The Morrison government has been dealt a blow with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal ruling national cabinet is not a committee of federal cabinet and therefore is not covered by cabinet confidentiality.
This means its documents are accessible under freedom of information legislation. The federal government had argued that, as a cabinet committee, it was exempt from FOI.
The challenge to national cabinet secrecy was brought by crossbench senator Rex Patrick.
In his judgment, federal court Justice Richard White said: “The mere use of the name ‘National Cabinet’ does not, of itself, have the effect of making a group of persons using the name a ‘committee of the Cabinet’.
“Nor does the mere labelling of a committee as a ‘Cabinet committee’ have that effect.”
White rejected the government’s argument the prime minister had the ability to determine what a cabinet committee was.
“This seemed tantamount to a submission that any committee may be a ‘committee of the Cabinet’ for the purposes of the FOI Act merely because the Prime Minister of the day has purported to establish it as such. This premise is unsound,” White said.
Patrick said the decision was “a decisive win for transparency and accountability”.
He said what Morrison labelled “national cabinet” was a faux cabinet – in effect, the former Council of Australian Governments by another name.
“For almost 40 years Australians have had a legal right under the Freedom of Information Act 1984 to access information relating to intergovernmental meetings, subject only to a test of public harm,” Patrick said.
Morrison had tried to take that right away, he said.
“He did not ask the Parliament to change the law, he just declared that National Cabinet to be part of the Federal Cabinet and as such exempt under the Cabinet secrecy exemption of the FOI Act.
“That arrogant declaration has now been overturned,” Patrick said.
He said this now “opens the vault” including to documents of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, which advises national cabinet.
Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus said the ruling rejected what had been a “tricky marketing ploy” by Morrison. The government was “addicted to secrecy”, he said.
The government can appeal the decision. There is a stay of 28 days before it has to hand over to Patrick the documents he sought.
The judgment, unless overturned, will mean the Senate’s COVID committee will be able to seek access to information it has been refused on confidentiality grounds.
An Australia Institute poll done in May found 58% of people supported allowing national cabinet documents to be accessible via FOI requests.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Hillsong church pastor Brian Houston has been charged over the alleged concealment of information relating to child sex offences.
Houston is a personal friend of Scott Morrison who wanted him invited to the White House state dinner President Donald Trump held in the prime minister’s honour in 2019.
But the White House rejected Houston.
A NSW Police statement issued late Thursday said: “In 2019, an investigation commenced by officers attached to The Hills Police Area Command into reports a 67-year-old man had knowingly concealed information relating to child sexual offences.
“Following extensive investigations, detectives requested the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) review their brief of evidence.”
Earlier this week, the ODPP gave its advice to police. After further inquiries, “detectives served a Court Attendance Notice for conceal serious indictable offence on the man’s legal representative” on Thursday afternoon.
“Police will allege in court the man knew information relating to the sexual abuse of a young male in the 1970s and failed to bring that information to the attention of police.
“The man is expected to appear in Downing Centre Local Court on Tuesday 5 October 2021,” the police statement said.
In 2015 the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, which examined allegations against Houston’s father Frank, found neither the executive of the Assemblies of God in Australia nor Brian Houston referred the allegations to police.
It found Brian Houston “had a conflict of interest” in assuming responsibility for dealing with the allegations “because he was both the National President of the Assemblies of God in Australia and the son of Mr Frank Houston, the alleged perpetrator”.
The Wall Street Journal broke the story, during Morrison’s US trip, of the PM’s nomination of Houston for the dinner and the rejection.
Morrison dodged questions at the time and later about whether he had put Houston’s name up. He said the story was “gossip”.
It wasn’t until March 2020 that he confirmed it, telling 2GB “we put forward a number of names, that included Brian, but not everybody whose names were put forward were invited”. He said he had known Houston a long time.
In the 2GB interview, Morrison was asked whether he was not aware that Houston was under police investigation at the time.
“These are not things I follow closely,” Morrison said. “All I know is that they’re a very large and very well attended and well-supported organisation here in Australia.
“They are very well known in the United States – are so well known that Brian was actually at the White House a few months after I was. So the President obviously didn’t have an issue with it. And that’s why I think that’s where the matter rests.”
Houston has been living in the US for some time.
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 the past two weeks numerous opposition politicians — MPs, former prime ministers, party leaders and even party volunteers — have been taken in for police questioning in relation to their criticism of a government land bill.
Land ownership is a highly sensitive issue in Fiji. As new legislation relating to land and introduced in the middle of the country’s alarming covid-19 crisis, the iTaukei Land Trust Bill No. 17 was destined to trigger debate.
But criticism of the contentious legislation has prompted the repeated detention of opposition figures, with police saying they were being questioned under the Public Order Act.
The National Federation Party leader, professor Biman Prasad, was taken in four times.
“All this talk about Fiji being a genuine democracy as espoused sometimes by [Prime Minister Voreqe] Bainimarama and others in the government is all hogwash,” the MP said.
“We are not in a country where we have the freedom to talk about legislation which has been tabled in Parliament. I mean, that’s the role of the opposition.”
Public order While Dr Prasad said he was treated courteously by police, it is unclear who has been laying the complaints which spark the arrests, or who is ordering them.
Dr Prasad said the head of the police, or the government, should come clean about it.
However, Fiji police are contending with what the Acting Commissioner of Police, Rusiate Tudravu, describes as attempts to incite instability and rally support against the government.
He issued warnings to the public, particularly after a series of recent fires, including at a shopping arcade in Ba, and a mosque compound in Tavenui.
“We want to assure all Fijians that any attempts to destabilise and cause instability will be investigated and dealt with,” Tudravu said on a police Facebook post.
Fire at a commercial precinct in Ba, western Fiji. Image: Fiji Police
The head of the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre, Shamima Ali, said while there was tension in the community over the worsening pandemic, job losses and economic hardship, it was unclear whether the fires could be linked to anti-government sentiment.
But according to her, community fear and uncertainty have deepened regarding what people are or aren’t allowed to say.
“The police, whenever people start talking, start questioning the government, in recent years, they come in and start talking about the Public Order Act.
“But the laws are such that people are scared to talk,” Ali said, adding that the media in Fiji remained largely muzzled.
Shamima Ali … Image: FWCC/RNZ
No room for criticism Fiji’s government has not taken up RNZ Pacific’s requests for comment on the issues raised here.
A government on the back foot, it continues to defend its no-lockdown policy as covid-19 spreads like wildfire on Fiji’s main island, Viti Levu.
For the past two weeks around 1000 new cases of the virus were reported each day, along with a steady rise in deaths.
There has been no shortage of epidemiologists quietly urging the Fiji First government to employ some form of lockdown in order to curb the spread of the virus, perhaps buy it some time to complete vaccination without too many people becoming gravely ill. But Bainimarama and his deputy remain unmoved.
After delivering a new budget aimed at helping Fijians recover from the pandemic’s economic fallout, the Attorney-General and Minister for Economy, Aiyaz Saiyed-Khaiyum bristled at opposition suggestions that throwing all of Fiji”s eggs in the vaccination basket was unwise.
“What is the alternative? There is none, and of course they [the opposition] won’t offer any,” he said.
“If we just rely on lockdowns, unfortunately we’ll forever be closed to the outside world. That is why the opposition wants a lockdown, because they don’t want this crisis to end, so they can blame the socio-economic woes on the government, and make this an election issue.”
The government has made steady progress with the vaccine rollout, with 85 percent of Fiji’s eligible population having received at least a first dose, and almost 30 percent having had two doses.
The rollout is being conducted using doses purchased for Fiji by Australia and New Zealand, whom Saiyed-Khaiyum claims are supporting his country with vaccines because it is “the only solution”.
Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum … vaccines “the only solution” for Fiji. Image: RNZ/Facebook/Fiji govt
Ali said people who criticised government handling of the covid-19 crisis were lambasted by the administration.
More worrying, she said, some critics of the goverment land legislation were held in police detention over for almost 48 hours without charge.
“Democratic and human rights spaces are really diminishing in this country over the years, and it’s at its worst right now, with the taking in of all these people — two former prime ministers, leaders of this country — with no reason or rhyme. No charges have been laid, just intimidation and so on.”
‘Docile’ regional response Most regional governments, including Australia, have been silent on the arrests. New Zealand’s government has registered concern, via a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“New Zealand is concerned by reports about the detention of a number of Fiji political figures,” a ministry spokesperson said.
“We are continuing to monitor the situation and the New Zealand High Commission in Suva is making inquiries with Fiji officials to ascertain further details.”
Ali said that she had worked with various diplomatic missions in Fiji over the years as upheavals, including coups, have happened in the country.
“I have never seen such a docile international community as I have seen this time around. The threat of China is also there, so people are taking it easy,” she said.
“Monitoring the situation is good, they need to do that. But I just think some firm diplomacy around accountability and those things also should be there.”
The situation in Fiji is a major concern for the Pacific Islands Forum, but the regional body’s limited ability to respond to the crisis is compounded by the expectation that the Bainimarama government is about to take up the Forum’s rotational chair.
While covid has the country’s health system is on its knees, job losses and food shortages are causing serious hardship in Fiji.
Shamima Ali said her centre was seeing increasing cases of domestic violence, a sign that the strain on Fiji’s social fabric is becoming untenable.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Artificial systems such as homecare robots or driver-assistance technology are becoming more common, and it’s timely to investigate whether people or algorithms are better at reading emotions, particularly given the added challenge brought on by face coverings.
In our recent study, we compared how face masks or sunglasses affect our ability to determine different emotions compared with the accuracy of artificial systems.
The study used full and partial masks and sunglasses to obscure parts of the face. Author provided
We presented images of emotional facial expressions and added two different types of masks — the full mask used by frontline workers and a recently introduced mask with a transparent window to allow lip reading.
Our findings show algorithms and people both struggle when faces are partially obscured. But artificial systems are more likely to misinterpret emotions in unusual ways.
Artificial systems performed significantly better than people in recognising emotions when the face was not covered — 98.48% compared to 82.72% for seven different types of emotion.
But depending on the type of covering, the accuracy for both people and artificial systems varied. For instance, sunglasses obscured fear for people while partial masks helped both people and artificial systems to identify happiness correctly.
Importantly, people classified unknown expressions mainly as neutral, but artificial systems were less systematic. They often incorrectly selected anger for images obscured with a full mask, and either anger, happiness, neutral, or surprise for partially masked expressions.
Decoding facial expressions
Our ability to recognise emotion uses the visual system of the brain to interpret what we see. We even have an area of the brain specialised for face recognition, known as the fusiform face area, which helps interpret information revealed by people’s faces.
Together with the context of a particular situation (social interaction, speech and body movement) and our understanding of past behaviours and sympathy towards our own feelings, we can decode how people feel.
A system of facial action units has been proposed for decoding emotions based on facial cues. It includes units such as “the cheek raiser” and “the lip corner puller”, which are both considered part of an expression of happiness.
Can you read the researchers’ emotion from their covered faces? Both artificial systems and people are compromised in categorising emotions when faces are obscured. Author provided
In contrast, artificial systems analyse pixels from images of a face when categorising emotions. They pass pixel intensity values through a network of filters mimicking the human visual system.
The finding that artificial systems misclassify emotions from partially obscured faces is important. It could lead to unexpected behaviours of robots interacting with people wearing face masks.
Imagine if they misclassify a negative emotion, such as anger or sadness, as a positive emotional expression. The artificial systems would try to interact with a person taking actions on the misguided interpretation they are happy. This could have detrimental effects for the safety of these artificial systems and interacting humans.
Risks of using algorithms to read emotion
Our research reiterates that algorithms are susceptible to biases in their judgement. For instance, the performance of artificial systems is greatly affected when it comes to categorising emotion from natural images. Even just the sun’s angle or shade can influence outcomes.
Algorithms can also be racially biased. As previous studies have found, even a small change to the colour of the image, which has nothing to do with emotional expressions, can lead to a drop in performance of algorithms used in artificial systems.
As if that wasn’t enough of a problem, even small visual perturbations, imperceptible to the human eye, can cause these systems to misidentify an input as something else.
Some of these misclassification issues can be addressed. For instance, algorithms can be designed to consider emotion-related features such as the shape of the mouth, rather than gleaning information from the colour and intensity of pixels.
Another way to address this is by changing the training data characteristics — oversampling the training data so that algorithms mimic human behaviour better and make less extreme mistakes when they do misclassify an expression.
But overall, the performance of these systems drops when interpreting images in real-world situations when faces are partially covered.
Although robots may claim higher than human accuracy in emotion recognition for static images of completely visible faces, in real-world situations that we experience every day, their performance is still not human-like.
Will Browne receives funding from Science for Technological Innovation, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
Harisu Abdullahi Shehu and Hedwig Eisenbarth 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.
Six months after the prime minister received his first jab, Australia finally has a national plan to roll out COVID vaccines.
The plan’s goals, set out in the Operation COVID Shield document released this week, are to ensure public confidence in the vaccine rollout and to get as many Australians as possible vaccinated as early as possible.
The plan looks to reach the vaccination targets set out in modelling from the Doherty Institute and announced after national cabinet.
That would aim to have 80% of eligible Australians fully vaccinated by the end of the year. This figure has been criticised by some experts as too low. On this basis alone the plan is short-term and arguably short-sighted.
But, as the plan admits, there is no exhaustive detail for any of these initiatives, and in particular for how to reach the vaccination target. And any substance competes with jargon and sloganeering.
At best this is an optimistic vision for an improved vaccination rollout that fails to acknowledge and fully address the errors of the past.
The man in charge, Lieutenant General John Frewen, says: “Mathematically, we can get there.”
The plan proposes three key elements for achieving its vision — coordinate, motivate and deliver — each of which comes with inherent problems.
Coordinate
Ramping up the vaccination rollout will require an unprecedented level of collaboration between the Commonwealth and the states, and with other stakeholders. That’s a no-brainer.
But national cabinet has only agreed “in principal” to the prime minister’s plans, with more work to be done. If state and territory governments are not fully on board, then national coordination is impossible.
Motivate
Positive public sentiment and the willingness of Australians to get vaccinated are seen as the “centre of gravity”.
The plan defines this as “the primary entity that possesses the inherent capability to achieve the desired end state” for the plan. This language is a direct steal from the Australian Defence Glossary.
The key new element in this section is setting up an “industry liaison cell” to coordinate messaging and to work with business.
Deliver
Arguably the real centre of gravity of the plan must be the ability to deliver vaccinations at times and locations that ensure jabs in people’s arms. If these commitments are not met, the “positive public sentiments” seen as so crucial to the “motivate” part of the plan will quickly become negative.
Some pretty heroic assumptions underpin the 19 million vaccine doses expected to be available in November (that’s 10 million Pfizer, 5 million AstraZeneca, 4 million Moderna).
The most striking feature of the plan is the array of new structures it imposes, such as new committees or “cells”. These are on top of the complicated array that already exists and the many stakeholders.
Frewen is the coordinator general of the National COVID Vaccine Taskforce, known as Operation COVID Shield. But there are many other hands on the tiller. He reports to the prime minister, the health minister, cabinet and the national cabinet. He must also work in partnership with the states and territories.
The taskforce now has streams to coordinate, motivate and deliver. It also oversees an “assessments cell”, which will analyse data and track progress of the vaccine rollout against targets.
There will also be a new “program governance committee” to oversee and advise the taskforce on managing key (unspecified) risks and achieving outcomes.
Then there are business stakeholders who will be looked after by the already mentioned new “industry liaison cell”.
This interesting addition will coordinate the allocation of vaccines to approved business partners, drive how businesses communicate about vaccination, and facilitate policy discussions relating to issues business raises.
This could help efficiently drive vaccinations in the workplace. But it’s easy to see how disruptive this could be if industry voices and needs are privileged over those of communities that may not have the government’s ear.
Two issues highlight the potential problems ahead.
The first is the deliberate decision that a number of vulnerable population groups — including community carers, people in mental health facilities and immigration detention, the homeless and prisoners — are not included in this plan and responsibilities for their vaccinations will be left to current jurisdictions. This is unfair and untenable.
The second is the lack of insight into what has gone wrong with the vaccine rollout to date.
Ultimately, the only way to know if this military-style campaign plan will fight the pandemic war and defeat the coronavirus enemy is to marshal the troops, invoke a national call to arms, and begin the battle, adjusting the battle plan as needed.
Lesley Russell 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 Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya left Tokyo this week after her Olympics were over, bound not for her home country, but a new home in Poland.
Tsimanouskaya was granted a humanitarian visa by the Polish government after claiming the Belarusian Olympic Committee was trying to force her back to Minsk where she was in danger for her life. According to Tsimanouskaya, “her team had ‘made it clear’ she would face punishment if she returned home”. She wanted protection and asylum.
Tsimanouskaya was not the only athlete to attempt to flee in Japan. On July 16, the Ugandan weightlifter Julius Ssekitoleko left his training camp, with a note saying he hoped to find work in Japan. He is now back in Uganda, where he has been charged with conspiracy to defraud for allegedly travelling to Japan without having qualified for the games.
A history of asylum claims
As the historian Barbara Keys notes, international sporting competitions “provide a very attractive opportunity for people to escape difficult situations at home, most often political repression”.
While athletes claiming asylum often have overlapping political and economic motives, the most high-profile defections of athletes were strongly linked to geopolitics during the Cold War.
In the 1948 London Games, the gymnastics coach Marie Provazníková became the first known defector from the Olympics when she refused to return to Czechoslovakia after the communist coup that toppled the democratic Benes government. Provazníková said she sought asylum because of the “lack of freedom” in Prague.
During the Cold War, athletes seeking to abandon communist states for the US or western Europe expressed diverse motivations, but newspapers mobilised the politicised language of “defection” as a catch-all phrase for these moves.
One of the largest numbers of asylum seekers at an Olympics were the Hungarians who defected during the 1956 Games in Melbourne.
The Olympics came shortly after the bloody Soviet invasion of Hungary, which ended political reforms in that country. CIA planners helped convince Hungarian athletes to defect, even as the Hungarians battled Soviet athletes in the pool and on the track. However, as historian Johanna Mellis explains, some of those defectors soon discovered that life in America was not necessarily as good as in communist Hungary.
Laszlo Tabori, a Hungarian champion miler, for instance, shared a three-bedroom house with 12 other athletes in California. A quarter of the defectors eventually returned to Hungary.
In 1972, over a hundred athletes defected during the Munich Olympics, but some reporters privileged political motives over other reasons in telling their stories.
And during the 1976 Montreal Games, Soviet diver Sergei Nemtsanov sought asylum in Canada, but his defection seemed motivated by love rather than by politics. When his American girlfriend broke up with him, he returned broken-hearted to the Soviet Union.
The role of international law
Under the 1967 protocol of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of a Refugee, a refugee is defined to be
anyone who is outside their own country and is unable or unwilling to return due to a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality, membership to a particular social group, or political opinion.
Signatories to that convention have the obligation to not return refugees to their country of origin. Other international treaties offer rules and guidelines on the treatment of refugees in host countries.
The crux of many of these agreements is that asylum seekers need to be physically in another country to claim asylum and their reason for not wanting to return home is linked to political, ethnic or other forms of persecution, not economics.
Because of their greater mobility, athletes are more able than most to be in a position to ask for asylum. Before finally defecting at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, for instance, Iraqi weightlifter Raed Ahmed had sought international competitions “as the best way to get out of Iraq for good”, according to one report.
As a result, countries hosting international sporting competitions have long prepared for athletes to defect. Even so, officials can still be caught off-guard.
More than a dozen athletes sought asylum during the 2012 London Olympics, and over three years later, the government was still adjudicating their claims. Many athletes who seek asylum face difficult circumstances, including homelessness.
Ironically, many countries happily welcome successful migrant athletes into their fold if they can win gold medals. Qatar and Bahrain have recently fielded Olympic teams full of migrants. In fact, 23 of the 39 Qatari athletes at the 2016 Rio Games were foreign-born.
The International Olympic Committee’s uneven approach to refugees complicates how nations respond to athletic asylum claims.
Officially, the IOC keeps no official tally of asylum seekers at the games. In response to a German media outlet in 2012, the IOC said
There is no stipulation relating to this subject contained in the Olympic Charter. The IOC does not keep a record of cases where athletes, other members of team delegations, or sporting officials may have defected while attending the Olympic Games.
Nevertheless, for over 25 years, the IOC has worked closely with the UN Human Rights Commission to promote athletics in refugee camps and there is now even an Olympic refugee team that competes at the games.
Whenever they saw fit, they exploited me […] I am one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran who they have been playing with for years.
At the same time, however, the IOC did not heed international calls to punish Iran after a wrestler was executed for what human rights activists say were political reasons. (The IOC says its president made appeals to Iran’s leaders to show “mercy” to the wrestler.)
The IOC has opened an investigation into Tsimanouskaya’s case and has demanded Belarus respond to allegations it tried to force the sprinter onto a plane back to Minsk last week. The IOC could sanction Belarus over the incident, but this remains to be seen.
Keith Rathbone 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.
One reason is the official narratives universities present about themselves. The expectations of many stakeholders, not least national governments, shape these narratives. The cruel irony is that this makes our universities all appear the same.
So universities are castigated for their lack of originality and failure to differentiate. There are calls for greater diversity in their teaching and research.
It was claimed these reforms would promote greater diversity in higher education. Observers suggest the opposite occurred very rapidly. Subsequent government reports continued to advocate greater institutional diversity.
By 2008 the Bradley Review had led to so-called mission-based compacts. These were intended to formalise diverse university missions, through agreements negotiated with the Commonwealth. In practice, each university periodically completes a template outlining its planned activities and key performance indicators.
So what does this government program, designed to stimulate diverse and specialised missions, show us? The university compacts provide a veritable bingo card of descriptors for research activity such as:
focus and concentration on research strengths
collaboration and cross-disciplinary thematic approaches
application to complex national and global problems
investment in health and medical areas
growth and nurturing of external partnerships, engagement and impact.
The sameness of institutional research positioning is so pronounced that individual university claims of distinctiveness appear contradictory. It’s easy to see from the compacts how a view has taken hold that universities are all too much alike.
What do we see, though, when exploring beyond abstract institutional descriptions? In another part of our research we looked at Australia’s oldest university, the University of Sydney. This case shows how institutional pronouncements represent a veneer over what is really a hugely diverse internal ecosystem.
This university’s compacts and strategy identify around two dozen areas of research. Extracting from its website and annual reports, however, we find the number of faculties, schools, centres, networks and research groupings exceeds 240.
The picture presented by the University of Sydney’s mission-based compact doesn’t do justice to the full diversity of its research. Shutterstock
The finer detail of such an environment is impossible to articulate in a digestible form. Nobody, least of all government departments with templates and performance indicators in hand, is likely to want to read about such a labyrinth. They are even less likely to invest in something so difficult to describe and manage that it could be labelled organised anarchy.
Universities aim to produce institutional descriptions acceptable to both internal and external stakeholders. This means the extent of internal diversity within even a single university requires considerable finessing.
While the resulting products are then vague and unoriginal, they follow a recipe of heavily institutionalised norms and expectations through which universities signal their status and legitimacy. Australian universities universally believe this is the key to the resources they need to survive and thrive.
It may not appear so at first glance, but differences between universities become clear when examined closely through their research. The research enterprise itself is built on the value of originality and difference. These attributes are controlled mercilessly at a project level through peer review.
And, unlike other enterprises, cross-institutional collaborations are the norm for research.
While important in terms of status and branding, and to those who manage and co-ordinate resource allocation, institutional constructs can be arbitrary distinctions. They can be quite removed from the day-to-day activities of researchers, who are akin to franchisees managing their own research businesses.
Our research also supports the idea that, at the institutional level, Australian universities are highly passive in how they respond to environmental influences. In particular, universities respond diligently to signals from government, on which they feel dependent.
Couple this with a contradiction between policy logic that seeks diversity and associated programs that appear to stifle it, and the result is the homogeneity that we perceive. Compacts provide but one example of this dynamic.
The funding model for universities makes research a (mandatory) cost-bearing exercise. To subsidise research, universities have converged upon the international student market, which lacks the regulatory constraints placed upon domestic student fees and enrolments. A more comprehensive suite of offerings for international students naturally enables institutions to maximise the fees they can generate. This then helps cover the unfunded costs of research.
The funding and regulatory settings that limit university choices are rightly easy targets for blame. But these settings work hand in hand with the unoriginal goals of universities, which reflect a lack of diversity in thinking and approaches to dealing with systemic challenges.
Before jumping headlong into reconfiguring the sector, it may be prudent to examine more closely how and in what ways our universities are similar. When perceiving sameness, we should be careful to ensure we are not missing the finer details that are often – for good reasons – obscured.
The long-observed homogeneity of our universities may be a function of how and why we are asking certain questions, as well as where we choose to focus our attention.
The research on University of Sydney was undertaken before Kalervo Gulson commenced his current position.
Kristy Muir currently receives funding from Vincent Fairfax Foundation, The Myer Foundation, Sidney Myer Trust, Paul Ramsay Foundation and the National Australia Bank.
Julian Zipparo 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.
Recently released modelling from the Doherty Institute, which the federal government used to back its roadmap out of the pandemic, misses one critical point — the importance of vaccinating children.
The Doherty modelling instead focuses on vaccinating 70-80% of the adult population as thresholds for easing various restrictions, such as lockdowns. It says vaccinating younger adults, in particular, is important to reach these thresholds.
However, our modelling shows vaccinating children is vital if we are to reach herd immunity, which would allow us to ease restrictions and safely open up.
This would mean potentially vaccinating children as young as 5 years old.
However, we are still waiting to see if this is safe and effective, with trials under way in the United States. So we need a plan that assumes we may never achieve herd immunity.
Here’s what our modelling shows and how it differs from the modelling used to advise the federal government.
Our modelling, which we’ve uploaded as a pre-print and has yet to be peer-reviewed, considers different vaccine strategies for Australia to achieve herd immunity. That’s when we can expect no sustained transmission of the virus in the community.
We take into account the Delta variant, which is twice as infectious as the original Wuhan strain of the virus, and has a reproduction number estimated between 5 and 10. In other words, this is when one person infected with Delta is estimated to infect 5-10 others.
We also consider different contact patterns across various age groups. This is because some age groups are more mobile and have many contacts. If infected, these people are more likely to infect many others, particularly of similar age, which can lead to reservoirs of transmission.
We combine this information with possible vaccine effects. These include the possibility of having the vaccine then becoming infected, having symptoms, and if infected, how serious the illness is and how infectious people are.
This allows us to model what’s likely, given we’re focused on the Delta variant for now, and allows us to assess the impact of strategies across different age groups, types of vaccines and percentage vaccinated.
Our interactive tool also allows rapid response to changing information, such as new variants, or new evidence about vaccine impact.
Delta is more infectious
The Wuhan strain had a basic reproduction number of 2.5. This means, at the start of the pandemic, one person infected with it was expected to infect 2.5 others.
If the Delta variant is twice as infectious, this means its basic reproduction number may be over 5 (at the lower range of international estimates). So this changes the number (and type) of people we need to vaccinate to reach herd immunity considerably.
The simplest form of the herd immunity equation would suggest we needed to fully immunise 60% of the population to achieve herd immunity for the Wuhan strain but as much as 80% for the Delta variant.
If we take into account how different age groups mingle or are in contact with others, the situation is worse.
For the Wuhan strain, children were not as infectious or susceptible to infection and we predict that if we vaccinate 65% of the adults, transmission would not continue among children.
However, with the Delta variant, we predict children will continue to infect other children, even when most adults are vaccinated.
We also know both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines are less able to protect against the Delta variant, with a reduced efficacy after one dose and slightly reduced efficacy after two doses.
All this makes achieving herd immunity a great challenge.
We estimate if the reproduction number is 5, then vaccinating 85% of the population, including children down to age 5, will be necessary to achieve herd immunity.
If the reproduction number is as low as 3, then vaccinating children will not be necessary to achieve herd immunity and we will only need to vaccinate 60% of the population.
The Doherty modelling uses an effective reproduction number of 3.6. This explains why its modelling does not see vaccinating children as critical to reaching herd immunity. This is the major difference between our model and theirs.
What happens next?
Of course, new variants may arise pushing Delta aside, and the world post-COVID is unpredictable.
The lesson from Delta is if we don’t vaccinate children, we may need to continue some form of public health action to prevent large-scale circulation of the virus.
This would not require stringent lockdown, but may require ongoing mask use and physical distancing, including in children. The alternative is to reduce the focus on case numbers, expect transmission and focus on protecting the most vulnerable.
Herd immunity is not the only possible target. Even if we don’t reach full herd immunity, we may achieve “herd protection”. This provides some reduced risk to people who can’t or won’t be vaccinated, and it will make outbreaks smaller and easier to control.
And without full herd immunity, individuals still benefit from vaccination as they are dramatically less likely to die from COVID.
We predict Australia’s strategy of vaccinating the elderly and vulnerable first is the best strategy for reducing deaths under most circumstances, particularly when there is insufficient vaccine available.
But once the most vulnerable groups have been covered, we should turn our attention to the highest transmitters to achieve herd protection. In Australia, this group is the late teens and young adults.
Whether we next focus on vaccinating children is controversial and many people have voiced their concerns about going down this path. This is because COVID is generally a very mild illness for most children — although long COVID and life-threatening complications can arise.
So we need to balance the risks with benefits. But included in the benefits should be the potential benefit of herd protection and the freedoms that may bring.
The typical Australian will change careers five to seven times during their professional lifetime, by some estimates. And this is likely to increase as new technologies automate labour, production is moved abroad, and economic crises unfold.
Jobs disappearing is not a new phenomenon – have you seen an elevator operator recently? – but the pace of change is picking up, threatening to leave large numbers of workers unemployed and unemployable.
New technologies also create new jobs, but the skills they require do not always match the old jobs. Successfully moving between jobs requires making the most of your current skills and acquiring new ones, but these transitions can falter if the gap between old and new skills is too large.
We have built a system to recommend career transitions, using machine learning to analyse more than 8 million online job ads to see what moves are likely to be successful. The details are published in PLOS ONE.
Our system starts by measuring similarities between the skills required by each occupation. For example, an accountant could become a financial analyst because the required skills are similar, but a speech therapist might find it harder to become a financial analyst as the skill sets are quite different.
Next, we looked at a large set of real-world career transitions to see which way around these transitions usually go: accountants are more likely to become financial analysts than vice versa.
Finally, our system can recommend a career change that’s likely to succeed – and tell you what skills you may need to make it work.
Measure the similarity of occupations
Our system uses a measure economists call “revealed comparative advantage” (RCA) to identify how important an individual skill is to a job, using online job ads from 2018. The map below visualises the similarity of the top 500 skills. Each marker represents an individual skill, coloured according to one of 13 clusters of highly similar skills.
The similarity between the top 500 skills in Australian job ads in 2018. Highly similar skills cluster together.
Once we know how similar different skills are, we can estimate how similar different professions are based on the skills required. The figure below visualises the similarity between Australian occupations in 2018.
Each marker shows an individual occupation, and the colours depict the risk each occupation faces from automation over the next two decades (blue shows low risk and red shows high risk). Visibly similar occupations are grouped closely together, with medical and highly skilled occupations facing the lowest automation risk.
The similarity between occupations, coloured by technological automation risk.
Mapping transitions
We then took our measure of similarity between occupations and combined it with a range of other labour market variables, such as employment levels and education requirements, to build our job transition recommender system.
Our system uses machine learning techniques to “learn” from real job transitions in the past and predict job movements in the future. Not only does it achieve high levels of accuracy (76%), but it also accounts for asymmetries between job transitions. Performance is measured by how accurately the system predicts whether a transition occurred, when applied to historic job transitions.
The full transitions map is big and complicated, but you can see how it works below in a small version that only includes transitions between 20 occupations. In the map, the “source” occupation is shown on the horizontal axis and the “target” occupation on the vertical axis.
If you look at a given occupation at the bottom of the map, the column of squares shows the probability of moving from that occupation to the one listed at the right-hand side. The darker the square, the higher the probability of making the transition.
A small piece of the transitions map, with 20 occupations. Transitions occur from columns to rows, and darker blue shades depict high transition probabilities. Source, Author provided
Sometimes a new career requires developing new skills, but which skills? Our system can help identify those. Let’s take a look at how it works for “domestic cleaners”, an occupation where employment has shrunk severely during COVID-19 in Australia.
New occupations and skills recommendations made by the Job Transitions Recommender System for ‘Domestic Cleaners’ – a ‘non-essential’ occupation that has experienced significant declines during the COVID-19 outbreak in Australia.
First, we use the transitions map to see which occupations it is easiest for a domestic cleaner to transition to. The colours split occupations by their status during the COVID-19 crisis – blue occupations are “essential” jobs that can continue to operate during lockdown, and red are “non-essential”.
We identify top recommended occupations, as seen on the right side of the flow diagram (bottom half of the image), sorted in descending order by transition probability. The width of each band in the diagram shows the number of openings available for each occupation. The segment colours represent whether the demand has increased or decreased compared with the same period of 2019 (pre-COVID).
The first six transition recommendations for are all “non-essential” services, which have unsurprisingly experienced decreased demand. However, the seventh is “aged and disabled carers”, which is classified as “essential” and grew significantly in demand during the beginning of the COVID-19 period.
Since your prospects of finding work are better if you transition to an occupation
in high demand, we select “aged and disabled carers” as the target occupation for this example.
What skills to develop for new occupations
Our system can also recommend skills that workers need to develop to increase their chances of a successful transition. We argue that a worker should invest in developing the skills most important to their new profession and which are most different from the skills they currently have.
For a “domestic cleaner”, the top-recommended skills needed to transition to “aged and disabled carer” are specialised patient care skills, such as “patient hygiene assistance”.
On the other hand, there’s less need to develop unimportant skills or ones that are highly similar to skills from your current occupation. Skills such as “business analysis” and “finance” are of low importance for an “aged and disabled carer”, so they should not be prioritised. Similarly, skills such as “ironing” and “laundry” are required for the new job but it is likely that a “domestic cleaner” already possesses these skills (or can easily acquire them).
The benefit of smoother job transitions
While the future of work remains unclear, change is inevitable. New technologies, economic crises and other factors will continue to shift labour demands, causing workers to move between jobs.
If labour transitions occur efficiently, there are significant productivity and equity benefits for everyone. If transitions are slow, or fail, it will have significant costs for both individuals and the state and the individual. The methods and systems we put forward here could significantly improve the achievement of these goals.
We thank Bledi Taska and Davor Miskulin from Burning Glass Technologies for generously providing the job advertisements data for this research and for their valuable feedback. We also thank Stijn Broecke and other colleagues from the OECD for their ongoing input and guidance in the development of this work.
Nik Dawson works as a Senior Data Scientist for FutureFit AI. Nik received funding from the OECD as a Future of Work Fellow to support this research. Burning Glass Technologies generously provided the job advertisements data that enabled this research.
Marian-Andrei Rizoiu receives funding from Facebook Research under the Content Policy Research Initiative grants and by the Commonwealth of Australia (represented by the Defence Science and Technology Group).
Mary-Anne Williams receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Violence can only hinder Fiji’s safe passage leading up to next year’s next general election, says former prime minister Sitiveni Rabuka.
After the enactment of Bill 17 to amend the iTaukei Lands Trust Act 1940, he said no disturbance could change what had been done in Parliament but it could hinder the election.
“There is no need to agitate because the Bill has now been enacted, it’s now part of the iTaukei Lands Trust Act of 1940,” Rabuka said.
“I don’t have a political standing. My comment as the former prime minister is that there is no amount of disturbance that will change what already has been enacted, there is no need for violence.”
In his position as a proposer of a new political party, he said he hoped to participate in the next election.
“It is very dangerous for Fiji to be going through a period of instability because this could delay elections,” he said.
“What has now happened has happened according to law through parliamentary process and can only be undone through parliamentary processes.
“Nothing else, it is in my interest to have a stable passage between now and to the next general elections.”
It might have been just a bronze medal to some people but for the Fijiana team — especially Sesenieli Donu — it was the fruit of sacrifice and a token of appreciation for her village of Vatukarasa in Nadroga.
After an intense competition for the bronze medal with Great Britain at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in Japan, the country’s women sevens rugby team bagged their first ever medal after defeating their former coloniser 21-12 last Saturday.
The excitement spread like wildfire in Vatukarasa as one of their very own has her name down in the history book especially at a hard-hit time when Fiji is battling the deadly delta variant of covid-19.
“This is gold to us to see that one of our own women got to the top and played against teams from bigger countries,’’ Donu’s uncle Jone Domonakibau said.
“After losing both her parents at a very young age, Sesenieli became determined to be one of the best players in rugby and she has proved herself.
“She would lose herself to training and even if it meant for her to be surrounded by men as this was a male-dominated sport. She never gave up.”
Donu was picked for the sevens squad after she proved herself worthy to be with the team at the 2020 Women’s Skipper Cup games in Lautoka.
Deserving trip The 25-year-old’s Olympic journey out of Fiji is her first time in a foreign land and Domonakibau said it was a deserving trip after what she had been through.
“We are so blessed to have witnessed her rugby life at the Olympics and we look forward to more magical works of God in her life as we know she is a capable child.”
He knew that Donu would do wonders when they would see her returning from her training at the beach near their village early in the morning.
“She would wake up around 4 to 5am in the morning when the village is silent and run to the beach and train.
“It was not a surprise to many of us waking up to her return after an intense exercise. He added that the village was organising a celebration for the 25-year-old when she returns.
“We are aware of the restrictions in place and so we would do something really small yet meaningful to show how proud we are of her.
Captain thanks Fijians Like Donu, the rest of the history-making team could not contain their happiness as a video by the Fiji Rugby Union featuring the Fijian captain Rusila Nagasau saying “thank you” to people in the country.
“I want to thank the girls for standing up and winning the bronze today,” she said.
“To our family and friends back at home, I would like to say a big vinaka vakalevu (thank you)… thank you very much for your prayers and support.
“To the government, thank you so much for helping us throughout the five months of quarantine back in Fiji.”
PM congratulates Fijiana In his official Facebook page, the Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama congratulated the team of women for the legacy created in Tokyo.
“Ahead of the Rio Olympics, there were 200 registered women rugby players in Fiji. Now, there are more than 1000.
“With the eyes of the young women of Fiji upon these heroes — no doubt we’ll soon see many thousands more.
The prime minister said the best was yet to come from the team.
The women’s sevens team will return to Fiji next Tuesday and spend 14 days in quarantine before rejoicing the win with their loved ones afterward.
Josefa Babitu is a final-year student journalist at the University of the South Pacific (USP). He is also the current student editor for Wansolwara, USP Journalism’s student training newspaper and online publication. He is a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
Local governments in Papua — such as the Yapen Islands and Puncak administrations — say they are continuing to promote the benefits of covid-19 vaccines to indigenous Papuans as hoaxes and distrust from local people towards the Indonesian government has increased low vaccination rates.
Head of Yapen Islands Health Agency, Karolus Taniwani, has appealed to the public to get vaccinated, showing himself and other Yapen Islands officials who have been vaccinated as evidence that the vaccine is safe.
“Those of us who have been vaccinated are in good health. I invite all people in the Yapen Islands Regency to take part in the covid-19 vaccination,” Taniwani told Jubi by phone.
Taniwani also recounted his own experience of getting vaccinated. He said he got sick following the vaccination but immediately saw the doctor in the hospital for examination.
It turned out the illness was caused by relapsing malaria. Amid the covid-19 pandemic, the Papuan people are still vulnerable to other diseases such as malaria, HIV, and hepatitis.
Coordinator of the Yapen Islands Covid-19 Task Force, Erny Renny Tania, said her party continued to educate the people about the covid-19 pandemic, as well as the importance of adhering to the health protocols.
They did this by traveling around markets and villages by car and spreading information through loudspeakers.
Vaccine ‘not poison’ Puncak Health Agency head Demus Wonda said that the covid-19 vaccine was not poison.
“Drugs [vaccine] imported from outside Papua are not meant to kill the people but to strengthen the people through the formation of antibodies,” he said.
Taniwani echoed Wonda, saying that if it was true the covid-19 was ‘poison’, he would have died. But the fact is, he did not die after being vaccinated.
Fear that the government’s covid-19 vaccination programme would kill the Papuan people is not surprising as years of oppression, discrimination, murder, and imprisonment inflicted by the state against the Papuans have created a prolonged trauma among the people.
Benny Giay, chairman of the Kemah Injili Church Sinode of Papua, said that for the past two years, covid-19 had been used by the Indonesian Military (TNI) and police as an excuse to disperse Papuan people’s protests against racism and the continuation of the Special Autonomy (Otsus) Law.
“Those people whom the Papuan people highly distrust should not be involved in overseeing the vaccination,” Giay said, as quoted by Project Multatuli.
The Papuans, Giay said, saw the involvement of the army and police as “bad intentions” and refused to be vaccinated.
Distrust towards state Audryne Karma, a dentist and daughter of Papuan political figure Filep Karma, also told Project Multatuli that the distrust from the Papuan people toward the government’s health programme was not only over covid-19 vaccinations.
Even before the pandemic, from Karma’s own experience at least, health programmes were, in the eyes of many Papuans, considered to carry a disguised mission to harm Papuans.
According to the head of Papua Health Agency, Roby Kayame, covid-19 vaccination in the province had only reached 190,723 people for first dosage, or 13.06 percent, and 12,911 people (5.58 percent) for the second dose. Most of them are non-Papuan people.
“The percentage of indigenous Papuans [who get vaccinated] is very small compared to non-Papuans in some places,” Kayame said.
Jayapura, Mimika, and Merauke are areas with high vaccination rates. On the other hand, vaccination rates are still low in the mountainous areas of Lapago and Meepago.
In the Saireri area, the vaccination rate in Biak Regency is much higher than Supiori, Yapen and Waropen. Vaccination rates in Boven, Mappi, and Asmat are considered high.
The Project Multatuli report also depicted the story of a mother of two in Wamena city, who was still in doubt about whether she would get the vaccine.
Fear over side effects “Actually, I don’t really mind. But with a lot of information circulating, some say vaccines is good and others say it’s bad, with the side effects and all kinds of things,” she said.
“I have other disease, so this has also become my question. I prefer not to be vaccinated for fear that the side effects can be fatal,” she said.
She said she only obtained information about covid-19 and the vaccination programme through social media. The internet service in Wamena was very slow, making it difficult to find accurate information.
As for direct information, she only heard about the vaccination programme from the police car that going around the villages.
“Mostly, people are terrified by the effects of the vaccine,” she said.
“Indeed, from what I have seen, there has been no major dissemination about the various vaccines that have reached this small community.
“Which groups need vaccines? I don’t know myself. We have the right to know first, don’t we? So we can decide what to do.”
Her testimony shows that the low interest in vaccines is also due to the lack of information from government authorities.
Hengky Yeimo is a Tabloid Jubi reporter. Some information in this article is excerpted from an article written by Asrida Elisabeth for Project Multatuli. The article is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
It’s now well recognised gambling can cause significantharm. However, many countries have done much more to reduce gambling-related harm than we have in Australia.
Here’s four examples of how other countries have responded to the challenge of growing gambling-related harm, drawn from my research on the topic.
Setting loss limits for everyone
Norway replaced harmful high-intensity slot machines — similar to poker machines seen in many clubs, pubs and casinos in Australia — with machines that require users to register their gambling.
For example, every Norwegian using one of these machines has to create a registered account, with maximum limits set on how much you can lose per day and per month, and the capacity to set a lower limit than the universal maximum.
These kind of pre-commitment systems help prevent harm, and help people keep track of their losses.
Finland also has universal loss limits (meaning limits on how much can be bet per day or per month) to prevent “catastrophic” losses for online gambling.
There’s no reason Australia couldn’t follow suit, if it wanted to.
Victoria already offers a voluntary pre-commitment scheme, which allows people to opt-in if they want to set a loss limit. It’s been shown to be ineffective, partly because it is optional. A universal scheme that applied to all would work much better to reduce gambling-related harm.
Reducing the stakes
In 2019, the British government responded to reports of a surge in harms related to slot machines known as “fixed odds betting terminals” (FOBTs). This is a kind of electronic roulette game that sits in betting stores in the UK.
Despite the gambling industry, as one report put it, “disputing a causal link between FOBTs and problem gambling”, harm-reduction campaignerspublicisedstories of people bereaved by gambling-related suicide.
In response to subsequent public concern, the government reduced stakes on FOBTs from £100 to £2.
In other words, the maximum amount you could lose per spin shrank from £100 to £2.
By contrast, in Australia in 2010, the Productivity Commission recommended a reduction in the maximum stake on poker machines in clubs and hotels from $10 to $1.
A decade later, this has yet to be tried, although most Australian states (other than NSW and the ACT) have reduced the maximum loss per spin to $5.
Other countries have shown reforms that reduce gambling-related harm are possible. Shutterstock
Many Nordic countries also divert gambling revenue to good causes such as not-for-profit organisations providing child protection services or Olympic teams.
In Finland, over 69% of gambling revenue goes to good causes (though even this is coming under scrutiny).
In Australia, donations to good causes are around 2% of revenues. The community benefits from gambling are tiny.
Australian state and territory governments rely on gambling taxes for around 6% of their state tax revenue.
This is may pose a challenge to reform; any significant reduction in harm will reduce revenues.
Finland is achieving reform by introducing it incrementally, allowing the reduction in revenue to be managed over time.
A national regulator
Australia’s fragmented system, where gambling is regulated at state and territory levels, is another challenge.
National strategies to prioritise action and coordinate efforts can help align responses. A national regulator could assist in implementing and strengthening existing responses.
The standardised system of regulation in the countries I researched was a feature that could be adopted in Australia, which has a relatively small population.
An opportunity for reform
The recent Bergin inquiry into whether Crown was fit to hold a license in a new casino in Barangaroo and ongoing royal commissions in Victoria and Western Australia continue to expose flaws in the provision of gambling with Australia’s largest casino operator.
These overseas examples show there are many effective ways to reduce gambling harm in casinos, clubs, pubs and suburban communities.
We are fortunate at least in Australia that online gambling has been limited to wagering and lotteries; in many countries slot machines and casino table games are available online 24/7.
Australia has an opportunity now to reduce harm by considering approaches implemented elsewhere.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone
you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or the Gambling Helpline on 1800 858 858.
Angela does not accept funding from the gambling industry. She has been employed on grants funded by the Australian Research Council and the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation. She has contributed to studies funded by Australian Institute of Family Studies, Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety, and the Australian Commonwealth Department of Social Services. Angela has received travel funding from the Turkish Green Crescent Society, Monash University and the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.
The Morrison government will provide $378.6 million for a new redress scheme for Stolen Generation survivors as part of more than $1 billion for its Closing the Gap implementation plan.
The one-off payments will go to living survivors of the Stolen Generation who were removed as children from their families in the Northern Territory and ACT, which were administered by the Commonwealth at the time, and Jervis Bay Territory. The states are responsible for their own arrangements.
Under the Territories Stolen Generations Reparation Scheme eligible people will be entitled to a payment of $75,000 “in recognition of the harm caused by forced removal” from families, and a $7000 “healing assistance payment … in recognition that the action to facilitate healing will be specific to each individual”.
Survivors will also have the opportunity, if they wish, to confidentially tell the story of the effect of their experience to a senior official, and receive a face-to-face or written apology “for their removal and resulting trauma.”
Applications will open on March 1 and the program will run until June 2026.
Scott Morrison said he was delivering practical action on a long-standing issue that was nationally important. It would improve the health and wellbeing of Stolen Generation survivors and their families and communities, he said.
The Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, said it “reflects the government’s commitment to recognise and acknowledge the wrongs of the past as part of the nation’s journey to reconciliation”.
Wyatt said supporting intergenerational healing was key to the government’s commitment to Closing the Gap.
The government, with Indigenous leaders, previously re-worked the Closing the Gap program, originally set up under Labor.
The implementation plan also includes an additional $254.4 million towards infrastructure for Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations.
There will be $160 million to help give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children “the best start in life” through initiatives such as the Healthy Mums and Healthy Bubs program, the Community Child Care Fund, the Connected Beginnings Program and the Early Years Education Program.
Beginning next year the federal government will produce an annual report on progress to deliver on its plan.
In addition, funding will be provided to Aboriginal community-controlled organisations to assist families resolve post-separation parenting and property disputes. Support will be also provided to these organisations to increase involvement in Indigenous family support services.
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.
A new vaccine may be needed if the delta variant of covid-19, which is currently in Fiji, continues to mutate, health experts say.
The government says more than 22,000 people with covid are in isolation and the death toll has passed 260, and climbing.
The victims included an 11-month-old baby, pregnant mothers, a 15-year-old teenager and a 102-year-old woman.
The government maintains there is no need to impose a complete shutdown of the country.
According to the Health Ministry, the average deaths per day is eight, while the daily average infection is 1039 cases or 1174 per million population.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has placed Fiji on level 4 of its covid-alert due to the growing number of cases in the Pacific nation.
Professor Fiona Russell from the University of Melbourne said reports that more people are dying from the virus in Fiji should be a concern.
She said the mutation of the delta strain could happen.
‘Characteristic of all viruses’ “That is a characteristic of all viruses, not just the coronavirus and there are other mutations that have already occurred. At the moment what we’ve found is that the variants have become more transmissible. We have to keep an eye on that and there’s ongoing studies to monitor it. And it may be that in the future, people in Fiji may need a booster.”
Professor Fiona Russell … “That is a characteristic of all viruses, not just the coronavirus and there are other mutations that have already occurred.” Image: Fiona Russell/RNZ
Professor Russell also said Fiji’s health facilities could easily get overwhelmed if people do not take heed of covid-safe protocols.
She warned the country was very early on in the outbreak and should take heed of what had happened in countries such as India.
“If covid-19 takes off in Fiji, then the hospitals may get full and that is if you get sick with anything at all, let alone covid, then the doctors and nurses may not be able to treat you properly because they’re just so busy treating all the other covid patients.
“We certainly in Australia were worried about that and so we made plans for that in case that was to occur.”
She praised Fiji’s efforts in trying to contain the disease.
Professor Russell said the seriousness of covid-19 was evident in how quickly it had spread during the second wave in the country.
University of Otago epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker … “The situation in Fiji is very worrying. They’ve really lost control of this epidemic.” Image: Luke Pilkinton-Ching/University of Otago
Government urged to change strategy New Zealand epidemiologist and University of Otago professor Michael Baker agrees.
He said Fiji was going backwards in its fight against the pandemic.
Despite the Fijian prime minister’s refusal to enforce a national lockdown, Baker said it was not too late for the government to change its strategy.
“The situation in Fiji is very worrying. They’ve really lost control of this epidemic at this point given the record number of infections that are of a very widespread nature.
“It depends what their overall strategy is. If they want to return to elimination position, I think they need to act very decisively now and that actually offers a much better route back to economic recovery than trying to suppress the virus and live with it which hasn’t really worked very well in the past.”
Fijian epidemiologist Dr Donald Wilson said the country was “overwhelmed” by the pandemic.
He warned the current trend of infections could force officials to make “unethical medical decisions”.
“The worry is that when the health system becomes overwhelmed, when it cannot any longer peak in lots of patients who have severe disease, then unfortunately like what has been happening in other countries where doctors have to do the unethical thing of needing to choose who to put on ventilators and who not to.”
Fiji PM Voreqe Bainimarama visited the covid-19 testing facility in Suva. Image: Fiji government/Facebook
Mass vaccination progress Dr Wilson said a mass vaccination campaign aims to immunise 600,000 Fijians by November this year.
Close to half a million Fijians or 84.4 percent of the target population have received their first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, while just over 158,000 or 27 percent have got both jabs.
The head of Fiji’s vaccination taskforce, Dr Rachel Devi, said the only good news is the Moderna vaccine, now in the country, is also effective against the delta variant, the UK variant and the Wuhan strain of the virus.
“We have important strategies in terms of how or when and where we roll this out across the country. This would definitely boost it up especially right now we weren’t vaccinating our pregnant women with the AstraZeneca unless these individuals consented. But I know there’s quite a lot of build-up in that area now. There’s a lot on safety reasons as well.”
Fijian epidemiologist Dr Donald Wilson … warning that the current trend of infections could force officials to make “unethical medical decisions”. Image: RNZ
Meanwhile, an Australia-based Fijian academic warns Fiji is suffering its worst medical, social and economic crisis since the measles epidemic of 1875 which led to the deaths of a third of the country’s population.
Professor Wadan Narsey said this could have been avoided had the government listened to the best medical advice – not just in Fiji, but also from its major partners New Zealand and Australia.
He said Fiji’s tragedy stems from its heath system being unable to cope with the crisis and has seen deaths soar to more than 260, and climbing.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A 15-year-old Papua New Guinean girl, found in a Port Moresby guesthouse during a spot check by immigration and police officers yesterday, says she was sold without her knowledge by her cousin sister for K100 to two men for sex.
Officers of the Immigration and Citizenship Authority (ICA) and police arrived at the guesthouse for a spot check just when the two men were trying to find a room for them and the girl.
The guesthouse at 5-Mile was next on the officers’ list as they crack down on illegal activities by businessmen and foreigners who have become naturalised citizens.
They found the girl among about 20 men and women inside.
They realised that the business was providing other services than accommodation.
The girl, when questioned by the officials, broke down, saying she had been forced to follow the two men by her cousin sister.
“My cousin asked my mother for me to spend a night with her.
‘My mother allowed me‘ “My mother allowed me to spend a night,” she said.
“But [yesterday morning], my cousin said she wanted us to go to the second-hand shop.
“She took me out of the house at 4-Mile and took me to Gordon.
“We met a guy from Popondetta who my cousin said was a friend of hers, and a man from Southern Highlands.
“My cousin told me to keep her friends company while she went to look for betel nut.
“However, she didn’t return.
“And with no bus fare, I was forced to follow the two men.
The 20-year-old woman and the two men detained by immigration and police officers. Image: Kennedy Bani/The National
Paid money to cousin “They both told me they had paid some money to my cousin.”
The officers found out that the cousin had sold her to the two men for K100 (NZ$40) for an hour of sex.
The two men, released with others in the guesthouse, were tracked down at Vision City, where officers found them with the cousin sister.
They had used the girl to find out where the three were after they had left the guesthouse.
The three were surprised when they were surrounded by ICA and police officers.
They were taken to the ICA office in Waigani where they were interviewed.
The girl’s 20-year-old cousin admitted to the officers that the man from Popondetta was her brother-in-law.
Police detain trio Last night, the three were detained at 6-Mile police station for further interrogation today.
Police plan to charge the two men with “obtaining the services of child prostitution”.
The 20-year-old cousin will likely face a charge of “officering, facilitating and receiving benefits from child prostitution”.
It is understood that the girl was taken back to her relatives.
ICA officers and police began their spot checks last weekend arresting people — especially foreigners they believe have been involved in illegal activities.
Some are also being investigated for breaching their visa conditions.
Miriam Zarrigais a reporter for The National. Republished with permission.
Veteran Samoan parliamentarian and chairman of the Fa’atuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) has criticised what he characterises as the “extreme” and “defamatory” behaviour of the former Prime Minister of Samoa since losing government.
Speaking during his programme Ia Ao Samoa yesterday, La’auli Leuatea Schmidt said he was “appalled” by the actions of Tuila’epa Dr Sa’ilele Malielegaoi and his party, especially their “unfounded accusations” towards Samoa’s Chief Justice.
Tuila’epa and the Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP) have so far staged two separate “peaceful protests” to protest what they claim to be the “disintegration” of the Constitution.
Hundreds of people were seen marching in unison, singing together with posters held up in the air.
Some messages were directed explicitly at Satiu Simativa Perese, asking him to step down from the role of Chief Justice.
The Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries believes that Tuila’epa and his party have “gone too far” with their actions.
‘Whole new level’ “I have seen that the level of criticism from them (HRPP) has been upgraded. It has gone up to a whole new level and it’s disappointing [to see],” said La’auli.
“They used to sit here while we were on the other side.
“[And] back then they have been accusing us of so many things, yet we have never gone up to this level.
“This is extreme…what we are seeing right now, their actions and the things they have said is extreme.”
In saying that, La’auli said they are well-aware of all the accusations made by Tuila’epa and his party so far.
However, he flatly denied the claims from the Opposition Leader.
“The comments and remarks they have made are not only impolite, rude, unfounded but also have gone without barriers,” he said.
“I mean, we (FAST) have got used to the way he communicates and the blaming game from him [Tuilaepa].
‘Brainwashed our people’ “But what is sad to see is that they have manipulated and brainwashed our people and exploited our people to achieve their agenda. It’s disappointing to see.”
La’auli believes that the actions from the opposition side of government are causing “unnecessary hatred” among Samoans.
“The level of defamatory remarks has gone above and beyond, without barriers. They’ve made accusations so many times before to ruin the name of our leader, our party, and myself,” he said.
“But now, they are targeting the judiciary.
“I’m appalled at the things they have come up, with especially what they have said.
“It’s sad to see it coming from people who used to lead the country and from someone who was the Prime Minister.
“But I guess they don’t care anymore and have gone as far as trying to destroy the constitution and the judiciary. They have cursed our judiciary and have come up with all those baseless accusations towards the one pillar we are relying on to keep the peace within the country
‘Extraordinary defamation’ “The level of defamation is extraordinary.
“But the question is, who are they to question the work done by the panel of judges in Samoa?
“Were they appointed under the Constitution to question the work of our judges? Are they liable under the constitution to question the roles of judges? Is that their job? I don’t think so.
“Samoa’s highest courts have delivered their decision, so I do not understand why they are still questioning that.
“It seems like they are trying to imply that they are superior and that they are smarter than our judges.”
La’auli said the opposition side has been doing nothing but “wrong moves” since they stepped down.
Moreover, La’auli said, he had already tasked an “investigative team” to look into all the accusations made by the opposition leader and members towards the Chief Justice, judiciary and the FAST government.
‘Criticism has skyrocketed’ “Because the level of criticism has skyrocketed, we need to do something. Therefore, I had already called on our investigation team and asked them to go out and gather all the claims and accusations made by them and bring them all in.
“We will deal with all the unfounded accusations later on.
“At the moment we need to bring and gather them all in, and while we don’t want to waste our time to go and face them (HRPP) there will come a time where we will take all of them to court, that’s the best way to deal with this.
“We will leave it in the good hands of our police and judiciary.
“If they (HRPP) have the guts to break the law then they should also be bold and ready to stand before the court.
“They (HRPP) have exploited our people to achieve their goals.”
‘Tarnishing Samoa’s Constitution’ La’auli accused Tuila’epa of “tarnishing Samoa’s Constitution”.
“How can he accuse other people of destroying the Constitution when it has been greatly damaged under his leadership.,” he asked.
“You only need to look at all the amendments he made over the years, only to destroy and amend them again if it doesn’t work the way he expects it to work.
“So to say that we and the Chief Justice have destroyed our Constitutions is ironic. Because that’s exactly what he has been doing.
“The amendments made under his leadership and under his orders have not only tarnished our Constitution, but also the good work and sacrifice of our forefathers.”
Sialai Sarafina Saneriviis a Samoa Observer journalist. Republished with permission.
Covid-19 infections continue to rise in Fiji with 1220 new cases recorded in the last 24 hours to 8am yesterday.
The government also confirmed seven more deaths, bringing the toll to 261.
That compares with 1100 cases and 13 deaths in the previous 24-hour period.
Health Secretary Dr James Fong said the seven deaths were reported between 31 July 31 and 2 August.
He said all but two of the victims were not vaccinated.
Dr Fong said six of the victims were in the Central Division and one in the Western Division.
A 24-year-old man from Tailevu presented to a medical facility in severe respiratory distress. A medical team brought him to the Colonial War Memorial Hospital in Suva on 1 August. He died on his way to the hospital. His family reported that he was experiencing shortness of breath one week prior to his presentation to the health centre.
A 78-year-old man from Kalabu in Nasinu died at home on 1 August.
An 85-year-old woman from Nasinu died at home on 2 August.
A 67-year-old woman from Nabua had died at home on 1 August.
A 65-year-old man from Sigatoka was declared dead on arrival by the attending medical officer at the Sigatoka Sub-Divisional Hospital. Dr Fong said this means the man had died either at home or on his way to the hospital.
A 48-year-old woman from Nabena village died at home on 2 August. Her family reported that she had a cough, fever, shortness of breath and chest pain for a week before her death.
A 54-year-old man from Cunningham died at home on 31 July.
Fiji’s Chief Medical Adviser Jemesa Tudravu … “all our major health facilities remain fully functional in all divisions.” Image: RNZ/Fiji govt
Three other people who tested positive to covid-19 had also died but their deaths have been classified as not caused by the virus.
Dr Fong said that out of the 1220 latest cases, 756 were from the Central Division while the rest are from the west.
He said there had been 1113 recoveries since the last update that meant there were now 22,689 active cases; 18,506 active cases in the Central Division and 4183 in the West.
Covid-patients on oxygen support, ventilators Meanwhile, 64 covid patients are on oxygen support while three are on ventilators, Chief Medical adviser Dr Jemesa Tudravu said.
He said 332 infected people were admitted in hospital facilities, with 84 in a severe or critical condition.
A total of 384,200 individuals had been screened and 70,744 swabbed, Dr Tudravu said.
He also said all major health services were operational across the country.
Dr Tudravu said the ministry was concerned about the increase in the number of new cases and deaths in the country.
“In terms of health services, all our major health facilities remain fully functional in all divisions providing emergency services, admissions, and inpatient care for Covid and non-covid patients,” he said.
Dr Tudravu said a patient care-flow pathway has been established to ensure that all cases of Covid-19 are identified and followed up.
“This essentially means that if a patient is diagnosed with Covid-19, that patient will be directed to a care plan where the patient will be admitted at home and followed up through telehealth.
“They can also be admitted to an intermediate care facility such as the field hospital and cared for by our team or admitted at the main hospital for high-level care.”
Fiji now has 22,689 active cases in isolation and 261 deaths, 259 of them from the latest outbreak that began in April.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
When the Polynesian Panthers (PPP) activist group began calling for an apology for the Dawn Raids two years ago, we went into the process with eyes wide open. Government lobbyists seldom get everything they ask for, but our intent was honest and real and fuelled by our Panther legacy and love for the people.
We believe that the apology was, and is, a necessary step towards the healing and restoration of trust and relationships between the Pacific peoples and families who were adversely affected by government actions during the Dawn Raids and the Aotearoa New Zealand government.
The prime minister’s emotional ritual entry into Auckland’s Great Hall and her address to Pacific people and communities assembled there last Sunday drastically relived the shameful and unjust treatment of Pacific peoples by successive governments during the Dawn Raids era of the 1970s, when police, hunting for immigrant overstayers and armed with dogs and batons, would burst into the homes of Pasifika families in the early morning hours.
Polynesian Panthers … Why has the government remained silent about setting up a legacy fund to allow education about the Dawn Raids? Image: Screenshot
These experiences and the subsequent deportations have created layers of intergenerational shame and trauma for Pacific victims and families in New Zealand and in the homelands. Studies have since shown that Pacific people made up only 30 percent of the overstayers, and yet almost 90 percent of the deportations.
The bulk of the migrants who overstayed their visas were from the US and UK. Since the apology was announced there has been a flood of victims’ stories –- stories no longer silenced by the guilt, shame and trauma of the raids and random checks.
What was missing from Sunday’s apology was a list of concrete actions the government will take in addressing the injustices. Instead, what was delivered were four “gestures”: some national and Pacific scholarships, and two other educational “gestures” that were really already in place — a publication about experiences of the Dawn Raids and the provision of resources to those schools already teaching about them.
Why has the government remained silent about setting up a legacy fund to allow education about the Dawn Raids — as requested in the petition signed by more than 7000 people and presented to Parliament by Josiah Tualamali’i and Benji Timu — to prevent future generations of New Zealanders from carrying out the same or similar racist actions?
Educate to Liberate The only programme currently addressing this is an unfunded one run by the PPP for 50 years and more specifically for the past 10 years with their Educate to Liberate programmes in schools.
This was a far cry to what the Panthers were calling for.
In its submission for healing and restoration to the government in May, the Panthers were clear about what they wanted: an apology as well as 100 annual scholarships, and the overhaul of the current educational curriculum to include the compulsory teaching of racism, race relations, the Dawn Raids and Pacific Studies and the significance of the Treaty of Waitangi as the cornerstone of harmonious race relations in Aotearoa New Zealand, across all sectors, and assessed as “achieved standards” across appropriate non-history subjects.
If what we Panthers called for was granted and acted on, it would provide a clear message to all Pacific peoples and communities and to all New Zealanders that the government was ready for a truly liberating education and a world-leading pathway to the best race relations — Kiwi-style — in the world.
Alas, what the apology delivered was a watered-down version of what the Panthers called for. By perpetuating a myopic view of our long-term educational needs, the short term gestures outlined in the apology will not be enough to grow a truly liberated and informed youthful leadership for the future.
This oversight suggests a rocky future for the New Zealand government and the va (the social and sacred spaces of relationships) with Pacific peoples. The Polynesian Panther demands to annihilate racism in New Zealand might seem too revolutionary and drastic, and will probably fuel anti-Pacific sentiments, but is this really the absolute maximum that the government can do?
What we were given in this apology did little to dismantle systemic racism. Much more work needs to be done to decolonise and re-indigenise our education system. Why is the teaching of the Dawn Raids only optional and not compulsory? The Panthers platform of peaceful resistance against racism, the celebration of mana Pasifika and a liberating education is as relevant now as it was in the era of the Dawn Raids.
If the changes the Panthers have fought for over the last 50 years don’t materialise, then we have no alternative but to — as Māori scholar and activist Ranginui Walker puts it — “ka whawhai tonu matou [we will continue the fight]”.
Dr Melani Anae is a foundation member of the Polynesian Panthers and an associate professor and director of research at the Centre for Pacific Studies, Te Wananga o Waipapa, University of Auckland. Her books include The Platform: The Radical Legacy of the Polynesian Panthers (2020), Polynesian Panthers: Pacific Protest and Affirmative Action in Aotearoa NZ 1971–1981 (2015), and Polynesian Panthers (2006). This article first appeared inThe Guardianand has been republished here with the author’s permission.
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. Click here to subscribe to Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup and New Zealand Politics Daily.
This stone tablet records the restoration of certain lands by the Babylonian king Nabu-apla-iddina to a priest. Babylonian, circa 870 BCE. From Sippar (Tell Abu Habbah)Wikipedia
Our modern understanding of trigonometry harks back to ancient Greek astronomers studying the movement of celestial bodies through the night sky.
But in 2017, I showed the ancient Babylonians likely developed their own kind of “proto-trigonometry” more than 1,000 years before the Greeks. So why were the Babylonians interested in right-angled triangles? What did they use them for?
I have spent the past few years trying to find out. My research, published today in Foundations of Science, shows the answer was hiding in plain sight.
Many thousands of clay tablets have been retrieved from the lost cities of ancient Babylon, in present-day Iraq. These documents were preserved beneath the desert through millennia. Once uncovered they found their way into museums, libraries and private collections.
One example is the approximately 3,700-year-old cadastral survey Si.427, which depicts a surveyor’s plan of a field. It was excavated by Father Jean-Vincent Scheil during an 1894 French archaeological expedition at Sippar, southwest of Baghdad. But its significance was not understood at the time.
Si.427 shows a surveyor’s plan of a field. Author provided
It turns out that Si.427 — which has been in Turkey’s İstanbul Arkeoloji Müzeleri (Istanbul Archaeological Museums) for several decades and is currently on display — is in fact one of the oldest examples of applied geometry from the ancient world. Let’s look at what makes it so special.
A brief history of Babylonian surveying
The ancient Babylonians valued land, much as we do today. Early on, large swathes of agricultural land were owned by institutions such as temples or palaces.
Professional surveyors would measure these fields to estimate the size of the harvest. But they did not establish field boundaries. It seems those powerful institutions did not need a surveyor, or anyone else, to tell them what they owned.
The nature of land ownership changed during the Old Babylonian period, between 1900 and 1600 BCE. Rather than large institutional fields, smaller fields could now be owned by regular people.
This change had an impact on the way land was measured. Unlike institutions, private landowners needed surveyors to establish boundaries and resolve disputes.
The need for accurate surveying is apparent from an Old Babylonian poem about quarrelling students learning to become surveyors. The older student admonishes the younger student, saying:
Go to divide a plot, and you are not able to divide the plot; go to apportion a field, and you cannot even hold the tape and rod properly. The field pegs you are unable to place; you cannot figure out its shape, so that when wronged men have a quarrel you are not able to bring peace, but you allow brother to attack brother. Among the scribes, you (alone) are unfit for the clay.
This poem mentions the tape and rod, which are references to the standard Babylonian surveying tools: the measuring rope and unit rod. These were revered symbols of fairness and justice in ancient Babylon and were often seen in the hands of goddesses and kings.
In modern times, surveyors measure land with specialised GPS tools. Chris Arnison
Babylonian surveyors would use these tools to divide land into manageable shapes: rectangles, right-angled triangles and right trapezoids.
Earlier on, before surveyors needed to establish boundaries, they would simply make agricultural estimates. So 90° angles back then were good approximations, but they were never quite right.
Right angles done right
The Old Babylonian cadastral survey Si.427 shows the boundaries of a small parcel of land purchased from an individual known as Sîn-bêl-apli.
There are some marshy regions which must have been important since they are measured very carefully. Sounds like a normal day at work for a Babylonian surveyor, right? But there is something very distinct about Si.427.
In earlier surveys, the 90° angles are just approximations, but in Si.427 the corners are exactly 90°. How could someone with just a measuring rope and unit rod make such accurate right angles? Well, by making a Pythagorean triple.
A Pythagorean triple is a special kind of right-angled triangle (or rectangle) with simple measurements that satisfy Pythagoras’s theorem. They are easy to consturct and have theoretically perfect right angles.
Pythagorean triples were used in ancient India to make rectangular fire altars, potentially as far back as 800 BCE. Through Si.427, we now know ancient Babylonians used them to make accurate land measurements as far back as 1900 BCE.
Si.427 contains not one, but three Pythagorean triples.
Crib notes for surveyors
Si.427 has also helped us understand other tablets from the Old Babylonian era.
Not all Pythagorean triples were useful to Babylonian surveyors. What makes a Pythagorean triple useful are its sides. Specifically, the sides have to be “regular”, which means they can be scaled up or down to any length. Regular numbers have no prime factors apart from 2, 3 and 5.
Plimpton 322 is another ancient Babylonian tablet, with a list of Pythagorean triples that look similar to a modern trigonometric table. Modern trigonometric tables list the ratios of sides (sin, cos and tan anyone?).
But instead of these ratios, Plimpton 322 tells us which sides of a Pythagorean triple are regular and therefore useful in surveying. It is easy to imagine it was made by a pure mathematician who wanted to know why some Pythagorean triples were usable while others were not.
Plimpton 322 in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University in New York. UNSW/Andrew Kelly
Alternatively, Plimpton 322 could have been made to solve some specific practical problem. While we will never know the author’s true intentions, it is probably somewhere between these two possibilities. What we do know is the Babylonians developed their own unique understanding of Pythagorean triples.
This “proto-trigonometry” is equivalent to the trigonometry developed by ancient Greek astronomers. Yet it is different because it was developed in response to the problems faced by Babylonian surveyors looking not at the night sky — but at the land.
In this short video I summarise my findings, explaining how the ancient clay tablet Si.427 is the oldest known and most complete example of applied geometry.
Daniel Mansfield 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 blood of Jesus is my vaccine” read one of the signs at a recent protest against lockdown regulations in Sydney. While our tendency might be to roll our eyes at such ridiculous anti-science views, these sentiments have a long and complicated history in the Christian tradition.
On social media platforms, a small number of Christians are offering a pastiche of biblical symbols to link the idea of Jesus’s blood and protection. In one video, a man claims we know the blood of Jesus will protect Christians in the 21st century from COVID because the blood of the Passover lamb protected the Israelites in Egypt (Exodus 12). As an analogy, it is a stretch.
Kolina Koltai, a vaccine misinformation researcher with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, points out that appealing to people’s beliefs and values in spreading vaccine misinformation is particularly potent. Such views can be extremely hard to combat, because doing so is perceived as an attack on someone’s core beliefs.
While for some, Jesus’s “blood” is spiritually invoked through prayer, other misinformation links the protective power of Jesus more explicitly to taking communion (or the Eucharist). Taking communion daily, such people claim, prevents you from getting sick from COVID.
Communion is a Christian ritual in which token amounts of bread and wine are consumed to recall Jesus’s last meal with his disciples before dying on a cross. While different Christian traditions hold a variety of theological views, at the heart of communion is the idea that bread and wine are ritually shared as a way to spiritually connect, to have “communion”, with Jesus and with one another. The bread symbolises Jesus’s body and the wine his blood. Drinking communion wine then is drinking the blood that saves, according to these fringe views.
Melbourne Anglican priest Peter French told me that, in the past year, he has had to refuse requests from people who want to buy communion bread and wine from his church in the belief that taking it daily will prevent them from contracting COVID. Anglicans, we should note, do not teach that communion will protect you from sickness and the Archbishop of Canterbury has urged people to be vaccinated.
The association of the Eucharist and healing were around long before COVID. In 2013, Pope Francis addressed exactly this issue in a sermon stating the Eucharist is not a “magic rite”, but a way to encounter Jesus.
Where does this association of communion and healing come from? Nowhere explicitly, yet the Christian tradition has a long association of communion and health metaphors.
In the second century, Bishop Ignatius wrote the Eucharist is the “medicine of immortality” and the “antidote” to death. Ignatius’s “medicine” is one that brings eternal life rather than freedom from physical suffering.
In the third century, Bishop Cyprian claimed the blood of Jesus has pharmacological benefits, being “health-giving” and superior to the benefits of ordinary wine. The medicinal effects of wine were widely known in antiquity, often being a safer drink than water. But here we have Christians claiming something more for the wine that represents Jesus’s blood, even if their claim is still primarily a spiritual one.
In the Christian churches, taking communion is a way to be closer to Jesus, not a magical cure for COVID. Shutterstock
The Eucharist is always an enacted sign of the love and regard for community shown by Jesus, not a talisman for personal gain or benefit.
In this sense, it is only like the vaccine in that it exists for the good of the whole community, not ourselves as individuals.
McGowan notes there are more early Christians stories indicating that wrongly taking the Eucharist could do you harm than there are ones suggesting communion will bring healing. In several post-biblical apocryphal sources, bread and wine are shared after a healing miracle as a means of thanksgiving and confirming faith, but it does not bring physical healing.
Similarly today, communion is regularly administered to the sick or dying. It serves as a reminder of Jesus’s salvific action to people of faith, not as a magic pill or healing potion.
Indeed, traditional Christian churches usually anoint the sick with oil for healing or have other prayers for healing that do not involve communion. However, one can see how superstitious ideas developed linking recovery from illness to the body and blood of Jesus. To do so is to conflate spiritual well-being and physical health. While spiritual health can correlate with other forms of health (mental, physical), it is not the same thing.
The vast majority of religious leaders are urging people to be vaccinated. No serious Christian teaches that taking communion will magically protect a person against illness.
Yet, the line between taking the Eucharist (the blood of Jesus) for spiritual wholeness and taking it as a magical potion that will protect one physically remains thin enough to be abused by irresponsible people touting conspiracy theories.
To do so is preying on the vulnerable, a most anti-Christian activity in the guise of religion.
Robyn J. Whitaker 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.
With greater numbers of people being vaccinated and countries looking to reopen borders safely, the introduction of some form of vaccine passport seems increasingly likely.
For New Zealand, where the elimination strategy has been largely successful but which remains vulnerable to border breaches, proof of vaccination may well be a condition of entry.
Some countries are also requiring “health passes”, mandatory proof of vaccination or a negative test, including for indoor events (such as sports games and concerts) and hospitality — triggering anti-restriction protests in the process.
In Britain, the Royal Society has warned of the potential of vaccine passports to restrict the freedoms of some individuals, or to create a distinction between individuals based on health status.
Furthermore, vaccine passports use sensitive personal information, and recent cyber attacks on health sectors in New Zealand and overseas are a reminder that data security is not always guaranteed.
Vaccine passports aren’t new
We should remember, however, that freedom of movement across borders has been routinely regulated throughout history. Modern passports for international travel have been in use for over 100 years.
Proof of vaccination is nothing new, either. Some countries have required certificates for yellow fever vaccination for a number of decades, and the World Health Organization’s “yellow card” vaccination document is familiar to many international travellers.
In New Zealand, immunisation registers document vaccination records for public health purposes. And in Australia, a “No Jab No Play/No Jab No Pay” policy governs eligibility for child welfare payments.
But border closures and lockdowns clearly demonstrate that this right can be limited, although this “must be necessary and have a legitimate aim, be proportionate and be based in law”.
In reality, any requirement that citizens use vaccine passports or passes will involve balancing various rights.
Limiting the right to freedom of movement can be justified on the grounds of public health. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights actually requires states to prevent, treat and control epidemic diseases as one means of ensuring the right to the highest attainable standard of health.
Because the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act also permits demonstrably justifiable restrictions on the right to freedom of movement, the various COVID-19 measures adopted by the government under the Health Act had to meet that requirement.
And Te Tiriti o Waitangi underpins the principle of active protection that “requires the Crown to act, to the fullest extent practicable, to achieve equitable health outcomes for Māori”.
While the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act does not contain a right to privacy, one of aims of the Privacy Act is to give effect to international obligations and standards, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
No grounds for discrimination
Any initiatives to introduce vaccine passports or health passes must be underpinned by the right to be free from discrimination, as provided for in international human rights law, as well as the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. The Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of physical illness.
These requirements extend to the private sector, with particular rules at play around the provision of goods and services and access by the public to places, vehicles and facilities — an exception to the latter being the risk of infecting others with an illness.
But it’s not only a question of avoiding discrimination. Just as there have been questions about equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines themselves, universal access to the digital technology underpinning passports or passes presents a challenge.
More generally, as a recent UN report warned, “big data and artificial intelligence are entrenching racial inequality, discrimination and intolerance”.
Ultimately, it will be a balancing act, not a case of absolutes.
Digital vaccination certificates will help in the effort to reopen borders and protect public health. But there are significant implications for our rights as individuals. Careful and transparent decisions will be crucial.
Claire Breen 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.
When land is cleared to make room for urban growth, infrastructure, mining, and so on, developers are often required to “offset” their environmental damage by improving biodiversity elsewhere. This could mean, for example, planting trees along a river, or building shelters for animals that lost their habitats.
In New South Wales, one mechanism to fulfil this requirement is the Biodiversity Offsets Scheme, and a NSW parliamentary inquiry into this scheme is currently underway. The inquiry will look into the scheme’s administration, transparency and oversight, and will investigate the ability for private landowners to engage in it.
This is where our research comes in. We interviewed landholders in Greater Metropolitan Sydney during 2019 and 2020 to find out if they can — and want to — participate in biodiversity offsets.
Our findings suggest the NSW government would be wise to open up its offset scheme to make it more equitable, diverse and socially acceptable.
Recent controversies
Australia is considered an international forerunner when it comes to biodiversity offsetting, with all Australian states and territories having some form in place (complemented by federal provisions).
But over the years, biodiversity offset schemes have been marred with controversy, particularly recently.
In April, The Guardian Australia revealed a single company had made more than A$40 million by buying land and then selling offsets on that land to the state and federal governments. The new inquiry is a direct response to this news report.
How landholders come into it
Landholders are essential to making biodiversity offsets successful. They play a pivotal role in how offsetting functions on the ground, and in safeguarding its outcomes.
For example, landholder work could involve removing stock, weed control, pest fauna management, fencing off the site or building nest boxes for birds whose trees were cut down.
To get involved in biodiversity offsetting in NSW, landholders must first enter an agreement with the government to enhance and maintain the biodiversity values of their land, in perpetuity.
They often generate a one-off profit when they enter the agreement, and receive yearly payments from the government to manage their land. These payments are funded by, for instance, developers and mining companies, who have been required under law to offset their developments.
But while it’s been shown biodiversity offsets readily meet developers’ needs, the diverse perspectives of landholders remain poorly understood.
This knowledge gap is what inspired us to undertake research with landholders in Greater Sydney. This included conducting interviews with landholders and land managers, both participants and non-participants in the scheme.
Can landholders participate?
Four factors determined whether landholders participated in the scheme: experience, financial and staff resources, access to information and technical support, and property size.
Several participants had a good understanding of the scheme because of prior experience or involvement. Some had access to financial and staff resources (such as lawyers and property managers), while others were given information and technical support.
Having support like this gave them confidence to enter into an agreement and manage the land appropriately. One landholder told us:
I think I knew enough people who’d done it to know that they’d got through all of that [management of the land] without too much concern.
In contrast, landholders unable to participate generally didn’t have experience, resources, support or large properties. They often relied on online information and had a poor understanding of the scheme. They had many concerns, especially financial. One barrier they identified, for example, is the cost of the initial ecological assessment of the land.
A non-participant said:
We don’t want to outline money for something that we don’t really understand or know anything about and might not happen.
Do landholders want to participate?
A variety of ethical, financial, technical and governance-related factors influenced a landholders’ willingness to participate in offsets. Some don’t consider nature as something that can be substituted, and fundamentally disagreed with the very principles of offsets:
We shouldn’t be clearing [t]here and then growing stuff here. We just shouldn’t be clearing there.
Others consider the rules of the scheme not stringent enough to achieve positive ecological outcomes. Some have reservations about their technical ability to do the conservation work, and question the likelihood of “nature complying” with stated ecological outcomes.
Some landholders seek compensation only for their conservation actions — in other words, making a profit isn’t their goal. For others, the prospect of a profit is a determining factor, with some hesitant to participate because it would take away from potentially more lucrative property development options:
I suspect there’ll be rezoning of land and all sorts of things, so if we do [offsetting] we’re going to lose that potential.
And some landholders perceive participation, in perpetuity, interferes with their right to sell their land. They see the scheme as potentially diminishing the land value, or putting unnecessary burden on the next landowner.
Building artificial refuges like nest boxes is a popular offsetting project. Shutterstock
What needs to change?
These findings tell us two things about the current scheme:
financial and information barriers create unequal opportunities across landholders
the scheme doesn’t cater to diverse conservation perspectives.
The NSW government should loosen up the narrow neo-liberal market principles underpinning the scheme and open it up to a wider range of landholders. As an immediate first step, the government could introduce a more equitable model for sharing the costs of the initial ecological assessment.
It could also open the scheme to a wider range of conservation perspectives.
Offsetting is meant to be used as a last resort, according to globally accepted standards for development projects.
If developers and the government clearly demonstrate habitat destruction is completely necessary and offsetting really is a last resort, then we expect broader acceptance among landholders. Further research is required to learn how the government could achieve this.
Such reforms would give the scheme a stronger social license to operate and ensure it meets its policy objectives better.
Importantly, opening up the scheme would make it more transparent, so that future excessive profit seeking, with questionable conservation outcomes, can be prevented.
This project has been assisted by the New South Wales Government through its Environmental Trust. Grant number: 2018/RD/0087.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Naomi Barnes, Senior Lecturer, School of Teacher Education & Leadership, Queensland University of Technology
The central role of schools in the Brisbane COVID-19 outbreak means the virus might move through the community differently from previous outbreaks. Previously, the focus has been on the spread of the virus through the aged care sector and via service workers. People in education systems move and interact differently.
Sociology can provide a useful lens for understanding how the virus is moving. The type of insight sociologists can give is an organised story behind the contact tracing list based on their knowledge of how the sector at the centre of an outbreak works. Epidemiologists and policymakers can then draw on these systematic stories to help communicate the transmission risks and manage public responses to their decision-making.
An analysis of the Queensland contract tracing list shows many of the exposure sites are typical of school children travelling on public transport. Their families are also driving them around to attend social, medical and educational activities after school.
How do children change the spread?
Sociological network analyses can methodically explain the nuances and dynamism of how the virus will move differently via children compared to adults. It will move differently again for university and TAFE students and teenagers.
For example, primary school children are more likely to move through multiple sites after school. Sporting lessons and care outside school hours (categories of multiple exposure sites on the list) mean children could move from one big group to another big group.
A teenager will move differently again. Teenagers are more likely to move independently to and from school, their after-school activities and home. They use public transport more than younger children do, bringing them into contact with larger groups than in the family car. They also congregate in places like shopping centres to do things teens like to do: shop, share food and canoodle.
Families, especially those with more than one child, have after-school activities in varied places, hugely multiplying possible exposure sites. Children will encounter more people than an adult who goes to the shops, gym or takeaway after work. But an adult may be a parent and have the child, who has been in multiple big groups through the day, with them.
Currently, there are nine Brisbane schools at the centre of the spread of the Delta variant of the virus. Many of these schools are connected via postcode. But postcode does not tell the whole story.
The more concerning narrative is that these schools are connected systemically. For example, Brisbane Grammar School boys will most likely have sisters at Brisbane Girls Grammar. The primary school, Ironside State School, is a feeder school for many affected schools. In other words, primary school children have older siblings at the high schools.
Many of the schools are also independent schools that children commute to from all over Brisbane. This means the single child or set of siblings at one school affected by the virus could very easily move the virus outside the area. On the contact tracing list, we are seeing cases emerge not only in neighbouring suburbs but also in suburbs in completely different areas of Brisbane.
This movement of the virus through the education system reveals a need to shift the decision-making about schools, teachers and examinations away from only how the virus might get into schools to also consider how the virus is getting out of schools.
Schools can manage social distancing, hand washing and mask wearing when the students are at school but cannot oversee those things out of school. No matter how careful a school is about its COVID-safe procedures, the Brisbane outbreak has shown that those who manage education spaces, like principals and teachers, cannot control all the variables. Public discussions that suggest they can is simply unreasonable and demoralising.
A sociological approach to COVID planning, especially network approaches, like I use, would support governments to make systematic decisions about the social sectors. Current decision-making processes have only considered the surface-level (though still important) purposes of schooling in society, like teaching, assessment and care during work hours. By considering the nuances and dynamic nature of school life, sociology can shed light on options for school closures, examinations, remote learning and schooling the children of essential workers.
Thank you to sociologist Dr Mark Bahnisch for support on this article.
Naomi Barnes 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.
English composer and multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield began writing Tubular Bells 50 years ago, at the age of 17. The record, released two years later, was the first on Richard Branson’s newly established Virgin label and remains Oldfield’s highest selling and best known album to date.
An instrumental work, Tubular Bells is 49 minutes and 16 seconds long presented in two parts, each taking up one side of the original vinyl release.
The album was pioneering in many ways, from its use of bells to electric guitars recorded at half speed, and has been credited as an early example of new age music.
At the time of its release — although a unique sounding album in many ways — Tubular Bells was closely associated with the progressive rock scene. Indeed, Oldfield had roots in this scene: he was previously bassist with Kevin Ayers and the Whole World, a band who, along with Soft Machine, Gong and Caravan were part of the Canterbury Scene.
Tubular Bells gained further exposure when the introduction to Part One was used in William Friedkin’s 1973 film The Exorcist.
Still in his teens, Oldfield was disillusioned with the rigours of touring and the limitations of live performance. His vision was to produce an album taking full advantage of the sound production opportunities offered by the recording studio.
Brian Wilson and the Beatles had begun this trend in the mid-1960s, but by the early 1970s studio technology had developed to the extent stereo recording on tape machines featuring 16 tracks was possible.
This significantly extended the possibilities for layering sound.
Several sections of music on Tubular Bells were written by Oldfield and recorded as demos on cassette before he entered the Manor — a 16th century building bought by Branson and converted into a recording studio — to begin work on the album.
A repeated motif
Tubular Bells is best known for Part One, particularly the first three and a half minutes of music, which feature a repeated motif in the key of A minor with a 15/8 time signature.
This time signature was highly unusual in rock music at the time and, combined with the stark minimalist sound of the grand piano, Oldfield created a mesmerising and slightly surreal effect.
An unusual time signature and a stark sound gives Tubular Bells a surreal effect.
Through a series of modulations, this motif is repeated at various stages throughout side one of Tubular Bells, ending with the motif played on a Spanish guitar in the transposed key of E major.
Primarily a guitarist, prior to working on Tubular Bells Oldfield had familiarised himself with a range of other stringed, keyboard and percussion instruments. A popular perception of the album’s creation is of Oldfield playing a large number of musical instruments and endlessly overdubbing his performances to produce a one-person orchestra.
In truth, Oldfield did play most of the instruments on the album (with the exception of the drums heard on side two) but this amounted to around ten instruments, including electric and acoustic guitars, grand piano and pipe organ, glockenspiel, timpani, tin whistle and, of course, the famed tubular bells.
Chosen as the album’s title and the subject of a great fanfare at the end of side one, tubular bells constituted something of a novelty item and source of fascination for listeners.
A series of metal tubes of varying length, when tubular bells are struck they resemble the sound of church bells. Commonly used in classical music, in the world of rock tubular bells were a relatively unknown quantity.
(Partly due to the exposure afforded by Oldfield’s work several rock and progressive rock drummers also added tubular bells to their percussive arsenal during the arena rock years of the 1970s.)
Tubular Bells used a wide variety of instruments.
Another novel aspect of Tubular Bells was the use of “speed guitars”: electric guitars recorded at half speed, then brought back to normal speed in playback. This meant the notes produced were higher than the normal range of notes possible on guitar. This technique was used to create the mandolin-like effects heard in several parts of the album.
A custom-made distortion was used to create the “bagpipe guitars” (so called because their sound is similar to bagpipes) heard on side two. And at the end of side two a familiar tune is heard: Oldfield’s arrangement of the Sailor’s Hornpipe brings the album to a close.
A template for innovation
Tubular Bells has spawned an orchestral version of the work and two sequels, Tubular Bells II and III. Aspects of the work have been incorporated into songs by metal bands Possessed and Death Angel as well as other artists including the California Guitar trio.
This month, 50 years after Oldfield started writing Tubular Bells, the album will again be performed live in London, directed by Oldfield’s longtime collaborator Robin A Smith and featuring Australian circus company Circa. A short tour is planned in 2023 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Tubular Bells’ release.
Oldfield performing Tubular Bells as part of the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics. Nick Webb/flickr, CC BY-SA
Upon its release, Oldfield was reluctant to tour Tubular Bells. He finally agreed to a one-off concert at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on June 25 1973. An all-star cast of musicians was recruited for the event, including Kevin Ayers, Fred Frith, Steve Hillage and Mick Taylor (then with the Rolling Stones).
Preceding Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and 10cc’s I’m Not in Love (songs now regarded as the great multi-track masterpieces) by two years, Tubular Bells was undoubtedly a critical template for innovation in studio-based music during an era when album-orientated-rock commanded a hefty market share.
Last week the federal government announced 70% of over-16s would need to be vaccinated for COVID-19 restrictions to be eased.
And this week, Melbourne’s Doherty Institute published the modelling informing this. The Doherty Institute had been asked by national cabinet to model the effects of increasing vaccination rates on Australia’s pathway out of the COVID pandemic.
The collaboration created an impressive assembly of models that allows them to assess the impacts of outbreaks under a range of infection-control scenarios. The model can be adapted to explore easing of specific restrictions, or changed conditions, for example if the dominant variant changes, or our response is more or less effective than anticipated.
They found vaccinating 70% of over-16s would allow for lesser restrictions in the event of an outbreak, and getting to 80% would mean significant easing and likely no lockdowns.
The ongoing need for interventions highlights how difficult it is to manage the Delta variant compared to previous strains. Even vaccinating 80% of the population over 16 still requires a level of active control in an outbreak setting, albeit with light restrictions.
The modelling uses Australian data gathered from across the country since August last year. This includes data on “transmission potential”, which is effectively the average number of people one infected person is likely to infect. Under varying levels of public health responses and people’s compliance with restrictions, the modellers were able to estimate this reproduction rate of the virus to understand what it will take to get transmission potential below one, and keep it there, so infections don’t climb beyond manageable levels.
The modelling forecast extends out six months. This is actually a relatively long time horizon given how quickly things change in this pandemic. The parameters start to become unreliable beyond that, and therefore the reliability of forecasts wanes. The modelling is a very well informed best guess, but there are many uncertainties. The value here lies in comparing different scenarios to chart the most strategic course, rather than the specific number of ICU beds or cases predicted.
The modelling gives us a guide for the level of vaccination coverage we’ll need to control the virus. The 80% mark for those currently eligible delivers a level of protection that promises an escape from our current cycling between lockdowns. It also highlights that time is of the essence — we need to get there before new variants emerge.
If we stay in the current limbo, we’re at risk of community transmission becoming embedded in other states, repeating the New South Wales situation across Australia.
As vaccination rates increase, the need for heavy restrictions decreases, so vaccination is the path out of the limbo we’re in.
Why the focus on younger people?
To date, Australia’s rollout has focused on those most at risk of severe outcomes from the disease, including older Australians, protecting them and our health-care systems from overload.
But to reach the vaccination targets in the most effective way, the modelling demonstrates the value in turning our focus now to reducing transmission.
Our highest transmission and case rates occur in 20-39 year olds. This group is the most mobile. They tend to socialise and mix with other people the most and therefore have the most close contacts on average. Many live in shared houses, have young families, and make up a large portion of the workforce, particularly essential workers. The Doherty Institute’s Professor Jodie McVernon said people aged 20-29 in particular were “peak spreaders”.
It’s vital we start vaccinating 20-39 year olds, because this approach gives a better bang for our vaccination buck.
Vaccinating this group protects not only them, but the whole population including those who can’t be vaccinated. Vaccinated people are less likely to become infected and, even if they do, less likely to pass it on. The Doherty Institute’s technical report on the modelling indicates the combined effect is a reduction in transmission risk of 86% for AstraZeneca and 93% for Pfizer.
Professor McVernon said vaccinating as many 20-39 year olds as possible could double the protection for over-60s, and protect everyone else, making it the most equitable strategy at this stage of our rollout.
Why weren’t kids included?
The Doherty Institute wasn’t asked to factor in vaccinating those younger than 16, so kids are treated as unvaccinated in the model. Their protection, and the protection of schools from the impact of outbreaks, therefore relies on adults reaching the 80% target, and parents in particular.
The risk here is that if the virus does find its way into schools, it might cause significant outbreaks that quickly spread across schools — like we’re seeing in Queensland at the moment. Stronger public health interventions might still be required to contain an outbreak.
We’ll have to monitor this closely over time, and as COVID vaccine trials in kids continue, to help us weigh up risks and benefits.
This week, ATAGI advised kids aged 12-15 should be prioritised for vaccination if they’re Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, live in a remote community or have underlying medical conditions.
As overall vaccination rates rise, we need to look out for areas with low vaccination coverage. If the virus finds its way in, we may still see a degree of local transmission that requires restrictions. But in these instances, restrictions would be more localised and targeted rather than a whole city or state.
Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor Paul Kelly, said it well in Tuesday’s press conference: we can aim for a “soft landing” where other countries can’t. The modelling tells us when we get to 80% adult vaccination coverage, we can avoid the huge wave of infections we’ve worked so hard to prevent.
Unlike the United Kingdom, where cases peaked again on reopening, or the United States, where cases and hospitalisations are both on the rise, we can leverage our past success in outbreak control and get through this without ever seeing a wave of a truly international proportions.
Catherine Bennett receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council and The Medical Research Future Fund. Catherine is also an independent expert on the Covid-19 AstraZeneca Vaccine Advisory Board, Australia.
In the lead up to the 2019 election, the Shorten opposition attacked the government’s planned 2024 tax cuts, and promised to curb negative gearing and halve the capital gains tax discount.
Last week, the Albanese opposition said it wouldn’t try to unwind the tax cuts and would leave negative gearing intact – a pragmatic decision designed to make the party a small target at next year’s election.
Speaking to The Conversation in the Mural Hall in Parliament House – COVID restrictions prevented a visit to his office – Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers defended the change of stance:
“I think people understand that the highest priority right now needs to be the management of this pandemic, which is doing such damage to the economy and to local communities, and also what the economy and our society will look like after Covid-19. And what we’re able to do now is to focus properly on that. And that’s why we took that decision and why we announced it immediately.”
In a populist move this week, the opposition called on the government to provide a $300 incentive to anyone who was fully vaccinated by 1 December. Such an initiative – vehemently rejected by the government – would cost $6 billion, which Chalmers concedes “is not a small amount of money” but “is a fraction of the money that the government has given in JobKeeper for companies whose profits actually went up and didn’t need JobKeeper support. $13 billion at least wasted there.”
Chalmers says $300 per vaccinated person would be “a lot of bang for buck in terms of public health outcomes, but also in terms of economic outcomes.”
If successful at the election, as treasurer Chalmers would be inheriting an enormous debt, with not much room for spending. Despite this, he says Labor’s approach to spending “won’t be held to constraints that the government’s not held to.”
“The government spent a 100 billion dollars in one night on budget night[…]not a dollar offset, and nobody’s saying to the government ‘what taxes are you raising to pay for that 100 billion dollars in spending?’
“The commitment I give to the Australian people as the alternative treasurer is our budget position will reflect the needs of the Australian people and the economy[…]
“It will be more responsible than the Liberals. We won’t be taking a lecture on responsibility from the most wasteful government since Federation, and our budget settings will reflect the economy.”
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.
The race to vaccinate Australians is heating up as the supply of vaccines starts to increase and lockdowns continue.
Labor this week suggested a A$300 cash payment for people fully vaccinated by December. Meanwhile, “Operation COVID Shield”, the newly published national COVID vaccine campaign plan, includes support for “freedom incentives” put forward by the Coalition.
Let’s take a look at how effective the evidence suggests these measures might be in getting more Australians vaccinated.
Vaccination is a key weapon in our armoury as we navigate the pandemic. We know it’s very effective in protecting people from illness and death, and also reduces transmission of COVID-19.
At this stage, only 19.8% of Australians over 16 have been fully vaccinated.
Although insufficient supply has been the main reason for the slow rollout to date, vaccine hesitancy is an increasingly important issue as we strive for herd immunity.
The latest data from our Taking the Pulse of the Nation Survey shows vaccine hesitancy in Australia has fallen to 21.5% since the recent outbreaks, from a high of 33% in late May.
Among that 21.5%, 11.8% of Australians remain unwilling to be vaccinated, while 9.7% are unsure.
So can financial or non-financial incentives bring these figures down and in turn speed up Australia’s vaccination rollout?
The government has proclaimed cash incentives will have minimal impact on vaccination rates — although the review of the evidence they conducted hasn’t been published.
There is in fact evidence from a range of settings showing cash payments do have one-off effects in terms of persuading people to visit a health professional.
Our survey research has shown 54% of those willing to be vaccinated, but waiting, said they would get vaccinated as soon as possible if offered cash.
Cash incentives are likely to encourage people who are willing to get vaccinated, but haven’t done so yet. CDC/Unsplash
Further analysis shows those willing and eligible to be vaccinated (people over 50 at the time these data were collected) were more likely to respond to cash payments if they were male, and if the amount was at least A$100. Overall, half said they would get vaccinated sooner if offered A$100 or more. So Labor’s plan of A$300 would be effective for this group.
However, for people who are unwilling or unsure about vaccination, cash payments may make only a small difference. Just 10% of this group said they would respond to cash.
This is because there are many reasons people may be unsure or don’t want to get vaccinated. These include a lack of access to unbiased advice and information, strong beliefs about vaccination including around vaccine safety, and medical conditions. To increase vaccination in this group, we need to consider different approaches.
Vaccination as a ticket to freedom
We’re likely to see non-financial incentives offered to fully vaccinated Australians as time goes on. These might be in the form of exemptions from health restrictions, or more lenient rules, around, for example, travel and social activities.
We know holding our vaccination records in our smartphones might provide us with more freedom, earlier. The United Kingdom now allows fully vaccinated travellers from the United States and the European Union to enter without quarantine, accepting the risk that even people who are vaccinated can still carry and spread the virus.
Our survey found roughly 70% of Australians think fully vaccinated people should be allowed to participate, without restriction, in sporting events, concerts, interstate travel, religious events, going to restaurants and movies, and the like. Around half believe those who remain unvaccinated once vaccination is available to everyone should be banned from these activities.
Slightly fewer think international travel should be unrestricted even when fully vaccinated.
Of people unwilling or unsure about vaccination, 18-28% stated they would get vaccinated if they were banned from these activities. This suggests that, compared to cash payments, non-financial incentives might be more likely to work for those who are unwilling or unsure about vaccination.
Where to next?
Both Labor’s and the Coalition’s incentive policies would have some impact on vaccination rates, but the devil is in the detail.
Cash payments are likely to be effective for those who are already willing to be vaccinated, but have not yet done so. This would speed up the rate of vaccination.
Cash is less likely to influence those who are unwilling or are unsure, though it could still work for some of these people.
Allowing fully vaccinated people more freedoms will likely increase the vaccination rates among those yet to get the jab, including those who are unsure or unwilling.
Reaching this group is the holy grail, giving us a better shot of attaining the elusive, but crucial, herd immunity. Incentives matter.
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.
If the proposed A$300 payment to each Australian who is fully vaccinated works, it might be at the expense of getting Australians hooked on incentives, and there are reasons to think it might not not work.
Labor has suggested paying $300 to every Australian who is fully vaccinated by December. The government hasn’t ruled out doing it or something like it.
If 20 million Australians took up the offer, it would cost $6 billion.
An alternative would be to emulate the much cheaper US5.6 million “Vax-a-Million” lottery held in the US state of Ohio. But there is some doubt as to whether it worked.
A preliminary analysis comparing vaccination rates in border counties in Ohio and Indiana before and after the announcement found it might have lifted vaccinations by between 50,000 and 80,000 doses.
Another study found no evidence of any effect when other changes that were taking place at the same time were taken into account.
The payment proposed by Labor is many times bigger at A$6 billion, as would be an A$80 million series of Vaxlotto draws proposed by the Grattan Institute.
What matters is cost per additional vaccination
In assessing value for money we would need to do more than work out the cost per vaccination. We would need to work out the cost per additional vaccination.
Then we would need to set that cost against the benefit of lockdowns those extra vaccinations avoided and the lives and healthy years saved.
While the economic cost of lockdowns is large (the estimate released by the treasury on Tuesday puts the cost of Australia-wide lockdown at A$3.2 billion per week) the reduction in the frequency of Australia-wide or partial lockdowns resulting from incentive payments might be small.
The Treasury estimates suggest an increase in the vaccination rate from 65% to 70% of the proportion of the population aged 16+ would cut the number of days of strict lockdowns per quarter from around 40 to 29.
Economic Impact Analysis: National plan to transition to Australia’s national COVID 19 response. Australian Treasury
Even if effective, the incentive payments would create expectations. Australians might come to expect (or demand) them in order to get booster shots.
Unless the payments are made retrospective to everyone who has been vaccinated (something both Labor and the Grattan Institute are proposing) they could encourage Australians to delay signing up until they know what’s on offer.
Australians might wait til they know what’s on offer
And they could encourage a mentality of compensating Australians who are reluctant to make sacrifices in the national interest. The government’s emissions reduction payments are rightly seen as having this defect, as was the award of free tradable permits under Labor’s emissions reductions scheme.
Sticks, along the lines of denying access to “vaccine passports”, might be more effective than carrots, and they would create fewer expectations.
The best approach would be for the government to get its own house in order by ensuring adequate vaccine and booster supply and delivering consistent messages.
On Tuesday General Frewen, in charge of the COVID taskforce, said an incentive payment wasn’t needed “right now”. If other things are in place, it mightn’t be needed at all.
Mark Crosby 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 Michael Westaway, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Archaeology, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland
Plans are underway to rebury the remains of more than 100 Aboriginal people, including the remains of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady, arguably the two most important people who ever lived in Australia”.
The ancestral remains from Willandra occupy a crucial place in understanding the dispersal of modern humanity across the globe and the story of our species’ adaptation to climate change. Mungo Man and Mungo Lady have been dated to 42,000 years old, making them Australia’s oldest human remains. Mungo Lady is the oldest known cremation in the world.
Human remains were first identified at the dry Lake Mungo in 1968. During the 1980s, a small number of the ancestral remains were excavated. The vast majority, however, were exposed through erosion and collected by archaeologists from the Australian National University and NSW National Parks. Ancient DNA has been recovered from one individual, but the majority of the ancient people have not been researched.
The age of the remains are instrumental touchstones in the battle for Indigenous rights. This research led directly to the 1981 inscription of the area on the World Heritage List as one of Australia’s first two World Heritage properties.
Aboriginal people have consistently fought for their ancestors to be returned to Country. During the 1980s and 1990s the remains became national symbols for repatriation. There has been agreement among traditional owners, pastoralists and scientists for more than two decades that the ancestral remains should be repatriated to the Willandra.
The remains of Mungo Lady were returned to the area in 1992, and the remainder of the ancient people returned in 2017–18. A National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples said in 2018 a permanent “keeping place”, rather than reburial, should be provided with a monument to mark their importance.
The traditional owner groups have been seeking a keeping place since the 1990s, and in 2000 passed a resolution seeking support from government for its establishment.
But following a series of workshops a plan for reburial (rather than a keeping place) was approved in 2018 by a group representing Barkindji/Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa peoples. These workshops didn’t include experts in palaeoanthropology or biological anthropology.
The current proposal is for the remains to be taken into the World Heritage Area and buried in deep, unmarked graves. A recent NSW government review concluded this would not negatively impact World Heritage values.
We disagree with the NSW government report and believe burying the remains would negatively impact World Heritage values. Mutthi Mutthi Aboriginal Advisory Group (AAG) members Jason and Daniel Kelly responded to the NSW government review arguing the government did not adhere to UNESCO policy for engaging with Indigenous peoples and had denied traditional owner communities the rights to free, informed and prior consent.
The NSW review ignored a 1997 report by leading palaeoanthropologists Chris Stringer and Clive Gamble listing the fossil remains and their surrounding archaeological and palaeoenvironmental context as a site of outstanding value to the human evolutionary story.
The NSW government review also omitted reference to international standards such as the Vermillion Accord. It states the perspectives of both traditional owners and scientists should be given respect when considering the disposition of ancestral remains of great significance.
The NSW Department of Environment has now referred the proposed plan to rebury the remains for consideration of the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley.
An early design for the Mungo keeping place by leading Australian environmental architect Gregory Burgess.
What would be lost?
The age of most of the key burial sites is still unknown. If these remains were reburied in secret locations, we may lose the opportunity to re-date a large number of them using new methods. Research on Garnpung Man demonstrated this possibility.
Mungo Man is buried with ochre from many hundreds of kilometres away. It may prove possible to reconstruct migration of people across the landscape by looking at the geochemical (isotopic) signatures in their teeth. Importantly, we could trace how this mobility changed between 40,000 and 20,000 years with the coming of peak glacial mobility, a period that saw the Willandra transform from a wetland into a desert.
Recovering DNA or employing a new method known as proteomics could provide insights into the complexity of Aboriginal origins: early humans on their journey to ancient Australia mixed with other species of humans such as Neanderthals and the enigmatic Denisovans.
Around 16 individuals whose remains were uncovered had been heavily burnt or cremated. Studying this could challenge our understanding of the origins of complex mortuary practices.
Further research could also help us understand how our species adapted to past climate change.
A learning place
Many Barkandji and Mutthi Mutthi Elders and community members have expressed their wish to share the stories of these ancient people with all humanity.
Earlier this year, a letter with Barkandji Native Title holders in Nature called for a delay of the reburial process, highlighting an absence of adequate consultation.
Students on the Arumpo lunette during an early Lake Mungo Youth Festival. The Mungo Youth Conference brings together Elders, researchers and pastoralists to discuss the values of the Willandra World Heritage Area.
Every party involved has supported the repatriation of the ancestral remains to Country and all refer to Willandra as a learning place.
A recent online forum, facilitated by Mutthi Mutthi members of the government’s AAG, discussed how a keeping place could enable future learning.
Supporting the development of a keeping place and cultural centre for the traditional owners of the Willandra, rather than reburial in unmarked graves will be an action in keeping with the principles of World Heritage.
Some Mutthi Muthi AAG representatives believe the current proposal dismisses the voice of elders of the three tribal groups past and present, who have fought for a keeping place. They say it inflicts soul sickness and cultural harm to traditional owners who have been excluded from consultations.
Michael Westaway receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He was the Executive Officer for the Willandra Lakes between 2004-2008 and undertook his PhD on the ancestral remains from the Willandra after receiving consent from the Willandra advisory committees (including Three Traditional Tribal Groups and the Technical Scientific Advisory Committees)..
Doug Williams was the Executive Officer for the Willandra Lakes Region World Heritage Area from mid 2000 to early 2004
Jason Kelly is a community elected representative for the North West Region of Victoria on the First Peoples Assembly of Victoria.
Research Checks interrogate newly published studies and how they’re reported in the media. The analysis is undertaken by one or more academics not involved with the study, and reviewed by another, to make sure it’s accurate.
Coffee is one of the most popular beverages worldwide. Many of us enjoy a cup in the morning to prime us for the day ahead, or reach for a cup later in the day to avert that mid-afternoon slump.
But you may have seen reports about a new study finding that drinking more than six cups of coffee a day could shrink brain volume and increase dementia risk. So if you’re constantly seeking your next caffeine fix, should you be worried?
Researchers from Australia and the United Kingdom found this level of coffee consumption is associated with smaller total brain volume and a 53% increased risk of dementia. But they didn’t show high caffeine intake causes dementia, and they note this study cannot confirm the underlying reason for the association.
How was the study conducted?
The paper, published in the journal Nutritional Neuroscience, examined whether habitual coffee consumption was associated with differences in brain volume, and changed odds of developing dementia or stroke.
The researchers looked at 398,646 participants aged between 37 and 73, taken from the research database UK Biobank.
To measure disease outcomes, the researchers looked at the number of these people who developed dementia or had a stroke over time, and analysed this data alongside coffee intake.
For the association between coffee consumption and brain volume, the researchers compared brain imaging against the amount of coffee participants drank daily. This aspect of the study looked at 17,702 people out of the 398,646.
The study was observational, so researchers didn’t make any changes to the participants’ diets or lifestyles. Instead, they looked back at the individual’s coffee intake and correlated the amount of coffee consumed daily to their brain size, and the odds of developing dementia or having a stroke.
Overall, they found the more coffee participants consumed daily, the smaller their total brain volume.
Dementia risk was less straightforward. People who didn’t drink coffee, or drank decaf, showed slightly higher odds of developing dementia than people who drank a moderate amount of coffee. The odds of dementia were significantly higher for those who drank more than six cups daily. The results suggest people who drink one to two cups of coffee a day are at no increased risk of dementia.
After adjusting the data for variables such as underlying health conditions, age, sex and body-mass index, the researchers concluded consumption of more than six cups of coffee daily was associated with smaller brain volume, and 53% higher odds of dementia compared with one to two cups daily.
The evidence for any association between the amount of coffee consumed and stroke risk wasn’t significant.
Is it good for us? Is it bad for us? Coffee is regularly making headlines. Shutterstock
How should we interpret these results?
The consequences of smaller brain volume are unclear, and this study doesn’t address this question. However, brain shrinkage does happen naturally as we age, and studies suggest there is a connection between brain volume and dementia.
But does brain size really matter? There are plenty of animals with larger brains than humans, and the association between brain size and intelligence is weak. This is a growing area of research, so stay tuned.
Notably, the study doesn’t actually address whether the brain shrunk over time — brain volume measurements were conducted at one time point. So while some reports have claimed the study found too much coffee can cause the brain to “shrink”, the researchers didn’t actually measure this.
One issue with this study is that full information on diet was only available for a portion of participants. This is a problem as poor diet is a major risk for cognitive decline and dementia. On the flip side, healthy dietary patterns have consistently been associated with longevity and better cognitive health. So dietary factors could be confounding the results.
Observational studies like these can only tell us whether certain things are linked, not whether there’s a causal relationship.
A potential explanation for the increased dementia risk could be related to the cardiovascular effects of caffeine. For instance, there’s evidence consuming unfiltered coffee increases cholesterol, with high cholesterol being a leading risk factor for atherosclerosis (the buildup of fats on the artery walls), which is associated with vascular dementia.
However, other lifestyle factors, such as diet and inactivity, appear to play a bigger role in cholesterol levels.
Ultimately, we don’t know the reasons behind the links observed in this study.
This study finds correlation, but doesn’t prove causation. Shutterstock
So what’s the take-home message?
The results of this study shouldn’t be ignored, and help us form questions for future research. There’s plenty more research to be done into how caffeine interacts with our bodies.
This new study follows previous research that found drinking coffee in moderation decreases dementia risk by 65%. There’s a body of evidence suggesting drinking coffee is beneficial for health, reducing the risk of diabetes and heart disease, and improving metabolism and cognition.
As with most things in life, the amount matters. So while the findings here aren’t cause for alarm, if you’re drinking six cups of coffee or more a day, you might want to think about drinking a little less. Perhaps one to three cups daily.
This will reduce your risk of any negative health outcomes, like those reported in this study, and may in fact increase the chances of ageing well. – Lachlan Van Schaik
This article is a fair and rational analysis of the study. In this study the researchers did find high intake of coffee was associated with smaller brain volumes and higher dementia risk.
It’s also important to point out that this study did not look at other sources of caffeine (such as energy drinks), nor the types or strengths of coffee or tea people consume. This means it did not make any conclusions about brain size or dementia risk in relation to caffeine, just coffee itself.
The author is correct in pointing out this study was purely observational and did not find high coffee intake “caused” the brain to shrink. While the findings are interesting, this is a classic case of correlation not equalling causation. High coffee consumption may cause brain shrinkage, or even increase risk of dementia, but at this stage we just don’t know.
It does, however, hint this may be another health risk associated with high levels of coffee drinking. Perhaps erring on the side of moderation would be wise until we know more. – Greg Kennedy
Lachlan Van Schaik is affiliated with La Trobe University and The University of Melbourne.
Greg Kennedy 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.
It’s not “new” news that Asian Australians are experiencing high rates of racism during the pandemic. However, existing data under-represent the true extent of COVID-related racism. The vast majority of cases aren’t being formally reported and official reporting processes aren’t capturing or addressing the impact of racism on Asian Australians.
Our recent national survey of 2,003 Asian Australians examined the nature, type and frequency of racist incidents they experience.
It also investigated changes over time (before and during the pandemic), the effects of such experiences on people’s mental health, wellbeing and sense of belonging, the reporting of racist incidents, and the actions (or inactions) of witnesses.
Our study found that four in ten Asian Australians experienced racism during the pandemic (and nearly the same number witnessed racism).
Of these, however, just 3% reported the incident to the Australian Human Rights Commission. Police received more reports (12%), as did bosses (7%) and teachers (6%). A much larger proportion (29%) of participants didn’t report the racism they experienced or witnessed (not even to friends or family).
Reporting to the AHRC appeared to be higher than usual at the start of the pandemic. In February 2020, the AHRC recorded the highest monthly number of racial discrimination complaints that financial year. And one in four people who reported racial discrimination to the commission in early 2020 linked those incidents to COVID-19.
Our findings worryingly suggest this is an under-representation of the racism that is occurring during the pandemic.
According to our respondents, the barriers to formal reporting include a lack of trust in statutory agencies and the perception that racism reports would not be responded to.
For example, 63% agreed that the report would not be taken seriously, 60% agreed the incident would not be dealt with properly, and 40% did not trust the recipients of the report. As one participant said:
I don’t think the police would do much, they are always saying they are under-resourced so why would they spend time and resources trying to locate some hooligan who was being racist.
A more strident distrust of the recipients of formal reports was also voiced:
The perpetrator of the incident was a client of the company I am working for. I’m sure that if I reported the incident, it would have been ignored. Even worse, I feared that I would have to face ramifications for reporting the incident.
Feelings of hopelessness, shame or disempowerment were other barriers to reporting racist incidents: 63% said it would not help, 54% felt uncomfortable or embarrassed, and 50% wanted to forget about the incident.
One participant explained:
If there is a white person and an Asian person in Australia they always side with the white person even if the Asian is the victim.
Just over half of participants also did not know how to report an incident, while just under half did not know they could report one. Said one participant:
I don’t know who they were and how to report. Wherever this happened there was not security camera so that police could trace the person.
This is consistent with other studies that have found similar barriers to reporting racism, including a lack of knowledge about reporting and lack of trust in agencies to do anything about it.
Racism is having far-reaching consequences
In line with research on the effects of racism on people’s health and wellbeing, the racism experienced by Asian Australians in our study is linked to high rates of stress, depression, anxiety and “non-belonging”.
Worryingly, there are even wider consequences of the anti-Asian sentiments being expressed during COVID. A large majority of participants who haven’t experienced racism during the pandemic directly still have some anticipation (on a scale of rarely to very often) of someone saying or doing something racist.
And a significant number of respondents who haven’t experienced racism said they avoided places and situations because of an anticipation of racism.
Other research has found that experiences or anticipation of racism can impact a person’s mobility and feelings of safety. This, in turn, can limit access to essential services such as health care, employment and housing.
It is therefore a significant concern that anxiety, worry and avoidance of potential racism is so high during the pandemic, even among those who aren’t being directly targeted.
Second, previous experiences of racism and discrimination may be causing people to anticipate repeated incidents, particularly during a crisis like the pandemic. Before the pandemic, Asian Australians were twice as likely to experience racism than other Australians.
But without trust in institutions or adequate data on reported incidents, the full impact of racism — and how it undermines social cohesion and individual health and wellbeing — remain hidden.
There is an urgent need for government and non-government agencies to develop tools that allow the reporting of incidents “without prejudice”, such as third-party reporting systems. (This is also advocated by the Hate Crime Network.) Examples of this include the UK’s True Vision reporting tool and the Islamophobia Support Service of the Islamic Council of Victoria.
As our research shows, reporting processes and responses need to be streamlined and made accessible to all communities, too. This will also lift confidence in reporting.
Alanna Kamp receives funding from the Department of Premier and Cabinet Victoria, Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS), and SBS Corporation. She is affiliated with the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS).
Kevin Dunn received funding from Victorian Department of Families, Fairness and Housing and the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS).
Matteo Vergani receives funding from the Victorian government, Gandel Philanthropy, the Australian federal government, and the Canadian government. He is affiliated with the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS).
Nida Denson currently receives funding from the Department of Premier and Cabinet Victoria, Department of Education (NSW), Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS), SBS Corporation, ACON Health Limited, and Guide Dogs NSW/ACT. She is affiliated with the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS).
Rachel Sharples has received funding from the Department of Premier and Cabinet Victoria and the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS). She is affiliated with the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS).
Scanning through data fresh off the telescope, we saw two ghosts dancing deep in the cosmos. We had never seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what they were.
Several weeks later, we had figured out we were seeing two radio galaxies, about a billion light years away. In the centre of each one is a supermassive black hole, squirting out jets of electrons that are bent into grotesque shapes by an intergalactic wind.
The two galaxies we think are responsible for the streams of electrons (shown as curved arrows) that form the Dancing Ghosts. But we don’t understand what is causing the filament labelled as 3. Image by Jayanne English and Ray Norris using data from EMU and the Dark Energy Survey
But where does the intergalactic wind come from? Why is it so tangled? And what is causing the streams of radio emission? We still don’t understand the details of what is going on here, and it will probably take many more observations and modelling before we do.
We are getting used to surprises as we scan the skies in the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, using CSIRO’s new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a radio telescope that probes deeper into the Universe than any other. When you boldly go where no telescope has gone before, you are likely to make new discoveries.
A deep search returns many surprises
The image produced by the EMU Pilot Survey. The full moon is shown for scale in the bottom left. The dancing ghosts are barely a pin-prick on this image. Image by Ray Norris from EMU data
The Dancing Ghosts were just one of several surprises found in our first deep search of the sky using ASKAP. This search, called the EMU Pilot Survey, is described in detail in a paper soon to appear in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
The first ‘Odd Radio Circle’. Radio data are green and the white and coloured data show the optical background from the Dark Energy Survey. image created by Jayanne English from data from EMU and the Dark Energy Survey
The first big surprise from the EMU Pilot Survey was the discovery of mysterious Odd Radio Circles (ORCs), which seem to be giant rings of radio emission, nearly a million light years across, surrounding distant galaxies.
These had never been seen before, because they are so rare and faint. We still don’t know what they are, but we are working furiously to find out.
We are finding surprises even in places we thought we understood. Next door to the well-studied galaxy IC5063, we found a giant radio galaxy, one of the largest known, whose existence had never even been suspected.
A giant radio galaxy with plumes of electrons stretching nearly 5 million light years from top to bottom of the image. These plumes had never been seen before the EMU Pilot Survey, even though the galaxy IC5063 (the bright blob in the centre) is a very well-studied galaxy. The radio emission (white) is superimposed on an optical imge (coloured) from the dark energy survey. Image by Ray Norris from EMU data and Dark Energy Survey data
This new galaxy too contains a supermassive black hole, squirting out jets of electrons nearly 5 million light years long. ASKAP is the only telescope in the world that can see the total extent of this faint emission.
What EMU can do
Most known sources of radio emissions are caused by supermassive black holes in quasars and active galaxies, which produce exceptionally bright signals. This is because radio telescopes have always struggled to see the much fainter radio emission from normal spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way.
The EMU project goes deep enough to see them too. EMU sees almost all the spiral galaxies in the nearby Universe that were previously seen only by optical and infrared telescopes. EMU can even trace the spiral arms in the nearest ones.
The Galaxy NGC 7125 with EMU radio data (contours) overlaid on an optical image (coloured_ from the Dark Energy Survey. Image created by Baerbel Koribalski from EMU data and Dark Energy Survey data
EMU will help us understand the birth of new stars in these galaxies.
These some of the first results the EMU project, which we started in 2009. The EMU team of more than 400 scientists in more than 20 countries has spent the past 12 years planning the project, developing techniques, writing software, and working with the CSIRO engineers who were building the telescope. It has been a long haul, but we are at last seeing the amazing data we have dreamed of for so long.
But this is only the start. Over the next few years, EMU will use the ASKAP telescope to explore even deeper in the Universe, building on these discoveries and finding more. All the data from EMU will eventually be placed in the public domain, so that astronomers from around the world can mine the data and make new discoveries.
But don’t take my word for it. You can already use EMU Pilot Survey data to explore the radio sky yourself, using the zoomable image on our website.
Use your mouse wheel to zoom in from the big picture down to the finest details, and see what you find. Perhaps you may even discover something there that the astronomers have missed.
Ray Norris 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.
Giant bird-eating centipedes may sound like something out of a science-fiction film — but they’re not. On tiny Phillip Island, part of the South Pacific’s Norfolk Island group, the Phillip Island centipede (Cormocephalus coynei) population can kill and eat up to 3,700 seabird chicks each year.
And this is entirely natural. This unique creature endemic to Phillip Island has a diet consisting of an unusually large proportion of vertebrate animals including seabird chicks.
Phillip Island in the Norfolk Island group, with a valley of iconic Norfolk Island Pine trees. Luke Halpin
We show how large, predatory arthropods can play an important role in the food webs of island ecosystems. And the Phillip Island centipede achieves this through its highly varied diet.
This centipede can grow to almost one foot (or 30.5cm) in length. It is armed with a potent venom encased in two pincer-like appendages called “forcipules”, which it uses to immobilise its prey. Its body is protected by shield-like armoured plates that line each of the many segments that make up its length.
On warm and humid nights, these strictly nocturnal arthropods hunt through thick leaf litter, navigating a labyrinth of seabird burrows peppered across the forest floor. A centipede on the prowl will use its two ultra-sensitive antennae to navigate as it seeks prey.
The centipede hunts an unexpectedly varied range of quarry, from crickets to seabird chicks, geckos and skinks. It even hunts fish — dropped by seabirds called black noddies (Anous minuta) that make their nests in the trees above.
A frightful discovery
Soon after we began our research on the ecology of Phillip Island’s burrowing seabirds, we discovered chicks of black-winged petrels (Pterodroma nigripennis) were falling prey to the Phillip Island centipede.
We knew this needed further investigation, so we set out to unravel the mystery of this large arthropod’s dietary habits.
Black-winged petrel chick just prior to being weighed on Phillip Island. Trudy Chatwin
To find out what these centipedes were eating, we studied their feeding activities at night and recorded the prey species they were targeting. We also monitored petrel chicks in their burrow nests every few days, for months at a time.
We eventually began to see consistent injury patterns among chicks that were killed. We even witnessed one centipede attacking and eating a chick.
From the rates of predation we observed, we calculated that the Phillip Island centipede population can kill and eat between 2,109 and 3,724 petrel chicks each year. The black-winged petrels — of which there are up to 19,000 breeding pairs on the island — appear to be resilient to this level of predation.
Envenomation of a black-winged petrel nestling by a Phillip Island centipede. (Video by Daniel Terrington)
And the predation of black-winged petrels by Phillip Island centipedes is an entirely natural predator-prey relationship. By preying on vertebrates, the centipedes trap nutrients brought from the ocean by seabirds and distribute them around the island.
In some sense, they’ve taken the place (or ecological niche) of predatory mammals, which are absent from the island.
Luke Halpin monitoring black-winged petrel chicks on Phillip Island. Trudy Chatwin
Restoration and recovery
Up until just a few decades ago the Phillip Island Centipede was very rare. In fact, it was only formally described as a species in 1984.
After an intensive search in 1980, only a few small individuals were found. The species’s rarity back then was most likely due to severely degraded habitats caused by pigs, goats and rabbits introduced by humans to the island.
The removal of these invasive pests enabled black-winged petrels to colonise. Their population has since exploded and they’re now the most abundant of the 13 seabird species that breed on Phillip Island.
They provide a high-quality food source for the Phillip Island centipede and have therefore likely helped centipede population to recover.
Black-winged petrels on Phillip Island are active both during the day and at night. (Video by Luke Halpin)
Ancient bone deposits in the soil suggest that prior to the black-winged petrel’s arrival, Phillip Island was home to large numbers of other small burrow-nesting seabird species. It’s likely the Phillip Island centipede preyed on these seabirds too.
Now, thanks to the conservation efforts of Norfolk Island National Park, the island’s forest is regenerating alongside endemic species like the centipede, as well as the critically endangered Phillip Island hibiscus (Hibiscus insularis).
The endemic Phillip Island hibiscus. Luke Halpin
As a driver of nutrient transfer, the persistence of the Phillip Island centipede (and its healthy appetite) might just be key to the island’s ecosystem recovery. But we’ll need to do more research to fully understand the intricate links in this bustling food web.
Luke Halpin is a recipient of the Endeavour Postgraduate Leadership Award from the Australian Government. This research was funded by the Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment – Equity Trustees Charitable Foundation & the Ecological Society of Australia, BirdLife Australia Stuart Leslie Bird Research Award and the Australasian Seabird Group. Support was also provided by the New South Wales Department of Planning, Industry and Environment and Norfolk Island National Park.
Rohan Clarke receives funding from Parks Australia, the Australia and the Pacific Science Foundation. Rohan Clarke is affiliated with Monash University.
Rowan Mott is affiliated with the University of Adelaide.
The supermarket sector is finally about to receive some serious government intervention. Following a scathing report from the Commerce Commission, it’s now almost inevitable that the Labour Government is going to have to introduce some major changes to this vital but uncompetitive retail sector. And these moves are likely to be popular.
The report, released on Thursday, met with almost universal praise and celebration. And it surprised everyone with just how scathing it was about the supermarkets, and how radical its early recommendations are.
The first key point the supermarket sector report makes, is that the current groceries sector is utterly broken. It paints a picture of a Foodstuffs and Woolworths duopoly making super-profits – in excess of 20 per cent return on their capital – by ripping off both food suppliers and customers. The report found that food prices are the sixth highest in the OECD. Staff, too, are heavily exploited to help make billions of dollars in profits.
The second key point is the possible suite of reforms that will be necessary to fix the sector. These range from encouraging supermarkets to reform themselves, through to serious state intervention to break up the mega-entities that control the market, or even the state setting up a third supermarket chain (in the way that KiwiBank was introduced).
Rutherford summed up the reform options: “The Commerce Commission’s recommendations for measures to improve wholesale competition are a spectrum, ranging from modest changes on a voluntary basis, to creating a new wholesaler or even forcing the break-up of the groups into retail and wholesale. Aimed at attracting a new major retailer into the New Zealand market, it could be accompanied by forcing the supermarket to sell off certain sites to a new player.”
The mood for a more interventionist state in broken markets
In the above article, Rutherford also explains that such a scathing and radical report really puts pressure on the Labour Government and the Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister David Clark to actually carry out some substantial reforms. Rutherford concludes: “with such a clear verdict of a duopoly exercising market power in such a mammoth sector, the Government will quickly need to find a suitable response.”
Stuff newspapers political editor Luke Malpass also emphasised how the report squarely puts the ball into the Government’s court, making it almost impossible for them to avoid doing something big. He says that normally these types of reports take the pressure off governments: “Market studies are great for governments. If nothing else, a Commerce Commission probe creates the appearance of government action long before the action happens”, but given the tenor of this particular report, “the Government will have to actually do something this time around” – see: Labour’s $22 billion supermarket problem — and opportunity.
According to Malpass, David Clark is a good fit for this role (better than the ill-fated Health portfolio), and he’s inclined towards proper reform: “His view is simple: Labour campaigned on doing this, he thinks that there is a mood for real change, and now it will be up to the Government to get on with it.”
Government intervention is also likely to be substantial, Malpass points out, because there’s now a strong public philosophical mood for the state to act: “This political landscape has changed massively from five years ago. There seems to be a pretty good public appetite for the Government to sort some of these things out. If anything, Labour’s only downside risk here is not doing enough. And if Covid has taught us anything, it’s that – rightly or wrongly – Kiwis are quite happy for governments to intervene in the right circumstances. In the coming cost-of-living political war, the party that convinces voters it is the one on their side will be rewarded.”
This mood for a bigger and more interventionist state, especially in regard to the broken supermarket sector, is very well examined by Max Rashbrooke in his column, Supermarket prices: Politicians have dropped the ball, which begins like this: “The forensic evisceration on Thursday of our uncompetitive supermarket duopoly is a landmark moment, a sign of shifting attitudes towards capitalism – and a massive test for Commerce Minister David Clark.”
According to Rashbrooke, Clark has a big job ahead, and will have to resist “a determined lobbying campaign by the supermarket duo”, but ultimately will achieve his own redemption if he can create a legacy as the Minister “who broke up the big two”. And the fact that he even has this task is a sign that the “laissez-faire thinking” of the past that allowed the market to evolve into a duopoly is out of fashion.
Rashbrooke points to other broken sectors that will also need reform, including electricity, building supplies (where “Fletchers utterly dominates”), petrol, and banking. And he suggests that in the new environment, National is likely to be onboard with radical reform, “because conservatives need capitalism to work properly and retain the public’s support.”
Economist Cameron Bagrie also thinks the Government has a strong incentive to go hard on supermarkets, and that the construction sector and banking should be next – see: Supermarkets are sitting ducks for pro-competition regulation (paywalled). He notes the Government is building up the Commerce Commission’s capacity, budgeting “$30.4 million extra for the commission over three years, and $13.9m per year thereafter.”
Bagrie believes that reform of the grocery sector will be favoured by Government because rising inflation is “not likely to be economically or voter-friendly”, and “Moving on supermarkets could help around the edges to contain inflation.”
Media commentators are also keen for the Government to deal to the supermarkets. Heather du Plessis-Allan says she’s hoping for big reforms to increase supermarket competition but is not sure this will happen, especially given that promised reforms in the petrol market don’t appear to have worked – see: We pay too much for groceries.
She says reform will be difficult, but electorally rewarding: “The easy option is to force the supermarket chains to supply a third player with wholesale groceries at reasonable prices so they can compete. The hard option is force the supermarket chains to sell off some of their stores or brands. Either way, this will kick up a storm in the sector. The Government will buy itself a fight. Does it have the courage? I’d like to see it go hard. I think there’s public support from frustrated shoppers.”
Similarly, Kerre McIvor is sceptical of reform eventuating, but says it would be popular: “waving a stick at big international companies and millionaire supermarket owners is good for votes from families doing it tough, and if this Government knows anything, it’s how to capitalise on populist causes. The big two would be sensible to take this report, and its recommendations, very seriously” – see: The supermarkets should take ComCom report seriously (paywalled).
Newspaper editorials are also favourable to reform. The New Zealand Herald’s editorial said the report findings “are unsurprising”, but “What’s important is what happens next” – see: Smashing the supermarket duopoly is a safe bet for Labour (paywalled). The newspaper says “with inflation on the way voters are sure to be supportive of any measures to increase competition.”
The Otago Daily Times argues that the reforms must be radical: “consumers, suppliers, and potential new retailers will be expecting the Government to do something more than tinker” – see: Supermarket changes unknown.
Although a lot of reform conversation is about helping assist a third supermarket chain into the market, the ODT says greater regulation of current grocery store pricing is also required: “Questions are already being raised about whether an extra big player or two would necessarily make the improvement sought without some sort of control of the margins on grocery items.”
He also believes that government price controls must be introduced, arguing supermarkets are “like a power company, they’re essential to modern living, and it’s important that they should be regulated to make sure that they actually do deliver”. Hamlin argues there’s a need for a dedicated senior Minister in charge of supermarkets, rather than just an independent regulator: “I would imagine there will be a call for an independent regulatory authority… that would be a very poor idea because I doubt if it would stay independent for very long – that it would be captured by the people it’s supposed to be being regulated by.”
Calls for a Telecom-style breakup of the supermarket duopoly
Many commentators are drawing parallels between the state of the supermarkets and how the Telecom monopoly was broken up in the mid-2000s. For the best argument in this regard, see Ernie Newman’s column, Supermarkets – the Telecom parallel (paywalled).
Newman, who was once the head of the Technology Users Association of NZ, and now advises the Food and Grocery Council, is emphatic about the need for a break-up being forced on the supermarkets, starting his column like this: “Like cracking open an egg and finding it rotten, the Commerce Commission has exposed in one dramatic report the ugly reality of market power abuse in our supermarket sector.”
He argues that the split up of Telecom and major reforms to the telecommunications market quickly brought about huge benefits for the consumer, and the same can happen with groceries: “So can consumers, and grocery suppliers, expect a similar outcome from this action against supermarkets? Emphatically yes. The core problem is the same – blatant abuse of extreme market power. The detail is different, but arguably less challenging in the distribution sector which is about trucks and real estate, unlike the technology sector grappling with massive and continual technological changes.”
However, business journalist Bernard Hickey is much less sure. He says the Commerce Commission report is “a detailed, meticulous and cracking read” but dissents from the growing chorus who suggest big structural reforms could be easily implemented – see: Don’t bet on a breakup.
Here’s Hickey’s main point: “Unlike Telecom, which was a locally-listed and a former state-owned network monopoly that could be relatively easily broken in two with legislation, a share split and a couple of minor regulatory tweaks, the two supermarket chains’ ownership structures (two cooperatives with individually owned supermarkets and an Australian-owned corporate) mean they would both be fiendishly complicated to unravel and replicate with legislation and simple corporate action.”
Land reform to help new supermarket rivals
One of Hickey’s preferred fixes involves helping foreign chains enter the market with “accelerated RMA help for [property] sites or overseas investment exemptions, which should be expedited.”
This is because the Commerce Commission report shines a light on the problem for new supermarket companies face acquiring property for stores. Suitable land is hard to get, and this is partly due to a lot of council and resource management rules and processes, but also because of strategic actions by the existing grocery companies in blocking site availability. This is all explored in Dileepa Fonseka’sPulling out all the stops to get a new supermarket player into the market.
For more on this, see Eric Crampton’s Why it’s hard to open a supermarket in NZ. He explains that a lot of suitable sites for new supermarkets have contracts that prevent them being used for this purpose: “Existing supermarkets either own those sites already, or previously owned them and sold them off with encumbrances on the title restricting any future owner against using the site as a supermarket, or the site is part of an existing shopping centre where the supermarket has an exclusivity restriction.”
KiwiShop: “Where everyone is at the front of the queue”
Probably the most contentious and interesting reform option put forward by the Commerce Commission is the government establishment of a supermarket chain. Max Rashbrooke comments on this, saying “Though I can’t see the state running a supermarket well in the long term, this could be the short-term circuit breaker we need. The risks would require careful assessment, but the benefits to consumers and suppliers would probably be substantial.”
The way that such a “KiwiShop” would operate is sketched out further today by marketing specialist Associate Professor Mike Lee of the University of Auckland, who says that such an idea could be as successful as KiwiBank, but operating more as a not-for-profit public service – see: Subsidies not soft drinks: The brave new world of Kiwishop (paywalled).
He argues that when the market fails, the government needs to enter: “Governments need to step in when systems fail, or when the profit incentive of the major players result in poor levels of wellbeing for the population. That’s why governments get involved in public housing, public transport, public education, and public health. So why not try public retailing?”
Lee envisages a KiwiShop that employs welfare beneficiaries, trains them up, prioritises the sale of New Zealand goods, and doesn’t sell harmful products (such as cigarettes and soft drinks).
In contrast, Herald business commentator Kate MacNamara says the KiwiShop-type idea is “risible”: “For one thing, it conjures alarming visions of the Prime Minister’s chiding hand on your supermarket trolley steering it firmly away from the biscuit aisle (renamed ‘occasional treats’ and cordoned off before mid-afternoon)” – see: The problem of supermarkets’ power and Government’s attitude to competition (paywalled).
Chris Trotter says it’s not going to happen anyhow. He says that David Clark and his colleagues are allergic to such “democratic socialist” ideas, which would be seen as too much of a threat to capitalism – see: The Sin of cheapness.
Finally, not everyone is convinced that the supermarket sector is even broken and in need of reform. Mike Hosking says that the “report found fault for no other reason than all reports find fault”, and the problems of the current market are because: “It’s not easy doing business at the bottom of the world with a small population and a weird geography” – see: Nothing will change from the supermarket inquiry.
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. Click here to subscribe to Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup and New Zealand Politics Daily.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kim Ellis Hayes, Senior Lecturer in Space Research & Law / In training as Suborbital Spaceflight PoSSUM Astronaut Candidate Graduate, Swinburne University of Technology
Me (top, third from right) with others from the International Space University, in front of the Shuttle Atlantis at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.Author provided
I’m currently training to become Australia’s first woman astronaut. I expect to fly my first suborbital mission sometime in 2023 as a payload specialist on a commercial mission. In other words, I’ll be one of few certified crew members who can handle specialised scientific equipment aboard a suborbital spacecraft.
Once we’re up there, my team and I expect to conduct research on Earth’s atmosphere. It’s an opportunity I consider out of this world. But it has taken a lot of effort for this dream to be realised.
My path to PoSSUM
As a female STEM and legal professional, my past jobs included working as a research scientist in mining and metals for BHP-Billiton, Rio Tinto and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) — but I always loved space.
After combining my science degree with two law degrees, I won a scholarship for the International Space University. I eventually received an Australian Government Endeavour Executive Award for a project at the NASA Kennedy Space Centre. With this I pivoted towards a career in the space industry, and have never looked back.
The International Space University students and teaching teams in 2012, in front of the Shuttle Atlantis at Kennedy Space Center. Author provided
I was selected as a PoSSUM (Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere) Scientist-Astronaut candidate and global ambassador for 2021. PoSSUM is a non-profit US astronautics research and education program run by the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences (IIAS).
The program uses next-generation suborbital spacecraft to study the upper atmosphere and its potential role in global climate change. Generally speaking, a suborbital spaceflight is any flight that reaches an altitude higher than 80km, but doesn’t escape Earth’s gravity to make it into orbit.
Anything above 80km is deemed “space” under US legislation, although some nations (including Australia) don’t agree with this and the debate about where “space” begins — also called the Kármán line — remains ongoing.
Last month, commercial space tourism companies Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic completed the very first suborbital spaceflights carrying passengers (without research). This was an incredible achievement, which many have said could mark the beginning commercial space tourism.
In 2019 I led a Victorian Trade mission for aerospace in the US. This picture was taken in Connecticut at the International Space Trade Summit, where I spoke. I’m pictured here (third from the right) with the Victorian Delegation and Karl Rodrigues from the Australian Space Agency. Author provided
To graduate as a PoSSUM Scientist-Astronaut candidate, there are several academic and flight training components I must complete before I can head into space.
During academic training in 2020, I covered topics such as spaceflight physiology (what happens to the body in space), spaceflight life support, atmospheric science and spaceflight research equipment.
My flight training later this year will involve spending days with former NASA astronaut instructors and PoSSUM team scientists. On day one, we’ll begin to use the spaceflight simulator which is currently set up as the Virgin Galactic Unity 22 vehicle.
In the days that follow, we will receive high-G training, crew resource management training, high-altitude training and equipment training which will be crucial to conduct our research. We’ll learn how to operate a series of instruments to measure physical atmospheric properties.
We will also need to know our way around the spacesuits, which will be similar to those used by NASA. The famous orange suits are a life-support system for astronauts. Astronauts in orbital and suborbital spaceflights must wear them during launch, flight and return in case they have to exit the spacecraft in an emergency, or in case the spacecraft depressurises.
Me sitting in the captain’s seat of the NASA’s Space Shuttle Endeavour. Author provided
We’ll need to learn how to manage unexpected events such as decompression, too. This is when the pressure inside a spacecraft or spacesuit is reduced by a leak. If pressure becomes too low, breathing oxygen can be forced out of the suit. The astronaut will then experience hypoxia (a lack of oxygen in body tissues), which can be deadly.
Or let’s say we’re not able to land where we planned to; the training will cover how to manage a water landing and a fast exit from the vehicle. We must be prepared in case one of the electrical or physical systems fails, causing a hazardous environment.
Nobody likes to imagine things going wrong, but planning for emergencies is necessary.
A ‘steep’ learning curve aboard parabolic flights
It’s likely I will complete my first research flight to space on the Virgin Galactic vehicle — but given the rate of spacecraft development, it could be another similar craft.
Launching aboard a spacecraft subjects the human body to a variety of forces. Learning to identify and manage changes caused by these forces is critical. On day four of training I will climb into an aerobatic aircraft with a cruise speed of 317km per hour, in which I will practice using equipment and techniques to avoid blackouts during aerobatic flight.
The final test will be a series of parabolic flights simulating microgravity aboard a different aircraft. In parabolic flights, an aircraft repeatedly climbs steeply, then enters a deep dive, to create weightlessness for up to 40 seconds. This is repeated 20-25 times during the flight to demonstrate weightlessness in space. Experiments are conducted during weightlessness.
The last day of training will involve using virtual and augmented reality to practise planning space missions. We’ll be able to work on any aspect of the training we feel is needed before our final evaluation.
If all goes to plan, I will graduate with FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) qualifications as a spaceflight crew member for any space vehicle in the US (orbital and suborbital). Both my training and the work I will do aboard my first suborbital flight as a payload specialist fall within the guidelines outlined in the FAA’s advisory circular released on July 20.
If there are no further changes to the eligibility requirements or criteria, I could be nominated to receive Astronaut Wings once the mission is complete.
Why do research in space anyway?
But what’s the big deal when it comes to research in space? Well, for one, spaceflight allows researchers to observe how materials behave in the absence of gravity.
Studying how materials behave in weightless environments has proven immensely useful for scientists. For instance, studying how a virus replicates in space could help scientists develop better vaccines and treatments for diseases such as COVID-19.
Most people have heard of the International Space Station (ISS): the football-field sized laboratory in space which constantly orbits Earth. Generally, only space agency astronauts from the US, Russia, Japan and Europe will travel to and from the ISS in various orbital spacecraft (rockets). Doing research on the ISS is expensive, slow and subject to long wait times.
Australian companies can benefit from research opportunities offered by suborbital flights in the USA. Being able to complete human tended research on a suborbital research flight is a much more affordable option, and is therefore a game changer. It means small companies that couldn’t previously afford spaceflight can now get in the game.
It’s an honour for me to be able to train for this mission and hopefully bring the space dream closer to Australia. And by teaching space technology and law, I look forward to playing my part in advancing the next generation’s access to space.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patricia A. O’Brien, Visiting Fellow, School of History, Australian National University, and Adjunct Professor, Asian Studies Program, Georgetown University
Fiji now heads the grim list of Pacific nations counting their dead from coronavirus, having just passed Papua New Guinea’s toll. So far, 254 Fijians have died from the disease, and the nation is recording 1,000 new cases every day.
But numbers are an inadequate and inaccurate way to calculate the cost of the pandemic in the Pacific. Even in the Pacific’s COVID-free countries, the pandemic casts an ominous shadow.
The Delta variant has drastically altered the situation for the Pacific. It was first detected in Fiji in April and spread quickly. This is despite Fiji being the first Pacific nation to receive AstraZeneca vaccines through the COVAX program in March.
The Bainimarama government is being blamed for not executing a rapid mass vaccination campaign and not sufficiently locking down the nation. The other contagion accompanying coronavirus around the globe – misinformation – has also been blamed for widespread Fijian vaccine reluctance.
Now Fiji’s government is desperately fighting to contain the outbreak. Fears are circulating that it is facing a repeat of the 1875 measles epidemic that killed about 40,000 people.
The Fijian government is desperately trying to contain its COVID outbreak. Aileen Torres-Bennett/AP/AAP
A mandatory vaccination order was issued on July 8 to all government workers. Non-compliance will be punished by job loss. Currently, 25% of Fijians are fully vaccinated. The government has also expanded curfews for the main island and the outbreak epicentre, Viti Levu.
Beyond the urgency of saving lives and halting the disease’s spread, Fiji is also economically devastated by the pandemic. Most Pacific borders were closed by March 2020, instantly cutting the economic lifeblood of tourism.
Being a Pacific hub, Fiji is a dangerous launching point for the Delta strain to other nations. In early July, for example, nine travellers from Fiji arrived in New Zealand infected with COVID-19.
Repatriating students and their families from Fiji remains a serious concern for both the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The Solomons has decided to repatriate some, but most will remain in Fiji until more vaccines have been administered at home (currently under 3% are fully vaccinated).
Vanuatu’s low vaccination rate of under 8% also makes the return of students a perilous decision for lawmakers. Like Fiji, it is now considering a “no jab, no job” policy.
In addition to the risks posed by Fiji, both nations have had numerous scares from infected shipping crews. All Pacific nations must contend with this border vulnerability.
Papua New Guinea
The havoc unfolding in Fiji is bad news for Papua New Guinea. Though PNG recorded its first COVID-19 case in March 2020, it was not until one year later that a health crisis erupted.
PNG’s official toll is almost certainly the tip of the iceberg, as COVID testing was scaled back once vaccinations became the main focus for health authorities. And this was before PNG’s first confirmed case of the Delta variant was announced on July 16.
Again, mass vaccinations are PNG’s only defence. Vaccine donations have arrived from various sources, but only about 1% of the population is fully vaccinated according to available government reporting.
Australia has already donated thousands of doses to PNG and other Pacific nations, but with a reported stockpile of 3 million unused doses of AstraZeneca, the Pacific nations would be obvious places to send these.
Australia has donated vaccines to its neighbour PNG, but across the Pacific much more help is needed. Darren England/AP/AAP
Papua and West Papua
Over PNG’s border with Indonesia, COVID-19’s spread is clashing with another surge in political unrest. Tensions had been building again following the rebel killing of an Indonesian general in April. Then Indonesian legislators voted on July 17 to again controversially reshape Papua.
Protests occurred at the same time the Delta variant entered the community. Police controls limiting movements into rebel areas, ostensibly to curb COVID, have increased.
Papuan activists are concerned vaccine distribution will be withheld from rebel populations as an Indonesian tactic to further weaken them. West Papua leader Benny Wenda has called on the West to vaccinate Indigenous Papuans because COVID is an additional existential threat to his people. Wenda’s fears may have foundation. The Papua province has the lowest vaccination rates in Indonesia, at about 6%.
Elsewhere in the Pacific
The news is better in other parts of the Pacific. Numerous Pacific nations, including Tonga, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia and American Samoa, have not recorded any confirmed COVID cases. Kiribati recently reported its first case, matching Samoa’s record to date.
The natural isolation of many Pacific populations will protect them for only so long. Analysis of the 1918 influenza epidemic shows outbreaks persisted in the Pacific through to 1921. When it reached the phosphate-mining island of Nauru in 1920, it killed 18% of the local populace.
A century later, Nauru has vaccinated all its adults against COVID and claims this as a “world record”.
Niue has also achieved herd immunity thanks to New Zealand’s swift donation of Pfizer vaccines, a process now being repeated in Tokelau. The Cook Islands, with its more complex geography, nonetheless has a high vaccination rate (55%) sustaining the travel bubble with New Zealand that opened in May 2021.
In the US territory of Guam, where the first COVID death in the Pacific was recorded in March 2020, tourism and vaccinations have merged in a different way. Travellers from Taiwan began taking “vacation and vaccination” trips from early July. While Guam recently reached 80% vaccinated, it also recorded its 142nd death attributed to the pandemic.
Like Guam, Palau got fast and adequate supplies of vaccines because of its freely associated relationship with the US. This has shielded them from the pandemic with near herd immunity.
Yet Hawaii is seeing the same recent surge as is afflicting mainland US. The Delta variant and July 4 parties have combined to unleash what President Joe Biden called a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.
Hawaii is now seeing the same surge in cases in the past month as has the US mainland. Jennifer Sinco Kelleher/AP/AAP
This latest surge, like earlier ones, disproportionately impacts Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander communities living in the US by a substantial degree.
COVID has devastated the US-based Marshall Islands community, especially in Arkansas, so alarming health officials they investigated it in 2020.
French Polynesia has grappled with the costs of an operating tourist industry since early 2020. Twice, borders have been closed when cases numbers and deaths rose, and then reopened. Now President Edouard Fritch is calling for compulsory vaccinations.
In New Caledonia, COVID has complicated a fractious political situation as it heads towards its final referendum on independence from France in December. In February 2021, a budget crisis exacerbated by COVID’s economic impact led to the collapse of the government. In July, the territory elected its first Kanak pro-independence leader in 40 years, increasing the likelihood of a vote to break with France.
COVID has also added complications to the protracted political crisis in Samoa that ended on July 26. Closed borders prevented non-resident voters returning to cast ballots in the April 9 election that saw Fiame Naomi Mata’afa become prime minister.
Samoa has seen the same economic and social stresses due to COVID as elsewhere in the region. Many saw the introduction and extension of emergency powers by the now-defeated government (despite having only one case and no deaths) as another move towards autocracy. The political crisis has been a drag on all Samoan government functions, not least a sluggish vaccine rollout.
In another disaster, COVID pushes climate change to the backburner
Every Pacific nation faces its own challenges due to COVID. The region also has shared ones. The Pacific Islands Forum lost one-third of its members in February 2021 in part because meetings were held virtually. The fracturing of this regional body comes at a bad moment, not least in the fight against climate change.
Until COVID, this was the immediate existential crisis facing the region. Now activist worry climate change initiatives have stalled at the long-term peril of the region. As the Federated States of Micronesia president has argued, “economies can die and be revived but human beings cannot”. Whether this also applies to the planet remains to be seen.
Patricia A. O’Brien receives funding from the Australian Research Council and New Zealand’s JD Stout Trust.
Just weeks before the first COVID-19 cases emerged, Gallup published its latest poll on America’s views about business. At the bottom of the list of 25 sectors was the pharmaceutical industry. Below advertising. Below oil and gas. Below the banks.
The pandemic and the new vaccines have of course turned that reputation around, but let’s not forget why the pharmaceutical industry’s credibility sank so low.
Or how the industry got so big. One company, Johnson & Johnson, is currently worth around US$450 billion. About the same as the economy of Norway.
The idea of the miraculous potion or cure-all dates back at least as far as Greek mythology. The goddess Panacea even gets a mention in the Hippocratic Oath.
The rise of the modern pharmaceutical industry is more recent, coming through the 19th century. On the eve of the 20th century, the German company Bayer famously launched its early blockbusters, including “Aspirin” and “Heroin.”
Around this time, US drug-makers were arguing for patent protections, or exclusive rights to market a drug for a specific period of time. By the 1950s, they’d won those arguments, and the US soon became the world’s biggest market for medicines.
In addition to patents, the other special ingredient for success was the right to market pills directly to doctors, and in the US, directly to consumers via television commercials.
At the dawn of the 21st century, in those dark ages before Facebook and Big Tech, pharmaceuticals was among the most profitable industries on the planet.
Wonder drugs, miracle cures
Clearly many medicines extend lives and reduce suffering. And while we need caution with hyperbole, some discoveries are major breakthroughs.
Antibiotics revolutionised the treatment of deadly infections, and gave a boost to science at the same time.
In the 1940s, one of the first-published “randomised controlled trials” was a test of Streptomycin for the treatment of tuberculosis.
In the 1980s, another famous class of wonder drugs was developed, this time to tackle the HIV-AIDS epidemic. The mysterious new virus bringing many people a death sentence would soon become a manageable disease.
And while some cancers remain incurable, others are treated and even prevented with medicines that are simply miraculous.
Over-pricing and patent protections for HIV medicines put them out of reach of the world’s poorest, and prices only came down after massive global campaigns for greater access.
With cancer, companies have demanded huge prices for products offering sometimes minimal benefits.
Extortionate prices were feeding drug company mega-profits, and at the same time driving down the industry’s reputation. In a notorious example, the cost of the life-saving Epipen skyrocketed more than 400%, helping make drug prices a big issue in the 2016 US presidential election.
The price of Epipens rose by more than 400%. Shutterstock
Industry argues high prices fund vital research. Critics say companies can spend more on marketing than research, and their profits sometimes derive from taxpayer-funded science.
To make matters worse, the big pharmaceutical companies are also among the big tax avoiders. A 2015 Senate hearing in Australia heard companies were paying rates as low as one cent in the dollar.
A global report from Oxfam in 2018 concluded the pharmaceutical industry was “cheating countries out of billions in tax revenues”.
Toxic marketing causes harm
The major problem with the drug giants is their unhealthy influence over medical science. The industry dominates research, and there’s strong evidence that company-sponsored studies tend to have a bias which favours the sponsor’s product.
Medical education is also heavily sponsored, with evidence suggesting an association between a doctor accepting just one meal at an “educational event”, and prescribing more of the sponsor’s drugs.
And the guidelines which can be so influential over a doctor’s prescribing decisions are too often written by medical experts with ties to drug companies.
Central to this marketing effort are these senior medical experts, sometimes called “key opinion leaders”, who claim to be independent yet accept fees for advice, consultancies or “educational” presentations to other doctors.
Just one meal at a sponsored educational event can result in a doctor prescribing more of that company’s drugs. Shutterstock
A former top-selling drug company sales representative turned whistleblower put it plainly in a 2008 piece in The BMJ:
Key opinion leaders were salespeople for us, and we would routinely measure the return on our investment, by tracking prescriptions before and after their presentations.
If that speaker didn’t make the impact the company was looking for, then you wouldn’t invite them back.
Unhealthy marketing means the latest most expensive pill is too often favoured over older cheaper options, or doing nothing at all, causing much harm and wasting precious resources.
Corporate crime
In 2009 came the biggest health-care fraud settlement in history. Pfizer was forced to fork out a US$2.3 billion fine for illegal promotion, false and misleading claims about drug safety, and paying kickbacks to doctors. That included a US$1.2 billion criminal fine, the largest ever in a US criminal prosecution.
One of the whistleblowers in that case happened to be a member of a special Pfizer sales team promoting Viagra. He revealed doctors were taken to breakfasts, lunches, dinners, Broadway shows, baseball games, golf courses, ski fields, casinos and strip clubs.
In 2013, Johnson & Johnson paid out US$2.2 billion in civil and criminal fines for putting “profit over patients’ health”. The company had illegally promoted powerful anti-psychotic drugs as behaviour control for the elderly and most vulnerable, overstating benefits and playing down dangerous side effects, including stroke.
Drug companies have faced massive fines for putting profits over health. Shutterstock
Other court documents around the same time exposed how the giant global company Merck used dirty tricks to try and defend its controversial anti-arthritis drug Vioxx. Merck created a fake medical journal and drew up secret lists of academic critics to “neutralise” and “discredit”.
In the end, Vioxx was taken off the market because it was causing heart attacks, with estimates in The Lancet suggesting it may have led to 140,000 cases of serious coronary heart disease.
Scandals like Vioxx tarnished the industry’s image, and brought more intense scrutiny.
The US National Academy of Sciences produced a landmark report arguing the closeness between doctors and drug companies could jeopardise the integrity of science, the objectivity of education, the quality of care, and public trust in medicine.
A series of US congressional hearings on unhealthy marketing produced the Open Payments register, mandated by US law to publicly list every company payment to every doctor.
Many around the world are reforming further, moving from transparency to independence. Italy brought in a special tax on drug company promotion to fund public interest research. Norway doesn’t give doctors full credit anymore for industry-sponsored education.
But there’s a long way to go. A study in 2020 found 80% of the medicos who run the world’s most powerful doctors organisations still take money from drug and device companies. For research, for consultancies, for hospitality.
Even some agencies which assess drugs, notably the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), still rely on significant funding from industry, which pays to have its products assessed.
And the harmful marketing has continued. Just last month, a group of drug companies, including Johnson & Johnson, agreed to pay a total of US$26 billion for their roles in fuelling the opioid epidemic.
A prescription for trust
One drug company chief reportedly said last year the industry had a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset” its reputation.
Given the dark arts that drove pharma’s credibility to rock bottom, its fanciful to imagine the pandemic will magically end the misleading marketing and the price gouging.
Any post-pandemic recovery requires meaningful reform.
Ray Moynihan is Assistant Professor at Bond University’s Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. He receives funding via competitive grants from Australia’s publicly funded National Health and Medical Research Council. Ray has written about and researched the pharmaceutical industry’s influence for almost 25 years and is the author of 4 books on the business of medicine.
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