretched to protect Pacific islands from the risk of future inundation.
Unfortunately, these claims are not always successful.
A sea wall on Boigu Island in the Torres Strait. Talei Elu
A legal hurdle in a similar NZ case
Last week, the New Zealand Court of Appeal ruled in another case that common law tort claims are not an appropriate vehicle for addressing the problems of climate change.
Like Mr Pabai and Mr Kabai in the Torres Strait Islands, a Maori leader, Michael Smith, argued that various sites of customary, cultural, historical, nutritional and spiritual significance to his people are close to the coast on low-lying land or in the sea. As such, they were all at risk of harm from the greenhouse emissions of the dairy giant Fonterra and six other companies.
In a legal slapdown, three judges found Mr Smith’s three “tort-based” arguments departed from the fundamental principles of the common law and they refused to extend the existing law to cover his claims.
A tort is a legal wrong committed by one person or entity against another, which is usually remedied through an award of damages. Since 2016, the potential remedies have been expanded from damages to injunctions as a result of the work the National Justice Project did in an asylum seeker case.
Rejecting the idea that the law of negligence was appropriate in the Fonterra case, the New Zealand court added it was an inherently inefficient and ad hoc way of addressing climate change, likely to cause arbitrary outcomes and protracted litigation.
If it is applied by the Australian Federal Court, the Fonterra case presents a serious legal impediment to the Torres Strait Islands class action.
Despite the chance of failure, climate change litigation based on tort law plays an important role in drawing the risks of inaction by our federal government to the attention of all Australians.
An aerial view of Boigu island. Talei Elu
Crucially, these cases highlight the moral imperative for our leaders to do something, as summed up by Justice Mordecai Bromberg in the Sharma case:
It is difficult to characterise in a single phrase the devastation that the plausible evidence presented in this proceeding forecasts for the children. […] Lives will be cut short. Trauma will be far more common and good health harder to hold and maintain.
None of this will be the fault of nature itself. It will largely be inflicted by the inaction of this generation of adults, in what might fairly be described as the greatest intergenerational injustice ever inflicted by one generation of humans upon the next.
Through my work at the National Justice Project, I have worked for years on strategic court cases to establish a duty of care for the federal government to provide medical treatment for asylum seekers on Nauru and to eliminate systemic prejudice.
I can tell you the legal process is hard and drawn out, but the results are worth fighting for. The road ahead through the legal system may be tough but it can be a catalyst for change.
Mr Pabai and Mr Kabai should be congratulated for their brave stance.
George Newhouse 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 New Zealand government revealed changes to MIQ (managed isolation and quarantine) today, with stays halving from 14 to seven days, followed by isolation at home for three days.
Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins and Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield gave today’s update on the government’s response to the Delta outbreak.
Under the new MIQ regime, which will begin from November 14, arrivals must be fully vaccinated and will be tested on days 0, 3 and 6 and undertake a rapid antigen test before leaving MIQ, before a day-9 test at home.
He said this would free up about 1500 rooms a month in MIQ. Some of this would be taken up by community cases but some would go into the booking system for travellers from overseas.
Pacific border travel The second step will be to reopen the border to low-risk travellers from Samoa, Tonga and Tokelau without isolation.
This one-way quarantine-free travel will begin from November 8.
The third step will allow more people to isolate at home, available to increasing numbers of travellers in the first quarter of 2022.
He said changes at the border will be linked to the traffic light system.
“The faster New Zealanders get fully vaccinated so that we can move to the traffic light system, the faster we’ll be able to open the border.”
He said New Zealanders will also understand that the government does not want to accelerate the spread of covid-19 around the country by lowering restrictions before we reach very high levels of vaccination.
Kiwis first priority Hipkins said the first priority for allowing people into New Zealand was Kiwis and people who already had visas, followed by other groups like international students.
“Tourists are more of a challenge … what you will see though in the first part of next year will be quite different from the way we’ve been managing it over the past 18 months.”
Hipkins said stopping covid-19 at the border had been a priority and New Zealand’s ability to do so had led to levels of freedom over the past year and a half which were the envy of many other nations.
“As a country we owe a massive vote of thanks to our front-line MIQ and border workers,” he said.
Hipkins said in the meantime, the message to all New Zealanders was very simple – get vaccinated.
Frederic Eggleston presented his credentials to Chinese President Lin Sen (林森) at an official reception in Chungking on 28 October 1941Sydney Morning Herald, November 12 1941
Gough Whitlam’s visit to China in 1971 is an iconic moment in the history of Australia-China relations. As prime minister, he officially recognised the People’s Republic of China the following year, heralding a new era of engagement with China.
But Whitlam’s visit overshadows an earlier and equally significant moment in Australia’s relationship with China.
On October 28 1941, Australia opened its first diplomatic mission in China, a legation in the wartime capital of Chungking (Chongqing) in central Szechwan (Sichuan) province.
Until the 1930s, Australian foreign policy was still considered part of British Empire policy. But with the urgency of the second world war, Australia began to exercise a foreign policy distinct from Britain. Australia’s first overseas diplomatic missions were established in Washington and Tokyo in 1940. The Chungking Legation was the third.
The Australian Legation in Chungking at No. 71 I Au Tze, c.1942. Chongqing Foreign Affairs Office Archive
Australia announced its decision to appoint an Australian Minister to China in May 1941. Sir Frederic Eggleston was chosen for the role and his counterpart, the first Chinese Minister to Australia, Dr Hsu Mo (徐謨), arrived in Canberra in September 1941.
The notorious White Australia Policy was still in place, but by the end of the year Australia and China would be allies in defending the Pacific against the Japanese.
Wartime Chungking
Stairs leading up from the ferry landing on the Yangtze River at Chungking, 1941. American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, fr205777
China had been at war with Japan since July 1937. With much of the east coast of the country under Japanese occupation, Chungking served as the wartime capital.
Perched on the steep banks of the Yangtze River, the city was swollen with refugees, suffered heavy bombing, and faced shortages of food, housing and supplies.
An early challenge for the Legation was finding suitable premises and equipping it. Eventually, a building at No. 71 I Au Tze (遺愛祠) in the Li Family Estate (李家花園) became home to the offices and residence for the staff.
Scenes in Chungking – China’s much-bombed capital, 1942. Chronicle (Adelaide), May 14 1942
Legation staff were advised to bring all the clothes they would need, medicines including quinine (to treat malaria) and aspirin, and daily items like soap, toothpaste and boot polish. Other stores had to be ordered from India.
Transport to Chungking was difficult. People and supplies first came in by road over the Himalayas via the Burma Road. Later they came by plane, landing on a tiny island in the middle of the Yangtze River.
Alison Waller, wife of First Secretary Keith Waller, recalled, “you felt you had ten tin trunks sitting on your chest, and you couldn’t breathe because you had to fly right over the Himalayas”.
The Legation staff
Sir Frederic Eggleston (1875–1954), known as “The Egg” to staff, was a warm and thoughtful leader, and a popular and respected member of the foreign diplomatic community. A former lawyer and experienced public servant, Eggleston proved himself an able diplomat, serving in Chungking until 1944, when he was appointed Ambassador to the United States.
Frederic Eggleston outside the Waichiao Pinkuan (外交賓館), Foreign Ministry reception house, in Chungking. Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Diplomatic and office staff sent from Australia worked alongside locally employed staff, including a Chinese teacher, translators and clerks. Australian wives, such as Alison Waller, were also employed by the Legation.
Their work supported the Australian Minister to China, whose role, in Eggleston’s words, was “to interpret the Chinese viewpoint to Australia and the Australian viewpoint to China”.
Charles Lee at the Australian Legation, Nanking, 1947. Private collection of F.B. Hall
Among the staff was the first Chinese-Australian diplomat, Charles Lee (1913–1996), who was born in the Northern Territory to Cantonese parents.
After graduating from the University of Queensland, Lee joined the public service in 1936. He was chosen to become Third Secretary in Chungking because of his general aptitude and his abilities with Cantonese and Japanese.
During his time in Chungking, Lee’s proficient language skills (now including Mandarin), local connections and general knowledge rendered him invaluable. He went on to represent Australia in Indonesia, Singapore and Spain, among other countries, and retired in 1973.
Brisbane’s Courier-Mail reporting on Maris King’s appointment, 1943. Courier-Mail (Brisbane), July 22 1943
Another notable staffer was Maris King (1922–1997). Only 20 when she left Australia, alone, for Chungking in 1943, King worked as Eggleston’s secretary.
She stayed in Chungking for 15 months and later returned to work in Shanghai and Hong Kong. King went on to have a lifetime career as a diplomat, becoming only the second woman to head an Australian diplomatic mission before her retirement in 1984.
As she recalled of her time in China: “I had a ball! I’m surprised my mother let me go, looking back, because life overseas was so hazardous really in those days, with the war and all that, and I was very young – and female!”
After the war
Japan surrendered to China on September 9 1945. With the war over, the Nationalist government moved back to Nanking (Nanjing). The Australian Legation followed, relocating in April 1946 under the charge of a new Minister to China, Professor Douglas Berry Copland (1894–1971).
The Nanking Legation was upgraded to an embassy in 1948, and closed in 1949 after the Communists gained power. Charles Lee was the only member of the Chungking Legation to stay until the Nanking Embassy closed.
It would be another 24 years until, with Whitlam’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China, a new Australian Embassy opened in Beijing in 1973. But 80 years on, it is worth remembering the changing and complex relationship Australia has had with China.
Kate Bagnall was commissioned by the Chinese Museum in Melbourne to undertake research on the history of the Chungking Legation for a project funded by the Australian Consulate-General in Chengdu, China.
Sophie Couchman was employed as Curator at the Chinese Museum in Melbourne and managed a project on the Chungking Legation funded by the Australian Consulate-General in Chengdu.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vasso Apostolopoulos, Professor of Immunology and Associate Provost, Research Partnerships, Victoria University
Australian children aged five to 11 could begin receiving the Pfizer vaccine by the end of November, with the nation’s regulator currently reviewing the health and safety data.
Pfizer submitted a partial application to Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) this week and will supply the remaining data over the next two weeks. The TGA will then review all the information and make a decision about whether to approve the vaccine for use in this age group.
Barring any issues, TGA head John Skerritt expects a decision will be made by the end of November. The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI), will then advise the government on timing of the rollout.
So what does the data say so far on safety and efficacy? And what are the benefits of vaccinating children aged five to 11?
Why vaccinate children?
While the risk of severe COVID in children is low, a small proportion of children who are infected will become severely unwell, and some of them will die from the virus.
As Delta case numbers rise, so too will the number of serious cases and fatalities.
In the United States, children represented more than six million (16.4%) of the total COVID reported cases (8,208 cases per 100,000 children). More than 23,582 US children have been hospitalised and 558 children died (0.01% of child COVID cases).
Multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) has been reported in children following COVID infection. This can cause multiple parts of the body to become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, eyes, brain, kidneys, skin and gastrointestinal system.
Since May 2020, 5,217 cases of MIS-C have been reported in the United States, with a median patient age of nine years; 46 children have died from the condition.
Thankfully, although MIS-C can be serious, most children who are diagnosed with MIS-C recover with medical care.
The risk of severe disease in children is low, but it’s still possible. Shutterstock
The long term effects of COVID are still unknown. In adults, even mild infection can cause a range of ongoing symptoms of long COVID. These include fatigue, shortness of breath, joint and muscle pain, loss of smell, chest pain and problems with memory, concentration and sleep.
Data from the UK found 9.8% of children aged 2–11 years reported at least one long COVID symptom five weeks after, with other research suggesting they rarely last more than 12 weeks.
However, data from Russia which is yet to be peer reviewed found one-quarter of children discharged from hospital had symptoms more than five months later.
Even if a small proportion of children have long-term symptoms, this is of concern, and further studies are required.
There are also other factors to consider. With children under 12 completely unvaccinated, these children can potentially spread the virus to older, vulnerable people.
This may be a particular risk where extended family live together or older relatives care for younger family members.
When approved, children will receive a reduced dose (one-third of the adult dose) and will receive two doses, at the same schedule as adults: approximately three weeks apart.
Children aged 5-11 will received a third of the adult dose. Shutterstock
In order for the new vaccines to gain approval for a new use, they must undertake their own trials to show they are safe and effective in that population specifically.
A recent submission to the FDA showed a robust immune response following the vaccine. It also provided a good safety profile, with side effects comparable to those seen in a study of 16-25 year olds.
So far, no cases of myocarditis or pericarditis (inflammation of the heart and around the heart) have occurred among the children aged 5-11 in the three months after their second dose.
However, as the vaccination is rolled out to larger groups, there is a small risk of myocarditis and pericarditis.
But the benefits of being vaccinated – in preventing severe disease, hospitalisation and death – outweigh the risk of the rare inflammatory heart conditions, as you can see in the data below.
While the initial studies were not designed to measure efficacy, they showed the vaccine regimen was 90.7% effective at preventing COVID infection.
Of the vaccinated children who developed COVID, symptoms tended to be very mild and didn’t include a fever. Non-vaccinated children generally presented with headaches and fever.
What about the other vaccines?
Early data on Moderna, another mRNA based vaccine, found it was safe and induced strong antibody responses in 6-11 year olds. Children aged 6-11 were given half the adult Moderna dose, twice, 28 days apart.
As with adults and adolescents, the most common side effects in children aged 6-11 from Moderna were fatigue, headache, fever and pain at injection site; the majority were mild or moderate.
Moderna plans to submit the data to the FDA, European Medicines Agency and other regulators in the near future.
The protein-based vaccine Novavax, (currently under evaluaton by the TGA), has plans to evaluate its use in younger children, however the necessary trials are long from completion. So far, no preliminary data is available.
A study evaluating the AstraZeneca vaccine in children was paused due to safety concerns about blood clots and is unlikely to continue.
Should I vaccinate my children?
Given the strong safety and efficacy of the vaccines, and the increasing risk of children contracting COVID as the only remaining population of unvaccinated people, the benefits significantly outweigh the risks.
Vaccination will also play an important role in ensuring vulnerable children can continue to participate in social and educational activities with their peers, and reduce their role in spreading the virus.
It’s OK for parents to have questions about the vaccines. If you do, talk to your GP who can listen your concerns and discuss the evidence and how that relates to your circumstances.
Vasso Apostolopoulos’ COVID-19 research has received internal funding from a Victoria University research grant and from philanthropic donations
Athina (Tina) Soulis, 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Penny Levickis, Senior Research Fellow, REEaCh (Research in Effective Education in Early Childhood) Hub, The University of Melbourne
Shutterstock
Australian early childhood educators feel burnt out and undervalued. Our research reports on more than 200 educators’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed existing strains on the system and further eroded their well-being.
However, educators also identified three important ways their well-being can be restored. As one educator told us:
“You cannot pour from an empty cup. Our well-being needs to be supported so we can do the best job possible.”
The pandemic has brought into sharp focus the challenging working conditions the profession faces. Educators have to navigate emotionally complex work. They work long hours, with poor pay and a lack of status or public recognition. Their opportunities for professional development or career progression are limited.
Well-being is essential for educators to do their job well. Their well-being affects the well-being, learning and development of children across the country. A stable, qualified and healthy workforce is essential for families, communities and societies.
In our research, more than 85% of educators reported the pandemic had negative impacts on their well-being. However, three key findings detail how well-being can be supported. Educators talked about the importance of:
self-care
relationships with children, families and colleagues (and in educators’ personal lives)
recognition for their essential work.
Self-care has to be a priority
Educators spoke about a renewed focus on self-care to support their own well-being.
“We’ve all finally realised that taking the dog for a walk has huge merits and having some meditation and doing some mindfulness and having our weekly yoga sessions are all actually working.”
Self-care involved more than exercise and meditation. Creativity was also a support for well-being, including activities such as baking, clay-making and knitting. Educators took proactive steps for their health, to strengthen their own well-being.
Service supports also matter. Counselling and professional development services were helpful. Educators made use of (mostly online) professional services such as Beyond Blue and the Employee Assistance Program. Some services provided additional resources to support mental health.
“The psychologist was extremely powerful and she’s given a few presentations of how to look after ourselves.”
Personal and professional relationships are key to educators’ well-being. Supportive professional relationships provided solidarity and shared understanding. The value of being able to unload, debrief or talk with others at work increased throughout lockdowns.
“That sense of belonging to a team and all the educators really caring very strongly for each other.”
Despite reporting that the pandemic had a negative impact on their well-being, educators reported strong relationships with the children they work with. Teaching and engaging with children is central to educators’ well-being. Connection to other aspects of children’s lives is also important:
“COVID has taught us that it’s the relationships we have with parents, with families, with everybody in our community that’s the most important thing.”
Recognise their essential work
Educators in our research rated their sense of contribution high. Workforce studies reflect this, showing educators value and recognise the importance of their work with children. But their professional contribution is not always acknowledged.
“[Being told by government] we are here to support ‘essential workers’ without actually being referred to as essential ourselves was a real blow to the industry and self-esteem of educators.”
Acknowledgement at the local level was even more important to educator well-being during the pandemic:
“Families [are] really, really appreciating the work that we do. I think they got an extra insight into, and appreciation, for the work that the educators do for their children.”
Research in child development shows us the continuum of vital learning between birth and eight years of age. However, the Australian education system treats school and pre-school settings very differently. Educators felt ignored in government decision-making throughout the pandemic, and have long argued for early learning to be recognised as pivotal for life trajectories.
“A system that acknowledges the absolute fundamental truth that unless you get early childhood right, you never get it. That child then struggles into adulthood. And as educators, we know that. So that affects our well-being as well.”
Let’s listen to educators
The pandemic has added to existing strains on the system. Educators’ well-being has continued to suffer as a result. As one educator said:
“The stress of COVID-19 exacerbated any of the stresses and difficulties that were going [on], it didn’t create them. The precedent that we have, there were always going to be problems.”
We know there’s a problem, we know the problem affects the community more broadly, but to support well-being effectively, we need to understand the experiences of educators themselves. We need to keep listening to them and act on what they’re telling us.
Here’s a good place to start: encourage self-care and provide access to resources; support and sustain relationships; acknowledge educators’ essential role in society and recognise that their well-being matters.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In its pandemic response, the New Zealand government has consistently been tardy, and then found itself playing catch-up, having to ‘go hard’ (indeed a ‘world-leading’ hardest) on account of its lack of preparedness. Further, having gone hard, there has always been an ambivalence about when the emergency period is over; an unwillingness to promptly restore liberties once the ‘hardness’ had either succeeded or failed.
Eventually, the government’s advisers caught on to the idea that vaccination was the way back to a normal, with civil liberties restored for vaccinated people. Yet the government continues to apply an ‘abundance of caution’ – an ambivalence – towards the issue of restoring basic liberties. The result is a China-like ‘vaccination plus fortress’ safety mentality, rather than a ‘vaccination in lieu of fortress’ approach. The important context here is that there are other forces, not health related, that compromise our liberties; in particular there are state-control, market-discipline, kleptocratic, and unempathic ‘race-to-the-bottom’ competitive forces. Public health induced loss of liberty can be a catalyst for these other forces to gain traction. (A useful introduction to the safety versus liberty conundrum is this from RNZ on 27 Oct: Time to change the COVID conversation. The interviewee, California epidemiologist Dr Vinay Prasad, makes a number of important points about the growing social tribalism and its problematic relationship with ‘truth’; and noting that scientists themselves are not immune from the politicisation of science. Indeed, applied scientists [aka ‘technocrats’] in the past have often been quite wrong in their vehemently-held medical and other prescriptions.)
(We acknowledge that vaccine mandates are themselves problematic from a civil liberties viewpoint. But the valid principle here is that there is a hierarchy of civil liberties, and that compulsory Covid19 vaccinations can only be justified as a means to restoring more important liberties. The lose-lose scenario is that we accept the loss of a liberty on this principle, but that the other [more important] liberties are not restored.)
Yet, even in terms of its preferred ‘control-first’ approach, the government remains blinkered about what may be coming. A safety-first approach does not necessarily achieve more safety; defence against one predator is not defence against all predators, let alone all dangers. The government has bullied people in covid-absent places into wearing facemasks on the basis that Covid19 might turn up in the future, when the proper approach is to use such emergency measures when the emergency occurs. Facemask mandates in such communities make their populations more vulnerable, not less vulnerable, to future micropredators.
What is here now is a Covid19 outbreak that will affect people with expired vaccinations as much as people who have never been vaccinated. (Here, ‘expired vaccination status’ means six-months since a person’s most recent vaccination. For whatever reason, the government may adopt a different definition of ‘expired’.) We are seeing new covid outbreaks in Europe at present (just a few weeks behind the current Singapore outbreak; see my Covid19: Latest Outbreaks, 27 Oct), and signs are that case fatality rates, while most likely lower than in the past, will not be ‘trivial’ either. Further, South Korea’s not looking too good; Covid19 is much more problematic there at present than it is in Japan. These countries are facing the problem of ‘expired vaccination status’ just as they enter winter.
In New Zealand, for many of the early high-priority vaccinees (including people in airports and hospitals, and older people), their second vaccine was six-months or more ago. Revaccinating these people now – especially in Auckland – is much more important than bullying unvaccinated people leading remote lives in the outer provinces. (My partner, who works in the multicultural education sector, will be required to mix with adult students from February, just as her vaccination protection expires.)
Indeed, we will need to plan to revaccinate these critical people again (fourth shot) in May 2022. For high-priority contact workers, regular vaccinations will need to be mandated every November and May; November ahead of the high-circulation summer holiday season, and May ahead of winter. The government not only needs to be acting on this urgent requirement, it needs to be seen to be acting on the revaccination issue; and the Fourth Estate needs to be nagging the government on this issue instead of focussing on hapless escapees from present restrictive locations of detention (such as Auckland).
We are also starting to get people – even Professor Michael Baker – warning about the possibility of a problematic return of influenza next winter. The government needs to pick up such issues, rather than pretending them away until the only option is to go very quickly and very hard.
It would be a Civil Liberties step too far to mandate vaccination for a hypothetical flu epidemic – just as it has been a step too far requiring people to wear facemasks to protect themselves against something that is not in their communities. (Firemen wear facemasks to protect themselves from smoke only when there is smoke. Fires are a good analogy for epidemics, noting that the main factor that drives both is the available ‘fuel’.)
What is required is for the Government to announce this Friday (29 Oct) that it will ramp up the influenza vaccination programme for 2022. (In 2021, the influenza vaccination roll-out was actually held back!) And the government needs to clearly announce that influenza vaccinations will be free to all vaccinees.
At present, influenza vaccinations are free to over-65-year-olds. Additionally, some employers – such as my former employer – pay so that their employees can be vaccinated for free. Such ramping up the influenza vaccination programme is prudent insurance. As most of us appreciate, insurance should be taken out before the event, not during the event.
Not only slow to anticipate, also dishonest when reviewing the past
The government relies much on advisers who, like many other people, are invested in maintaining the truthiness of their past advice.
On this matter, the ‘elephant in the room’ is Sweden, a country widely lampooned – including by me – in 2020 for its apparent callous disregard for human life in the face of Covid19; for what seemed to be (and indeed may have been) a ‘money before lives’ approach, an ‘economy-first’ approach.
It is important to note that, if it turns out that Sweden’s ‘callous’ public health approach to Covid19 turns out to have had betters outcomes than other countries’ policy approaches, that doesn’t mean – in the light of available information at the time – that Sweden’s was the best policy approach. The diverse outcomes, that now appear to favour Sweden, were not predictable then. There was some truth in the New Zealand government’s mantra that the best economic outcomes arise from the best public health policy. Yet, there is also growing evidence for the reverse. By putting the economy first, Sweden appears to have (perhaps unwittingly, and not because its economic policies are particularly good) achieved better public health outcomes.
So far, Sweden’s public health statistics for the pandemic period are not the world’s best; but they are among the best for 2021. (While excess deaths in Sweden have been low, unlike New Zealand they have been positive.) But, if we project into the near-future – say to the end of 2022 – then, based on best predictions with today’s information, Sweden is looking like it may attain the world’s best health outcome. (It’s still not too late for New Zealand, however; to achieve that ‘world leading’ objective, New Zealand must prioritise its Covid revaccination programme, and insure against non-covid health risks such as influenza.)
(We should also note that it’s not just a health/economy dichotomy. It’s more a health/liberties/economy trichotomy, noting that none of these three criteria are, from a policy point of view, independent of the other two. Neither mortality rates nor GDP per capita are themselves adequate measures of policy success.)
Narrow-Sightedness and getting Broadsided
Governments are often accused of being short-sighted (myopic). Indeed, frequently we get (as a reason to have a longer gap between elections) the tiresome claim trotted out that governments only govern in the middle year of New Zealand’s three-year electoral cycle. (Thankfully, the United States parliament – Congress – only has a two-year cycle; otherwise the Biden government would be much more hamstrung today.) In times like now it does indeed seem that ‘a week is a long time in politics’.
The bigger problem is professional narrow-sightedness, a problem that has led, in the criminal courts of the western world, to many miscarriages of justice. When people get invested in a hypothesis, they become unwilling to ‘let go’ when new disconfirming information becomes available. In relation to Covid19, the most apparent form of narrow-sightedness is the obsession with one health threat to the detriment of others. (New Zealand’s celebrity of epidemiologists were conspicuously silent during this year’s RSV epidemic which led to many children being hospitalised; to be fair, the problem may have been that too few journalists were asking them questions about RSV.) People who are not broad-sighted easily get broadsided.
I remember renowned economist Deirdre McCloskey being criticised for changing her mind on some matter. In reply, she said that she modified her views when presented with new information that challenged her previous views. “What do you do” she then said rhetorically “when you get new information?”. We are now moving into a pandemic of closed-mindedness, whereby people – sometimes including politicians, bureaucrats, and technocrats – disregard information that doesn’t fit with a viewpoint in which they are invested.
Conclusion
Revaccinate now, and again in May.
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.
We write this article together – Kelly, a First Nations woman living on Kombumerri Country, and Richard, a Canadian white male settler living on the lands of the Minjungbal people of the Bundjalung Nation.
As a First Nations Australian academic, Kelly is often approached to give guest lectures. She aims to accept these invitations as she believes acts of reciprocity and relationality are essential building blocks for reconciliation. Further, her job requires her to teach First Nations People’s histories and knowledges.
Unfortunately, on many occasions, her knowledge is appropriated, reproduced without permission, frequently misconstrued, or misrepresented and colonised in some way. This all happens under the guise of a non-Indigenous person having “good intentions”. In addition, Kelly is frequently micromanaged regarding her Indigenous knowledges.
This is not an uncommon experience for First Nations academics.
The outcome for these academics is often an increased and unpaid workload, and no opportunities for collaboration between academic staff or faculty. This is all coupled with the trauma that occurs when experiencing ongoing micro-aggressions and racism.
White people often fail to appreciate the nature of power differentials and white privilege – with all the accompanying benefits, including money, prestige and even the option to act.
Further, good intentions are not enough. What settlers need to understand are the principles of proper allyship.
This requires not acting on behalf of someone, but ceding space and decisional authority to others, and privileging the voices and experiences of First Nations Peoples and communities. First Nations communities get to decide on all matters related to themselves and their knowledges. Allies need to understand this is not negotiable.
Here we invite you to consider some strategies for being a good ally with First Nations Peoples and communities.
What can I do?
1) First, allies must assume and confront racism in themselves, explore how they may be part of the problem and look at ways to change.
This means reflecting on and accepting one’s own assigned privilege. Acceptance allows us to become more understanding of how we impact others.
2) Always prioritise the voices of First Nations Peoples above your own. Their voices matter – not those of settlers – in what happens to their communities. This applies to everything – law, policy, health, funding decisions, choices made (or not), and research undertaken (or not).
3) As allies, one’s skills and achievements do not take priority over First Nations Peoples and their needs. Rather, allies should prioritise the creation of “right relations.” This is an act of establishing relationships with First Nations Peoples as an ally, in a culturally appropriate and reflective manner.
4) Listen to and believe the voices of First Nations Peoples and adopt a position of cultural humility.
Cultural humility is a commitment to self-awareness and refection. It also means redressing power imbalances and developing reciprocal, non-paternalistic partnerships with First Nations Peoples and communities.
Further, one must cede any right to determine the shape or direction of political, economic, or academic projects that involve First Nations Peoples. This needs to be determined by or in consultation with First Nations Peoples.
5) Publicly support First Nations People’s sovereignty, self-determination and autonomy. In this case, act only if First Nations Peoples judge it to be valuable. If they say it could be harmful, then back off and remain silent.
6) Finally, if consistent with relevant First Nations voices, teach (not preach) anti-racism messages to our white-privileged peers and others.
It is important to involve one’s peers in this process. People require space to voice their views, even when their views may be perceived as “racist”. Having an open dialogue is a way to address potential hostility that can arise when people get defensive.
All people have the right to autonomy and to determine what is right for their own communities. This, too, is an exercise of power, because only those sufficiently privileged to make such choices can do so. Being a better ally is to essentially use the space you are given to provide space for people who are too often excluded from the conversation.
If you are called out for racism or cultural insensitivity, please listen and take the comment seriously as a gift and an invitation to change.
Racism is a white problem and white people need to be the ones to solve it.
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.
Armed conflict in West Papua has caused an exodus of displaced people into one of the most remote parts of neighbouring Papua New Guinea.
The latest flashpoint in the conflict is in the Indonesian-administered Bintang Mountains regency, where state forces are pursuing West Papua Liberation Army fighters who they blame for recent attacks on health workers in Kiwirok district.
Since violence surged in Kiriwok last month, Indonesian security forces have targetted suspected village strongholds of the OPM-Free Papua Movement’s military wing.
At least 2000 people are recorded by local groups to have fled from the conflict either to other parts of Bintang Mountains (Pegunungan Bintang) or crossed illegally into the adjacent region over the international border.
Hundreds of people have fled across to Tumolbil, in Yapsie sub-district of the PNG province of West Sepik, situated right on the border.
A spokesman for the OPM, Jeffrey Bomanak, said that those fleeing were running from Indonesian military operations, including helicopter assaults, which he claimed had caused significant destruction in around 14 villages.
“Our people, they cannot stay with that situation, so they are crossing to the Papua New Guinea side.
“I already contacted my network, our soldiers from OPM, TPN (Liberation Army). They already confirmed 47 families in Tumolbil.”
Evidence of the influx A teacher in Yapsie, Paul Alp, said he saw evidence of the influx in Tumolbil last week.
“It is easy to get into Papua New Guinea from Indonesia. There are mountains but they know how to get around to climb those mountains into Papua New Guinea.
“There are foot tracks,” he explained, adding that Papua New Guineans sometimes went across to the Indonesian side, usually to access a better level of basic services.
A village destroyed in Pengunungan Bintang regency, Papua province. Image: ULMWP/RNZ
Alp said West Papuans who had come to Tumolbil were not necessarily staying for more than a week or so before returning to the other side.
He and others in the remote district confirmed that illegal border crossings have occurred for years, but that it had increased sharply since last month.
For decades, the PNG government’s policy on refugees from West Papua has been to place them in border camps, the main one being at East Awin in Western Province, with support from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Thousands of displaced Papuan have ended up at East Awin, but many others who come across simply melt into the general populace among various remote villages along the porous border region.
Threadbare security Sergeant Terry Dap is one of a handful of policemen in the entire Telefomin district covering 16,333 sq km and with a population of around 50,000.
He said a lot of people had come across to Tumolbil in recent weeks, including OPM fighters.
“There’s a fight going on, on the other side, between the Indonesians and the West Papuan freedom fighters.
“So there’s a lot of disruption there [in Tumolbil]. So I went there, and I talked to the ward development officer of Yapsie LLG [Local Level Government area], and he said he needed immediate assistance from the authorities in Vanimo [capital of West Sepik].”
“They want military and police, to protect the sovereignty of Papua New Guinea, and to protect properties to make sure the fight doesn’t come into PNG.”
Sergeant Dap said he had emailed the provincial authorities with this request, and was awaiting feedback.
Papua New Guinea police … “There’s a fight going on, on the other side, between the Indonesians and the West Papuan freedom fighters.” Image: Johnny Blades/RNZ
More civilians crossing over According to Bomanak, the impacts of displacement from recent attacks in Kiwirok district are ongoing.
“This problem now is as we have damage in village, more civilians will cross over in Papua New Guinea side.
“Five to six hundred villagers, civillians, mothers and children, they’re still in three locations, out in jungle in Kiwirok, and they’re still on their way to Papua New Guinea,” he warned.
On the PNG side, Sergeant Dap said some of the people coming across from West Papua have traditional or family links to the community of Tulmolbil
But their presence on PNG soil creates risk for locals who are fearful their communities could get caught in the crossfire of Indonesian military pursuing the Papuan fighters.
Dap said he spoke with the OPM fighters who had come to Tumolbil, and encouraged them not to stay long.
“I’ve talked to their commander. They said there’s another group of people coming – about one thousand-plus coming in,” he said.
“I told them, just stay for some days and then you go back, because this is another country, so you don’t need to come in. You go back to your own country and then stay there.”
Clashes in the mountainous Pengunungan Bintang regency, near the border with PNG, in October 2021. Image: RNZ
The policeman has also been involved in efforts by PNG authorities to encourage vaccination against covid-19.
Mistrust of covid vaccines is deep in PNG, where only around 2 or 3 percent of the population has been inoculated, while a delta-fuelled third wave of the pandemic is causing daily casualties.
Sergeant Dap said convincing people to get vaccinated was difficult enough without illegal border crossings adding to the spread of the virus and the sense of fear.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
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.
Of all the vertebrates on Earth – that is, animals with backbones – birds are the only ones that lay colourful eggs. Scientists are still unsure why, but new research brings us a step closer to finding out.
Although most reptiles lay eggs, and even some mammals (such as the platypus) too, birds are the only backboned animals alive today that can lay colourful and patterned eggs. Author provided
In a study published today in the journal Evolution, my colleagues and I reveal how the colours of songbird eggs diversified alongside the evolution of “open cup” nests, more than 40 million years ago.
Why are eggs colourful?
Scientists are not entirely sure why birds lay such colourful eggs. Current theories fall into two main categories.
The first is that colour helps protect the eggs from environmental factors such as extreme cold or rain. Eggs with darker pigments heat up faster and maintain heat longer than white eggs. Pigments have also been shown to help strengthen thinner eggshells.
Eggshells can show areas of thinning, usually when the female’s diet is lacking calcium. This can often result from the use of pesticides, including DDT, in the wild — as they can dissolve or contaminate otherwise nutritious food such as snail shells.
Females have been shown to deposit pigments in the same spots where a shell is thinner (and more prone to breaking) — a bit like covering it with plaster. This may reinforce the shell and help keep it structurally sound.
We know the pigments are produced in the female’s uterus during the shell’s formation, but it’s still not known how different colours and complex patterns are applied to the shell while the egg is still inside the female.
The second theory is that colour provides a survival advantage, either by camouflaging the eggs from predators or parasites, or by signalling the female’s reproductive fitness to potential partners. More colourful eggs, particularly blue, signify that the mother is healthy and can spare resources for her babies.
How is the colour made?
All the colours we see in bird eggs stem from just two pigments, one brown and the other blue. Different concentrations of these two pigments create the vast range of egg colours we see today.
Some eggs have intricate and delicate patterns. We still don’t know how the female birds apply the pigments to the eggshell in this way. Author provided
Until 2017, scientists believed laying colourful eggs was a trait unique to birds. But as it turns out, the same pigments can be found in fossilised dinosaur eggs too.
Researchers also found a link between dinosaurs’ nesting behaviour and egg colour. Specifically, they discovered dinosaurs that laid their eggs in partially open nests (rather than burying them like crocodiles) had colour in their eggshells.
Nest-building through time
Until about 40 million years ago, songbirds built complex dome-shaped nests with insulated walls and roofs. Over time, however, they evolved the ability to create the open cup nests we see more commonly today.
Birds exhibit fantastic dexterity when building nests. Using only their beaks and feet, they can weave an array of nests ranging from relatively rudimentary designs to substantial, intricately woven structures.
The nests must have enough structural integrity to hold both the eggs and the weight of an incubating parent without being punctured. They must also stay intact while parents move around, hatched chicks start wriggling, and during rainfall and harsh winds.
Now, our research has found a link between eggshell colour and changes in nest construction. Specifically, birds have gone from laying a narrower range of coloured eggs (mainly white or dark brown) in closed dome nests, to a wider variety of colours (white, pink, olive, blue, pink and brown) in cup nests.
The transition to cup nests means the eggs are exposed when the incubating parent leaves to forage. During these foraging bouts, eggs are much more vulnerable to falling outside the temperature range needed to survive.
If they get too cold or hot, the embryos die. They’re also more exposed to passing predators looking for a snack.
Parasitic cuckoos lay their eggs inside other birds’ nests, and match their eggs to those already in the nest. Perhaps colour started playing an essential role in host parents’ evolutionary attempts to thwart the cuckoos?
Back when nests were mostly closed, and eggs hidden, the host wouldn’t have needed to produce colourful eggs to distinguish them from the cuckoo’s. Similarly, cuckoos wouldn’t have needed to match their eggs with the host’s.
Our research found that laying colourful eggs is a flexible trait, and was lost and regained multiple times during songbirds’ evolutionary history. Moreover, birds that evolved to make cup nests lost and regained this trait twice as many times as birds that still make closed nests today.
In the 1800s naturalists had a fascination with birds’ eggs, and it became common to own extensive egg collections. The ultimate goal for collectors, other than prestige, was to have as many different species as possible.
Today, collecting specimens is quite understandably illegal. But those old collections do come in handy.
Today, it’s illegal to collect or trade native bird eggs in Australia without a permit. Author provided
For our work, we were able to draw on extensive egg collections donated to museums in Australia. We measured the egg colours of more than 250 different species of Australian songbird, took photographs, and analysed them against their evolutionary histories.
Many of the eggs from museum collections also come with geographical locations. We’re grateful to early naturalists for making extensive notes on where, when and how they collected each clutch.
Moving forward, we want to use this data to investigate how climatic variables interact with egg colour — as well as whether a female’s diet impacts egg colour. Egg-citing stuff!
We would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land from which these eggs were taken, and pay our respects to the Elders, past and present and emerging.
Kiara L’Herpiniere 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.
Most groups of modern animals had their beginnings more than half a billion years ago in an amazing evolutionary event known as the Cambrian Explosion.
This wasn’t the kind of explosion caused by a bomb or asteroid: we call it an “explosion” because of the huge and rapid increase in the diversity of animals we see in the fossil record during this time.
Many familiar features of today’s animals arose in this period. The first eyes and other sensory organs developed, and appendages for swimming and walking also appeared. Tooth-rimmed jaws for predation evolved, as did complex hard parts for protection against predators.
One group of animals, called bryozoans, has until now appeared to be absent from the Cambrian Explosion. In new research, we took a closer look at some old fossils and discovered these tiny coral-like creatures were indeed present during this riotous surge in the variety of animal life on Earth.
Have you heard of bryozoans?
Bryozoans are a distinct group of water-dwelling, filter-feeding animals. Like corals, bryozoans form colonies of tiny individuals. They eat using a crown of fine tentacles called a lophophore to extract tiny food particles from the water.
Bryozoan colonies come in a variety of shapes and sizes, including forms that encrust rocky surfaces, delicate branching structures, and even small jelly-like mounds.
Because the colony is often constructed of a hard material called calcium carbonate (the same material from which seashells are made), bryozoans are easily preserved as fossils. This is why roughly 15,000 species of fossil bryozoans are known to science.
Hidden origins
Despite all these fossils, the origin of bryozoans has remained a mystery. The group seemingly “bursts” into existence about 480 million years ago (some 50 million years after the Cambrian Explosion), during the Ordovician Period.
Before the Ordovician, there is no record of their existence. This “missing” record led many palaeontologists to speculate that bryozoans first evolved sometime during the Cambrian. But these early forms were probably tiny and delicate, and may not have constructed their colonies of calcium carbonate. This would make them much less likely to be preserved as fossils.
A new look at old fossils
Our research, published today in Nature, reveals bryozoans were indeed present during the Cambrian Explosion. The key to solving the mystery of their origins is a strange, honeycomb-like fossil called Protomelission (the name means “first honeycomb”).
The first specimens of Protomelission were originally described in 1993 from important Cambrian rocks in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. However, it wasn’t clear from these original specimens that Protomelission was a bryozoan. Then, in 2018, an almost identical specimen was discovered in China.
The early Cambrian bryozoan Protomelission gatehousei from the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. Image a shows a scanning electron microscope image of a colony with individual capsules, called zooids, that held separate individuals of the colony. Images b and c show internal structures from different orientations revealed by microCT. Colours are added to show different structures. Zhang et al./Nature, Author provided
Using a state-of-the-art technology called micro-computed tomography (MicroCT), we looked inside Protomelission to confirm it is, in fact, a fossil from a bryozoan colony.
MicroCT technology is similar to a CAT scan in a hospital. Using a thin beam of X-rays, we peer inside the fossil in a series of narrow “slices”. We then use a computer to stack the slices together and produce 3D images and videos of tiny objects like Protomelission.
Our new images confirmed the fossil lacked the robust calcium carbonate skeleton that most living bryozoans possess. Based on our analyses, we can now say with certainty that bryozoans first appeared during the Cambrian Explosion.
A hidden history revealed
A reconstruction of what P. gatehousei may have looked like in life, with Cambrian seafloor in the background. Zhifei Zhang / Northwest University, Author provided
It’s not every day the hidden history of an entire group of animals is revealed by the fossil record! For context, this would be like revealing the early ancestor of every fish, amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal all in one go.
Our discovery pushes back the first appearance of the phylum Bryozoa by about 35 million years, making Protomelission the oldest known bryozoan. Importantly, our results also mean that living in colonies, a rare feature in complex animals, also originated during the Cambrian Explosion.
The bryozoans can now take their place among the incredible evolutionary and ecological events associated with the rise of animal communities.
For more information and resources related to the wonderful phylum Bryozoa please go here.
Glenn A Brock is an Honorary Professor of Palaeobiology in the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University. This research was funded partly from internal MQ Research funds and from the Australian Research Council (DP120104251).
Luke Strotz receives funding from a Shaanxi Province Research Grant (2019-2024) through Northwest University, Xi’an, China
All Australians have a stake in our nation’s good governance. The past week has provided plenty of reasons to be concerned about the Morrison government’s disregard of core tenets of Australian democracy in its quest for electoral advantage.
I can’t recall an Australian government that has been as blatant in its disdain for accountability as the one led by Scott Morrison. Nor has there been one that has more assiduously bred the culture of secrecy that permeates from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) down.
Its contempt for checks and balances, resentment of scrutiny and preparedness to trash long-standing conventions is widely observed among journalists, experts and practitioners – including former Coalition members. Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull describes “a culture of entitlement, a culture of non-accountability” within the government that he claims to be “deeply troubled by”.
This culture was on full display again in the parliament recently, when the government defied Speaker Tony Smith to stop the matter of Christian Porter’s blind trust fund being referred to the House of Representatives Privileges Committee.
Smith had ruled there was a “prima facie case” for the committee to investigate. But in a move unprecedented in the 120 years of the federal parliament, the government’s leader in the House, Peter Dutton, opposed the speaker’s ruling, mobilising Coalition MPs to win the vote. He achieved this by refusing to count the votes of independent members attending remotely, despite this being routine for remote attendance in the Senate since September 2020.
Much ink has been spilled documenting the Morrison government’s dubious record on integrity matters. These include the rorting and misuse of public funds through discretionary grants programs, its refusal to conform to reasonable expectations of accountability to parliament or answer questions from the media, its unwillingness to enforce ministerial or other codes of conduct, or to concede accumulating evidence of widespread abuses of power with respect to public appointments.
The parliament, like the national cabinet, is merely the latest arena to showcase Morrison’s audacity, given his slim majority and the deep fractures within his government.
Speaker Tony Smith was overruled by the government on referring the Porter blind trust matter to the privileges committee, an unprecedented move in Australian politics. Lukas Coch/AAP
‘Whatever it takes’ approach gains momentum
Political scientist James Walter argues Morrison embodies the decades-long move to the centralisation and predominance of the leader in Australian politics. Morrison has leveraged and strengthened the institutional and personal power of the prime ministership, including an inner court of trusted loyalists and a large and powerful PMO. It asserts discipline and control across the government, including the public service.
Australia is not the only Westminster-style system grappling with the trend towards an increasingly powerful political executive. In the United Kingdom, similar concerns have been raised about the extent to which unwritten “conventions” intended to guide political practice – premised on those holding power exercising self-restraint in the long-term public interest – are now sufficient to ensure appropriate standards of behaviour and respect for constitutional norms.
[The abuses] have touched upon many of the main government organs: the Cabinet, the Civil Service, Parliament, the judiciary, the devolved institutions, and even the monarchy.
These have brought into question whether the “good chap” theory that has underpinned the British political tradition (and also informs Australia’s) remains a sufficient bulwark against an overweening executive.
The flexibility of an unwritten constitution, based on restraint and mutual respect for governing norms, has served Britain and other Westminster-style systems well. However, Blick and Hennessy argue:
For the system to work, ministers must exercise [their] power responsibly and be willing to cooperate with oversight mechanisms to an appropriate extent.
[…] If general standards of good behaviour among senior politicians can no longer be taken for granted, then neither can the sustenance of key constitutional principles.
More effective ways need to be found to promote a culture of good behaviour among office-holders. This may include formally codifying expectations of behaviour and safeguards to protect the rule of law and strengthen the institutions of governance, including the civil service, parliament and the judiciary.
In 2020, Britain’s Committee on Standards in Public Life launched a review of “the strengths and weaknesses of the institutions, policies and processes that implement ethical standards in Westminster and beyond”. The review is being conducted against the backdrop of the Greensill lobbying scandal that involved (among numerous others) former prime minister David Cameron, and claims of a “chumocracy”, where access, positions and honours are a quid pro quo for mates and political donors.
It also comes amid criticism of the impact of informal, personalised networks surrounding British ministers on other institutions, notably the civil service. COVID-19 has exposed Boris Johnson’s shambolic governance style, his cavalier approach to the truth and preparedness to breach long-standing constitutional norms. This culture has extended to former supporters such as top adviser Dominic Cummings.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has also been criticised for a lack of accountability in government. AAP/AP/Alberto Pezzali
The case for a federal integrity commission is overwhelming
If, as recent performance in the Australian government suggests, “general standards of good behaviour among senior politicians can no longer be taken for granted”, the case for a federal integrity commission with strong powers is overwhelming.
But last week, as his government broke precedent to shield Porter from scrutiny, Morrison told independent MP Helen Haines his government would not facilitate debate of her Australian Federal Integrity Commission Bill.
Like his “forever friend” Boris Johnson, Morrison seems little inclined to accept restraints on government power. But as last week also showed, even predominant prime ministers face risks when they overplay their hand.
Coalition MPs voted down the motion to refer Porter to the privileges committee on party lines. But many MPs, reportedly angry, demanded a meeting with Dutton.
Similarly, the National Party sorely tested the prime minister’s authority. Its agreement to the net zero by 2050 target was achieved despite Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce’s opposition, although the Nationals leader accepted the decision of his party room.
As the PM touted his net zero by 2050 plan, it has been galling to hear both he and Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor invoke the “Westminster system” and conventions of Cabinet confidentiality while at the same time ignoring key traditions of “responsible government” – including accountability to parliament. These had already been comprehensively trashed by Joyce and fellow National Bridget McKenzie, whose pretence of “outsiderism” despite their place at the apex of power would have been laughable if not so cynically damaging.
Lacking a federal integrity commission and anything remotely resembling a Committee on Standards in Public Life, the Australian parliament is increasingly an outlier. It is diminished and demeaned by an emboldened political executive, which, as we saw in 2019, will stop at nothing to secure its return to office.
It’s time for the nation’s legislators to exercise constitutional stewardship by resetting the balance. That will require courage from moderate Liberal backbenchers, whose compliance under their leader’s whip hand may have electoral consequences.
During her academic career, Anne Tiernan won research funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australia and New Zealand School of Government.
As lockdowns ease in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT, and people return to work and socialising, many of us will be mixing more with others, even though a section of the community is still unvaccinated.
Many vaccinated people are concerned about the prospect of mixing with unvaccinated people. This mixing might be travelling on trains or at the supermarket initially. But also at family gatherings, or, in NSW at least, at pubs and restaurants when restrictions ease further, slated for December 1.
Some people are wondering, why would a vaccinated person care about the vaccine status of another person?
Briefly, it’s because vaccines reduce the probability of getting infected, which reduces the probability of a vaccinated person infecting someone else. And, despite vaccination providing excellent protection against severe disease, a small proportion of vaccinated people still require ICU care. Therefore some vaccinated people may have a strong preference to mix primarily with other vaccinated people.
But what exactly is the risk of catching COVID from someone who’s unvaccinated?
We also know that vaccinated people are less likely to transmit the disease even if they become infected. The Doherty modelling from August puts the reduction at around 65%, although more recent research has suggested a lower estimate for AstraZeneca. Hence for this thought experiment, we’ll take a lower value of 50%.
As the prevalence of COVID changes over time, it’s hard to estimate an absolute risk of exposure. So instead, we need to think about risks in a relative sense.
If I were spending time with an unvaccinated person, then there’s some probability they’re infected and will infect me. However, if they were vaccinated, they’re ten times less likely to be infected and half as likely to infect me, following the numbers above.
Hence we arrive at a 20-fold reduction in risk when hanging out with a vaccinated person compared to someone who’s not vaccinated.
The exact number depends on a range of factors, including the type of vaccine and time since vaccination. But, in Australia we can expect a large risk reduction when mixing with fully vaccinated people.
The calculation holds true whether you yourself are vaccinated or not. But being vaccinated provides a ten-fold reduction for yourself, which is on top of the risk reduction that comes from people you’re mixing with being vaccinated.
So, dining in an all-vaccinated restaurant and working in an all-vaccinated workplace presents a much lower infection risk to us as individuals, whether we are vaccinated or not. The risk reduction is around 20-fold, but as individuals, we need to consider whether that’s meaningful for our own circumstances, and for the circumstances of those we visit.
There are also added complexities, in that there are three vaccine brands available, and eligibility is still limited to those aged 12 and older. Although, we do know kids are less susceptible and less likely to show symptoms.
However, as more information emerges, we can always update our estimates and think through the implications on the risk reduction.
What about people who can’t be vaccinated?
Some people haven’t been able to get vaccinated because they’re either too young or they have a medical exemption. Other people are immunocompromised and won’t get the same level of protection from two doses as the rest of the community.
Increasing our coverage across the board will help protect those who aren’t fully protected by vaccination (whether that’s by eligibility, medical reasons or choice).
Those at higher risk also enjoy the risk reduction if they’re able to mix primarily with vaccinated people.
And other choices we make can help reduce the risk of transmission when vaccination is impossible, for example, wearing masks, washing hands carefully, and so on.
Do rapid antigen tests help?
Some people have proposed that frequent testing could be used to suppress COVID spread for those who are unwilling to be vaccinated.
Health minister Greg Hunt said Australians can buy rapid antigen tests from November 1, so they can test themselves at home or before entering certain venues.
So how much does a rapid antigen test reduce risk to others?
To answer that question we need to consider test sensitivity.
Test sensitivity is the probability a rapid test will return a positive result, if the person is infected.
So, if you did a rapid antigen test at home, it’s about 64% likely to pick up that you’re positive, if you did have COVID.
Therefore, rapid antigen tests can find about two-thirds of cases. If you’re going to a gathering where everyone has tested negative on a rapid antigen test, that’s a three-fold reduction in risk.
Even though rapid tests provide a reduction in risk, they don’t replace vaccines.
When used in conjunction with high levels of vaccination, rapid tests would provide improved protection for settings where we’re particularly keen to stop disease spread, such as hospitals and aged care facilities.
Consequently, despite the high efficacy of COVID vaccines, there are still reasons a vaccinated person would prefer to mix with vaccinated people, and avoid mixing with unvaccinated people.
This is particularly true for those at higher risk of severe disease, whether due to age or disability. Their baseline risk will be higher, so a 20-fold reduction in risk is more meaningful.
Christopher Baker receives funding from The Australian Government Departments of Health and Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Andrew Robinson receives funding for biosecurity research from the federal Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment and New Zealand’s Ministry for Primary Industries
The Nationals this week finally agreed to a plan of net-zero emissions by 2050. Farmers say they’ve done much of the heavy lifting on Australia’s emissions reduction and had been calling for a deal that addressed purported inequities of the past.
The terms of the agreement between Morrison and the Nationals have not been formally released. We know it involves five-yearly reviews by the Productivity Commission to assess how regional Australia is faring throughout the transition, cutting red tape for farmers and a new cabinet position for the Nationals.
But so far, there’s no clear indication that the deal includes expanded measures to help farmers restore rural environments. This would be a huge missed opportunity.
Agriculture covers 58% of Australia’s land mass, and restoring farmland is one of the best ways to tackle climate and environmental issues over the long-term. A recent study I was involved in explored how farmers can best be supported to do this.
It found landholders are often forced to rely on unreliable and insufficient funding and support when restoring land. What’s more, no coordinated strategy exists to maximise the value land-stewardship programs might deliver.
It’s unclear what concessions the Nationals secured from Scott Morrison. Mick Tsikas/AAP
Why farmer think they’re owed
Sentiment from farmers that they’re owed compensation for their emissions reduction efforts stems back to the 1990s and early 2000s. It was then, according to the National Farmers Federation, that Queensland and New South Wales farmers became “victims of land clearing legislation that removed their property rights, without compensation”.
The belief is linked to the unique concession Australia won in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Following an extraordinary 1990 spike in land clearing, Australia was allowed to count reduced land-clearing toward its emissions reductions commitments.
Restrictions on land clearing mean more vegetation is retained, leading to carbon dioxide being drawn down from the atmosphere and stored in plants and soil. This limit to land-clearing relieved pressure on other sectors of the economy to reduce carbon emissions.
So it’s understandable the National Party wanted compensation for farmers, and used the net-zero emissions target as a negotiation opportunity. Details of the final deal are expected in coming months.
It would be in everyone’s interest if the measures included ways to boost environmental stewardship of rural areas. This would not only help farmers reduce emissions over the long term, but help improve Australia’s very poor environmental record.
Native vegetation cover must be restored across vast tracts of Australia. Shutterstock
Well designed, well funded programs
Land stewardship involves efforts to enable landowners and others to responsibly manage and protect land and environmental assets.
This year’s federal budget included A$32.1 million for “biodiversity stewardship”, in which farmers who adopt more sustainable practices can earn money on private markets. The funding includes programs to protect existing native vegetation, implement a certification scheme and set up a trading platform.
But as others have noted, the experience of environmental markets and certification schemes to date suggests they won’t effectively encourage farmers to take part.
Farmers often have unreliable or weak cash-flows, due to seasonal conditions, natural disasters, and the nature of commodity markets.
More government funding and policy support is needed to promote responsible land management, as well as to enforce rules prohibiting environmentally damaging practices.
A study I was recently involved in found current systems to achieve this are inadequate.
Well-designed, well-funded and long-term programs would create a significant win-win for the farming sector and for the environment, and shore up Australia’s credentials internationally. These measures should make it easy and affordable for farmers to:
conserve water
protect soil
avoid manure and chemical runoff, which can contaminate soil and waterways
Any new climate deal for agriculture should focus on removing hurdles to practical land stewardship. Industry-led sustainability initiatives show what’s possible.
Examples include:
myBMP, a best practice training management program helping the cotton industry manage land sustainably and reduce water use
Sustainawool, a similar example from the wool sector
But current incentives and support for farmers to participate in programs like these are not strong enough to ensure a large proportion of farmers take part.
We need a national stewardship investment strategy, developed in partnership with industry and involving sufficient long-term government funding.
A new authority
Payments for environmental services and good stewardship practices often promote good environmental stewardship, but require sufficient investment to work. The National Farmers Federation and KPMG have proposed such a scheme for agriculture.
Our study recommended the creation of an authority to lead the design and initial implementation of a national rural stewardship investment strategy.
It could be created via a successor to the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) or a special purpose national and state body. We proposed this new authority should be responsible for initiating a national stewardship funding program within a specified time frame, such as three years.
The authority should be supported by research from the Productivity Commission or a similar body. Crucially, it must consult widely with environmental and primary production stakeholders and First Nations people and ensure they’re involved in design and decision-making processes.
Well-designed stewardship work can create efficiencies. A recent study, for example, devised a feasible plan to restore 30% of native vegetation cover across almost all degraded ecosystems on Australia’s marginal farming land, by spending just A$2 billion a year for about 30 years.
The plan could restore 13 million hectares of degraded land without affecting food production or urban areas, the authors found.
A feasible rural stewardship investment strategy for Australia is essential, possible, and would deliver a much needed win-win for landholders and the planet. It would be a shame for Australian politicians not to harvest such attractive, low-hanging fruit.
Paul Martin has received funding from the ARC and various government and private agencies, which are listed in full at https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0243-2654.
Once five to 11 year olds have access to COVID vaccines, children up to four years old will make up about 40% of Australia’s unvaccinated population. This will make Australia’s early learning sector the next frontline of the pandemic.
A new report from the Mitchell Institute shows childcare centres are at risk of becoming major transmission locations without a comprehensive strategy to reduce the risk.
While high vaccinations rates across the population will slow the spread of COVID, outbreaks are still likely to occur with the virus predominantly finding the unvaccinated. As younger children are not yet protected by vaccines, it is important to implement measures that reduce possible transmission in educational settings.
Mitchell Institute report on COVID-19 and ECEC.
Many of the approaches used to mitigate the spread of COVID in schools – such as masks and social distancing – will be more difficult to implement in childcare. The childcare funding model also means measures that result in a reduction in physical attendance threaten the viability of providers.
Our report calls for a federal strategy and package of support for the sector to reduce the risk of transmission among the one million unvaccinated children attending childcare and pre-school.
Children and COVID
Rates of sickness, hospitalisation and death due to COVID are much lower in children compared to adults.
Evidence from the most recent outbreak in New South Wales suggests about 2% of children and young people under 18 years old who catch COVID end up in hospital. The most common symptoms among children who showed symptoms of COVID include fever, stuffy or runny nose, cough and fatigue.
As vaccination rates rise among adults, so does the proportion of COVID cases involving children.
This has been the experience in Europe. The figure below shows the proportion of weekly reported COVID cases involving children under 15 years old in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, along with the rates of vaccination.
Before any vaccinations were available in these countries, children under 15 made up about 15-25% of reported COVID cases. They now make up about 35-40% of all reported cases.
As the figure below shows, children 0-4 years old make up about 6% of Australia’s total population. Once 5-11 year olds have access to vaccines, and vaccination rates are above 90%, children aged 0-4 make about 40% of the unvaccinated population.
Many of these children will interact on a daily basis at childcare centres.
There is also recent evidence that shows children under five are 40% more likely to transmit COVID than older children.
The consensus among health experts is that mitigation measures will help manage the spread of COVID in early childhood education and care, and school settings.
But our report highlights these measures can be more difficult to implement in childcare and preschools compared to schools.
For instance, “cohorting” reduces contact between groups of children. In schools, this means keeping class groups together and separate from other classes as much as possible.
However, in childcare, there is not always a consistent or regular group of children attending and the mix of children can change every day. This makes such a measure difficult.
Improving ventilation has also been proposed to reduce spread in childcare, preshools and schools. Open or well-ventilated spaces reduce the risk of COVID transmission because infectious particles are more quickly diffused in the open air than in spaces with less ventilation.
Some states have offered funds to schools and preschools to introduce better ventilation. But childcare centres don’t yet have the same level of support.
Childcare operators are largely run by not-for-profit or private organisations and may not have the means to invest in costly measures such as improved ventilation.
The funding model of early childhood education and care providers is also very different from schools. While schools can still receive funds if students are learning remotely, childcare funding is closely tied to physical attendance.
Any COVID mitigation measures that reduce the number of children at a centre can quickly threaten the financial viability of providers.
Some states and territories are providing schools with strategic direction and funding. But the childcare sector is largely the responsibility of the federal government, which does not have an urgently needed strategy or support package.
In the short term, Australia needs a plan specific to the operating reality of the early childhood education and care sector. The sector requires buttressing to not only prevent its collapse, but so it can play a significant part in minimising the potential harm COVID causes children and the wider population.
And in the medium to long term, the pandemic highlights Australia may need to rethink how it funds and delivers early childhood education and care services.
There is an enormous body of literature describing the benefits of high-quality childcare. Australia needs a system that ensures children and families can continue to benefit from a more resilient early childhood education and care service, even in times of crisis.
Peter Hurley works for the Mitchell Institute who receive funding from Minderoo and the Thrive by Five campaign to undertake research on Australia’s early childhood, education and care (ECEC) sector.
Maximilian de Courten is the director of the Mitchell Institute a Think Tank for Education and Health Policy.
Jora Broerse 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.
Thanks to HomeBuilder and the housing price boom, house building is experiencing its hottest year on the record.
Over the space of a year the number of houses (not apartments) under construction has jumped from 56,060 in the June quarter 2020 to 88,445 in the June quarter 2021 — the biggest peak of all time.
It would be entirely reasonable to expect the record number under construction to be converted to record completions. That’s the point of construction.
But bizarrely, the same set of Bureau of Statistics figures show no such thing. Even after an enormous jump in construction, and all through previous jumps in construction, the number of houses completed each quarter has changed little.
In this year’s June quarter, it was 28,399 — little more than the quarterly total at any time over the past five decades.
It is as if starting building is one thing, and finishing it is another.
Houses under construction, houses completed, quarterly
During the smaller 2001-2008 construction boom, the average completion time blew out from 5.2 months to seven.
Our projections suggest this time it will sharply blow out from 6.5 months to more than nine by the end of this year.
The impact will be felt by hundreds of thousands of Australian house buyers, builders, subcontractors and lenders.
Why can’t we build faster?
Houses are not built on production lines. Unlike other universal purchases such as cars, each house is built individually.
And the method hasn’t changed much in 100 years.
The people we call builders are better described as project managers who rarely employ in-house tradespeople or have long-term contracts with subcontractors.
The way they manage the process has not changed much since the introduction of construction checklists by AV Jennings in the 1970s.
The method is hard to scale up, and unresponsive to demands for speed.
It is ripe for innovations such as offsite construction and prefabrication, but it isn’t clear the authorities are especially aware of the problem.
Now would be a good time. Builders could absorb the costs of changing processes while demand was high, taking advantage of the changes when demand recedes.
But I’m not hopeful. Too much talk is about housing supply in the abstract rather than how to achieve it concrete.
Ali Zolghadr receives RMIT Research Stipend Scholarship for his PhD.
Ehsan Gharaie 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.
Review: The Green Knight, directed by David Lowery.
Nothing about The Green Knight, the new film from director David Lowery, is comfortable.
From its opening scene, where Gawain (Dev Patel) sits in an empty throne room, a crown menacingly hovering above his head as flames suddenly engulf him, this film is wonderfully unsettling.
The Green Knight is a reimagining of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which tells the story of Gawain, a knight of King Arthur’s court. Gawain accepts a challenge from a supernatural Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) to use his axe to strike this knight, and take a reciprocating blow from him the following Christmas.
Although Gawain beheads his opponent, the Green Knight does not die. When Gawain departs the following year to fulfil his promise, he demonstrates chivalry and fidelity to duty. But despite this show of chivalry, his honour is tested by the lord and the lady of the Hautdesert, a castle in which he takes refuge.
This narrative poem is a part of the larger collection of stories about King Arthur: a pseudo-history caught up in ideas about nationhood and identity. Throughout this tradition, Arthur is posited as a “once and future king”; Camelot as a utopian government.
Today, representations of the Middle Ages have been embraced by right-wing nationalists. But Lowery’s adaptation disrupts these narratives of a utopian past and future.
Lowery presents a series of contradictions and conflicts between duty, heroism, honour, fear and temptation. He offers viewers a medieval world in which contemporary anxieties about nationality, national identity and personal politics can be explored.
Despite being named for the monstrous Green Knight, this film follows the story of Gawain, the nephew of King Arthur (Sean Harris).
Awed by the King’s invitation to sit with him, Gawain quietly contends the other knights present “have spilled enough blood” to be more deserving of the honour.
But despite his inexperience, Gawain is the first to meet the challenge of the eponymous knight: to strike him and receive the same blow in return the following year. Although Gawain severs the knight’s head with one clean blow, he retrieves his gruesome head, his raspy laughter echoing off the walls.
Unlike the knightly figure in the medieval poem, Patel’s Gawain is not yet a knight. The bulk of this film forms his hero’s journey: his chance to spill blood for his King and be worthy of a seat at the table.
The Green Knight is a hero’s journey: Gawain’s quest to prove he is worthy of becoming a knight. A24/Eric Zachanowich
Gawain was a celebrity as he left Camelot. The hero of street theatre productions and the subject of portraits; a popular culture icon recognised by all. But his bravery had been untested.
Indeed, the chivalric bravery expected of a legendary knight is remarkably absent during this journey. This Gawain displays weakness, uncertainty and fear.
He cites “honour” as the motivation for his journey. Yet the Gawain of this film asks the restless spirit of a raped and murdered woman for payment to retrieve her head so that she may be at peace. He succumbs to the sexual advances of the lady of the house in which he is given refuge. He would use an enchanted girdle to trick his way out of his knightly duty.
This disparity between the celebrated hero of medieval legend and the flawed Gawain of this film invites us to consider how the medieval is reconstructed in popular culture.
The Green Knight begins in a conquered land. When Gawain rides to the Green Chapel, the signs of war are all around him, from the stark landscape pocked with ruin to an entire battlefield of recently dead men.
These are the Saxons the King is referring to when he gives his Christmas speech:
Out my window this morn, I looked and I saw a land shaped by your hands. You have lain those same hands on your Saxon brethren, who now in your shadow bow their heads like babes. Peace. Peace you brought to your kingdom.
The peace was won through a bloody conquest, but our contemporary imagining of a medieval past often romanticises these conquests. This sort of romanticisation encourages the use of the medieval in right-wing politics, and can legitimise racism.
This film interrupts those narratives not just with the colour-conscious casting of Gawain and his mother Morgana (Sarita Choudhury), but also with its demand that we look beyond the common plot points of medievalist stories into what lies beneath: the conquests, the displacement of people, the grotesque Middle Ages.
The Green Knight asks us to consider what lies beneath narratives of the Middle Ages. A24/Eric Zachanowich
Patel’s performance as Gawain is nothing short of captivating. Doubt, vulnerability and trepidation pour from him throughout the quest.
Lowery’s film is beautifully cast and beautifully shot, but always disquieting and inquisitive. It leaves the viewer with more questions than answers.
From the lilting, hissing, ominous voice over of the opening scene, The Green Knight will enthral you – right through to the ambiguous ending where you will release a breath you did not even know you were holding.
The Green Knight is on Amazon Prime from 28 October.
Sabina Rahman 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.
Indonesia’s popular tourism islands of Bali opened for tourism last week, while Thailand announced that from November 1 vaccinated travellers from 19 countries will be allowed to visit the kingdom including its tourism island of Phuket.
Both those countries’ tourism industry, which is a major revenue earner, has been devastated by more than 18 months of inactivity that have impacted on the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of people.
India and Vietnam also announced plans to open the country to vaccinated foreign tourists in November, and Australia will be opening its borders for foreign travel from mid-November for the first time since March 2020.
Countries in the Asia-Pacific region — except for China — are now beginning to grapple with balancing the damage to their economies from covid-19 pandemic by beginning to treat the virus as another flu.
The media may have to play a less adversarial role if this gamble is going to succeed.
October 11 was “Freedom Day” for Australia’s most populous city Sydney when it came out of almost four months of a tough lockdown.
Ironically this is happening while the daily covid-19 infection rates are higher than the figure that triggered the lockdowns in June.
‘It’s not going away’ Yet, New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet told Sky News on October 11: “we’ve got to live alongside the virus, it’s not going away, the best thing that we can do is protect our people (by better health services)”.
He added, “each time we tighten up, businesses are further disrupted, workers lose jobs, children are deprived of a proper childhood and school life”.
Singapore is coming out of lockdown when it is facing the highest rates of daily infections since the covid-19 outbreak.
Both Singapore and Australia adopted a “zero-covid” policy when the first wave of the pandemic hit, quickly closing the borders, and going into lockdown.
Both were exceptionally successful in controlling the virus and lifting the lockdowns late last year with almost zero covid-19 cases. But, when the more contagious delta virus hit both countries, fear came back forcing them back into lockdowns.
However, PM Lee told Singaporeans that lockdowns had “caused psychological and emotional strain, and mental fatigue for Singaporeans and for everyone else. Therefore, we concluded a few months ago that a “Zero covid” strategy was no longer feasible”.
‘Living with covid-19’ Thus, Singapore has changed its policy to “Living with covid-19”.
In a Facebook posting on October 10, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said: “The phenomenal response from Australians to go and get vaccinated as we’ve seen those vaccination rates rise right across the country, means it’s now time that Australians are able to reclaim their lives. We’re beating covid, and we’re taking our lives back.”
On October 8, Australia’s Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said that though infection rates might still be a bit high, yet less than 1 percent of those infected were in intensive care units (ICUs).
Why didn’t political leaders take this attitude right from the beginning and continue with it? After all the fatality rate of covid-19 has not been that much higher than the seasonal flu in most countries.
True, it was perhaps more contagious according to medical opinion, but fatality rates were not that large in percentage figures.
According to the Worldometer of health statistics, there have been 237.5 million covid-19 infections up to October this year and 214.6 million have recovered fully (90.4 percent) while 4.8 million have died (just over 2 percent).
According to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates, there have been between 39-56 million flu cases, about 700,000 flu hospitalisations recorded in the US during the 2019-2020 flu season up to April 2020.
They also estimate between 24,000 to 62,000 flu deaths during the season. But did the media give these figures on a daily or even a weekly basis?
New global influenza strategy In March 2019, WHO launched a new global influenza strategy pointing out that each year there is an estimated 1 billion flu cases of which 3-5 million are severe cases, resulting in 290,000 to 650,000 influenza-related respiratory deaths.
This has been happening for many years, but, yet the global media did not create the panic scenario that accompanied covid-19.
Unfortunately, the media’s adversarial reporting culture has helped to create a fear psychosis from the very beginning of the outbreak in early 2020, which may have contributed to millions of deaths by creating anxiety among those diagnosed with covid-19.
During the peak of the delta pandemic in India, many patients died from heart attacks triggered by anxiety. Would they have died if covid-19 were treated as another flu?
In the US out of the 44 million infected with covid-19 only 1.6 percent died. In Brazil from 21.5 million infected, 2.8 percent of them died, while in India out of 34 million infected only 1.3 percent died.
But what did we see in media reports? Piles of dead bodies being burnt in India, from Brazil bodies buried in mass graves by health workers wrapped in safety gear and in the US, people being rushed into ICUs.
They are just a small fraction of those infected.
Bleak picture of sensationalism I was the co-editor of a book just released by a British publisher that looked at how the media across the world reported the covid-19 outbreak during 2020. It paints a bleak picture of sensationalism and adversarial reporting blended with racism and politicisation.
It all started with the outbreak in Wuhan in January 2020 when the global media transmitted unverified video clips of people dropping dead in the streets and dead bodies lying in pavements. Along with the focus on “unhygienic” wet markets in China this helped to project an image of China as a threat to the world.
It contributed to the fear psychosis that was built up by the media tinged with racism and politicisation.
If we are to live with covid and other flu viruses, greater investments need to be made in public health.
In Australia, health experts are talking about boosting hospital bed and ICU capacities to deal with the new policy of living with covid, and they have also warned of a shortage of health professionals, especially to staff ICUs.
What about if the media focus on these as national security priorities? Rather than giving daily death rates and sensational stories of people dying from covid — do we give daily death rates from heart attacks or suicide?
We should start discussing more about how to create sustainable safe communities as we recover from the pandemic, and that includes better investments in public health.
We need a journalism culture that is less adversarial and more tuned into promoting cooperation and community harmony.
Kalinga Seneviratne is co-editor of COVID-19, Racism and Politicization: Media in the Midst of a Pandemic published in August 2021 by Cambridge Scholars Publishers. IDN is the flagship agency of the Non-profit International Press Syndicate. This article is republished in partnership with IDN.
Resources minister Keith Pitt might have been a “no” when the Nationals debated the government’s climate plan but he was a winner in the deal struck between Scott Morrison and the Coalition’s minor partner. He has been restored to cabinet, just months after Barnaby Joyce relegated him to the outer ministry.
The coal industry faces a bleak future as the world tackles global warming. But Pitt, a forthright voice for coal, is anxious to provide reassurance that the climate plan will not do anything to accelerate its decline.
“We’re not closing the coal sector, we’re not closing the gas sector, we’re not closing offshore oil. We will continue to work on markets that are available.”
He says right now thermal coal is in a “very strong position [..] we’ve got more people involved and employed in thermal coal mining than we’ve had since 2012.
“In the midst of the pandemic, thermal coal was under $50 US spot price – it’s currently over $240 [US].”
“We’ve looked at the International Energy Agency forecast […] they’re saying there’ll be continued increases in demand for thermal coal out to about 2030, and I expect it to drop off peak by about 2050 by around 20 per cent. So there’s still coal-fired power stations being built. There’s still demand. And keep in mind, we have one of the highest quality products in the world. That’s why there’s demand for Australian coal.”
Pitt is coy when pressed on what the Nationals got out of their negotiations with Scott Morrison – apart from his elevation and a commitment to having the Productivity Commission review progress of the plan every five years. “I’m sure we’ll have more to say in coming weeks […] there’s always process.”
On how Nationals members are feeling after the rough ride over the climate plan Pitt says, “this is a democracy at work and in Canberra nearly every decision is difficult […] we’re all knockabout sort of people”.
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.
These charts are of the type that I have published approximately monthly. Last time, three weeks ago, the key covid places were clearly the Caribbean and the Balkans. This time, while these two regions are important pandemic sites, there is clearly a new outbreak beginning in the European Union, starting from both Eastern Europe and the United Kingdom.
The first charts shows reported cases and deaths in countries with populations over 600,000. The Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) are clear leaders here. We also see the Caucasus countries (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), and the other ‘western Soviet’ countries (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova). The Balkans are strongly present (Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia). The United States and the United Kingdom remain strongly present. The newer re-entrants are Singapore and a number of West European countries (Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Austria). We also see new outbreaks in Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia, with Poland not far behind. Other places to note are Greece and Turkey – and Libya – on the Mediterranean. And, on the ‘deaths’ chart, some of the larger Caribbean countries that didn’t quite make it onto previous months’ charts (Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana); plus Mauritius, a similar kind of holiday place as Jamaica and Trinidad.
The largest European Union countries don’t show up yet, but it must only be a matter of time before they do; of these big four, only Spain is stable.
There are indications that some European Union countries are becoming tardy in reporting their deaths. Thus, the paucity of European Union countries in the deaths chart should not be taken as evidence of acceptably low death rates. While Sweden continues to be well down the covid league tables, and truthfully so, it should be noted that, while having trustworthy data, Sweden is particularly tardy in reporting its Covid19 deaths.
Chart by Keith Rankin.Chart by Keith Rankin.
The remaining two charts include the little countries; countries which we should not ignore (as we do) simply because they are little. We note that, in addition to the Caribbean countries and territories (Barbados, Anguilla, Dominica, St Vincent, St Lucia, Antigua, Grenada, Trinidad, Suriname, Guyana, Belize, Cayman Islands, Sint Martin, Martinique, Bahamas, Costa Rica) [plus New Caledonia], we also have the semi-independent islands that are for all practical purposes part of the United Kingdom (Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Gibraltar, Cayman Islands). We see Brunei, which is very rich and quite connected to Singapore.
And we see Denmark’s territory between the United Kingdom and Iceland; the Faeroe Islands. Greenland, Denmark’s other realm ‘nation’ is also climbing up the table. All is not well in the state of Denmark.
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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Moore, Associate Professor and Deputy Director, Australian Centre for Child Protection, University of South Australia
This came after years of social action and advocacy by survivors and their supporters, during which they were often ignored and dismissed. Thousands of survivors shared their stories and testimony with the royal commission, as well.
Throughout the life of the royal commission, Australians were confronted by horrific stories of child sexual abuse from victims and survivors, as well as case studies highlighting the widespread prevalence of abuse in institutions such as churches, out-of-home care, schools and sporting organisations.
There were also many stories documenting the failure of organisations to identify, prevent and respond to children’s suffering as a result of this abuse.
As former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who established the royal commission, observed,
the institutional failures and cover-ups that compounded and prolonged the suffering of victims are a stain on our country’s history.
This is a watershed day for Australia. Today we deliver the first-ever, long-term, truly national plan to protect our children from the scourge of sexual abuse.
So, what’s in the national plan, and does it go far enough?
The final report of the royal commission at Government House in 2017. Jeremy Piper/AP
What’s in the plan?
A comprehensive national strategy of this nature was one of the 409 recommendations handed down by the royal commission. The commission said it was needed to change the cultures, conditions and practices that have enabled child sexual abuse to continue to occur in Australia.
While outside the terms of reference for the royal commission, it was widely acknowledged many children are sexually abused in family and community contexts.
The national strategy, developed in partnership with state and territory governments, aims to tackle not only institutional child sexual abuse, but all other types of sexual abuse experienced by children and young people in their families and communities.
It identifies five key elements, including:
raising awareness, providing sexual abuse prevention education and building child-safe cultures
supporting and empowering victims and survivors
enhancing responses to children who display sexual behaviours that are harmful to themselves or others
offender prevention and intervention
improving the evidence base on what works in child sexual abuse prevention and supporting survivor recovery and healing.
Alongside the release of the strategy, the Australian government has pledged A$307.5 million over four years to implement the first national plan.
Positive investments
The plan responds to many of the recommendations from the royal commission. Among the priorities was implementing a national awareness campaign on the impacts of child sexual abuse, including the development of resources for teachers, children and young people, parents and families.
Research in Australia and abroad has shown the stigma attached to child sexual abuse makes it difficult for victims and survivors to raise concerns and seek support.
And without ample information, survivors and their families often don’t know where to go when they experience abuse.
The government’s strategy also highlights its ongoing commitment to the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations, which provide guidance on what organisations need to do to reduce the risks of child sexual abuse and better respond when it occurs. The principles are based on what experts believe will make a difference, but have not yet been tested.
Ongoing research and evaluation is required to ensure that the implementation of the principles are, in fact, achieving their intended outcomes and that children and young people are safer as a result.
Responding to children with harmful sexual behaviours
The strategy also focuses on developing the capacity of the community and clinical workforce to better understand and respond to harmful sexual behaviours among children and young people.
In institutions such as schools and residential care – and within the broader community – young people are much more concerned about being harassed, assaulted or victimised by their peers than adults. There is a significant gap in the availability of trauma-informed services for children demonstrating these types of behaviours.
The national plan also invests A$10.9 million in the co-design of culturally safe models to foster healing among child sexual abuse survivors in Aboriginal communities. And it allocates A$3.8 million towards working with Aboriginal experts to develop resources for front-line health workers.
For some time, organisations such as the Healing Foundation have stressed the need to understand how child sexual abuse causes trauma for individuals and communities. Recovery and growth can only be achieved through culturally safe practices, they maintain.
The national strategy is also underpinned by a commitment to build a larger evidence base for what works in child sexual abuse prevention and ensuring initiatives are meeting their objectives – namely the reduction of child sexual abuse in Australia.
More targeted supports for at-risk children
Although the strategy aims to improve the safety of all young people, there is limited recognition of the fact that some children are more vulnerable than others.
Those who are more at-risk include:
those who have already experienced abuse or maltreatment
children with disabilities and mental health issues
LGBTQI children and young people
those who live in out-of-home care
those who rely on services and supports.
As the strategy is implemented, it is crucial to give deep consideration to how these initiatives can target those who are most vulnerable.
In the royal commission’s research and hearings, survivors, children and young people also stressed that child sexual abuse occurred because young people were not valued and their needs and views were not seen as a priority.
They reported feeling disempowered and silenced and had little confidence in adults and organisations when they were not seen as partners in their own protection.
Although it puts a central focus on survivors, the plan is lacking detail about how the it will be shaped, overseen or evaluated by its key beneficiaries (young people). As survivors’ advocate Grace Tame commented this week, efforts to reduce child sexual abuse may be compromised without meaningful dialogue with survivors.
Survivors may also be frustrated by the lack of investment to help them recover and heal from child sexual abuse. The strategy provides no additional funding for victim support services beyond information resources, websites and helplines.
As survivors reported to the royal commission, the lack of appropriate and survivor-centred services means many experience prolonged trauma from their ordeals, with significant emotional, social and economic costs.
The national strategy provides a framework for reducing child sexual abuse, empowering survivors and their families, and improving our responses to those who have been harmed.
To be effective, such initiatives must be driven in dialogue with survivors, children and their families. These programs must also be evaluated to ensure they achieve their lofty goals.
The authors would like to thanks Craig Hughes-Cashmore, chief executive and managing director of Survivors & Mates Support Network (SAMSN), for his contribution to this article.
Tim Moore is Deputy Director at the Australian Centre for Child Protection (UniSA) and has participated in consultations to inform the development of the National Strategy. He was lead researcher on the Children’s Safety Studies funded by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Amanda Paton is part of the Australian Centre for Child Protection, which receives funding from state and territory governments to conduct research and provide services to sectors working with children and young people who have experienced sexual abuse or who are displaying harmful sexual behaviours.
Patrick O’Leary receives funding from Terre des Hommes Foundation Lausanne.
This week the federal government announced proposed legislation to develop an online privacy code (or “OP Code”) setting tougher privacy standards for Facebook, Google, Amazon and many other online platforms.
These companies collect and use vast amounts of consumers’ personal data, much of it without their knowledge or real consent, and the code is intended to guard against privacy harms from these practices.
The higher standards would be backed by increased penalties for interference with privacy under the Privacy Act and greater enforcement powers for the federal privacy commissioner. Serious or repeated breaches of the code could carry penalties of up to A$10 million or 10% of turnover for companies.
However, relevant companies are likely to try to avoid obligations under the OP Code by drawing out the process for drafting and registering the code. They are also likely to try to exclude themselves from the code’s coverage, and argue about the definition of “personal information”.
The current definition of “personal information” under the Privacy Act does not clearly include technical data such as IP addresses and device identifiers. Updating this will be important to ensure the OP Code is effective.
Which organisations would be covered and why?
The code is intended to address some clear online privacy dangers, while we await broader changes from the current broader review of the Privacy Act that would apply across all sectors.
The OP Code would target online platforms that “collect a high volume of personal information or trade in personal information”, including:
social media networks such as Facebook; dating apps like Bumble; online blogging or forum sites like Reddit; gaming platforms; online messaging and videoconferencing services such as WhatsApp and Zoom
data brokers that trade in personal information, including Quantium, Acxiom, Experian and Nielsen Corporation
other large online platforms that collect personal information and have more than 2.5 million annual users in Australia, such as Amazon, Google and Apple.
The OP Code would impose higher standards for these companies than otherwise apply under the Privacy Act.
The OP Code would set out details about how these organisations must meet obligations under the Privacy Act. This would include higher standards for what constitutes users’ “consent” for how their data are used.
The government’s explanatory paper says the OP Code would require consent to be “voluntary, informed, unambiguous, specific and current”. (Unfortunately, the draft legislation itself doesn’t actually say that, and will require some amendment to achieve this.)
In the EU, for example, “unambiguous” consent means a person must take clear, affirmative action – for instance by ticking a box or clicking a button – to consent to a use of their information.
Consent must also be “specific”, so companies cannot, for example, require consumers to consent to unrelated uses (such as market research) when their data is only needed to process a specific purchase.
Requests to stop using and disclosing personal information
The ACCC recommended we should have a right to erase our personal data as a means of reducing the power imbalance between consumers and large platforms. In the EU, the “right to be forgotten” by search engines and the like is part of this erasure right. The government has not adopted this recommendation.
However, the OP Code would include an obligation for organisations to comply with a consumer’s reasonable request to stop using and disclosing their personal data. Companies would be allowed to charge a “non-excessive” fee for fulfilling these requests. This is a very weak version of the EU right to be forgotten.
For example, Amazon currently states in its privacy policy that it uses customers’ personal data in its advertising business and discloses the data to its vast Amazon.com corporate group. The proposed OP Code would mean Amazon would have to stop this, at a customer’s request, unless it had reasonable grounds for refusing.
Increased protections for children and vulnerable groups
The draft bill also includes a vague provision for the OP Code to add protections for kids and other vulnerable people who are not capable of making their own privacy decisions.
A more controversial proposal would require new consents and verification for kids using social media services such as Facebook and WhatsApp. These services would be required to:
take reasonable steps to verify the age of social media users
obtain parental consent before collecting, using or disclosing personal information of a child under 16
ensure its data practices are “fair and reasonable in the circumstances”, with the best interests of the child as the primary consideration.
What is ‘personal information’?
A key tactic companies will likely use to avoid the new rules is to claim that the information they use is not truly “personal”, since the OP Code and the Privacy Act only apply to “personal information”, as defined in the Act.
The companies may claim the data they collect is only connected to our individual device or to an online identifier they’ve allocated to us, rather than our legal name. However, the effect is the same. The data is used to build a more detailed profile on an individual and to have effects on that individual.
Australia needs to update the definition of “personal information” to clarify it includes data such as IP addresses, device identifiers, location data, and any other online identifiers that may be used to identify an individual or to interact with them on an individual basis. Data should only be de-identified if no individual is identifiable from that data.
Increased penalties and upgraded enforcement
The government has pledged to give tougher powers to the privacy commissioner, and to hit companies with tougher penalties for breaching their obligations once the code comes into effect.
The maximum civil penalty for a serious and/or repeated interference with privacy will be increased up to the equivalent penalties in the Australian Consumer Law.
For individuals, the maximum penalty will increase to more than A$500,000. For corporations, the maximum will be the greater of A$10 million, or three times the value of the benefit received from the breach, or (if this value cannot be determined) 10% of the company’s annual turnover.
The privacy commissioner could also issue infringement notices for failing to provide relevant information to an investigation. The maximum penalty will be A$2,644 for individuals or A$13,320 for companies.
Such civil penalty provisions will make it unnecessary for the Commissioner to resort to prosecution of a criminal offence, or to civil litigation, in these cases.
Don’t hold your breath
Once legislation is passed, it will take around 12 months for the code to be developed and registered.
The tech giants will have plenty of opportunity to create delay in this process. Companies are likely to challenge the content of the code, and whether they should even be covered by it at all.
Katharine Kemp receives funding from The Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation. She is a Member of the Advisory Board of the Future of Finance Initiative in India, the Centre for Law, Markets & Regulation and the Australian Privacy Foundation.
Graham Greenleaf is a board member of the NGO, the Australian Privacy Foundation.
Ngāti Whātua kaitiaki remain in bolstered numbers at the border between Tāmaki Makaurau and Te Tai Tokerau to stop protesters getting through.
Together with Navy and police staff at Te Hana, Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Whātua has turned around about 50 people from anti-vax and anti-lockdown groups throughout this morning.
Chief operating officer Antony Thompson (Ngāti Whātua) told RNZ protesters had come from both sides of the border to meet up, but none got through.
“About 20 to 25 who got started protesting … after probably about 10 minutes they were moved on.”
His team respected the right to protest but it was the wrong place and wrong time, with a growing covid-19 cluster in the Far North, he said.
“The majority of them [protesters] have dispersed, or gone home. And there’s maybe a handful of, I guess ‘hold outs’, that are hoping that more cars turn up and they can go through together.”
The rūnanga would much rather be vaccinating whānau than having to protect them from rule-breakers, Thompson said.
“Recently our whaea Dame Naida Glavish quoted ‘this hoo-ha, this hōhā’ and it really is.”
‘Incredibly disappointed’ Police said they were “incredibly disappointed” by those rallying.
In a statement this afternoon, police said more officers had been deployed to monitor “hīkoi” activity.
“Police have additional staff deployed, including our Iwi Liaison Officers, to both monitor the hīkoi travelling north as well as additional staff in Waitangi,” the statement said.
“Our focus is to ensure the current restrictions set out in the Health Order are adhered to by those involved as well as working to support our Iwi partners in Northland.
“We are working closely with our partners, including leadership of Te Tii Marae, who have indicated that the protesters are not welcome this year due to the risk posed by the delta strain of covid-19.”
The chair of Te Rūnanga-Ā-Iwi-O-Ngāpuhi Wane Wharerau (Ngāpuhi, Te Māhurehure, Uri Kaiwhare, Ngāitawake ki te Waoku / Ngāitawake ki te Tūawhenua / Ngāitawake ki te Tairāwhiti, Ngāti Hine-Mutu) also put out a statement this morning.
The protesters were “particularly dangerous” attempting to get to Waitangi, he said.
Recognising ‘real Māori freedom fighters’ “It is disappointing that organisers are using He Whakaputanga, or the Declaration of Independence, as a means to bring attention to their cause.
“Ngāpuhi recognise and honour the real Māori freedom fighters whose lifelong activism and personal sacrifice meant something and moved our people forward; freedom fighters such as Eva Rickard, Dame Whina Cooper, Titewhai Harawira, Dr Matire Harwood, Rima Edwards, Matiu Rata, Sir James Henare, and Dame Cindy Kiro just to name a few.
“Almost every Ngāpuhi urupā has evidence of the thousands of whānau, some in unmarked graves,” he said, referring to those who died in the 1918 flu pandemic.
“Now, little more than 100 years after that pandemic, Te Tai Tokerau is at the point of a similar threat, but this time we have a vaccine at our disposal.
“We have not fought this virus for 20 months and tolerated the harsh restrictions around tangihanga, gathering at marae and visiting whānau, to abandon this plan now.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
France has detailed an unprecedented security set-up for New Caledonia’s third and final independence referendum on December 12.
The French authorities made the announcement as the pro-independence FLNKS called on its supporters to boycott the vote after France refused to delay it until next year.
If the call is heeded, the anti-independence side is all but certain to again have a majority as it did in the 2018 and 2020 referendums.
To ensure a safe voting process in December, French High Commissioner Patrice Faure said 1400 armed police will be flown in from France, including 15 mobile units.
French High Commissioner in New Caledonia Patrice Faure … 1400 armed police will be flown in from France. Image: The Pacific Journal
In coming weeks, an additional 100 members of the national police and 250 members of the armed forces are expected.
Elite tactical response unit The police’s elite tactical response unit will also be reinforced to deal with any situation that may arise.
One hundred and sixty vehicles, 30 armoured carriers, two helicopters and a transport aircraft are due in the next weeks.
Sixty investigators will be flown in to stay for as long as needed.
There will also be a cyber unit dedicated to respond to hate speech and calls for violence on social media.
General Christophe Marietti, who oversees the security operation, said the deployment — which is twice the size of the one at the 2018 referendum — is meant to be “reassuring, dissuasive and reactive”.
After the 2018 plebiscite, rioting south of Noumea closed the main road, which police managed to reopen after two days.
Both the French High Commissioner and Overseas Minister Sebastien Lecornu have said the vote would go ahead as announced in June despite the calls to defer it because of the covid-19 pandemic and the devastating impact on the indigenous Kanak people.
Elections held on time Lecornu said in democracies votes were held on time and only an out-of-control pandemic could make a date change possible.
More than 10,000 people caught covid-19 since the start of the latest community outbreak in early September and more than 260 people — mainly indigenous Kanaks — have died.
The FLNKS said its campaign was being hampered because covid-19 measures restrict meetings.
It also argues that the Kanak people are in mourning, and therefore the referendum should be postponed until September next year.
The wish to delay the vote is also being supported by the Melanesian Spearhead Group.
The anti-independence camp has meanwhile resumed its referendum campaign, dismissing the rivals’ concerns by pointing out that the issue at stake has been debated for the past three years.
It also said that it was the pro-independence politicians who in April wanted a third referendum when others were against holding another one.
Final referendum held early Lecornu has said 18 months after the December 2020 referendum, another vote would be held on the next status of New Caledonia.
Paris outlined in a paper in July what the consequences would be of either a yes or a no vote.
A no vote would open the way for an arrangement of partial reintegration into France while a yes vote would, after a transition phase, usher in a sharp rupture.
An FLNKS politician, Pierre-Chanel Tutugoro, said that amid the current debate, two important historic aspects emanating from the 1983 roundtable in Nainville-les-Roches remained.
He said the French state had recognised the innate and active right to independence of the colonised Kanak people.
He also said the Kanak people accepted to include in any future decolonisation process all the various communities that had settled in New Caledonia as part of France’s colonisation.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
National Capital District Governor Powes Parkop has announced that there will not be a total lockdown of Port Moresby.
He said the decision was made after much deliberation with key stakeholders in the city and the national government.
“Instead we will focus on maintaining and upgrading the three-pronged approach we are currently pursuing to respond to the third wave of the covid-19 pandemic,” Parkop said.
NCD Governor Powes Parkop … “we will focus on maintaining and upgrading the three-pronged approach we are currently pursuing to respond to the third wave of the covid-19 pandemic.” Image: EMTV News
NCD Metropolitan Superintendent Gideon Ikumu said it would also be a logistical nightmare for police to arrest people who breached the covid protocols because they did not have the facilities to lock up all those people.
He said city police would only encourage city residents to observe the new normal protocols of wearing facemasks, observing social distancing and other measures as part of their policing routines in the city.
Superintendent Ikumu said this as the City Hall announced on Monday that it would not enforce a complete lockdown as many people had expected, despite the rocketing number of deaths and covid-19 positive cases in the city since September.
“There is an absence of regulations to implement the specifics of the Pandemic Act 2020 and we cannot arrest someone for simply not wearing a mask as an example,” he said.
Defining legislation A regulation is the subsidiary legislation that defines the essence of an Act.
It also provides guidelines that show the way the Act needs to be implemented.
Superintendent Ikumu reiterated Governor Parkop’s appeal to city residents that to stop unnecessary deaths and to get “us to overcome the crisis at hand, it needs everyone to step up and do their part”.
“For those who are still reluctant or afraid of the vaccine for one reason or another, the “Nupla Pasin protocols and testing must be your foremost priority on a daily basis,” he said.
“We will do our best to encourage compliance but it is up to each and every person in the city to comply.”
A public relations disaster for Fiji just as Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama and Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum head to Glasgow for COP26 as one of Britain’s leading media outlets — The Independent — carries out a detailed investigation into events at the University of the South Pacific.
Fiji’s reputation in Britain and the academic community the world over has suffered a grievous blow.
What emerges is a sordid tale of cronyism, bullying, repression and a frontal assault on regional cooperation by the FijiFirst government that has undermined Pacific solidarity and adversely affected the education of ordinary Pacific Islanders at USP, including Fijian young people.
COP26 GLASGOW 2021
The length and scope of this article and its impeccable pedigree guarantee that it will become the dominant global narrative about events at USP and have a far reaching impact on Fiji’s reputation, including its current role as Chair of the Pacific Islands Forum.
And for what? For Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum’s ego.
A festering wound that will cripple the FijiFirst government all the way to the 2022 election, when its prized “youth vote” will get to make its own pronouncement at the ballot box on events at USP.
Be genuinely dismayed at the AG’s shortsightedness and Bainimarama’s stupidity for allowing his number 2 to embark on a battle he simply cannot win.
This is what The Independent describes as a “long read”:
“At first there is a woman’s voice coming from the back of the house in the dead of night. Then there is repeated ringing of the doorbell. Other voices, male ones, are coming through the front door now; the voices are authoritative and increasingly impatient. Instructions are barked, telling those inside to open up. Fists bang the door. Soon plainclothes police officers are inside and shortly afterwards 63-year-old Professor Pal Ahluwalia and his wife Sandy Price are forcibly escorted to the airport. The vice-chancellor of the most prestigious university in Fiji is being deported on the orders of the Fijian government.
“The University of the South Pacific (USP) is pretty. Its main campus building in Fiji has a clean, modern design and is fronted by rows of palm trees. But behind the attractive facade and beneath a clear blue South Pacific sky, all hell is breaking loose. An internecine conflict has broken out. On one side stands the vice-chancellor, Professor Pal Ahluwalia, who claims to have blown the whistle on mismanagement and malpractice at the university; opposing him are pro-chancellor Winston Thompson and the Fijian government, who say Ahluwalia is guilty of both breaking USP hiring protocols and of unspecified immigration violations.”
After 18 months of lockdown, the City of Melbourne is understandably anxious to get people back to the CBD and inner areas. Commercial vacancy rates are high, international student numbers have plummeted and the streets are dead.
The council’s $A2.6 million plan to provide “creatives and entrepreneurs” with “flexible, short-term licence agreements” should, however, ring alarm bells.
You can’t just add instant culture to activate an area. These kinds of efforts are not just exploitative, there is no evidence that they work.
Temporary use arrangements in Australia keep artists on the edge of being thrown out at any time.
As the council CEO Justin Hanney notes, artists will have the space month-to-month and the properties can be “taken back by the landlords/owners at any point in time”.
Serious cultural producers will tell you one of the most important components of their ability to work is security of tenure.
Perhaps unwittingly, though, the shopfront program may hold promise. Economists predict the current economic slump will persist for at least a year, meaning temporary users will likely be looking at a more meaningful time frame.
In addition, Lord Mayor Sally Capp’s extension of the program to “performance, new retail pop-ups, entrepreneurial activities, even community radio stations” opens out the field.
The program is part of the joint state government and council A$100m recovery fund, in addition to the state’s $A15 million package to support the hard hit creative sector.
These are positive initiatives. In crisis there is opportunity. Now, let’s think about how best to use this opening.
Melbourne’s streets emptied during the city’s lockdowns. Shutterstock.
What do artists actually need?
Arts, music, performance and other cultural activities should be treated as neither saviours nor indicators of a city’s economic health. They exist in their own right, with many spin-off and flow-on effects for the city including associated anti-racist, anti-fascist, LGBTI+-welcoming, social, environmental and political activism.
The strength of a city’s cultural scene is not linked to its economic success. The exception is that the more successful the city becomes, the more the scene is at risk.
Some of the world’s best cultural scenes are in poorer cities: New Orleans, Chicago, Berlin. Some of the world’s best scenes that have since died were in cities that became rich: New York, London, Paris. In all of these cities, along with cities like Austin, Seattle, Brisbane and Melbourne, two key conditions existed for the seeds of those scenes to be sown. Plenty of space and cheap rent.
Cities known for their arts and cultural activity today make a point of supporting those scenes – such as in New Orleans with a stream of world famous festivals employing only local artists and paying them well – or still have land available for cultural use and cheap housing, such as in Chicago and Berlin.
But Berlin is changing rapidly. The city celebrated for its alternative scene is gentrifying, with vacancy rates shrinking and property prices and rents increasing (due more to the large tax incentives offered to companies to relocate to Germany’s capital than to any cultural activity). These trends place the scene under pressure.
Most of these initiatives are aided by considerable financial or government support, with cultural producers and entrepreneurs recognised and respected members of civil society.
Melbourne’s large cultural scene has been fighting gentrification for decades. Organisations such as Fair Go for Live Music, Save Live Australia’s Music and most recently, Save Our Scene have clearly shown the threats from economic growth to local culture. Until very recently, government support has been sorely lacking.
But in the current economic climate, with vacancy rates higher and property prices and rents lower than they have been for years in the inner-city and stricken CBD, a real opportunity exists to literally as well as metaphorically embed the scene in the city’s fabric.
Part of the $A100 million recovery fund should provide deposits and guarantees for artist and artist-collective purchases of inner-city property. That would take those places out of the market and secure a place for the arts for the long term.
The state government and council could broker secure, long-term leases for cultural producers, using influence and incentives to negotiate reasonable rentals that would give owners secure, long-term revenue streams.
They could help venues, performance spaces, galleries and cinemas to fully open up again. Permanent arts spaces could be secured in the Nicholas Building – a hive of cultural production right on the doorstep of the Town Hall.
The Nicholas Building is on the market, and artists fear they may lose it to development. Could it, instead, enter into public or collective ownership?
The pandemic-induced slump will pass and Australia’s cities will come to life again. They are stable and secure places to invest. Students will return, vacancies will decline and commercial and residential rents will increase, irrespective of the health of arts and culture.
Now is the time to act. If Melbourne’s state and city governments do not take the chance now to value what we are lucky to still have, we may lose it forever.
Kate Shaw has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services, and the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius Gastwissenschaftsprogramm für Stadtforschung an der HCU (Fellows Program
for Urban Research at HafenCity University Hamburg) .
Participation in specialist sport programs keeps teenagers from low socioeconomic backgrounds at school and boosts their maths grades. This is what I found in my PhD study.
Being engaged in learning can set people up for success in the rest of their life. This is why experts see it as one of the main goals of early adolescence.
My PhD research explored the influence of specialist sporting programs on the educational outcomes of students attending schools in low socioeconomic areas of Perth. Specifically, I was interested in how participation in these programs affected the students’ academic performance and level of school engagement.
What are specialist sports programs?
Students who participate in specialist sporting programs specialise in one sport in place of a range of elective subjects in years 7-10. Enrolment is open to all students, including those who live outside a school’s catchment area, and selection is generally based on:
a high level (or potentially high level) of sporting ability and coachability
a positive attitude toward sport and school (in primary school)
a good record of behaviour and attendance.
The selection criteria are a way for the school to clearly communicate their expectations from the very beginning. They are about encouraging the continuation of students’ positive behaviours into secondary school, rather than trying to solve the problem of disengagement down the track.
Specialist sport programs are available in a variety of forms across Australia (including South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland). Some take an elite pathway approach, while others focus on participation. They are increasingly being developed in both public and private schools.
Specialist sporting programs come in various forms. Shutterstock
On average, schools allocate around four hours of class time per week to specialist sports programs. In years 7-10 this time is split evenly between practical and theoretical work. In years 11 and 12 there is roughly a 70-30% practical-theoretical split.
Practical sessions focus on developing skills and students’ fitness levels. Theoretical sessions cover topics such as biomechanics and physiology, rules and tactics, and nutrition and sport psychology.
What my study showed
Broad claims are made regarding the positive influence of the programs. For example, Western Australia’s education department states specialist sport programs can:
develop character, teach technical skills and self-discipline, and nurture a love of sport […] and […] enable children to compete at the highest levels and develop their skills as athletes both on the field and in the classroom.
But there has previously been no research on these programs in Western Australian schools to support this assertion.
Only two studies have investigated the influence of specialist sports programs on students’ academic achievement. Both were conducted in the United Kingdom and examined final year students’ academic performance in the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education). Students attending specialist program schools had better scores than those attending non-specialist schools. The improvement in scores over time was greater at schools with a high percentage of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.
Mine is the first study to examine the link between early adolescents’ academic achievement and engagement with school, and participation in specialist sports programs in Australia.
My study involved seven secondary schools and students in years 7-10, in low socioeconomic areas of Perth.
A total of 68 specialist sports students gave access to their school grades for each subject over the period of a year and 73 students completed a survey measuring their level of engagement with school.
I also interviewed 11 students and three parents, as well as five teachers and three graduates of the programs.
To analyse programs’ effects on student grades, I assigned each grade a number (A = 5, B = 4, C = 3) – essentially a better grade was assigned a higher number). I then compared the mean grade for each subject, each year. At the baseline measurement, the mean grade for maths was 3.08 (a C grade). At the follow-up a year later it was 3.30. Although it was still a C grade, statistical analysis deemed this a significant improvement.
There was some improvement in the maths scores of students who were part of the programs. Shutterstock
Mean grades in all other subjects – English, science, society and environment, and health and physical education – remained stable. Students’ level of engagement with school also remained stable over the period of a year.
What students said
Many students said the program was the reason they attended school each day, and the reason they applied effort to their education.
One male student said:
I didn’t want to come to [school] unless I got into the [program].
A parent said:
There are a lot of kids that the only reason they’re still at school is because of the program – it gives them a reason to go [to school].
Both male and female students felt participation in a specialist sports program positively influenced their engagement with school.
A female student said:
It’s fun […] it’s energetic and you just have a great time doing it.
And a male graduate told me:
It was the best five years of my life!
Only male students discussed specific aspects relating to engagement, such as attendance, behaviour and academic achievement. One said:
It made me think, it’s going to affect your appearance in the program […] it’s made me think harder in maths and like […] English and stuff like that so […] I moved up from a C to a B in English from thinking about the program, and if I didn’t think about the program, I would still have been on a C kind of thing.
There were two main limitations to this study: the lack of a comparison group and the possibility of self-selection bias. Despite my best efforts to recruit both specialist and non-specialist students, not enough non-program students provided informed consent to conduct a valid statistical comparison.
All schools with a specialist sports program located in low socioeconomic areas of WA were invited to participate, but only seven agreed. So it is possible only schools in which the specialist sports teacher was proactive and proud of the program’s accomplishments agreed to be involved in the research.
That said, for the schools involved in the study, specialist sports programs provided students with a supportive learning environment.
It is important educators consider the students’ individual needs and interests in designing specialist sports programs. And they should be open to further developing other specialist programs — whether that be in other sports or other interest areas.
Eibhlish O’Hara 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.
Health Minister Greg Hunt said he expects the booster program to start from November 8. However, the federal government is awaiting further advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) about who should receive it and when.
Given our approved vaccines were originally marketed as two-dose jabs, why are we now looking at an extra dose?
Why another jab?
Scientists have often said we may need another jab in the future to have better long-term protection against COVID. This is because of concerns about the possibility the immunity will decrease over time.
Initially it was hard to predict when this might happen. But it’s clear now the need and timing for an extra vaccine dose depends on what group of people you’re talking about.
Earlier in October, boosters for people who are severely immunocompromised became available in Australia. These are available 28 days after the second dose.
Among those who do have a strong response to a two-dose vaccine, their level of protection against infection or serious disease is being tracked over time.
Earlier this year, Israel reported increasing rates of infection in fully vaccinated people aged 60 years and older. This led the government to provide third doses for this age group.
In the short-term, the strategy appears to have worked, with infections dropping ten-fold at least two weeks after the boost.
What is ‘waning immunity’?
We’ve heard a lot about “waning immunity”, but this may actually be referring to more than one topic.
Across a population, we can track how well vaccines are performing at preventing people from getting infected, getting sick, or needing to go to the hospital.
At an individual level, scientists can also study the waning of immune responses over time.
There are two key parts to this immunity: the antibodies that can bind to the virus and stop infection completely, and the cells that remember the virus for (hopefully) years to come, ready to be reactivated if the virus gets in.
After a few months, the levels of these antibodies have dropped somewhat among those who receive two doses, likely explaining why vaccine effectiveness declines and breakthrough infections in fully vaccinated people occur.
But if our immunity drops, why are people still protected from hospitalisation and severe disease?
That’s where our immune memory comes in. If you do get infected after being vaccinated, your white blood cells will quickly jump into action, producing lots of antibodies and getting ready to kill the virus.
Although longer-term immunity from vaccination dramatically reduces the need for hospitalisation, breakthrough infections following the waning of immunity do result in further spread of the virus, complicating efforts to control the epidemic.
So, after six months, the vaccines may be less likely to stop us from becoming infected at all, but they’re still extremely important for preventing hospitalisation and death.
Therefore, administering boosters will likely reduce infection and transmission, but the effect of boosters to prevent serious disease and death is more modest, at least in those under 60.
Are boosters effective?
Early reports have shown strong immune responses to the third dose, and similar side effects to the first shots (mostly pain and fatigue).
This is important in Australia, as most vulnerable older people received the comparatively less potent AstraZeneca vaccine, and using a potent mRNA booster vaccine is wise.
3-dose vaccine, or booster dose?
Most discussion of additional doses uses the terms “third dose” and “booster dose” interchangeably. But there’s a key distinction.
Many vaccines for other diseases are given as three-dose vaccines, including the Hepatitis B and Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines. In these cases, you’re considered fully vaccinated after having three doses, and in some cases, are expected to have life-long immunity.
This is different from situations in which people might need intermittent booster vaccines to maintain their immunity, such as the annual flu vaccine.
For COVID, a third dose vaccine isn’t likely to provide life-long immunity against any infection, and further doses may be needed.
The third dose of Pfizer will be the same formulation that’s currently being given across Australia. In the US, Moderna is planning to administer a half-dose as the third shot.
The best timing of booster vaccines requires careful follow-up in trials.
Are boosters ethical?
There’s a question about whether wealthy countries should be embarking on third-dose rollouts given global vaccine supply is limited.
Many developing countries have vaccinated very small proportions of their populations. They remain vulnerable to widespread outbreaks and the overwhelming of already fragile health-care systems.
Also, large numbers of infections across the world can drive additional variants and economic and political instability.
There’s a moral and political imperative for wealthy countries to donate vaccines to initiatives such as the World Health Organization’s COVAX program.
The Morrison government’s eleventh hour commitment to net zero by 2050 is a monumental failure.
Critics rightly point out the government’s plan involves no increase to Australia’s 2030 climate target, no new funding or policies and few concrete details of how reductions will be achieved – except a heavy reliance on technological solutions not yet invented.
What we do know is not encouraging. The questionable focus on subsidising technologies such as carbon capture and storage seems designed to allow the fossil fuel industry to keep operating for decades to come. There is also no detail on how the promised jobs and economic growth will be achieved, nor any plan to legislate the projected reductions in emissions.
But the most glaring gap is a complete failure to tackle Australia’s biggest contribution to climate change: our coal, gas and oil exports. What’s more, the government’s “technology not taxes” mantra belies the fact taxpayers, not big business, will incur a multi-billion dollar bill for emissions reduction.
No net-zero without exports
The government’s plan contains no credible strategy to reduce the enormous emissions produced by Australia’s fossil fuel industry, especially the export industry.
Australia’s fossil fuel exports have more than doubled since 2005. We are the world’s largest exporter of metalurgical coal and the third largest exporter of fossil fuels overall.
The emissions caused by other countries burning Australia’s exported fossil fuels are more than double Australia’s domestic emissions.
Annual domestic greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 were around 494 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Yet the emissions from exported coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG) alone were 1,073 million tonnes, according to my calculations using standard conversion factors. This is more than the emissions caused by the 2019-2020 bushfires.
For a net-zero plan not to include a strategy to phase out this enormous contribution to climate change is an abrogation of responsibility.
Australia is not responsible for all of the emissions produced by exported fossil fuels – after all other countries consume them. Still, Australia must take a high degree of responsibility given the billions of dollars in subsidies and environmental approvals that allow the industry to exist.
Australia is the world’s third largest fossil fuel exporter. Shutterstock
The supply of cheap, subsidised fossil fuels to global markets significantly worsens climate change, even if not all of the emissions from those exported fuels are Australia’s responsibility.
The government is asking the wrong questions. Instead of asking how it can reduce domestic emissions, it should be asking: what is Australia’s contribution to climate change and how can it be reduced? Given the combined emissions from Australia’s exported fossil fuels and domestic emissions are around 3-4% of global emissions, this must be addressed.
And there is clear evidence Australia’s fossil fuel industry will continue to enjoy strong support.
The net zero plan includes directing the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency to fund technologies like carbon capture and storage – the process of capturing carbon emissions from the source and storing in the ground – which will channel more taxpayer dollars into the fossil fuel industry.
The federal government also continues to grant approvals for new fossil fuel developments that will create millions of tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. This includes three new coal mines and a new major gas power plant in Kurri Kurri in the Hunter Valley.
These actions are not consistent with a real commitment to reducing Australia’s contribution to climate change.
Emissions from our exports were far greater than emissions released in the 2019-2020 bushfires. Shutterstock
Technology via taxation
The support the fossil fuel industry will receive under the government’s plan also means the government mantra of “technology not taxes” is highly misleading.
The commitment in the government’s new plan to spend A$20 billion of taxpayer money on new technologies is using taxes to pay for climate action. Any subsidy for fossil fuel production, the development of new carbon capture and storage technologies or other low emissions technology, comes from taxation revenue.
There are many policies that would shift the burden of climate action away from taxpayers and onto the companies responsible for the pollution. This includes extracting the full historical social cost of carbon from big polluters or legislating a carbon price.
But as we all know, the Coalition scrapped the Gillard government’s carbon price in 2014 and such a policy is now considered political poison.
The bulk of federal tax revenue comes from individual taxpayers. The majority of the big fossil fuel exporters such as Shell or ExxonMobil, which have contributed huge volumes of greenhouse gases, pay little or no corporate tax. And under the Morrison plan they will not have to pay for their pollution.
The plan procrastinates on climate action
The timing of this plan is also deeply flawed. Even with Australia’s projected (not legislated) emissions reduction of 30-35% by 2030, this still leaves around 70% of the emissions reductions to happen after 2030. Given the urgency of the problem, the proportions ought to be the other way around.
In a briefing note released Monday by the ARC Centre of Excellence, Australian climate scientists say even if global emissions do reach net-zero by mid-century, temperatures are still likely to exceed 2℃ this century if short-term action doesn’t increase.
Australia’s weak targets are made worse by the fact our per capita emissions at 22 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent are double the OECD average. Australia’s long history of high domestic and exported emissions means we ought to be on top of the list of emission reducers, not at the bottom.
The position Australia finds itself in on the eve of the COP26 negotiations could not be more stark. We can either join the ranks of the climate ambitious and come up with a real plan with substantial interim targets. Or, we can join with the likes of Saudi Arabia and delay action further.
But what we cannot do is claim to be taking climate action while simultaneously being one of the world’s largest coal exporters and pretending it makes no contribution to climate change.
Jeremy Moss receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
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