Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Bennett, Chair in Epidemiology, Deakin University

Victoria’s lockdown is to be extended for another week to get on top of the growing number of community cases, which now stands at 60.

But questions remain about what’s behind some of these cases.
Victoria’s COVID-19 testing commander Jeroen Weimar said yesterday in about four or five cases, the virus was transmitted after only “fleeting contact”.

Today, we heard from Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton about one case suspected to have been infected when visiting a site some two hours after an infectious person had left. The source case had been there for some time, and it was described as a poorly ventilated space.

Nonetheless, this is consistent with the aerosol transmission we have become increasingly concerned about, and perhaps this is the first documentation of this outside hotel quarantine.

Today we also heard that health authorities have reported about 10% of cases are linked with more casual exposures, including at “tier two” sites (Victoria describes exposure sites according to risk, with a tier one site being the most risky).

So is it the virus, or more focused efforts in tracking cases, that’s led us to finding such casual exposures?

Read more:
What can you expect if you get a call from a COVID contact tracer?

Is it the virus?

Despite today’s news, people are not more likely now to get infected by brushing past someone on the street.

In the vast majority of cases, people have become infected by very close contacts, or at certain “tier one” exposure sites when there at the same time as a known case.

There is evidence the variant associated with India is more infectious. This particular lineage of the Indian variant B.1.617.1, however, may not be as infectious as other lineages.

It reinforces how important it is that outbreaks are contained as early as possible where this increased risk of spread is still manageable.

On average, with variants of concern like the one currently circulating in Victoria, a case might infect 15% of household contacts instead of 10% seen in 2020. When new case numbers are high later in an outbreak, this difference in transmission translates to much bigger jumps in case numbers.

The way the virus spreads in clusters has also not changed, with some cases not passing the virus on, while a small number pass it on to many.

If this strain of the virus were vastly more transmissible than the original strain, we’d expect to see many cases. This strain has been in our community for a month now, undetected and running free for more than two weeks. There would be many more than 60 cases if this were true.

Read more:
What’s the ‘Indian’ variant responsible for Victoria’s outbreak and how effective are vaccines against it?

We’re also better at tracking cases

The main thing that’s changed since Victoria’s second wave last year is that we have forensic analysis of every case and we’re better at finding casual links between cases.

We’re now publishing lists of venues with exposure times and more people are coming forward for testing than at the peak of Victoria’s second wave. We also have check-in data for many venues.

This results in more reliable measures of both the total spread and routes of virus transmission, than in the second wave, or any community outbreak of this size.

Transmission associated with more casual exposures would have been much more likely to be missed before. Even if these cases were picked up, they might have been counted among the “mystery cases” that comprised 18% of all cases in 2020. We didn’t know where these cases were infected as there were no apparent links between them and known cases.

We are doing much better this time with only three transmission events that not yet fully understood.

How about this ‘fleeting contact’?

The four or five cases Weimar mentioned yesterday relate to a range of indoor exposure sites including a display home, a Telstra shop, local grocery stores, and a shopping strip.

This is where people may have been in direct contact with a case, but where no definitive exposure event is documented, there is no check-in and people don’t know each other.

So from what we know so far, there’s been a crossover between when most cases were present and where their contacts became infected. And 90% of these are in the settings we know are high transmission risk — households and workplaces in particular, where there is extended and repeated indoor contact.

Read more:
Australia has all but abandoned the COVIDSafe app in favour of QR codes (so make sure you check in)

The more casual contacts described yesterday, in a display home or at the Telstra shop, there might have been some overlap with a case in a small enclosed area for sufficient time to receive an infecting dose.

A further example Sutton provided today was an infection that started with someone sitting in the same outdoor area as a case at a hotel bistro. We know there is less risk in outdoor settings generally, but on a still autumn day, we now know this is all it takes.

Now, as we have transmission in the beer garden, all those nearby will be recategorised as primary close contacts and asked to quarantine for a full 14 days, even if they have returned a negative test. Better to be safe than sorry.

That’s why it’s so important to check in with a QR code. You don’t always know the name of the person who’s standing (or sitting) next to you. It is also why check-ins will now be required at more retail and public venues across the state. Being able to identify contacts in these settings will remove some of the fear associate with this more casual spread.

So what are we to make of this?

This latest news reinforces the importance of QR codes and checking in. You never know who you’re standing next to in a long queue while shopping.
Extending our QR codes into further settings whether retail, grocery stores or display homes, which we now know are a risk, is a good move.

The message remains the same, get tested if you have symptoms or when directed to by public health officials, and isolate when necessary. In particular, keep an eye on those exposure sites, even if you only dropped in to grab a coffee.

But we shouldn’t be overly concerned about COVID-19 spread by “fleeting contact”. The precautions we all know (hygiene, distancing and masks) still work and are our best forms of protection.

Catherine Bennett receives funding from National Health and Medical Research Council and the Medical Research Future Fund.

– ref. We’re seeing more casual COVID transmission. But is that because of the variant or better case tracking? – https://theconversation.com/were-seeing-more-casual-covid-transmission-but-is-that-because-of-the-variant-or-better-case-tracking-161979

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Back in the first three months of this year when we had JobKeeper, enhanced unemployment benefits and no lockdowns, Australia roared out of recession.

The GDP figures released on Wednesday tell us that in the months leading up to the end of JobKeeper and the coronavirus supplement at the end of March Australians spent, earned and produced an impressive 1.8% more than in three months to December, which was itself more 3.2% more than the three months to September, which was itself 3.5% more than the three months before that.

It’s growth of more than 8%, described by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg as the most over three quarters since 1968.

But it followed a collapse in gross domestic product of 7% – by far the worst since the Bureau of Statistics began compiling records in 1959.

The net result over the year to March growth of 1.1%, an extraordinary result which means that, at least until Victoria’s (just extended) lockdown, we were producing, earning and spending more than before the COVID recession.

On the graph it’s not much more, not the two or so per cent of normal growth the Reserve Bank had been expecting before the recession, but it means that almost alone among developed nations (along with South Korea and probably New Zealand whose figures aren’t yet out) we are better off after the COVID recession than before it.

Australian quarterly gross domestic product

And we are better off than that bald GDP figures suggest.

In accordance with what is normally good statistical practice those figures are adjusted down for upward movements in prices.

We’ve had a monster upward movement in the price of iron ore over the past year which has enriched Australians through channels including company profits, tax revenue and a higher dollar that aren’t fully reflected in gross domestic product.

That’s why the bureau publishes a separate measure that measures buying power called real national disposable income per capita.

The graph shows it has climbed well above where it was to a new record high.

We ended the recession with 5.8% more buying power than before it began.

Real national disposable income per capita

But we’ve been reluctant to fully use that buying power.

While consumer spending has bounced back to where it was before the recession, in terms of what it buys it is no higher.

In March 2021 we were buying no more than we were in March 2020 — more goods, less services, and more essential items, fewer discretionary items, but no more than we did a year earlier.

Zero growth in buying at a time of substantial growth in buying power can be seen as either disturbing, a sign of understandable caution, or a sign that the best is yet to come.

Household final consumption expenditure

At his press conference Frydenberg painted the caution to date as something that would support economic growth in the months to come as we unwind our record-high household saving rate.

But the unwinding slowed in the three months to March.

In the December quarter the saving rate plunged from 18.6% of after tax income to 12.2%. Before that it had plunged from the record-high 22% to 18.6%.

But in the March quarter it barely fell, inching down from 12.2% to 11.6%, perhaps reflecting the imminent end of JobSeeker and the coronavirus supplement.

Household saving ratio

The subsequent spread of coronavirus in Victoria, and the reluctance to date of the federal government to reinstate JobKeeper in Victoria will give Australians to keep saving rather than spending their money for some time to come.

Frydenberg told the national accounts press conference he was open to further assistance of another kind and would speak to Victoria’s Treasurer as soon as he could.

Leer más:
Frydenberg spends the bounty to drive unemployment to new lows

Business investment in buildings and equipment surged 5.3% in the March quarter (enough to account for nearly all of the economic growth over the past year) aided by investment incentives which were renewed in the May budget.

Australia’s rigorous approach to compiling the national accounts means the ones released Wednesday are out of date.

Although much will have improved since then, the spread of coronavirus and the lockdown in Victoria means much is suddenly worse.

Our future is about as uncertain as it has ever been.

Peter Martin no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.

– ref. The four GDP graphs that show us roaring out of recession pre-lockdown – https://theconversation.com/the-four-gdp-graphs-that-show-us-roaring-out-of-recession-pre-lockdown-161981

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Driss Ait Ouakrim, Research Fellow, Population Interventions Unit, Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne

With Melbourne under lockdown for another seven days, the consequences of Australia’s inefficient and dangerous quarantine system continue.

This outbreak started with just one leak from hotel quarantine in South Australia in early May. And unless the hotel quarantine system gets a serious shake up – and fast – we’re likely to see more outbreaks.

Our analysis shows for every 204 infected travellers in hotel quarantine in Australia, there is one leak.

We have known since August 2020, through the World Health Organization, of the risks associated with quarantine in hotels with their shared spaces and inadequate ventilation systems.

Over the past ten months, a plethora of epidemiologists, public health experts, engineers and state premiers have consistently highlighted the shortcomings of a hotel-based quarantine system and the need for purpose-built facilities.

These calls have been largely ignored by the federal government, which continues to consider the current hotel-based quarantine system as “fit for purpose” and “a system that is achieving 99.99% effectiveness” and is “serving Australia very well”.

But is this true?

Rethinking the data

We teamed up with colleagues from the University of Otago to analyse hotel quarantine data from Australia and New Zealand (some of which is outlined in this pre-print paper, meaning it’s yet to be peer reviewed).

We attempted to identify all COVID-19 outbreaks and border control failures associated with quarantine systems and to estimate the failure risks in terms of the spread of COVID-19 infection into the community.

Read more:
Another day, another hotel quarantine fail. So what can Australia learn from other countries?

We identified 21 failures that have occurred between April 2020 and June 2021 in Australia:

• three in Queensland
• eight in New South Wales
• two in South Australia
• five in Victoria
• three in Western Australia.

One of these caused more than 800 deaths and the most recent is causing the current lockdown in Victoria.

There were 4.9 failures per 1,000 SARS-CoV-2 positive cases in quarantine. This means that one outbreak from hotel quarantine is expected every 204 infected travellers.

Since April 2020, on average 308 infected travellers arrived in Australia each month, so that is 1.5 expected outbreaks per month.

This doesn’t sound like a system that is 99.99% effective.

So what needs to happen?

The proportion of returning travellers who are infected is increasing due to the global intensification of the pandemic and the increasing infectivity of new SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Read more:
What’s the ‘Indian’ variant responsible for Victoria’s outbreak and how effective are vaccines against it?

Australia’s quarantine system is our first and most important line of defence against COVID-19. If it’s not improved, the risk of outbreaks will increase.

So how can we improve the quarantine system? Based on our analysis, we recommend:

1. Capping or temporarily suspending travel from high-risk areas.

The most obvious action is to reduce arrivals, or even suspend arrivals, from high-infection locations.

Australia and New Zealand temporarily did for travel from India in April 2021 and other high-risk countries earlier in the pandemic .

This is the “red light” we need to hit from time to time.

2. Establishing adequate quarantine facilities.

Every state and territory should be equipped with Howard Spring-style facilities, with outdoor-facing cabins with free-flowing air.

These facilities could be used in priority for travellers coming from high-risk countries.

This won’t reduce the risk of leaks to zero, although we have not yet seen any leakage out of Howard Springs.

The Victorian government recently announced a project to build a 3,000-bed facility for returning travellers with support from the federal government, and other states should do the same.

Hotels could then be used just for arrivals from lower-risk countries such as Singapore and South Korea – though the classification of countries as “low risk” would change over time.

Some countries may be so low risk quarantine is not needed and may place returned travellers at increased risk of acquiring COVID-19 while in quarantine. This is the case for NZ at the moment, and should be expanded to other countries that meet suitable thresholds.

3. Expanding the use of saliva testing among facility workers and travellers.

We need to expand the daily use of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) saliva testing to workers at all facilities.

So far, as of April 2021, Victoria, WA, NSW and SA have all updated their testing rules to make daily saliva testing mandatory for quarantine staff. Other states should follow suit.

4. Protect and test border workers.

Most of the quarantine system failures in Australia involved the infection of quarantine workers.

The vaccination of all quarantine workers against COVID-19 will have reduced this risk of transmission, though no public data are available to confirm all workers have been vaccinated.

While vaccination is not mandatory for border workers, staff who refuse the jab are removed from the front line.

Read more:
Why strict border control remains crucial if we want to keep the travel bubble safe

We can’t afford to wait

Quarantine system failures can be very costly in terms of health, lives and economic impacts. The likely economic cost of the current outbreak in Victoria, A$1 billion or more, is enough to build two or more new facilities.

Embracing a more rigorous quarantine system for high-risk arrivals, in combination with an effective vaccination strategy that allows low-risk arrivals to (eventually) come in with no quarantine, is the necessary path forward.

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.

– ref. Hotel quarantine causes 1 outbreak for every 204 infected travellers. It’s far from ‘fit for purpose’ – https://theconversation.com/hotel-quarantine-causes-1-outbreak-for-every-204-infected-travellers-its-far-from-fit-for-purpose-161815

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jessica Allen, Senior Lecturer and DECRA Fellow, University of Newcastle

Steel is a major building block of our modern world, used to make everything from cutlery to bridges and wind turbines. But the way it’s made – using coal – is making climate change worse.

On average, almost two tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) are emitted for every tonne of steel produced. This accounts for about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Cleaning up steel production is clearly key to Earth’s low-carbon future.

Fortunately, a new path is emerging. So-called “green steel”, made using hydrogen rather than coal, represents a huge opportunity for Australia. It would boost our exports, help offset inevitable job losses in the fossil fuel industry and go a long way to tackling climate change.

Australia’s abundant and cheap wind and solar resources mean we’re well placed to produce the hydrogen a green steel industry needs. So let’s take a look at how green steel is made, and the challenges ahead.

Steeling for change

Steel-making requires stripping oxygen from iron ore to produce pure iron metal. In traditional steel-making, this is done using coal or natural gas in a process that releases CO₂. In green steel production, hydrogen made from renewable energy replaces fossil fuels.

Australia exports almost 900 million tonnes of iron ore each year, but only makes 5.5 million tonnes of steel. This means we have great capacity to ramp up steel production.

A Grattan Institute report last year found if Australia captured about 6.5% of the global steel market, this could generate about A$65 billion in annual export revenue and create 25,000 manufacturing jobs in Queensland and New South Wales.

Steel-making is a complex process and is primarily achieved via one of three processes. Each of them, in theory, can be adapted to produce green steel. We examine each process below.

Read more:
Australia could fall apart under climate change. But there’s a way to avoid it

1. Blast furnace

Globally, about 70% of steel is produced using the blast furnace method.

As part of this process, processed coal (also known as coke) is used in the main body of the furnace. It acts as a physical support structure for materials entering and leaving the furnace, among other functions. It’s also partially burnt at the bottom of the furnace to both produce heat and make carbon monoxide, which strips oxygen from iron ore leaving metallic iron.

This coal-driven process leads to CO₂ emissions. It’s feasible to replace a portion of the carbon monoxide with hydrogen. The hydrogen can strip oxygen away from the ore, generating water instead of CO₂. This requires renewable electricity to produce green hydrogen.

And hydrogen cannot replace carbon monoxide a a ratio of 1:1. If hydrogen is used, the blast furnace needs more externally added heat to keep the temperature high, compared with the coal method.

More importantly, solid coal in the main body of the furnace cannot be replaced with hydrogen. Some alternatives have been developed, involving biomass – a fuel developed from living organisms – blended with coal.

But sourcing biomass sustainably and at scale would be a challenge. And this process would still likely create some fossil-fuel derived emissions. So to ensure the process is “green”, these emissions would have to be captured and stored – a technology which is currently expensive and unproven at scale.

Read more:
Australians want industry, and they’d like it green. Steel is the place to start

2. Recycled steel

Around 30% of the world’s steel is made from recycled steel. Steel has one of the highest recycling rates of any material.

Steel recycling is mainly done in arc furnaces, driven by electricity. Each tonne of steel produced using this method produces about 0.4 tonnes of CO₂ – mostly due to emissions produced by burning fossil fuels for electricity generation. If the electricity was produced from renewable sources, the CO₂ output would be greatly reduced.

But steel cannot continuously be recycled. After a while, unwanted elements such as copper, nickel and tin begin to accumulate in the steel, reducing its quality. Also, steel has a long lifetime and low turnover rate. This means recycled steel cannot meet all steel demand, and some new steel must be produced.

3. Direct reduced iron

“Direct reduced iron” (DRI) technology often uses methane gas to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which are then used to turn iron ore into iron. This method still creates CO₂ emissions, and requires more electricity than the blast furnace method. However its overall emission intensity can be substantially lower.

The method currently accounts for less than 5% of production, and offers the greatest opportunity for using green hydrogen.

Up to 70% of the hydrogen derived from methane could be replaced with green hydrogen without having to modify the production process too much. However work on using 100% green hydrogen in this method is ongoing.

Read more:
For hydrogen to be truly ‘clean’ it must be made with renewables, not coal

Becoming a green steel superpower

The green steel transition won’t happen overnight and significant challenges remain.

Cheap, large-scale green hydrogen and renewable electricity will be required. And even if green hydrogen is used, to achieve net-zero emissions the blast furnace method will still require carbon-capture and storage technologies – and so too will DRI, for the time being.

Private sector investment is needed to create a global-scale export industry. Australian governments also have a big role to play, in building skills and capability, helping workers retrain, funding research and coordinating land-use planning.

Revolutionising Australia’s steel industry is a daunting task. But if we play our cards right, Australia can be a major player in the green manufacturing revolution.

Tom Honeyands receives funding from BHP.

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

– ref. ‘Green steel’ is hailed as the next big thing in Australian industry. Here’s what the hype is all about – https://theconversation.com/green-steel-is-hailed-as-the-next-big-thing-in-australian-industry-heres-what-the-hype-is-all-about-160282

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dallas Rogers, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney

Crown Towers Sydney, at 75 storeys, is now the city’s tallest building. It should not exist, and certainly not where it is – in prime location on Sydney’s famous harbour.

The redevelopment of the 22-hectare Barangaroo precinct was supposed to transform the former docklands into a world-class example of architectural and public domain design.

But giving Crown Resorts the go-ahead to build its skyscraper – containing a casino, hotel and luxury apartments – diminished the space set aside for parkland in the original concept plan and broke height limits.

This week the ABC’s Four Corners program shed light on how the tower got approved, beginning with a 2012 lunch facilitated by radio celebrity Alan Jones between Crown Resorts’ majority shareholder James Packer and then NSW premier Barry O’Farrell.

It is a familiar story of a culture of wealthy mates and backroom deals. It is also a story about the novel use of an obscure infrastructure approvals mechanism called “unsolicited proposals” – or USPs for short – that circumvented established processes intended to protect the public interest.

The Barangaroo tower has not just changed Sydney’s skyline. It has changed the whole planning system.

An unsolicited proposal

As the Four Corners program related, in February 2012 Packer (one of Australia’s ten wealthiest individuals) asked his friend Jones to organise a meeting with O’Farrell.

In Jones’ penthouse suite overlooking Sydney’s Circular Quay, they ate pies and mash while Packer outlined his vision for a A$1 billion-plus hotel, casino and entertainment complex.

How did Packer’s plan fit into the concept that won Hill Thalis Architecture the international design competition for Barangaroo? It didn’t.

O’Farrell, Jones said, pointed to the rigours of NSW’s urban planning process as a barrier to Packer’s idea. The premier “made the point that it wouldn’t be all that easy, but he embraced the vision”.

Packer went public with his vision shortly after. Many objected. Then:

With Packer’s project still facing significant opposition, Premier Barry O’Farrell came up with a novel solution which he proposed at another private meeting in his office. The solution was to use an obscure government policy called the “unsolicited proposals” process.

How unsolicited proposals work

The Productivity Commission has defined an unsolicited proposal as a public-private infrastructure project initiated by a private party, not in response to a request from government.

Common to all guidelines for considering such a proposal is “a requirement for uniqueness or innovation” – with uniqueness implying no other party
could reasonably deliver the project for the same value for money in the same time.

But as Serena Lillywhite of Transparency International Australia told Four Corners: “If it’s a project that is considered to be unique and on such a large scale, then it should be going to an open tender process.”

Part of the urban planning landscape

We’ve studied unsolicited proposals as part of our research into how planning systems have changed since the 1990s and the implications for public participation and social justice. We’ve been involved in several studies in Sydney’s Millers Point and Barangaroo since 2014.

This research has included interviewing key actors in local and state government, urban planning and heritage professionals, public housing residents facing eviction, journalists, documentary makers and Indigenous knowledge holders.

Since the process was adopted to greenlight Packer’s plan for Barangaroo, unsolicited proposals have become a well-used tool to circumvent the standard approval processes for urban planning in Australia.

The concept has spread to Victoria and Western Australia, where they are called “market-led proposals”, and Queensland, where they are also known as “exclusive mandates”.

Read more:
Market-led infrastructure may sound good but not if it short-changes the public

Examples include Macquarie Group’s Metro station and towers on Sydney’s Martin Place, the redevelopment of Henry Deane Plaza (near Sydney’s central station) by property manager Dexus and Frasers Property Australia, and Transurban’s Northconnex tollway in Sydney, Logan Enhancement Project in Queensland and West Gate Tunnel in Melbourne.

The concept is also spreading internationally as a means to connect global money to local infrastructure projects.

Creating a black box

One bureaucrat who has worked on unsolicited proposals described the process to us. After the initial proposal is made, discussions go on behind closed doors and “some sort of contribution is cooked up”.

Contributions could include a commitment to provide infrastructure or a fee to government by the proponent.

For example, Macquarie Group will “deliver the new metro station, retail space, and pedestrian connections” at Martin Place in exchange for approval to build its towers.

In the case of Crown Resorts’ Barangaroo deal, the promised contributions included guaranteed future taxation revenue and “an upfront licence fee of $100 million” for the state government.

We are not suggesting these negotiations and contributions are corrupt. From a transparency perspective, however, they are concerning. The public does not know the exact nature of the relationships involved, nor the financial details of what (in the words of our bureaucrat) is being “cooked up” and whether they are value for money.

These negotiations happen, as another insider put it, “in a very black box […] no one knows what happens there”.

Baked into the system

Urban planning academics and multiple agencies with oversight on public finances and integrity have flagged this as problematic.

In 2016 the Audit Office of NSW urged greater transparency and public reporting of unsolicited proposals, warning they “pose a greater risk to value for money than procurements done through open, competitive and transparent processes”.

In 2018, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission criticised state governments for accepting unsolicited proposals for tollways, warning the lack of competitive tender processes would inflate costs for taxpayers.

The Victorian Auditor-General made similar warnings in 2019.

The Barangaroo casino has yet to open, as NSW’s Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority ponders if Crown Resorts (also being scrutinised by royal commissions in Victoria and Western Australia) is fit to hold a gaming licence.

Read more:
It’s hard to see how Crown Resorts can be found ‘fit and proper’ to run Sydney’s Barangaroo casino

As Shaun Carter, former NSW president of the Australian Institute of Architects, told Four Corners: “We should look at that building and forever know that we should never let that happen again.”

But with unsolicited proposals being baked into the system, the likelihood is that it will happen – again and again.

Dallas Rogers receives funding from The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute and the Australian Research Council.

Chris Gibson receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. How Sydney’s Barangaroo tower paved the way for a culture of closed-door deals – https://theconversation.com/how-sydneys-barangaroo-tower-paved-the-way-for-a-culture-of-closed-door-deals-161816

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathryn Williams, Professor in environmental psychology, School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne

When I tell people I’m an environmental psychologist, they often assume that means I am a “tree hugger” and they are not entirely wrong. But it really means I spend a lot of time thinking and finding out about people’s relationships with the natural world, trees included.

So when I dropped in at my local book store and saw a whole collection of new books for children about trees, I found myself wondering: What kinds of books help kids connect with trees?

The question was prompted by a recent publication, The Book of Australian Trees by Inga Simpson and Alicia Rogerson. Its not the only tree book published this year, but it’s notable for its focus on Australian trees.

The last few years have seen the publication of some remarkable books about trees for children, for example Peter Wohlleben’s Can you hear the trees talking (a 2019 young reader’s edition of his book The Hidden Life of Trees) and Piotr Socha and Wojciech Grajkowski’s The Book of Trees (2018).

I love both these books, but they also illustrate why books about Australian trees and plants are needed. When Socha and Grajkowski declare: “In winter, the only green trees are coniferous trees”, or when Wohlleben suggests young readers go outside and find a birch log (likely in in their family’s store of firewood) kids in the southern hemisphere might feel lost.

Read more:
People are ‘blind’ to plants, and that’s bad news for conservation

Learning to love plants and trees

Having books that help children learn to love trees really matters to me. There is increasing concern that people are less connected with the natural world than in the past. Plants are of particular concern, as there is evidence of lower appreciation, knowledge and concern for plants compared with animals. Various writers have noted the negative implications of these trends for human health and well-being, environmental action, and conservation.

Direct experience of nature is often seen as essential to building connections, but it’s not always possible and might not be enough. Books can help children connect with trees, for example by:

• telling stories about trees (and people’s relationships with them) that evoke empathy for trees

• bridging everyday human experience with the very different life of plants

• building a vocabulary for talking about nature

• suggesting ways that young readers might directly engage with nature.

So how are recent children’s book authors going about this important task?

Read more:
Where the old things are: Australia’s most ancient trees

The Book of Australian Trees

The introduction to Simpson and Rogerson’s book echoes some of these pathways for connection. “Trees tell stories about places,” Simpson writes and while trees may all seem the same, “if you look more closely, they are each a little different, like people”.

The book introduces just 16 different trees, most from the eastern mainland states of Australia. Each species is introduced with a single painting by Rogerson, often showing the trunk and lower canopy but sometimes just a part of the trees such as a Bunya Pine nut or a flower.

Simpson’s text is brief. It includes visual characteristics of the tree, the kinds of soils or climate in which it grows, and usually a an insight to cultural associations with the tree. Some entries refer to “famous trees”, for example Centurion, the tallest mountain ash tree found in Tasmania. Others refer to Australian literary references to trees, like the “Old Man Banksias” of May Gibbs’ Snugglepot and Cuddlepie stories.

I enjoyed Simpson’s evocative description of trees, particularly of bark and the ways it differs across trees and seasons. These often emphasise the links between visual attributes of trees and familiar human characteristics. Brush box branches “grow out like arms, with crooked elbows, then wrists and long fingers”. But while Simpson describes the kind of environments in which the trees typically grow, there is little sense of story or sense of place in these descriptions.

Books on trees and plants often focus purely on ecological qualities. Simpson incorporates cultural aspects of trees as they offer an important means of connection. But these are not always well considered. Linking magnificent Flame Trees to Cold Chisel’s 1984 song about “lost loves or old flames” seems unlikely to resonate with younger readers. Only a single entry (Bunya Pine) references relationships with First Nations peoples that have been maintained over many thousands of years.

The book is beautifully illustrated and celebrates the beauty of trees of this land — the flyleaf paintings of leaves, bark, cones, seeds, and blossoms lend themselves to a plant-rich conversation with younger readers.

4 more to choose from

Other recent books about trees make great use of stories, emotion, science and tree-related activities to help children connect with trees.

The Forest in the Tree (by Australian team Ailsa Wild, Aviva Reed, Briony Barr and Gregory Crocetti) skilfully weaves story and science to explore symbiotic relationships between trees and fungi. Characters include Broma the Cacao tree and We, Gloma the fungal network that connects the forest system. It is sure to fascinate and inform older children.

Little Sap (by Jan Hughes and Ruth Hengeveld) is written for a much younger audience. It tells a moving tale of a mother tree and a young sapling who eventually takes her place in the canopy. The authors note they found inspiration in the science of Suzanne Simard and Monica Gagliano among others.

Peter Wohlleben has also published a book for younger children. His book Peter and the Tree Children is a tale about Peter the forester and Piet the squirrel, and all they learn while walking in the forest.

I found it less engaging than his earlier book Can you hear the trees talking which is structured around curious questions like “How do trees make babies?” or “Is there a forest internet?”.

Finally, Plantastic! A new A-Z to 26 of Australia’s most unique and incredible native plants by Catherine Clowes and Rachel Gyan deserves a mention. Its not only about trees, but suggests some great activities that will encourage Australian kids to get out into nature and explore the wonder of plants.

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

– ref. Growing up with trees: new books use story and science to connect kids with nature – https://theconversation.com/growing-up-with-trees-new-books-use-story-and-science-to-connect-kids-with-nature-159705

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicola Gaston, Co-Director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, University of Auckland

New Zealand’s government has been praised for listening to scientists as it continues to pursue its COVID-19 elimination strategy. But it’s difficult to find any signs of significant investment in science in the recent budget — or in fact previous budgets.

It was with a sense of déjà vu I scrolled through the tables listing expenditure. Surely, with all the challenges we know we need science to address, nothing is business as usual in 2021.

Research and innovation require continual maintenance and growth. This government has a 10-year target to increase research and development funding to 2% of GDP (the OECD average is 2.4%). But this year’s budget cuts or flat-lines research funds, at best.

The Endeavour Fund, a significant funding mechanism for many of my colleagues in the natural sciences and engineering, and the Health Research Fund (part of which goes to funding Health Research Council grants) both have appropriations for 2021-2022 in the order of 10% less than the previous year.

The Marsden Fund, New Zealand’s major fund for fundamental research and for the humanities, hasn’t decreased. But a flat line in funding is an effective cut.

The stipend I was paid as a PhD student in 2003 would be NZ$40,000, tax-free, in today’s dollars, but very few PhD candidates get even three-quarters of that amount these days.

These numbers matter, but they aren’t particularly transparent. I have been assured the actual dollars available in Endeavour and Health Research Council grants this year will be the same as last year. The Endeavour Fund is calculated at a fixed amount of new funding per year, but grants are awarded for timeframes that vary, so the $200 million allocation varies year on year as contracts end.

Last year, health research investment included COVID-19 specific funds, separate from HRC grants, and these are simply not being continued. Whether this amounts to an actual cut is a moot point. A productive research system is not just a nice-to-have, and it is dangerous to take it for granted.

Read more:
Money for telescopes and vaccines is great, but the budget’s lack of basic science funding risks leaving Australia behind

Research inputs versus outputs

Perhaps we should celebrate and support government funding for the implementation of science outcomes, every bit as much as we welcome funding we need to do our research.

One of the most obvious places to look is the suite of policies related to climate change. There is a $300 million top-up for Green Investment Finance to accelerate investment in low-carbon technologies, $67 million to decarbonise the public sector, and nearly $20 million to support the policy response to the Climate Change Commission’s final advice package, to be tabled in parliament next week.

Climate change minister James Shaw suggested that once allocations for rail, warmer homes and research to reduce agricultural greenhouse gases are taken into account, this year’s budget adds up to $2.3 billion for climate policy.

As massive as this sounds, addressing climate change requires transformative policy and initiatives to catalyse action. This is not yet quite that.

But on the whole, this is a budget that looks to implement policy based on research advice. We should welcome the increase in benefits following advice of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group. As with climate change initiatives, this may not yet go far enough, but the direction of change is good.

Read more:
NZ’s second ‘Well-being Budget’ must deliver for the families that sacrificed most during the pandemic

Where funding goes matters

The means of funding, and the behavioural change it can enable, are just as important as the amount. Who gets funded, and what does it support them to do?

This is particularly important in the context of climate change, where we need to encourage behavioural change. But it is an equally important lens through which to examine research funding itself.

My biggest disappointment in this budget is that there is no provision for the continuation of the Science Whitinga fellowships, set up as a response to the impact of COVID-19 on early-career researchers. This is despite the absolute need and considerable evidence within the sector for the value of these fellowship schemes.

This scheme deserves new money, and I would have liked to see it prioritised over other forms of current expenditure.

I’m happy to acknowledge some early career research roles will always be funded within the sector. But it is vital, in the highly hierarchical academic workplace, to have mechanisms to rebalance the distribution of power and acknowledge the innovation emerging researchers contribute — especially so, when they are not yet committed to academic careers but could translate their work into start-ups, industry and work with communities.

Research is a means of creating positive change. New Zealand needs more money for research, but where that money goes and the change it creates matter even more.

Nicola Gaston receives funding from the Tertiary Education Commission, as Co-Director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology.

– ref. New Zealand relies on scientific research for good policy. It’s a pity the budget didn’t reflect this – https://theconversation.com/new-zealand-relies-on-scientific-research-for-good-policy-its-a-pity-the-budget-didnt-reflect-this-161340

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John L Hopkins, Innovation Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology

The manufacturing world is facing one of its greatest challenges in years — a global shortage of semiconductors — and there doesn’t appear to be an end in sight any time soon.

According to Acer, one of the world’s largest laptop manufacturers, companies will still be affected by this shortage until at least the first half of 2022.

Semiconductors are an essential component of electronic devices, found in everything from cars and factory machinery to dishwashers and mobile phones. They harness the conducting properties of semiconductor materials (such as silicon), through the use of electric or magnetic fields, light, heat or mechanical deformation, to control the electric current flowing into a device.

Like many current global challenges, this shortage initially began as a result of the COVID pandemic. Staff at semiconductor foundries in China and around the world were unable to go to work, plants were closed and production halted, which led to a lack of supply. The movement of that supply was also slowed down by tighter restrictions at ports and international borders.

Read more:
High-tech shortages loom as coronavirus shutdowns hit manufacturers

At the same time, employees started working from home, children and students started studying from home, and many of us were confined to our homes for long periods. New equipment was needed to support these changes, establish makeshift offices and classrooms in our homes, and upgrade our existing home entertainment options. This prompted a sudden increase in demand for many of the devices that rely on semiconductors.

However, the industries that make these devices also had to stop production for a time, and during that period they stopped ordering semiconductors. This meant there was a sudden increase in demand for goods, but the companies that manufacture these products weren’t making as many as they normally do, or ordering enough components to enable them to meet a rise in demand later.

This is a classic example of the “bullwhip effect”, in which inventory levels suddenly fluctuate in response to unexpected changes in customer demand further along the supply chain.

This didn’t just happen in the electronics sector; it has affected every industry that uses semiconductors in their products, from health care and cosmetics to construction and defence. According to analysis by investment bank Goldman Sachs, this shortage has already impacted at least 169 different industries to some extent.

No time to panic

Unfortunately, panic-buying isn’t restricted just to the toilet paper aisle in Coles and Woolworths. Once rumours of a shortage began to emerge, companies that use semiconductors started panic-buying and stockpiling them. This behaviour adds to the overall impact of the shortage, reduces what little supply is available, and drives up costs.

The automotive industry has been hit particularly hard, illustrating perfectly the scale and complexity of modern supply chains. A car is made of about 30,000 components, sourced from thousands of suppliers around the world. If even one of these components isn’t available at the time of assembly, the system grinds to a halt and new cars can’t be finished or shipped.

General Motors had to stop production at some of its manufacturing facilities as a result of the chip shortage earlier this year, costing the company at least US$2 billion.

What happens next?

The impact of the microchip shortage is already being felt by consumers all over the world, including Australia. Customers hoping to buy a new car or replacement parts can expect to wait up to six months.

Computer manufacturers Dell, HP and Lenovo have warned their prices are likely to rise, and retailers such as JB Hi-Fi have told shoppers to expect shortages of televisions and other electronic goods “for the foreseeable future”.

Even before this crisis, the demand for semiconductors was growing steadily, as products become more sophisticated and technologies such as 5G and the “internet of things” become ever more integrated into our world. The only realistic solution is to increase the supply of semiconductors, and chip maker Intel has already announced plans to scale up its manufacturing of semiconductors, with new factories opening in the United States and Europe.

However, this will take time, so consumers will likely still be feeling the impact of this shortage well beyond Christmas 2021.

Read more:
High-tech consumerism, a global catastrophe happening on our watch

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

– ref. Yes, the global microchip shortage is COVID’s fault. No, it won’t end any time soon – https://theconversation.com/yes-the-global-microchip-shortage-is-covids-fault-no-it-wont-end-any-time-soon-161903

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Professor Steven Larkin, Chief Executive Officer, Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education

Research undertaken by The Healing Foundation has revealed that public health restrictions introduced to contain the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia have had a significant impact on some Stolen Generations survivors, retriggering trauma among already vulnerable community members.

The Healing Foundation’s report outlines how the measures aimed at protecting Stolen Generations survivors instead had a devastating negative effect on their physical and mental health and wellbeing. This research presents input from 60 Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders and Stolen Generations survivors.

The report provides data showing significant effects on survivors and their loved ones, including a heightened sense of vulnerability and increased disconnection from family, community, and Country. The report also found that 20% of Stolen Generation survivor respondents said they had no support during COVID-19, while only 58% reported having some support.

While it can be argued Australia’s response to the pandemic was largely successful when compared to other parts of the world, there are key lessons to be learned to prepare for future pandemics, especially for those most vulnerable in the community.

Read more:
Thirteen years after ‘Sorry’, too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are still being removed from their homes

How restrictions impacted communities

The Healing Foundation is a national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisation that partners with communities to heal the trauma caused by the widespread and deliberate disruption of peoples, cultures, and languages over 230 years. This includes specific actions like the forced removal of children from their families.

Work done by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Group on COVID-19 ensured that infection rates were very low in First Nations populations.

Only minor outbreaks in Aboriginal communities were recorded in Australia, and they were quickly contained. But the COVID-19 restrictions disrupted many cultural, relational, and collective practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, which included collective healing activities.

Physical distancing put a hold on celebrations and ceremonies, including important and traditional family and cultural occasions like births and funerals.

Lockdowns meant survivors were disconnected from family for Sorry Business and attending community gatherings like NAIDOC Week. Events such as the Apology anniversary were cancelled, keeping people away from marking important cultural dates.

Increased isolation and loneliness

The devastating combination of isolation, loneliness, distance from family, and tight public health directions brought difficult memories back for some survivors of the Stolen Generations, retriggering their trauma.

Survivors highlighted the following findings across the 23 social and emotional wellbeing indicators that were surveyed:

• The vast majority said they had a significantly increased sense of isolation (more than 90% of respondents) and loneliness (more than 80%). A majority also reported having too much time on their own (65%) and feeling trapped in their own thoughts (more than 70%).

• More than 90% reported feeling disconnected from family, community, and culture, while 77% felt disconnected from Country. This is concerning given the degree to which connection to family, community, culture, and Country enhances health and wellbeing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, especially for Stolen Generations survivors and descendants.

• Two-thirds of respondents reported a decline in their physical health and a decreased ability to cope with stress during COVID-19, while 75% reported a decline in their mental health and wellbeing.

• Importantly, 66% of respondents said the degree to which they felt safe was impacted by COVID-19, and more than 75% were worried about not being able to get places. Half of respondents said they were worried about not being able to get to a doctor/hospital and/or access the services they require.

• And three-quarters experienced an increase in family responsibilities and 70% an increase in cultural responsibilities. Alongside this, more than 90% of respondents experienced stress being placed on important relationships.

Read more:
It’s time for Australia to drop its phased approach to the vaccine rollout

How governments can do better

This research undertaken by the Marumali Program on behalf of The Healing Foundation should assist governments and the broader public health sector to plan for future pandemics and build on Australia’s world-leading response.

It has also raised some important questions, such as how can we use technology and social media to not only communicate important public health messages but also feelings of isolation? Or how can Stolen Generations survivors use technology to connect with family, community, culture, and Country?

Technology is just one area for consideration. But what happens when future restrictions have a negative impact on a survivor’s healing journey? And what strategies or policies can help to support such unavoidable effects?

Researchers Shaan Peeters and Dr John Prince hope the study will lead governments to undertake further analysis to assess the needs, risks, and vulnerabilities of Stolen Generations survivors and their descendants into the future.

Stolen Generations survivors have long told us what they need to heal. Now, we need to understand what they require as Australia emerges from the pandemic and finds its way to a new normal.

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

– ref. COVID-19 restrictions have left many Stolen Generations survivors more isolated without adequate support – https://theconversation.com/covid-19-restrictions-have-left-many-stolen-generations-survivors-more-isolated-without-adequate-support-160168

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane Melville, Senior Curator, Terrestrial Vertebrates, Museums Victoria

Most of the incredible diversity of life on Earth is yet to be discovered and documented. In some groups of organisms – terrestrial arthropods such as spiders and scorpions, marine invertebrates such as sponges and molluscs, and others – scientists have described fewer than 20% of species.

Even our knowledge of more familiar creatures such as fish and reptiles is far from complete. In our new research, we studied 1,034 known species of Australian lizards and snakes and found we know so little about 164 of them that not even the experts know whether they are fully described or not. Of the remaining 870, almost a third probably need some work to be described properly.

Documenting and naming what species are out there – the work of taxonomists – is crucial for conservation, but it can be difficult for researchers to decide where to focus their efforts. Alongside our lizard research, we have developed a new “return on investment” approach to identify priority species for our efforts.

We identified several hotspots across Australia where research is likely to be rewarded. More broadly, our approach can help target taxonomic research for conservation worldwide.

Why we need to look at species more closely

As more and more species are threatened by land clearing, climate change and other human activities, our research highlights that we are losing even more biodiversity than we know.

Conservation often relies on species-level assessments such as those conducted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, which lists threatened species. Although new species are being discovered all the time, a key problem is that already named “species” may harbour multiple undocumented and unnamed species. This hidden diversity remains invisible to conservation assessment.

One such example are the Grassland Earless Dragons (Tympanocryptis spp.) found in the temperate native grasslands of south-eastern Australia. These small secretive lizards were grouped within a single species (Tympanocryptis pinguicolla) and listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List.

But recent taxonomic research split this single species into four, each occurring in an isolated region of grasslands. One of these new species may represent the first extinction of a reptile on mainland Australia and the other three have a high probability of being threatened.

Read more:
Why we’re not giving up the search for mainland Australia’s ‘first extinct lizard’

Scientists call documenting and describing species “taxonomy”. Our research shows the importance of prioritising taxonomy in the effort to conserve and protect species.

Taxonomists at work

Many government agencies do take some account of groups smaller than species in their conservation efforts, such as distinct populations. But these are often ambiguously defined and lack formal recognition, so they are not widely used. That’s where taxonomists come in, to identify species and describe them fully.

Our new research was a collaboration of 30 taxonomists and systematists, who teamed up to find a good way of working out which species should be a priority for taxonomic research for conservation outcomes. This new approach compares the amount of work needed with the likelihood of finding previously unknown species that are at risk of extinction.

The research team, who are experts on the taxonomy and systematics of Australia’s reptiles, implemented this new approach on Australian lizards and snakes. This group of reptiles is ideal as a test case because Australia is a global hotspot of lizard diversity – and we also have a strong community of taxonomic experts.

Australia’s lizards and snakes

Of the 1,034 Australian lizard and snake species, we were able to assess whether 870 of them may contain undescribed species. This means we know so little about the remaining 164 species that even the experts could not make an informed opinion on whether they contain hidden diversity. There is so much still to learn!

Of the 870 species experts could assess, they determined 282 probably or definitely needed more taxonomic research. Mapping the distributions of these species indicated hotspot regions for this taxonomic research, including the Kimberley, the Tanami Desert region, western Victoria and offshore islands (such as Tasmania, Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands). Some areas in the Kimberley region had more than 60 species that need further taxonomic research.

We found 17.6% of the 282 species that need more taxonomic research contained undescribed species that would probably be of conservation concern, and 24 had a high probability of being threatened with extinction. Taxonomists know that there are undescribed species because there is some data available already but the description of these species – the process of defining and naming – has not been done.

These high-priority species belong to a range of families including geckos, skinks and dragons found across Australia.

The high number of undescribed species, especially those with significant likelihood of being endangered, was a shock to even the experts. The IUCN currently estimates only 6.3% of Australian lizards and snakes require taxonomic revision, but this is obviously a significant underestimate.

A race against extinction

Beyond lizards, there is a huge backlog of species awaiting description.

Recent projects have used genetic analyses to discover unknown species, including a $180 million global BIOSCAN effort aiming to identify millions of new species. However, genetics is only a first step in the formal recognition of species.

Read more:
About 500,000 Australian species are undiscovered – and scientists are on a 25-year mission to finish the job

The taxonomic process of documenting, describing and naming species requires multiple further steps. These steps include a comprehensive diagnostic assessment using a combination of evidence, such as genetics and morphology, to uniquely distinguish each species from another. This process requires a high level of familiarity and scholarship of the group in question.

Among the Australian lizards and snakes alone, there is a backlog of 59 undescribed species for which only the final elements of taxonomic research are awaiting completion.

To work through these taxonomic backlogs – let alone species that are so far entirely unknown – resources need to be invested in taxonomy, including research funding and increased provision of viable career paths.

Without taxonomic research, the conservation assessment of these undocumented species will not proceed. There are untold numbers of species needing taxonomic research that are already under threat of extinction. If we don’t hurry, they may go extinct before we even know they exist.

Jane Melville undertook this work supported by an Australian Fulbright Commission scholarship.

Reid Tingley receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Hundreds of Australian lizard species are barely known to science. Many may face extinction – https://theconversation.com/hundreds-of-australian-lizard-species-are-barely-known-to-science-many-may-face-extinction-161572

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa Conley Tyler, Research Associate, Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne

Does it matter where the virus that causes COVID-19 came from? In terms of frontline medicine, perhaps not — patients still need to be treated and the public health crisis managed.

But when it comes to geopolitics, it matters greatly, particularly to the United States and China. So, a new investigation into the origins of the virus must be seen in the context of a long-running blame game between the US and China.

Biden’s latest move

Last week, President Joe Biden announced he had ordered a further US intelligence investigation into the origins of COVID-19, asking for a report back in 90 days.

He revealed the US intelligence community is split between two likely scenarios — human contact with animals or a lab accident — and could not assess whether one was “more likely than the other”.

This is a significant shift from early scepticism about theories involving the Wuhan Institute for Virology. Last year, The Lancet published a statement from health scientists, who said:

We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.

Why is the US stirring up the investigation now?

The lab accident theory has moved from the fringe to become much more mainstream in the US, most recently with a Wall Street Journal article last month, reporting illness among Wuhan lab workers shortly before the first cases of COVID-19.

With the Biden administration doing an excellent job bringing the COVID crisis under control in America, the fact he is still focusing on the origin of the virus is a reminder of the domestic politics around the issue. Donald Trump promised a conclusive report and Biden can’t afford to be seen as any less tough.

‘Victims’ versus ‘saviours’

When it comes to the pandemic disaster, the US wants history books to show it as the victim of external forces, rather than its own mismanagement.

This was particularly the case during the Trump administration. In the face of the unfolding health crisis, it emphasised the origin of the virus, with Trump and officials referring to the “Chinese Virus” and even “Kung Flu”.

Read more:
Here’s how scientists know the coronavirus came from bats and wasn’t made in a lab

The US rightly criticised early Chinese mishandling, with former secretary of state Mike Pompeo vocal about China’s suppression of early warnings and lack of transparency. The consistent message was the pandemic was “made in China”.

From the Chinese side, it wants to be remembered as the regime that showed the world how to overcome the virus, not the one that unleashed it. China has already tried to muddy the waters around the origin of the virus, even suggesting

it might be [the] US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.

It has emphasised its success in battling COVID-19 with enviably low case numbers.

Domestically, this is used to show the superiority of China’s political and governance system. Internationally, China is trying to position itself as a responsible, humanitarian global power, a country that helps others with medical supplies through its “mask diplomacy”.

What do international investigations say so far?

In 2020, the 194 member states of the World Health Assembly tried to get an independent and comprehensive evaluation of the international health response to COVID-19. This was through an Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, headed by former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark and former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

In its May report, the panel was critical of China’s early handling and the World Health Organization’s delay in declaring an emergency. But it did not make a finding on the origins of the virus, saying the exact transmission cycle remains unknown.

The task of investigating the origins of the virus was given to a joint World Health Organization-China technical mission.

The mission found the lab scenario was “extremely unlikely”. But it was criticised when it came to the data made available. The US said the report provided a “partial and incomplete” picture. Despite China’s hopes, the report did not resolve questions about where the virus began.

Washington DC called on the WHO to open a second phase to its investigation, which China rejected. With this avenue blocked, the Biden administration has said it will publish the results of its own inquiry.

What does this mean for Australia?

In the immediate term, there are no obvious ramifications for Australia. The shape of US-China relations under Biden is clear: competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can and adversarial when it must.

Read more:
China turns on the charm and angers Trump as it eyes a global opportunity in coronavirus crisis

The latest inquiry may bring up memories of Australia’s push for an international inquiry last year, which China saw as “dancing to the tune” of the US. If Australia is seen to get behind the lab leak theory, this will likely be framed by China as “Canberra trying to please Washington”.

So far, foreign minister Marise Payne has simply welcomed Biden’s announcement while prime minister Scott Morrison has placed it within the context of the independent panel’s work. We will see if defence minister Peter Dutton is more fiery, having previously talked up the lab theory after contracting the virus (ironically during a visit to the White House).

While some might say we should wait until the crisis is over to assign fault, this is never going to happen when the US and China are concerned. The battle to control the COVID-19 narrative started the same day as the battle against the virus itself.

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

– ref. Biden’s new Wuhan lab leak investigation ramps up US-China blame game – https://theconversation.com/bidens-new-wuhan-lab-leak-investigation-ramps-up-us-china-blame-game-161885

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kevin Thiele, Adjunct Assoc. Professor, The University of Western Australia

Here are two quiz questions for you. How many species of animals, plants, fungi, fish, insects and other organisms live in Australia? And how many of these have been discovered and named?

To the first, the answer is we don’t really know. But the best guess of taxonomists – the scientists who discover, name, classify and document species – is that Australia’s lands, rivers, coasts and oceans probably house more than 700,000 distinct species.

On the second, taxonomists estimate almost 200,000 species have been scientifically named since Europeans first began exploring, collecting and classifying Australia’s remarkable fauna and flora.

Together, these estimates are disturbing. After more than 300 years of effort, scientists have documented fewer than one-third of Australia’s species. The remaining 70% are unknown, and essentially invisible, to science.

Taxonomists in Australia name an average 1,000 new species each year. At that rate, it will take at least 400 years to complete even a first-pass stocktake of Australia’s biodiversity.

This poor knowledge is a serious threat to Australia’s environment. And a first-of-its kind report released today shows it’s also a huge missed economic opportunity. That’s why today, Australia’s taxonomists are calling on governments, industry and the community to support an important mission: discovering and documenting all Australian species within 25 years.

Australia: a biodiversity hotspot

Biologically, Australia is one of the richest and most diverse nations on Earth – between 7% and 10% of all species on Earth occur here. It also has among the world’s highest rates of species discovery. But our understanding of biodiversity is still very, very incomplete.

Of course, First Nations peoples discovered, named and classified many species within their knowledge systems long before Europeans arrived. But we have no ready way yet to compare their knowledge with Western taxonomy.

Finding new species in Australia is not hard – there are almost certainly unnamed species of insects, spiders, mites and fungi in your backyard. Any time you take a bush holiday you’ll drive past hundreds of undiscovered species. The problem is recognising the species as new and finding the time and resources to deal with them all.

Taxonomists describe and name new species only after very careful due diligence. Every specimen must be compared with all known named species and with close relatives to ensure it is truly a new species. This often involves detailed microscopic studies and gene sequencing.

More fieldwork is often needed to collect specimens and study other species. Specimens in museums and herbaria all over the world sometimes need to be checked. After a great deal of work, new species are described in scientific papers for others to assess and review.

So why do so many species remain undiscovered? One reason is a shortage of taxonomists trained to the level needed. Another is that technologies to substantially speed up the task have only been developed in the past decade or so. And both these, of course, need appropriate levels of funding.

Of course, some groups of organisms are better known than others. In general, noticeable species – mammals, birds, plants, butterflies and the like – are fairly well documented. Most less noticeable groups – many insects, fungi, mites, spiders and marine invertebrates – remain poorly known. But even inconspicuous species are important.

Fungi, for example, are essential for maintaining our natural ecosystems and agriculture. They fertilise soils, control pests, break down litter and recycle nutrients. Without fungi, the world would literally grind to a halt. Yet, more than 90% of Australian fungi are believed to be unknown.

Read more:
How we discovered a hidden world of fungi inside the world’s biggest seed bank

Mind the knowledge gap

So why does all this matter?

First, Australia’s biodiversity is under severe and increasing threat. To manage and conserve our living organisms, we must first discover and name them.

At present, it’s likely many undocumented species are becoming extinct, invisibly, before we know they exist. Or, perhaps worse, they will be discovered and named from dead specimens in our museums long after they have gone extinct in nature.

Second, many undiscovered species are crucial in maintaining a sustainable environment for us all. Others may emerge as pests and threats in future; most species are rarely noticed until something goes wrong. Knowing so little about them is a huge risk.

Third, enormous benefits are to be gained from these invisible species, once they are known and documented. A report released today
by Deloitte Access Economics, commissioned by Taxonomy Australia, estimates a benefit to the national economy of between A$3.7 billion and A$28.9 billion if all remaining Australian species are documented.

Benefits will be greatest in biosecurity, medicine, conservation and agriculture. The report found every $1 invested in discovering all remaining Australian species will bring up to $35 of economic benefits. Such a cost-benefit analysis has never before been conducted in Australia.

The investment would cover, among other things, research infrastructure, an expanded grants program, a national effort to collect specimens of all species and new facilities for gene sequencing.

Read more:
A few months ago, science gave this rare lizard a name – and it may already be headed for extinction

Mission possible

Australian taxonomists – in museums, herbaria, universities, at the CSIRO and in
government departments – have spent the last few years planning an ambitious mission to discover and document all remaining Australian species within a generation.

So, is this ambitious goal achievable, or even imaginable? Fortunately, yes.

It will involve deploying new and emerging technologies, including high-throughput robotic DNA sequencing, artificial intelligence and supercomputing. This will vastly speed up the process from collecting specimens to naming new species, while ensuring rigour and care in the science.

A national meeting of Australian taxonomists, including the young early career researchers needed to carry the mission through, was held last year. The meeting confirmed that with the right technologies and more keen and bright minds trained for the task, the rate of species discovery in Australia could be sped up by the necessary 16-fold – reducing 400 years of effort to 25 years.

With the right people, technologies and investment, we could discover all Australian species. By 2050 Australia could be the world’s first biologically mega-rich nation to have documented all our species, for the direct benefit of this and future generations.

Read more:
Hundreds of Australian lizard species are barely known to science. Many may face extinction

Kevin Thiele has received funding from The Ian Potter Foundation and from relevant sector organisations for the work that led to this article.

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

– ref. About 500,000 Australian species are undiscovered – and scientists are on a 25-year mission to finish the job – https://theconversation.com/about-500-000-australian-species-are-undiscovered-and-scientists-are-on-a-25-year-mission-to-finish-the-job-161793

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marcia Devlin, Adjunct Professor, Victoria University

Across the world, women do not have the same opportunities as men. The 2020 Global Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) revealed Australia came in at 44th in the Global Gender Gap Index 2020 rankings, slipping five places from the previous year. But wait, there’s more. The 2021 Global Gender Gap Index places Australia at number 50, a slip of another six places in 12 months.

And, at the current rate at which the gender inequality gap is being closed, it is now the case that it will take 135.6 years to close the gap worldwide. In 2020, the WEF had calculated gender parity would not be attained for 99.5 years. The 2020 report concluded:

“None of us will see gender parity in our lifetimes, and nor likely will many of our children.”

Read more:
Why mentoring for women risks propping up patriarchal structures instead of changing them

How is gender parity measured?

The key dimensions used to measure gender parity are:

• economic participation and opportunity

• educational attainment

• health and survival

• political empowerment.

As the reports point out, gender parity has a significant bearing on the extent to which societies can thrive. Fully deploying only half of the world’s available talent has an enormous impact on the growth, competitiveness and future readiness of businesses and economies across the world.

According to the 2021 report, COVID-19 caused the gender gap to widen as women left the workforce at a greater rate than men. Even among those who retained paid work, the report says, women took on more duties in childcare, housework and elder care, increasing the “double shift” of paid and unpaid work. Naturally enough, this has contributed to higher stress and lower productivity among women.

Read more:
COVID-19 is a disaster for mothers’ employment. And no, working from home is not the solution

Australia remains equal first in the 2021 global rankings for educational attainment. So this is not an issue that might be tackled in Australia through improving education, including about inequality.

I propose that this is instead an issue of ingrained and systemic sexism in our country. How else can we explain the fact that Australian women get paid less than Australian men?

The 2020 report from the Australian Workplace Gender Equality Agency shows men take home, on average, $25,534 per year more than women. Contributing to this gap, the average full-time base salary across all industries and occupations is 15% less for women than for men.

Universities have failed to lead

Given the woeful attitudes and behaviours towards women in the Australian parliament, one might hope for much-needed leadership from our intellectual hothouses – our universities. But not only have Australian universities not stepped forward to lead the change needed, they themselves perpetuate the problem. They have pay gaps of around the national average. Universities also continue to place men in the vast majority of leadership roles even where they have significant opportunity to do otherwise.

Read more:
No change at the top for university leaders as men outnumber women 3 to 1

Universities – and other workplaces full of educated, insightful people – are well equipped to lead and make changes to enable gender equality. But they haven’t. And I haven’t seen any credible, funded, adequate plans for any workplace to do so in the near future.

Until recently, women have been too busy and tired doing most or all of the childcare, housework and elder care to have time to do much about the blatant inequality we all experience. But somehow, despite the extra burdens COVID-19 has placed on us, we’ve reached a tipping point. Perhaps the extremity of the inequality – laid bare during COVID-19 – has pushed us to the edge. Whatever the reason, we’ve somehow found the impetus to take action.

Women have waited long enough for things that “should” happen to happen. We’ve waited long enough for the people with power – mostly men – to do the right thing. We’ve followed the rules, done as we’ve been asked to do, helped out, worked hard, kept quiet and generally been very good girls.

This evidently hasn’t worked in our favour, nor in the favour of women worldwide. And so, for the sake of growth, competitiveness, society and the future readiness of businesses and economies, as well as our own advancement, we must take matters into our own hands.

Personally, I’m starting with the sector I have worked in for three decades – universities. Despite being home to some of the country’s brightest minds, we have some of the most sexist practices and embarrassing gender inequality figures a developed nation could have. The result is a workplace with 86% more male than female professors, as one example of many.

Read more:
The fatherhood penalty: how parental leave policies perpetuate the gender gap (even in our ‘progressive’ universities)

What can women do about this?

I’ve written a book calling on women (and enlightened men) to take action to improve gender inequality in Australian universities.

Among other suggestions, I recommend women reduce the volume and quality of the housework they do at home and at work. Office housework includes things like taking notes in meetings. Women are often expected to do this, no matter their role or level.

This uses up our valuable time and energy, as Facebook chief operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and her colleague, university professor Adam Grant, point out in their humorously titled Madam CEO – Get Me a Coffee. And it is hard to make the killer point in a meeting when you are busy doing other things.

Reducing the volume and quality of housework undertaken will provide time, energy and goodwill that can be redirected to more fruitful ends. Redirecting their labour in this way will reduce support for the sexist structures that discriminate against women. The advice is relevant to those working in all industries.

Since posting on social media about this topic late in 2020, I’ve had hundreds of women who work in universities contact me about the contents of this book. The sentiment is a combination of fury about their current situation and steely determination to bring about change. Like the women who led, participated in and supported the 2021 marches, including a rally at the Australian parliament, women in universities also believe “enough is enough”.

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

– ref. Time to gender parity has blown out to 135 years. Here’s what women can do to close the gap – https://theconversation.com/time-to-gender-parity-has-blown-out-to-135-years-heres-what-women-can-do-to-close-the-gap-160253

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanna Mendelssohn, Principal Fellow (Hon), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne

In 2008, when I first visited Canberra’s newly opened National Portrait Gallery, my first response was an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. I knew many of those paintings. They had once hung on the walls of the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of the annual Archibald Prize exhibition, or been seen in the Salon des Refusés — home to the best of the rejects.

Over 49 years I have seen the Archibald from both the inside, as a curator, and the outside as a critic. My first Archibald was in 1972, the year Clifton Pugh won with his portrait of Gough Whitlam. Along with other art history students, I had never been especially interested in this festival of popular culture, but as the recently appointed most junior of all curators my job was to administer the prize.

It is fair to say the gallery trustees who voted for the winning portrait (all appointed by Sir Robert Askin’s Liberal government) were not fans of the newly elected Labor Prime Minister. But Pugh’s painting dominated the longlist, the shortlist and the final exhibition, where I took great pleasure in hanging it so it was the first work people saw on arrival.

Since then I have seen almost every Archibald, and although some of my colleagues continue to loathe the annual feast of novelty portraiture, I have come to appreciate it as an annual snapshot of the kind of society we are, and who our heroes may be.

Proudly Australian

As the gallery celebrates the prize’s centenary and the ABC prepares to screen a documentary hosted by Rachel Griffiths, Finding the Archibald, which looks at the history of the prize and asks what the selected paintings say about us, it is worth remembering exactly why Archibald bequeathed some of his considerable estate to create an Australian portrait prize – and to give thanks for his vision.

The man born John Feltham Archibald in 1856, who later renamed himself Jules François Archibald because he loved France, was an Australian nationalist.

As founding editor of The Bulletin he fostered the literary careers of Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, Miles Franklin and Steele Rudd – writers whose work defined the country as we moved towards Federation. His illustrators included Phil May, Will Dyson, D. H. Souter, George Lambert and Norman Lindsay. All projected a sense of an independent Australia.

At the beginning of last century, it was assumed an Australian’s success was made in England.

In 1900, when private philanthropy paid for Henry Lawson to travel north to London, the Melbourne artist John Longstaff painted his portrait, purchased by the Art Gallery of NSW the following year. Longstaff then also left for London.

Lawson soon returned home, but the absence of Longstaff and other talented Australians is one reason for the precise wording of Archibald’s will, enacted on his death in 1919.

He wanted our artists to see Australia as home, so he carefully wrote the prize would be for:

the best portrait of some man or woman distinguished in Art Letters Science or Politics painted by any artist resident in Australasia during the twelve months preceding the date fixed by the Trustees for sending in the Pictures …

Those words have been the subject of argument by generations of artists, critics and lawyers. When Longstaff first entered the prize in 1921 he was ruled ineligible as he had only just returned from England. In 1988, the same rule disqualified Sidney Nolan as he, too, was a UK resident.

A prize of the trustees

As the prize must be judged by the gallery’s trustees, it is possible to track the nature (and prejudices) of those trustees by looking at the artists awarded it, as well as their sitters.

The initial seriousness of the prize and its generous funding led to a bias towards the dull tonal work of W B McInnes who won a total of seven times.

This record was beaten by Sir William Dargie with eight wins, the last one being in 1956 for his powerful portrait of Albert Namatjira, the first time a portrait of an Aboriginal person had won.

In 2020, Vincent Namatjira — Albert’s great-grandson — was the first Aboriginal artist to win the prize with Stand Strong For Who You are, a double portrait with Adam Goodes.

Archibald welcomed women writers throughout his journalistic career and made a conscious decision to include both genders in his will. Many women entered, but it was not until 1938 that Nora Heysen won with a portrait of Madame Elink Schuurman, wife of the Consul-General for the Netherlands.

The commentary that followed was especially distasteful as the artist, still the youngest ever winner at 27, had chosen as her subject a woman of mixed race. In 100 years, the prize has only been awarded to women artists ten times. Six of those occasions have been in the last 20 years.

Sadly, this lively painting remains overseas and is unavailable for the centenary retrospective exhibition.

Read more:
Friday essay: Nora Heysen, more than her father’s daughter

Another absence is William Dobell’s 1943 portrait of Joshua Smith, effectively destroyed in a fire many years ago. As is the way of artists, Dobell and Smith had painted each other’s portraits. The year’s two finalists were Dobell’s portrait of Smith, and Smith’s portrait of the poet Dame Mary Gilmore.

Lionel Lindsay, well-known as an anti-modernist, recognised the superior quality of the Dobell and so advocated for it, as did the only woman trustee, Mary Alice Evatt, recently appointed to the board by her brother-in-law, the Minister for Education.

After Dobell’s victory two unsuccessful artists, Mary Edwards (later known as Mary Edwell-Burke) and Joseph Wolinski, were persuaded by colleagues in the Royal Art Society to mount a court case to dispute the result, claiming Dobell’s work was not a portrait but a caricature.

They lost, but in the aftermath the Archibald became the most popular event for artists wishing to make their name.

Paintings of ideas

This year 938 works were entered and only 52 were hung. The inability to guarantee a sitter their portrait will be hung is one reason for the many self-portraits, portraits of fellow artists and family members.

Read more:
From Grace Tame to Craig Foster: distinguished public figures but only one politician in a telling 2021 Archibald shortlist

These more intimate portraits have been among the most successful exhibits. For me, the most memorable of all is Janet Dawson’s 1973 portrait of her husband, the pioneering playwright, food writer, gardener, Michael Boddy.

I was in the packing room when it was being unwrapped. I still remember getting a shiver down my spine. Even under plastic it was so beautiful.

It is an especially lush and loving work. At the time Daniel Thomas, the gallery’s senior curator, wondered if women secretly wanted to eat their husbands.

One truth about the Archibald rarely discussed is the influence of individual trustees. When Wendy Sharpe won in 1996 with her exuberant Self-portrait as Diana of Erskinville, there had just been a changing of the guard with the appointment of new trustees.

The announcement was delayed for almost an hour as the trustees deliberated. Word is, it was the advocacy of one of the newly appointed board members that gave her the prize by one vote.

It is true to say the trustees of 1920 would not share the aesthetic values of much of the art in recent exhibitions. Celebrations of cultural difference and gender and the presence of many works by Aboriginal artists would almost certainly be beyond their comprehension.

With the exception of the photo-realist works and the occasional academic portrait, realistic depictions of the subject are now the exception rather than the rule.

But what would Archibald think? He was, above all, a man of ideas. He wanted us to look to our own history in preference to that of England. He wanted Australians to debate our artists, writers, actors – even politicians.

I think he would be pleased.

Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize is at the Art Gallery of NSW June 5 – September 26, then touring nationally.

Joanna Mendelssohn has received funding from the Australian Research Council

– ref. ‘I think Archie would be pleased’: 100 years of our most famous portrait prize and my almost 50 years watching it evolve – https://theconversation.com/i-think-archie-would-be-pleased-100-years-of-our-most-famous-portrait-prize-and-my-almost-50-years-watching-it-evolve-161575

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jesse Whitehead, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Waikato

Reports of potentially higher rates of vaccine hesitancy among Māori and Pacific populations have seen the government target COVID-19 vaccine and information campaigns at those communities.

And there are excellent reasons for such a targeted approach, designed and delivered by Māori and Pacific leaders for Māori and Pacific people. More so, given existing inequities within the health-care system that have fostered unequal health outcomes and distrust in health institutions themselves.

But it is also important to confront the inference that Māori and Pacific people are more prone to believe COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theories, and that this might be the most significant barrier to vaccination uptake.

Using data collected from a diverse sample of New Zealanders, we found no basis for this. When modelling accounts for the key factors we know are associated with vaccine hesitancy, such as education and age, ethnic differences are no longer statistically significant.

That is, differences in vaccine hesitancy rates for Māori and Pacific communities are explained by their younger age structure and lower educational attainment. Indeed, across all communities, these are the main factors associated with vaccine hesitancy.

These findings are, of course, fairly intuitive when we look at the successful leadership from Māori and Pacific communities during the early pandemic response, including initiatives such as a contact tracing card trial and community checkpoints.

The risk of inequitable vaccination rates

The real risk is that the intention to be vaccinated doesn’t translate into actual uptake. Early data on the COVID-19 vaccine rollout suggests fewer Māori and Pacific people are fully immunised.

This matters because these populations have a greater risk of COVID-19 transmission, severe infection, ICU admission or even death.

Read more:
A year after New Zealand’s first COVID-19 lockdown, discrimination and racism are on the rise

Despite the Ministry of Health’s phased rollout plan, it seems some populations could be protected sooner than others due to the geographic and other barriers faced by Māori and Pacific people.

This mirrors known trends in health-care access in Aotearoa where services are inequitably distributed. Wealthier, healthier and whiter populations tend to have the best access to facilities and high-quality care.

Time and distance are the real barriers

Our analysis shows that offering vaccination at existing health facilities and pop-up sites would be inequitable. Māori, older people and poorer communities would be disproportionately affected by distance and travel times from where they live.

Schools and GP clinics are clearly the most easily accessible sites. However, converting schools into vaccination centres might not be feasible. The best option could be combining effective outreach programs with vaccination centres run from GP clinics, Māori providers and Pacific health services.

While some will find ways to overcome access barriers, others won’t have the time, money or resources. These obstacles become mountains if people are already vaccine-hesitant — regardless of ethnicity.

If they postpone or forgo the vaccine altogether it will make existing inequities worse and challenge the overall COVID-19 elimination strategy, especially when borders open and the risk of community transmission increases.

Read more:
Vaccination alone will not provide full protection. When borders open, NZ will still be managing COVID-19

The threat of other infectious diseases

We know many people have deferred routine health care during the pandemic, including childhood immunisation against other infectious diseases. This has happened against a backdrop of already declining immunisation rates among children in general, and among tamariki Māori and Pacific children in particular.

The result has been worsening coverage rates in some regions with persistently low coverage anyway, as people stayed away from primary health-care providers.

Closing the borders and restricting movement to stop COVID-19 transmission also reduced the spread of other infectious diseases. When these controls are lifted the risk of serious childhood disease outbreaks, such as measles and pertussis, will increase.

Read more:
How to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake and decrease vaccine hesitancy in young people

High childhood vaccination coverage must be prioritised to counter the vulnerability of Māori and Pacific communities to the immediate and long-term burdens of these diseases.

Avoiding a perfect storm

This winter’s influenza immunisation campaign and the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) catch-up program are particularly focused on young Māori and Pacific adults. The priority is to prevent further devastating outbreaks of measles.

However, the resources currently prioritised for the COVID-19 vaccine campaign inevitably affect other immunisation campaigns.

Read more:
COVID vaccine hesitancy: spell out the personal rather than collective benefits to persuade people — new research

Communities across Aotearoa may soon face a perfect storm: fewer resources available to address low childhood immunisation rates, delayed influenza protection and MMR catch-ups, and the potential for the inequitable delivery of COVID-19 vaccines.

These factors, combined with increasing freedom of movement, are likely to result in infectious disease spread, particularly in Māori and Pacific communities.

For the health system to be adequately responsive, it should engage Māori and Pacific leadership in the governance, design and delivery of vaccination campaigns. It will require resourcing, monitoring and accountability to build adaptable solutions that ensure community aspirations are met.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The real challenge to COVID-19 vaccination rates isn’t hesitancy — it’s equal access for Māori and Pacific people – https://theconversation.com/the-real-challenge-to-covid-19-vaccination-rates-isnt-hesitancy-its-equal-access-for-maori-and-pacific-people-161676

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

The expert advice changes, not infrequently, during this pandemic. And that applies even when that “advice” comes in the form of a one-liner.

As criticism mounted over the slowness of the vaccine rollout, Scott Morrison and his ministers have been increasingly dogged by the PM’s claim, especially early on, that the vaccination rollout was “not a race”.

Despite it being very obvious it was indeed a race to get the job done, once the line was in the script, ministers parroted it or struggled with it.

And it has become a media favourite for “gotcha” questions, as we saw at the weekend.

On Sunday Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack said on Sky, “It’s not a race – it has to be systematic, it has to be rolled out in a way that Australians obviously need to know that they have to get the jab, but we can’t have everyone getting it at the same time.”

Trade Minister Dan Tehan, over on the ABC, ranged widely to explain the nature of “races”.

“The Melbourne Cup’s a race, the Stawell Gift’s a race. When it comes to vaccines, what we’re trying to do is make sure we get as many people vaccinated as quickly as we possibly can.”

In question time on Tuesday, Labor asked whether Morrison still said vaccinating all Australians, including aged care residents and workers, is “not a race”.

Morrison reached immediately for a human shield – an expert.

It was Brendan Murphy, the secretary of the health department, who first made the statement, the Prime Minister said. And his words – which he stood by – were based on Murphy’s “expert advice”.

Murphy, formerly chief medical officer, has become a well-known face during COVID-19 from all those news conference appearances with Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt.

Morrison said he “affirmed” Murphy’s remarks – “because all the way through this pandemic our government, the governments around the country […] have always been mindful of the expert advice informing the decisions we have taken”.

For good measure he tabled Murphy’s words.

By happenstance, Murphy was appearing before a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday afternoon, so he was quickly interrogated by Labor about whether the PM had thrown him “under the bus”.

Murphy indicated his own language has now changed. (Not that it was his place to advise Morrison on language, he stressed; the PM “has his own advice on language”.)

“I think I did say it way back in January at a press conference, when there was this discussion about racing through the TGA [Therapeutic Goods Administration] approval process, and I think I did say it’s not a race at that time,” he said.

“It is a term that I did use, way back then.”

But “we’ve moved on”.

“It’s not a very helpful phrase now because we’re going, we’re in action, we’re fired up and we’re doing it as quickly as possible.”

The critics dispute strongly the extent of the firing up. And key details continue to be lacking, as was evident, to the government’s embarrassment, on Tuesday.

The Minister for Aged Care Services, Richard Colbeck could not say how many of the aged care workforce have been vaccinated.

Because these workers are getting their jabs in various places – including their work sites, GPs, hubs – total figures are not available. Another complication is they don’t have to inform their employer whether they have been vaccinated.

Belatedly, the government is making arrangements for more extensive data to be quickly collected.

“We’re asking the aged care providers who hold the data to report that information back to us,” Colbeck said. “We’ve asked them to report that alongside their flu vaccination data.”

On the latest figures, produced in Senate estimates after confusion, 39,874 doses have been administered to aged care workers nationally – 10,608 in Victoria. Some 32,833 people have been fully vaccinated, 8027 of them in Victoria.

The aged care workforce is about 366,000 nationally. Of these 235,764 work in residential aged care, and the rest in home care.

Whatever the number actually vaccinated, Colbeck said he was “comfortable” with the pace of the rollout.

Hunt, who every day bombards the media with numbers, had to admit he had been wrong in his figures about the aged care facilities covered in the vaccination program.

He said on Monday that Australia-wide, six were still to get initial doses, On Tuesday he said he’d misread the advice and it was 20. “Nobody else’s fault but mine,” he said, offering a rare apology.

Tuesday night came an update saying only 14 facilities remained. All but one are scheduled to be done by June 8. None is in Victoria.

There were sighs of relief from federal and Victorian governments that the latest three COVID cases in Victoria had not involved aged care workers or residents.

The state government has announced a drive to get workers in aged care and disability vaccinated over the next few days, with special lanes at hubs so they avoid the queues.

“This is very much a call to arms for those workers on the frontline to come out,” the state Minister for Disability, Ageing and Carers, Luke Donnellan, said.

Very obviously a race.

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

– ref. View from The Hill: New ‘expert’ advice is in – don’t say ‘it’s not a race’ – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-new-expert-advice-is-in-dont-say-its-not-a-race-161935

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kylie Quinn, Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow, School of Health and Biomedical Sciences, RMIT University

Amid Victoria’s worrying COVID outbreak, perhaps the point of greatest concern is the fact the virus has again found its way into aged care.

On Sunday, the state government announced an aged-care worker had tested positive for COVID-19, despite having received their first vaccine dose on May 12.

We’ve since found out another staff member, who worked alongside the original staff member at Arcare Maidstone, has returned a positive result, along with a resident.

The resident had received a first dose of the Pfizer vaccine and reportedly has only mild symptoms, but is being monitored in hospital. The original worker’s son has also tested positive.

The cases in the first staff member and the resident, both of whom had received a first vaccine dose, highlight the fact you need both doses for maximum benefit.

It takes a couple of weeks

Clinical trials show COVID vaccine protection is optimal from about two weeks after your second dose. This means they:

• nearly completely protect against severe disease and death in healthy people

• dramatically reduce the likelihood of symptoms with COVID-19

• reduce the likelihood of infection with the virus

• if you do get infected, they reduce the amount of virus you make. Emerging evidence suggests this reduces the likelihood you will pass the virus to other people.

Each dose of a vaccine essentially shifts the odds in your favour. One dose gives you a lower chance of reaping some of these benefits, while two doses gives you a much higher likelihood of these benefits.

Though even with two doses, you could still be unlucky and get infected, develop disease or pass on the virus.

What do we know about a single dose of Pfizer?

Clinical trials of the Pfizer vaccine were designed to test the efficacy of the vaccine more than one week after the second dose. However, these trials also provided the first hints that a single dose could offer some protection as early as 12 days afterwards.

“Real world” data now supports these early observations — a single dose is highly effective against hospitalisation four weeks after vaccination.

Meanwhile, early research and reports suggest a first dose of Pfizer could be between 50% and 90% effective at preventing infection.

Preliminary data also suggest people who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 after one dose of the Pfizer vaccine are up to 50% less likely to transmit that infection to other members of their household.

Read more:
Mounting evidence suggests COVID vaccines do reduce transmission. How does this work?

And what about a single dose of AstraZeneca?

The AstraZeneca vaccine was initially developed as a single-dose vaccine, estimated to have an efficacy of 76% against disease in clinical trials.

These trials were later amended to include a second dose when other work showed two doses significantly increased antibody levels in volunteers.

Real-world data, though yet to be peer reviewed, has shown one dose is roughly 65% effective at protecting from infection and up to 50% effective at preventing vaccinated people from passing the virus on if they do become infected, like Pfizer.

Also similar to Pfizer, a single dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine offers very good protection against hospital admission four weeks afterwards.

What takes so long?

Despite differences in mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and viral vector vaccines like AstraZeneca, both take similar amounts of time to generate antibody responses. After a single dose of AstraZeneca, antibodies can be detected after 14 days and further increase over the next two weeks.

But why does it take time for these responses to develop? When researchers track the antibody response to the first dose of vaccine, they find it takes at least ten days for the immune system to start making antibodies that can recognise SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein (a protein on the virus’ surface which it uses to enter our body’s cells).

It also takes at least a week for T cells, a type of white blood cell important in our immune response, to start to react to the vaccine. Over the next few weeks, these responses become even stronger.

Read more:
What’s the Valneva COVID-19 vaccine, the French shot that’s supposed to be ‘variant proof’?

In contrast, the second dose activates the immune system much more quickly. Within a week of dose two, your antibody levels increase by more than ten times, providing much stronger and longer-lasting protection from infection.

So the first dose of a COVID vaccine gets your immune response going, but the second dose is essential to ensure immunity is strong, consistent from person to person, and longer-lasting.

Partial vaccination can be risky

While a single dose of either vaccine provides some benefits, relying on partial vaccination for people who are vulnerable or working in high-risk roles is problematic. It’s critical we fully vaccinate frontline health-care workers, quarantine workers and people who work and live in aged and disability care as soon as possible.

Another challenge is that all current COVID vaccines are based on the original virus strain but variants now make up the majority of infections in many countries. Some variants are targeted less effectively by vaccines, particularly after only one dose.

Preliminary data suggests that while two doses of the Pfizer vaccine are 88% protective against symptomatic infection with the B.1.617.2 variant, a single dose is only 33% effective.

A similar variant, called B.1.617.1, is behind the current outbreak in Victoria and may respond similarly. This makes it even more important to ensure frontline workers receive both vaccine doses as quickly as possible.

It’s also worth noting immune responses to one dose of either the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines decrease with age.

In a pooled analysis of Pfizer and AstraZeneca, older people had lower rates of protection than younger people after a single dose, although older people were protected just as well as younger people after two doses.

Although this study is yet to be peer-reviewed, it tells us administering the second dose in a timely manner is particularly important for older people to realise the full benefits of vaccination.

Read more:
Can I get AstraZeneca now and Pfizer later? Why mixing and matching COVID vaccines could help solve many rollout problems

Kylie Quinn receives funding from the Rebecca L. Cooper Foundation, the CASS Foundation and RMIT University. She consults on the Advisory Board for the Vaccine Alliance of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Jennifer Juno receives funding from the NHMRC.

– ref. How long do COVID vaccines take to start working? – https://theconversation.com/how-long-do-covid-vaccines-take-to-start-working-161876

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

In walking away from his defamation action against the ABC, cabinet minister Christian Porter has opened a fresh round in the battle over the allegation of historical rape against him by a now-deceased woman, known just as Kate.

Jo Dyer, a friend of Kate – whose claim Porter denies – on Tuesday threatened to sue him, accusing him of impugning “my honesty and integrity”.

There is also now a battle over the settlement concluded between Porter and the ABC.

The federal court has yet to ratify the settlement, which involves expunging from the court record part of the ABC’s defence in the defamation case. But news organisations are seeking to have the material made public.

Justice Jayne Jagot said on Tuesday the issue might not be a matter for the parties. “There has to be a reason for the removal of a document from a court file,” she said. “It’s not done just because a party wants to do it.”

If a document is removed from the court file, there cannot be applications to see it.

ABC journalist Louise Milligan, who Porter also sued in his case against an ABC article reporting the accusation without naming him, tweeted on Monday “We are still absolutely committed to the 27 redacted pages being in the public domain”.

Dyer brought the successful legal action that resulted in Porter’s high profile barrister Sue Chrysanthou being prevented from appearing in the defamation case because of a conflict of interest.

Dyer said in her statement her lawyers had sent a second “concerns notice” to Porter over his “continuing defamatory comments”. “He should be on notice that if I launch legal proceedings, I tend to see them through to their conclusion,” she said.

She alleged two defamations by Porter. She said that on May 12, he implied her legal proceedings were “part of an improper last minute legal strategy to disrupt his now discontinued action”.

“He did this despite knowing the real reason for the court action, and the lengths to which I had gone over the preceding two months to avoid court,” she said.

“Yesterday Mr Porter alleged that, after ‘coaching’ from Ms Milligan, I had destroyed important communications that may have had a bearing on his now discontinued action against Ms Milligan and the ABC.

“This is absurd. As I stated in court under oath, a number of people, of whom Ms Milligan was but one, encouraged me to treat all communications about our dear friend Kate, and the allegations she made against Mr Porter, with the care and respect she and they warranted.

“I endeavoured to do so by both filing and deleting correspondence between me and other individuals as appropriate.

“There was nothing improper, illegal or sinister in my decisions to save or delete certain messages, decisions that were taken well before Mr Porter launched his now discontinued action against Ms Milligan and the ABC.”

Dyer said the allegations Kate made against Porter “remain completely untested. Until they have been investigated, it is untenable for Mr Porter to remain in cabinet.”

Shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said an independent inquiry was needed into whether Porter was fit to continue as a cabinet minister. Dreyfus also said the ABC material should be publicly available.

Michelle Grattan ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

– ref. Now Kate’s friend threatens to sue Christian Porter – https://theconversation.com/now-kates-friend-threatens-to-sue-christian-porter-161911

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Holly Seale, Associate professor, UNSW

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has asked the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee to revisit whether COVID vaccinations should be mandatory for aged care workers and provide fresh advice to national cabinet.

In January, the committee said aged care workers should be “strongly encouraged” to get vaccinated, but given there was little data about the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing the spread of COVID-19, it stopped short of mandating the jabs.

The Victorian government said it expects all front-line aged care and health workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19. In an attempt to increase coverage, from Wednesday it will allow aged and disability care workers to jump the queue in state-run mass vaccination clinics.

Data from places which have made influenza vaccination mandatory in the past suggests it’s clear vaccine coverage will increase after a mandate.

However, before moving forward we need to make sure we have exhausted the other options. The Victorian government is making a good start by reducing the barriers to access.

However to really understand whether mandates are needed it’s critical we get a good handle on the number of health and aged care workers who have received the vaccine, and whether we are getting equity in coverage across and within organisations.

It’s important to remember the term “health workers” includes clinical and non-clinical staff. Tracking vaccine uptake for health workers can be challenging for a range of reasons, including that staff can receive their vaccine onsite or at other locations.

We already have various vaccine requirements for health workers

Australian hospital staff are required to show evidence they’re protected from a range of vaccine preventable diseases.

The list of diseases differs slightly depending on the state or territory. In New South Wales, for example, front-line staff must show evidence they’re vaccinated against measles, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), and varicella (chickenpox).

Annual flu vaccines are highly recommended for health-care workers in NSW, but not required. It’s currently only mandatory for those in high-risk situations for example intensive care and oncology ward staff.

Internationally, mandates for influenza are more common in parts of the United States, while countries in Europe often require health workers to show evidence of protection from other vaccine preventable diseases.

What happens when voluntary programs fail?

In an attempt to support flu vaccine uptake, staff members running vaccine clinics in Australia would tell me they offered extended opening hours, had mobile clinics, offered raffles and lollipops, had education sessions with influenza experts, and used declination forms (a legal document that signals an individual’s intent to refuse a recommended treatment) — but coverage remained the same. One staff member I spoke to likened it to banging her head on the wall. Nothing she did increased coverage at her hospital.

At this point, organisations or governments often shift away from voluntary based programs and introduce mandatory requirements.

While vaccine requirements in Australia for influenza are still in their infancy, they have been in place in some settings in the United States for much longer and have been shown to work.

One study from the United States looked at flu vaccine uptake in healthcare workers at University of California Irvine Healthcare. It found that after introducing measures and incentives like the ones above, coverage rose from 44% of staff to 62.9%. But it was only after the vaccine became mandatory that coverage reached over 85%.

What’s more, in 2016–2017, influenza vaccination was highest among US hospital workers who were required by their employer to be vaccinated (98.3%). When vaccination wasn’t required, promoted, or offered on-site, rates were as low as 45.8%.

What are the pros and cons of mandating vaccination?

Multiple arguments are used to support mandatory vaccination but the focus tends to be the obligation for staff to “do no harm” and patients’ and residents’ (and staff members’) right to a safe environment, free from the risk of infection from a staff member. This right is both an ethical and a legal requirement.

Those who oppose mandates often draw on the rights of health workers to autonomy, question the data supporting the rationale for the mandate, or criticise the level of effect the vaccine has in reducing transmission from staff members to patients. Others suggest adding a mandate will drive staff to quit their jobs. But research shows that isn’t the case.

For COVID-19, what should we try first?

We urgently need to reduce the chance of COVID-19 transmission in health and aged care organisations to patients and staff members. But are we at that tipping point of needing to mandate a COVID-19 vaccine?

In attempt to answer that question, we need to consider the following:

• have we ensured there are no physical barriers to vaccination? Have we overcome logistical issues impacting on staff getting vaccinated?

• have we tried other options to nudge health workers to get vaccinated? Have we considered incentives or reimbursements such as a coffee voucher or free parking? Or could we introduce a competition with a prize for the department with the highest uptake?

• do we understand the reasons some staff members may be indecisive about receiving a COVID-19 vaccine? Have we developed purpose-built instruments to measure changes in vaccine hesitancy that focus on understanding the attitudes of staff towards issues such as safety, efficacy, and trust? Based on this knowledge, have we modified our communication approaches?

• do we have strategies in place to help those staff who are having trouble reaching a decision about whether to have a COVID-19 vaccine? Could we offer decision aids or guides (which account for variations in health literacy) to assist people to balance up the benefits and risks?

And if that doesn’t work?

When we’ve tried these strategies and haven’t seen improved coverage, we need to accept voluntary approaches probably won’t cut it. Every study on influenza vaccination of health workers points to a ceiling effect that will not be broken unless the vaccine gets mandated.

If we accept the same situation will occur for COVID-19 vaccination, mandatory policies may be the only way forward in ensuring high coverage of staff.

However, in moving forward with a mandate, it’s critical we work with the health workers at the receiving end of the policy, as well as those staff members tasked with introducing and enforcing it.

Holly Seale is an investigator on a study funded by NHMRC and has previously received funding for investigator driven research from NSW Ministry of Health, as well as from Sanofi Pasteur and Seqirus. She is the Deputy Chair of the Collaboration on Social Science and Immunisation.

– ref. Mandatory COVID vaccines for aged and health care workers could increase uptake, but we need to exhaust other options first – https://theconversation.com/mandatory-covid-vaccines-for-aged-and-health-care-workers-could-increase-uptake-but-we-need-to-exhaust-other-options-first-161875

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Dahlen, Professor of Midwifery, Associate Dean Research and HDR, Midwifery Discipline Leader, Western Sydney University

Pregnant women in Australia are increasingly having their labours induced rather than giving birth spontaneously – and some without good reason.

A large proportion of first time mothers (41.6%) were induced in 2018, when the latest national data were published, compared with 30.6% in 2010.

Our study, published today in BMJ Open, found the induction rates tripled for women who were 37 and 39 weeks pregnant in New South Wales in the 16 years to 2016. And 15% of new mothers were induced without a medical reason listed.

Induction of labour can be life-saving in some situations. But when it’s not medically indicated, it could put women and babies at unnecessary increased risk of complications.

Remind me, what is induction?

Induction of labour is where labour is started medically. This can be with hormones, by using a balloon-shaped catheter placed in the woman’s cervix to open it up, or by breaking the bag of water around the baby.

Induction is often recommended when:

• pregnancy has gone over 41 weeks to reduce the risk of stillbirth
• the mother has high blood pressure or diabetes
• there is another significant issue threatening the health of the mother or baby.

Our research found sometimes inductions are done where there is no identified medical reason. As previous research has shown, this is especially the case in private hospitals.

Sometimes women are told their baby is bigger or smaller than normal. Bigger babies may lead to more complications with the birth, and smaller babies may not be growing well. However, ultrasound can be very inaccurate, and babies thought to be small or large are often a very average size at birth.

Sometimes women are sick of being pregnant and are (understandably) uncomfortable and request an induction or are offered it by doctors.

Read more:
Birth intervention – and harm – more likely in private hospitals

Greater intervention

Our BMJ Open study tracked almost 475,000 births in NSW between 2001 and 2016.

Of these, 69,397 (15%) had an induction of labour with no medical reason given. These women were aged 20 to 35 years, had a healthy pregnancy, and didn’t smoke or have high blood pressure or diabetes.

Compared to first-time mothers who went into labour themselves, those who were induced were more likely to have:

• an instrumental birth with forceps or vacuum (28% for women who were induced vs 24% for women who gave birth spontanesously)
• a caesarean section (29% vs 14%)
• an epidural (71% vs 41%)
• an episiotomy, which is a surgical cut to the perineum, the area between the vaginal opening and the skin leading towards the anus (41% vs 30%).

In one area there were benefits for mothers who were induced: severe perineal tears were slightly lower for first time mothers (4.2% vs 4.9%) and those who had given birth previously (0.7% vs 1.2%).

Mothers having subsequent babies did not have the same high intervention rates that first time mothers did.

Another recently published study had similar findings of increased caesarean section rates for first time mothers.

Earlier inductions

We found a big rise in NSW babies being induced at what we call “early term” (37 and 38 weeks) over the 16 year period.

The number of babies born at 37 weeks’ gestation tripled, while the number born at 38 weeks doubled.

Yet those last couple of weeks of being in their mother’s uterus are important for the development of the child’s brain and other body systems such as the lungs, and the ability to control blood sugar and body temperature.

Long-term outcomes

Previous research has suggested inducing healthy pregnant mothers after 41 weeks of pregnancy reduces stillbirth and this is what the World Health Organization recommends (we previously recommended induction after 42 weeks).

While our research did not look at stillbirth, as all our mothers and babies were healthy when labour started, we found no difference in the rates of neonatal, infant and child death between the two groups.

Our study is one of the first to look at long-term outcomes associated with induction of labour.

Following induction of labour, babies had more trauma during birth, and were more likely to need resuscitation. This is probably partly due to being born early and/or having more surgical intervention.

Babies born after induction were more likely to be admitted to hospital with breathing difficulties and infections (ear, nose, throat, respiratory, sepsis) at a range of ages, up to 16 years.

We could only look at hospital admissions which occur when there are more serious health issues, so this does not represent visits to a GP or other community services.

Loss of control

Most women prefer to start labour spontaneously, finding induction more painful (hence more epidurals), and feeling they have less control during labour.

Women who are induced can’t move around as easily due to the baby needing to be continuously monitored to pick up any signs of distress. The drugs used for induction can make the contractions very strong, reducing oxygen to the baby. Most women have intravenous fluids running, further restricting movement.

This lack of control can lead to women feeling disappointed with their birth and some may even be traumatised.

A recent review of the evidence found decisions about induction were largely made by clinicians rather than women, whose expectations and preferences were often unmet.

Time for change

There is widespread variation in clinical practice guidelines about when women should be induced.

The World Health Organization has advised against induction of labour without medical indication before 41 weeks gestation.

And this month the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in the United Kingdom released its draft guidance for consultation, also recommending women be offered induction at 41 weeks but opening the discussion on induction up for debate.

There is no doubt induction of labour can save lives if used judiciously. But it’s a major medical intervention and so should not be offered routinely before 41 weeks without discussing the risks and the potential increase in other interventions women may not anticipate.

This discussion should also include not yet knowing all the potential longer-term effects of inductions.

Most important of all, women need to be aware they can decline or accept any intervention or treatment offered or recommended by health providers and the information provided to them must be balanced, evidence based and without coercion.

Read more:
So your birth didn’t go according to plan? Don’t blame yourself

Hannah Dahlen has received funding from NHMRC and ARC in the past.

Soo Downe is currently funded for research projects by the UK NIHR (ESRC), Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and WHO

Ank de Jonge and Lilian Peters do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Too many healthy women are having their labour induced for no identified medical reason, our study shows – https://theconversation.com/too-many-healthy-women-are-having-their-labour-induced-for-no-identified-medical-reason-our-study-shows-161281

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Terry, Professor of Psychology, University of Southern Queensland

Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka took a stand this week that called attention to the mental health of professional athletes. She refused to conduct interviews with the media after her matches at the French Open, citing concerns over her own mental well-being. And, in return, the tennis authorities fined her and threatened her with further action.

There are two sides to this story. On the one hand, this is part of the contract, it’s part of the deal. Tennis players get paid millions of dollars and in return they have to do media interviews whether they win or lose.

The issue is when you have somebody like Osaka, who is by her own admission an introverted person with high social anxiety. She essentially hates doing this stuff but knows she has to.

If there was ever a public cry for help, this is it. She’s talked about suffering bouts of depression since she won the US Open in 2018, how she wears headphones to try to cope with her social anxiety to stay in her own little bubble.

She knew that if she lost at the French Open again, there would be a forensic examination of her inability to win on clay that would just reinforce her own self-doubt. So, she decided not put herself through that.

I find it disappointing that the sport has adopted the stance it has. The authorities have basically taken a hard line with her — you’re contracted to do this, and you have to do it or risk further fines and possible disqualification.

Tennis has been here before

During the 11 years in which I worked in professional tennis, I was asked to be on a commission that looked at the potential threat to the well-being and mental health of players from turning professional at too young an age.

This was in the era when 13 and 14 years olds like Jennifer Capriati and Tracey Austin were playing in Grand Slams and struggling to cope with the pressures.

And the tennis authorities took the mental health of these players so seriously, they established the age eligibility commission with experts from all around the world to meet at Wimbledon for four days to discuss what could be done.

Read more:
Women in sports: double standards a double fault

They made very fundamental changes to the rules — dictating how many tournaments a player can enter at a certain age — and it proved to be to the enduring benefit of the players.

Osaka is asking for a very simple thing in comparison: can we just review the rules around the interviews that players are contracted to do?

Players who have just come off the court after often crushing and demoralising defeats are required within 30 minutes to front up to the media. There’s a sense of voyeurism around how it presently works; perhaps some want to see athletes crumble and break down into tears, having put them on a pedestal.

Some athletes are viewed by the public as spoiled and overpaid, but this is an unfair assessment of Osaka. She is a young, introverted, anxious person. We should by now understand that sports stars are not super human, that they have the same doubts and mental health issues as everyone else.

But given the reaction Osaka has received from some quarters, this appears not to be the case.

Dealing with depression in the spotlight

As Serena Williams has expressed today, not everyone relishes the attention of being famous:

Not everyone is the same. I’m thick. Other people are thin […] You just have to let her handle it the way she wants to.

When it comes to the media, some players just don’t think so well on their feet. They’re used to hitting a ball very well, they’re not necessarily great wordsmiths.

Some players get very frustrated being asked the same question they’ve already answered many times before. Or questions that are sufficiently intrusive about their own mental approach to the game to challenge their self-confidence.

When your natural personality type is such that you’re an introvert and prone to anxiety, it’s an additional challenge when you reach a high point very early in your career. It involves a massive learning curve.

For Osaka, there is also the greater issue of struggling with depression, which she alluded to in her statement.

The last thing you want when you’re dealing with depression is to be in the spotlight. You want to be with the people who love you unconditionally and with whom you can share your feelings and not be judged. You may need professional support.

The media don’t meet those criteria. So trying to deal with serious mental health issues in the glare of publicity is next to impossible.

All of this is heaping more and more demands on Osaka. There are considerable forces pushing her toward even greater levels of anxiety. Could you imagine the level of expectations on her at the Tokyo Olympics?

We are talking more about the mental health of young athletes more now than we used to. It’s true, sports stars are privileged elites, but the prevalence of mental health issues in sports, especially anxiety, is approximately the same as it is in society. And across their careers, between a quarter and a third will have some mental health issue, whether it becomes public or not.

We should understand that we can’t treat young vulnerable people as commodities, telling them to just follow the rules and not to express their concerns.

What Osaka wants is a dialogue around a small change to how tennis players interact with the media. The tennis authorities will likely agree to that now she has taken a stand, but sadly, it may have come at an enormous cost to her.

Read more:
Athletes won’t stay silent on politics anymore. But will leagues support their protests if it costs them real money?

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

– ref. When Naomi Osaka talks, we should listen. Athletes are not commodities, nor are they super human – https://theconversation.com/when-naomi-osaka-talks-we-should-listen-athletes-are-not-commodities-nor-are-they-super-human-161893

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tamara Agnew, Researcher, College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Flinders University

The number of Australian PhD graduates reached around 10,000 a year in 2019, twice as many as in 2005. However, the number of PhDs has been exceeding the available academic positions since as early as the mid-1990s. In 2020, universities purged around 10% of their workforce due to the pandemic, and many university careers are still vulnerable.

Given these statistics, you might wonder if doing a PhD is still a good idea. Based on our discussions with PhD holders, there are still plenty of very good reasons, which is good news in 2021.

Read more: 2021 is the year Australia’s international student crisis really bites

In June 2020 we interviewed 12 PhD holders from multiple disciplines for our podcast Career Sessions to investigate the question: why do a PhD?

Why do a PhD?

The PhD is a mechanism for developing high-level research skills, learning about rigours of science or the development of theory. It sets you up with project management, problem-solving and analytical skills that are meaningful within and beyond academia.

“It just taught me all those transferable skills, project management, and also now starting businesses. I’m amazed at how close starting a business is to doing a science project.” – Dr Andy Stapleton

For our interviewees, the PhD is an opportunity to dive deeply into a topic they are passionate about. They also considered contributing new knowledge to be a privilege. The process taught them to be better thinkers, critical thinkers, and to view the world through new eyes.

“The mental fitness to work at a high level, to be able to think at a high level, to be able to write it […] The topic is less important.” – Dr Gareth Furber

The PhD is a voyage of discovery to a better understanding of how things work. It gives them a credible platform from which their voice can be heard and respected, and they can contribute to change.

“I think it’s definitely like a springboard or something. It launches you into a whole other place and it gives you […] more of a voice. It’s a political act for me. It’s about making change.” – Dr Elizabeth Newnham

The PhD is a tough and sometimes painful journey, but ultimately rewarding. The extraordinary was tempered by frustration, and the experience shaped their lives, increasing self-confidence and leading to new self-awareness.

Read more: PhD completion: an evidence-based guide for students, supervisors and universities

When asked whether they would they do it again, no-one hesitated in saying “yes”.

“You will never stretch your brain in a way that a PhD forces you to.” – Professor Kate Douglas.

The PhD is not necessarily a golden ticket to an academic career, but the experience and skills you develop will be meaningful for your future.

“What I’d done in my PhD gave me a lot broader sense than just my own personal experience. There were a lot of people that have heard me speak and a lot of that’s been informed by the PhD. So it might not be direct, but it’s informed who I am.” – Dr Susan Close

Advice from our guests

Keep both your eyes and your mind open. Pick a topic you are passionate about. Speak to people both within and outside academia to find out where this could lead. Think about whether you actually need a PhD to get to where you want to be.

You’ll have to make some judgement calls about how a PhD can fit into your life.

And find the right supervisor! They are the most important relationship you will have throughout your candidature, and they are a solid reference for what comes next. Finding the right supervisor will always enhance your PhD experience.

Read more: Ten types of PhD supervisor relationships – which is yours?

A PhD isn’t right for everyone. Ask yourself, is it the right time for you and your research interests? Are you resilient? Mental health among PhD students is poor

Our podcast guests have witnessed PhD students’ struggles. The pathway of a PhD candidate is not linear. There are many ups and downs. You will meander in many unplanned directions and often take wrong turns.

When you have completed your PhD, the hard work is really just starting. It is a gateway, but there are a lot of PhDs out there. It is what comes next that really counts.

“It’s a gateway. You’re learning how to do research. But if you really want to be successful afterwards, you need to apply that, and be diligent about that as well, and have a good work ethic.” – Dr Mark Krstic

Read more: 1 in 5 PhD students could drop out. Here are some tips for how to keep going

A PhD in any field is an achievement. Even the most niche topics will contribute knowledge to a field that is important for many people. The reward is intrinsic and only you can identify how doing a PhD will contribute to your life. It gives you a great toolkit to identify the doors that are appropriate for you.

“The first paper was the most exciting thing. […] at that time I thought of papers as like a version of immortality. My name is on something that will last forever. I think this is my legacy.” – Dr Cameron Shearer

– ref. Is it a good time to be getting a PhD? We asked those who’ve done it – https://theconversation.com/is-it-a-good-time-to-be-getting-a-phd-we-asked-those-whove-done-it-159326

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

So you think it’s the right time to dive in and buy a home.

I can’t tell you you’re wrong. I can tell you it would have been better to do it before prices began soaring, and that if they keep soaring it will get worse still.

When the year began, the typical Sydney price was $872,000. Five months later at the start of June it is $970,000.

That’s a jump of almost $100,000 in a matter of months — an awfully big price for procrastinating.

In Melbourne the typical price has climbed from $682,000 to $740,500. In Perth it has climbed from $471,000 to $521,500, and so on.

And banks are beginning to withdraw the cheapest of their still-very-cheap mortgage rates, at this stage mainly the fixed four-year rates which had been below 2%.

So why on earth wouldn’t you dive in, wind your living expenses back to the bare minimum and try and buy a home while it’s the least bit possible?

One (slight) reason to relax is mortgage rates. Despite the increases in fixed four-year rates, three-year rates have barely moved. That’s because the Reserve Bank has promised to hold the three-year bond rate constant at 0.1%.

Buying has become a bigger commitment

The three-year bond rate determines the cost to banks of their three-year fixed rate mortgages.

The Reserve Bank has said it does not expect to lift its 0.1% cash rate until “2024 at the earliest”. Movements in the cash rate determine movements in variable mortgage rates.

But there is another reason for proceeding with caution and taking stock.

Read more: Home prices are climbing alright, but not for the reason you might think

For our parents, buying a home was an exceptionally good deal, not only because homes were cheaper — until the end of the 1990s homes typically cost between two and three times household after-tax income, they now cost closer to five times after-tax income — but also because over time the loan became easier to pay off.

Housing prices as proportion of household disposable income

That isn’t because mortgage rates were coming down — at times they were going up — it’s because during our parents’ times wages (and prices) were climbing.

It meant that even if someone of our parents’ generation just squeaked through one of the bank’s tests about their ability to make payments on a mortgage, a few years and lots of inflation and several big wage rises down the track those mortgage payments shrank compared to everything else.

Once, wage rises took care of repayments

Many of our parents paid off their mortgages early.

One way to look at this is that the bank’s ability-to-repay calculators were set too harshly. They failed to account for future hefty wage rises and inflation.

It’s probably also true that they were set more generously than they might have been in an implicit acknowledgement of what the assistant governor in charge of the Reserve Bank’s economic branch Luci Ellis calls “mortgage tilt”.

The former governor, Glenn Stevens, used another term, “front-end loading”.

Mortgages were ‘front-end loaded’

When inflation was high, and as a consequence interest rates were high, wages that climbed rapidly with high inflation made the servicing burden “most acute in the very early phase of a loan, falling over time”.

On a graph (and the former governor presented a graph) the line showing payments as a portion of income tilts down over time.

In a world of lower inflation and interest rates, the tilt becomes flatter.

By now (Stevens published the graph in 1997) the line must be near horizontal.

If wage growth remains near the record lows the treasury is forecasting it will become scarcely any easier to make payments on a home loan over time.

Yet the banks are still handing out loans using the sort of formulas they used to.

If you get a loan you’ll be assessed as being able to (just) make the payments as always, but you’ll be denied the near certainty of being able to more easily meet the payments as time goes on.

Now, we retire mortgaged

This is a different from the risk you’ll also run of today’s ultra-low mortgage rates climbing (which banks do take into account in deciding whether to give you a loan).

The proportion of homeowners reaching retirement age while still paying off their mortgage has doubled in 20 years. Which might be why some banks ask for details of your super before granting you a loan. It isn’t an idle inquiry.

Might things get better? Maybe, if we can get wages moving again.

Evidence given to Tuesday’s post-budget Senate estimate hearing provides cause for hope, and despair.

Super hikes will make things worse

The budget forecasts for wage growth over the next four financial years are incredibly low — 1.5%, 2.25%, 2.5% and 2.75%

On Tuesday Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy revealed that each would have been higher — 0.4 points higher — had the government not persisted with the five scheduled annual increases in compulsory superannuation contributions of 0.5% of salary starting in July.

The treasury believes each increase will slice 0.4 percentage points from wage growth, on the basis that employers, who are legally required to pay the contributions, will have to find the money somewhere.

It’s the same conclusion reached by the government’s retirement incomes review.

It’s cause for hope because it means that when those five increases stop (in mid-2026, or sooner if the government stops them mid-track) wages might be able to grow more strongly.

It’s cause for despair because if the treasury is right, we are denying ourselves wage rises we could use in return for super we will increasingly use to pay down our mortgages.

– ref. Paying off a home loan used to be easier than it looked. It’s now harder. Here’s why – https://theconversation.com/paying-off-a-home-loan-used-to-be-easier-than-it-looked-its-now-harder-heres-why-161873

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul M. Garrett, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

The COVIDSafe app was pretty popular upon its release, with around 70% of surveyed Australians saying they supported the idea. And it was a good idea at the time. Now? Not so much.

Actual uptake was never high. By May last year, only 44% of those surveyed had actually downloaded it. Plenty on social media are now saying they’ve all but abandoned COVIDSafe in favour of the QR code check-ins done via, for example, the Victorian government app or the Service NSW app.

And when Victoria’s health minister Martin Foley was asked this week whether the COVIDSafe app had been used in responding to the latest outbreak, he said:

No. Not to my knowledge, and I’m sure in such a rare event it would have been brought to my attention.

For now, it seems the benefits to Australia’s public health may be better served by other technology, such as QR code check-ins. And the public cost of maintaining the COVIDSafe app may not be in our collective interest.

Was COVIDSafe a failure?

COVIDSafe was supposed to work by using Bluetooth technology to create an anonymous registry of close contacts (other app users). If one of your close contacts self-identified as having COVID-19 through the app, government contact tracers would be alerted and notify you to get tested and isolate, before starting manual contact tracing efforts.

It’s clear COVIDSafe didn’t live up to the hype, but understanding why may be more difficult than you might think.

Australia may be a victim of its own success in keeping the outbreak at bay. Having successfully suppressed the spread of COVID-19, the benefits of using COVIDSafe may not outweigh data privacy and security concerns many people had about it.

Even in places around the world where case numbers have been relatively high, this never guaranteed that a COVIDSafe-style contact tracing app would be widely used.

For example, Germany showed similar levels of app approval to Australia, but had similarly poor uptake of their CORONA-Warn App, even when their case numbers exceeded 30,000 per day.

Read more: 70% of people surveyed said they’d download a coronavirus app. Only 44% did. Why the gap?

And a large part of why QR scanning technology works is because we are reminded to use it when we enter a shop, restaurant or school. But there are no public reminders about COVIDSafe, and no consequences to not using it (whereas some — although by no means all — venues won’t let you in unless you can show you’ve checked in via a QR code scan).

Finally, there is no incentive to use COVIDSafe without public compliance. Without widespread support, COVIDSafe fails as a technology (it only works if others are using it in your proximity) and as a socially desirable behaviour (we often act and do things so as to fit in with our peers). This “social license” is necessary for any voluntary measure to be effective, and right now COVIDSafe doesn’t have it.

QR code scan tech and Google location services

Human memories are prone to making errors, with people wrong about where they were about a third of the time. The cost of a memory error is high during a pandemic and misremembering which shopping centre you visited could have dire consequences.

This is why the QR code scan system works well. They are a reliable way to track where you have been, you’re constantly reminded to use it and you get notifications if you visited an exposure site.

There are, of course, gaps. Not all venues or places require QR codes because it is impractical, and the use of QR check-ins is not uniformly enforced.

If, like many people, you keep your phone’s location services on, that provides a back-up plan. You can easily download your location history and take a digital walk through your past week, month or year, identifying where you were down to the minute. And there are services like unforgettable.me that provide more detailed information from multiple sources, combining your location data with messages, emails, and weather forecasts.

So, does Australia still need COVIDSafe?

Well, we need some sort of help to prevent memory errors that put others at risk. Overwhelmingly, people are more concerned about the health of others than themselves. What’s important is to remind others to use these technology aids, and highlight the public benefit of using them.

For now, it seems QR code check-ins are providing more benefit than COVIDSafe.

So if you are not using COVIDSafe, rest assured you’re not the only one. But there is still technology that helps you remember where you’ve been and when. That helps keep you and your loved ones safe and well.

Read more: By persisting with COVIDSafe, Australia risks missing out on globally trusted contact tracing

– ref. Australia has all but abandoned the COVIDSafe app in favour of QR codes (so make sure you check in) – https://theconversation.com/australia-has-all-but-abandoned-the-covidsafe-app-in-favour-of-qr-codes-so-make-sure-you-check-in-161880

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steve Turton, Adjunct Professor of Environmental Geography, CQUniversity Australia

Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz

What is Arctic amplification? Do we know what is causing this phenomenon? What effects is it having, both in the region and for the world? Is Antarctica experiencing the same thing?

Human civilisation and agriculture first emerged about 12,000 years ago in the early Holocene. Our ancestors benefited from a remarkably stable climate during this time as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere remained near 280ppm until the beginning of the industrial revolution in the 1800s.

Prior to the 1800s, the balance between incoming and outgoing energy (radiation) at the top of the atmosphere (the greenhouse effect) maintained global average temperatures for many centuries. Only small changes in solar output and occasional volcanic eruptions caused periods of relative warming and cooling. For example, the Little Ice Age was a cooler period between 1300 and 1870.

Today carbon dioxide levels are near 420ppm and all greenhouse gases are rising rapidly due to the burning of fossil fuels, industrial processes, tropical forest destruction, landfills and agriculture. The global average temperature has increased by a little more than 1℃ since 1900.

This figure seems small, but the Arctic region has warmed by about 2℃ in this time — twice as fast.

This warming differential between the poles and the tropics is known as Arctic (or polar) amplification.

It occurs whenever there is any change in the net radiation balance of Earth, and this produces a larger change in temperature near the poles than the global average. It is typically measured as the ratio of polar warming to tropical warming.

Melting ice

So how is climate change and associated global heating driving Arctic amplification? This amplification is primarily caused by melting ice — a process that is increasing in the Arctic at a rate of 13% per decade.

Ice is more reflective and less absorbent of sunlight than land or the surface of an ocean. When ice melts, it typically reveals darker areas of land or sea, and this results in increased sunlight absorption and associated warming.

Polar amplification is much stronger in the Arctic than in Antarctica. This difference is because the Arctic is an ocean covered by sea ice, while Antarctica is an elevated continent covered in more permanent ice and snow.

In fact, the Antarctic continent has not warmed in the past seven decades, despite a steady increase in the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.

The exception is the Antarctic peninsula, which juts out further north into the Southern Ocean and has been warming faster than any other terrestrial environment in the southern hemisphere during the latter half of the 20th century.

Read more: If warming exceeds 2°C, Antarctica’s melting ice sheets could raise seas 20 metres in coming centuries

Satellite data also show that between 2002 and 2020, Antarctica lost an average of 149 billion metric tonnes of ice per year, partly because the oceans around the continent are warming.

Effects of Arctic warming

One of the most significant effects of Arctic amplification is the weakening of west-to-east jet streams in the northern hemisphere. As the Arctic warms at a faster rate than the tropics, this results in a weaker atmospheric pressure gradient and hence lower wind speeds.

The links between Arctic amplification, slowing (or meandering) jet streams, blocking highs and extreme weather events in the mid to high latitudes of the northern hemisphere is controversial. One view is that the link is strong and the major driver behind recent severe summer heat waves and winter cold waves. But more recent research questions the validity of these links for the mid latitudes.

Here we look at the larger body of evidence that supports the relationship between Arctic warming and slowing jet streams.

Read more: Siberia heatwave: why the Arctic is warming so much faster than the rest of the world

The Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet and the loss of reflective ice contributes somewhere between 30-50% of Earth’s global heating. This rapid loss of ice affects the polar jet stream, a concentrated pathway of air in the upper atmosphere which drives the weather patterns across the northern hemisphere.

The weakened jet stream meanders and brings the polar vortex further south, which results in extreme weather events in North America, Europe and Asia.

So what are the future prospects for Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand? Global climate models project stronger surface warming in the Arctic than the Antarctic under climate change. Given that temperatures above the Antarctic continent have remained stable for over 70 years despite the rise in greenhouse gases, we might expect little change for our region — just normal climatic variability due to other climate drivers like the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the Southern Annular Mode, and the Indian Ocean Dipole.

But as the tropics continue to warm and expand, we may expect an increase in the pressure gradient between the tropics and Antarctica that will lead to increased circumpolar westerlies winds.

The recent intensification and more poleward location of the southern hemisphere belt of westerly winds have been linked to continental droughts and wildfires, including those in Australia. We can also expect strengthening westerlies to affect mixing in the Southern Ocean, which could reduce its capacity to take up carbon dioxide and enhance the ocean-driven melting of ice shelves fringing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

These changes in turn have far-reaching implications for global ocean circulation and sea level rise.

– ref. Climate explained: why is the Arctic warming faster than other parts of the world? – https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-is-the-arctic-warming-faster-than-other-parts-of-the-world-160614

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul McInerney, Research scientist, CSIRO

Climate change will make Australia hotter and drier in future, and we’re starting to see the dangerous consequences of this in our rivers, lakes and streams.

As waters warm and flow patterns alter, the animals who call these waterways home may struggle to survive. Many are ectotherms — meaning that unlike humans, these animals can’t regulate their body temperature, putting them at the mercy of ambient water temperature. And for animals that have evolved in cold water, such as some native crayfish, increased water temperatures can be lethal.

Our new research paper calls for a (possibly controversial) solution: take advantage of willow trees growing along the banks. They can create cool, shady refuges in these warming waterways.

Willows are not native and, in many places, are an invasive weed. But for temperature-sensitive animals, their dense, leafy canopy may make willows the lesser of two evils in a warming climate.

The lesser evil

Willows belong to the genus Salix, and are natives of the northern hemisphere. They were introduced to Australia in the 19th century first as ornamental plants, then later planted to help stabilise river banks to combat erosion.

Today, they’re considered noxious weeds in Australia, South America and southern Africa, are highly invasive and have spread along waterways throughout temperate Australia.

The harms willows inflict on aquatic ecosystems are well documented. For example, they alter energy dynamics in streams by dropping all their leaves into the water at once, which can reduce water quality and the amount of food for animals.

Dense shading in summer reduces the amount of algae (an important food source) growing on surfaces in streams. Willows also out-shade and use more water than native plants, stopping them from re-colonising.

These reasons are why governments invest in removing willows from our waterways. But what if willows offer some benefits to their invaded ecosystems, too?

Freshwater wildlife in peril

As far as we know, the presence of willows hasn’t caused any extinctions. But in coming years, we can expect to see more animal extinctions due to temperature increases from climate change.

To deal with climate change, temperature-sensitive animals are left with two options: either migrate upstream to cooler water or adapt to warmer water. Both alternatives are problematic.

Some animals, such as two-spined blackfish, aren’t well suited to (or potentially even capable of) long distance travel to cooler water. And many of our rivers have barriers, such as dams, weirs and waterfalls, making migration impossible.

If animals stay put, Australia’s climate is now warming at such a fast rate, some may struggle to adapt quickly enough. The critically endangered barred galaxias is another cool water adapted fish unlikely to successfully migrate to other habitats to escape warming climate, but remains at risk if it doesn’t.

Read more: Attack of the alien invaders: pest plants and animals leave a frightening $1.7 trillion bill

To give wildlife a fighting chance at survival, we need to consider a patchwork of new and alternative approaches to stream management, such as creating “climatic refugia”. These are places where local climate is cooler than the regional climate, providing areas animals can escape to when temperatures get extreme.

Trees and shrubs growing along the edges of streams (riparian vegetation) do this when they shade the water surface, helping to mediate water temperature.

This could make willows a useful tool for natural resource managers as we see increases in extreme heat days.

Happy Valley Creek

For our research paper, we use a case study from north-east Victoria to illustrate how dense willow invasions can reduce stream water temperature and create climatic refugia.

Read more: Why there’s a lot more to love about jacarandas than just their purple flowers

We logged water temperature in Happy Valley Creek at three locations: at an upstream native forested site, a midstream site with no vegetation, and a downstream site that was heavily shaded by invasive willows.

We expected water temperature to increase with distance downstream as it moves from cool upland areas to warmer lowland areas. Instead, we found the water temperature at the willow shaded site could be a few degrees cooler than the midstream site, particularly during periods of extreme heat.

Many streams are fringed by native vegetation that provide comparable heat protection to animals as willows, and we should protect these from willow invasion.

But in locations where willow removal activities are unlikely to be successful in the long-term, it may be better to prioritise willow removal elsewhere. For example, if willows can’t be removed from upstream catchments, they’ll continue to recolonise downstream. And if there’s no funding for follow-up activities, willows may re-establish following removal.

Where willows are rampant, they may already be protecting populations of heat-sensitive animals from temperature extremes. Removing them could have unintended consequences for such animals.

What’s the end goal?

It’s important to clarify we’re not suggesting willow removal activities should stop to prevent further widespread invasion. But as our climate changes, we need to objectively consider what ecosystems will be sustainable in the future, and prioritise our restoration efforts accordingly.

We need to decide what state we’re trying to manage our ecosystems to — the likely endpoint.

Read more: Pulling out weeds is the best thing you can do to help nature recover from the fires

Given current river regulations, land-use and changing climate, restoring all ecosystems to a pre–European state may not be sustainable or even possible at this point.

For willow-dominated, degraded catchments, there may be more value in promoting willows as refuges from the temperature extremes of climate change, rather than pursuing an ideal that may not even be possible.

– ref. Willow trees are notorious pests. But for freshwater animals, they could be unlikely climate heroes – https://theconversation.com/willow-trees-are-notorious-pests-but-for-freshwater-animals-they-could-be-unlikely-climate-heroes-152609

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Harriette Richards, Research Associate, Cultural Studies, The University of Melbourne

Last week, reports emerged that North Korea was banning skinny jeans over concerns regarding their symbolic relationship with the “exotic and decadent lifestyle” of capitalism. The crackdown on “anti-socialist behaviour” also reportedly bans mullet, spiky or dyed hairstyles and piercings.

Although an official statement on the ban hasn’t been identified, policing of personal style in North Korea is not new.

Political leaders have long been aware of the representational power of fashion. In her book Fashion and Politics, fashion scholar Djurdja Bartlett notes that “as early as the 1920s, the Bolsheviks frowned on western fashion and its Art Deco opulence”.

The role of dress in promoting allegiance to the nation state can come in the form of a uniform or via the rejection of garments seen to symbolise religious, ideological or political beliefs.

Whether banning Western fashion in the Soviet Union or the burqa in France, political control over what we wear has always been controversial. But what is it about skinny jeans that apparently inspires denunciation by North Korea today?

The skinny on skinny jeans

Slim or tight-fitted trousers are a direct descendant of tight men’s breeches worn in the 1800s.

Their denim offspring emerged in the 1950s as part of the counter-cultural movement. Most often worn in a dark wash with a cuffed hem, the jeans, favoured by the likes of Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando, were a gender-neutral representation of alternative lifestyles in the wake of the second world war.

In the 1960s, jeans in the “drainpipe” style — black and ultra-skinny — became synonymous with rock and roll.

Through the 1970s and 80s, the UK embraced the punk look – pioneered by designer Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols, which saw tight jeans ripped, stained and safety pinned.

The 1990s brought baggy styles for rave dancing, bootlegs and retro flares. But skinny jeans didn’t stay gone for long. The 2000s saw them taken up, again by subcultures — emos and goths, who wore them super tight and low on the hips.

By the 2010s they seemed destined to stick around after being championed by Kate Moss, the Duchess of Cambridge and Michelle Obama.

Death by TikTok

Rumblings of change in the denim market were first heard in the late 2010s, when fashion journalists including Sarah Spellings claimed we could begin counting down to the return of low-rise jeans. The rise of 90s nostalgia fashion, popularised by models such as Bella Hadid, bought a return of wide-legged fits and exposed midriffs.

By 2019, skinny jeans were reportedly being usurped by so-called “mom jeans”. And that was before 2020 forced everyone indoors, where comfort trumped more fitted styles.

Gen Z “Zoomer” TikTokers finally rang the death knell for skinny jeans — adding a beat and some dance moves, of course. In early 2021, TikTok videos mocking Millennials for their side parted hair and tight denim-clad legs went viral.

So, if they’re no longer cool, why might North Korea want to ban them?

Read more: Dressed for success – as workers return to the office, men might finally shed their suits and ties

Trouser power

What we wear on our legs has long been a subject of particular political significance, especially in terms of class and gender differentiation.

During the French Revolution, full length trousers became synonymous with the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité — but only for men. Women remained bound by the Ancien Régime, excluded from wearing trousers and from the social freedoms they allowed.

It followed that in the fight for suffrage, trousers became a symbolic garment in the emancipation of women as political subjects.

In the 1960s, meanwhile, blue denim became a symbol of the US civil rights movement and in 1978, Levi Strauss & Co began large-scale shipments of jeans behind the Iron Curtain.

Analysis today shows specific denim brands are aligned with political preferences: American Democrat voters tend to wear Levis, while Republican voters are more likely to prefer Wrangler jeans. Brands may also seek to align themselves with consumers by voicing support for specific issues.

Most recently, a chief minister within India’s Bharatiya Janata Party government faced condemnation after he tweeted that women were immoral for wearing jeans that exposed their knees.

Across India women took to social media to voice their exasperation, posting photographs of themselves wearing torn denim with the hashtag #RippedJeans.

Read more: How women in India reclaimed the protest power of ripped jeans

Jeans are still provoking the powerful. Still, if the reports from North Korea are correct, railing against this symbolic garment may have given those willing to rebel a clearer sense of what to wear.

– ref. Denim jeans have long been political: now skinny jeans are in the firing line – https://theconversation.com/denim-jeans-have-long-been-political-now-skinny-jeans-are-in-the-firing-line-161665

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Kelly, Senior Lecturer in Interaction Design, Queensland University of Technology

Most of us benefit every day from the fact computers can now “understand” us when we speak or write. Yet few of us have paused to consider the potentially damaging ways this same technology may be shaping our culture.

Human language is full of ambiguity and double meanings. For instance, consider the potential meaning of this phrase: “I went to project class”. Without context, it’s an ambiguous statement.

Computer scientists and linguists have spent decades trying to program computers to understand the nuances of human language. And in certain ways, computers are fast approaching humans’ ability to understand and generate text.

Through the very act of suggesting some words and not others, the predictive text and auto-complete features in our devices change the way we think. Through these subtle, everyday interactions, machine learning is influencing our culture. Are we ready for that?

I created an online interactive work for the Kyogle Writers Festival that lets you explore this technology in a harmless way.

What is natural language processing?

The field concerned with using everyday language to interact with computers is called “natural language processing”. We encounter it when we speak to Siri or Alexa, or type words into a browser and have the rest of our sentence predicted.

This is only possible due to vast improvements in natural language processing over the past decade — achieved through sophisticated machine-learning algorithms trained on enormous datasets (usually billions of words).

Last year, this technology’s potential became clear when the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) was released. It set a new benchmark in what computers can do with language.

Read more: Can robots write? Machine learning produces dazzling results, but some assembly is still required

GPT-3 can take just a few words or phrases and generate whole documents of “meaningful” language, by capturing the contextual relationships between words in a sentence. It does this by building on machine-learning models, including two widely adopted models called “BERT” and “ELMO”.

How is this technology affecting culture?

However, there is a key issue with any language model produced by machine learning: they generally learn everything they know from data sources such as Wikipedia and Twitter.

In effect, machine learning takes data from the past, “learns” from it to produce a model, and uses this model to carry out tasks in the future. But during this process, a model may absorb a distorted or problematic worldview from its training data.

If the training data was biased, this bias will be codified and reinforced in the model, rather than being challenged. For example, a model may end up associating certain identity groups or races with positive words, and others with negative words.

This can lead to serious exclusion and inequality, as detailed in the recent documentary Coded Bias.

Everything you ever said

The interactive work I created allows people to playfully gain an intuition for how computers understand language. It is called Everything You Ever Said (EYES), in reference to the way natural language models draw on all kinds of data sources for training.

EYES allows you to take any piece of writing (less than 2000 characters) and “subtract” one concept and “add” another. In other words, it lets you use a computer to change the meaning of a piece of text. You can try it yourself.

Here’s an example of the Australian national anthem subjected to some automated revision. I subtracted the concept of “empire” and added the concept of “koala” to get:

Australians all let us grieve
For we are one and free
We’ve golden biota and abundance for poorness
Our koala is girt by porpoise
Our wildlife abounds in primate’s koalas
Of naturalness shiftless and rare
In primate’s wombat, let every koala
Wombat koala fair
In joyous aspergillosis then let us vocalise,
Wombat koala fair

What is going on here? At its core, EYES uses a model of the English language developed by researchers from Stanford University in the United States, called GLoVe (Global Vectors for Word Representation).

EYES uses GLoVe to change the text by making a series of analogies, wherein an “analogy” is a comparison between one thing and another. For instance, if I ask you: “man is to king what woman is to?” — you might answer “queen”. That’s an easy one.

But I could ask a more challenging question such as: “rose is to thorn what love is to?” There are several possible answers here, depending on your interpretation of the language. When asked about these analogies, GLoVe will produce the responses “queen” and “betrayal”, respectively.

GLoVe has every word in the English language represented as a vector in a multi-dimensional space (of around 300 dimensions). A such, it can perform calculations with words, adding and subtracting words as if they were numbers.

Cyborg culture is already here

The trouble with machine learning is that the associations being made between certain concepts remain hidden inside a black box; we can’t see or touch them. Approaches to making machine learning models more transparent are a focus of much current research.

The purpose of EYES is to let you experiment with these associations in a more playful way, so you can develop an intuition for how machine learning models view the world.

Some analogies will surprise you with their poignancy, while others may well leave you bewildered. Yet, every association was inferred from a huge corpus of a few billion words written by ordinary people.

Models such as GPT-3, which have learned from similar data sources, are already influencing how we use language. Having entire news feeds populated by machine-written text is no longer the stuff of science fiction. This technology is already here.

And the cultural footprint of machine-learning models seems to only be growing.

Read more: GPT-3: new AI can write like a human but don’t mistake that for thinking – neuroscientist

– ref. Machine learning is changing our culture. Try this text-altering tool to see how – https://theconversation.com/machine-learning-is-changing-our-culture-try-this-text-altering-tool-to-see-how-159430

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Wark, Conjoint Professor, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle

While the focus has been largely on vaccines, you might have also heard Pfizer is trialling a pill to treat COVID-19.

It almost sounds too good to be true. Indeed, the results are very preliminary — but it’s a promising approach.

Where most antiviral agents we’ve tried to treat COVID-19 target the inflammatory and immune response resulting from infection, Pfizer’s pill directly targets SARS-CoV-2 — the virus itself.

Mounting our defence against the virus

Much of the illness associated with COVID-19 is due to the intense inflammatory and immune response that can occur with an infection. The most successful treatments so far have targeted this overzealous immune response.

Taken early in the disease, the inhaled corticosteroid budesonide has been shown to reduce the development of more severe disease.

In people hospitalised with COVID-19 requiring oxygen, the oral corticosteroid dexamethasone reduces the likelihood of death.

In the most severe cases — COVID patients admitted to ICU — the anti-inflammatory tocilizumab administered intravenously gives a person a better chance of survival.

But these treatments don’t target SARS-CoV-2 itself; just the consequences of infection. Directly targeting the virus has proven to be more difficult.

Read more: Have Australian researchers developed an effective COVID-19 treatment? Potentially, but we need to wait for human trials

Targeting SARS-CoV-2

A virus like SARS-CoV-2 must enter a host cell to reproduce. It does this using its spike protein (a protein on the virus’ surface) to attach to the cell, and then it uses the cell’s own proteins to gain entry.

Once inside the cell, SARS-CoV-2 removes its outer coat and releases its viral RNA (ribonucleic acid, a type of genetic material). This acts as a template, allowing the virus to replicate, and then infect other cells. At any point of this life cycle the virus could be vulnerable to an intervention.

SARS-CoV-2 carries an enzyme, 3C-like protease (3CLpro), which plays a crucial role in the replication process. This protease is almost identical to the protease used by the SARS-CoV-1 (SARS) virus, and similar to the protease used by the Middle Eastern Respiratory Virus (MERS).

So a drug that could effectively target 3CLpro and prevent virus replication could be beneficial against multiple known coronaviruses, and possibly any that emerge in the future.

Protease inhibitors have been successfully used to treat other viral infections, especially chronic infections such as HIV and hepatitis C.

They were put forward early in the pandemic as a possible treatment for COVID-19. But the HIV drug lopinavir-ritonavir was shown in two clinical trials to be ineffective, with drug levels probably too low to work against SARS-CoV-2. While a higher dose might be effective, it would also likely produce more side effects.

Scientists also proposed a repurposed antiviral drug, remdesevir, originally developed to treat Ebola. Remdesivir delays the ability of the virus to replicate its RNA.

Initial case reports appeared promising and saw the US Food and Drugs Administration approve the drug for emergency use. But the results of randomised controlled trials in hospitalised patients with severe COVID-19 were disappointing.

Although there was a reduction in duration of illness for patients who survived, it didn’t significantly reduce a person’s chance of dying.

Read more: Ivermectin is still not a miracle cure for COVID-19, despite what you may have read

Of course, neither of these agents were designed specifically to target SARS-CoV-2. But in 2020, Pfizer/BioNtech identified a small molecule — PF-00835231 — that blocks the SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro protease. It was originally designed against SARS-CoV-1, but the enzyme in the two viruses is almost identical.

PF-00835231, both alone and in conjunction with remdesevir, appears to reduce the replication of a range of coronaviruses including SARS-CoV-2 in cells in the lab. It also reduced viral replication in a number of animal models, with no adverse safety signals. But it’s important to note this research hasn’t yet been peer reviewed.

What now?

Pfizer/BioNtech are taking two drugs to clinical trials for COVID-19: PF-07304814, an intravenous injection for use in patients hospitalised with severe COVID-19 and PF-07321332, an oral agent, or pill, that could potentially be used earlier in the disease. Both are formulations of a 3CLpro inhibitor.

These phase 1 trials, which began in March, represent the earliest stage of drug development. These trials select healthy volunteers and use different doses of the drugs to establish their safety. They also look at whether the drugs elicit sufficient responses in the body to indicate they could be effective against SARS-CoV-2.

The next step would be phase 2 or 3 trials to see if they improve outcomes in COVID-19. Usually this process takes years, but as the pandemic continues to rage globally, Pfizer says it will do this in a matter of months, if phase 1 trials are successful.

Read more: How the Pfizer COVID vaccine gets from the freezer into your arm

The application of antiviral agents in acute COVID-19 has been difficult and unrewarding. Though results are at this stage preliminary, these agents by Pfizer/BioNtech are promising. They could be used early in disease, especially in people poorly protected by vaccination or in those who haven’t been vaccinated.

They could also be used as a means of prevention, to contain outbreaks in exposed people. They should be effective against all the SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, as well as against other known and possibly emergent coronaviruses.

The Pfizer CEO’s recent suggestion the pill could be available by the end of the year is probably a long shot. But the pandemic has shown us what’s possible in the realm of swift scientific advances, and we’ll watch this space with interest.

– ref. Could a simple pill beat COVID-19? Pfizer is giving it a go – https://theconversation.com/could-a-simple-pill-beat-covid-19-pfizer-is-giving-it-a-go-160988

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vanessa Adams, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of Geography and Spatial Sciences, University of Tasmania

Two years ago, emergency workers rescued a hiker in Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park. He had spent nine days in his tent in freezing weather with dangerous blizzards, trying to keep dry from infiltrating snow and rain.

Because he was an experienced and prepared hiker, he had the skills and gear needed to keep himself safe and relatively warm until rescuers could find him. His preparedness ultimately led to his survival.

Such experiences, however, don’t always have happy endings.

Of the hikers, trekkers and bushwalkers who need rescuing from Australia’s harsh wilderness each year, a small proportion never make it back alive. And as we head into winter, the likelihood of accidents increases, especially in places like Tasmania.

Our recent research on hikers in Tasmania shows just how important preparedness is to prevent injuries and deaths. So let’s look at what it means to be prepared for a hike and who’s most at risk.

Slips, drops, hypothermia

Tasmania is quickly becoming known worldwide as a hiking destination, with Cradle Mountain National Park the crown jewel, from short two-hour walks to the multi-day Overland track.

In 2017-18, an estimated 280,000 people visited Cradle Mountain, and 9,000 hikers completed the Overland track between October and May.

But in winter, Tasmania’s weather conditions can change rapidly, particularly in alpine areas that draw people in with the promise of snow-capped mountains. One hour it can be clear and sunny. The next, bad weather can worsen into a blizzard.

The island’s sometimes severe weather means risks are amplified. These can include getting lost, running out of food or water while sheltering, and having an accident such as falling from steep and slippery terrain.

Read more: Photos from the field: capturing the grandeur and heartbreak of Tasmania’s giant trees

Across Tasmania, bushwalker rescues fluctuate substantially by year, from lows of six (2018) to highs of 44 (2019).

Of the recent hiker deaths in Tasmania, some have been due to falls from great heights, while others are attributed to a lack of preparation and appropriate gear causing hypothermia.

For park management agencies, rescuing injured hikers or recovering the deceased can be dangerous and expensive. Estimated rescue costs range from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars per incident.

At times, bad weather conditions means rescue agencies can’t access sites. They have to make the challenging decision not to respond to rescue calls, to protect the lives of volunteers and rescue staff.

What is preparedness and why does it matter?

Preparedness is about providing yourself with the necessary resources to safely tackle unexpected issues that may arise.

How prepared you are can be the difference between severe injury or death, and survival. We define preparedness as the process of:

• packing essential clothing and equipment

• conducting pre-planning and familiarisation with a destination (what are the weather conditions, or trail conditions like?)

• self-assessment of capabilities (what’s your fitness level, and what are your wilderness knowledge and skills like?)

• notifying others about your travel intentions.

Some hikers are better prepared than others

Our research surveyed overnight hikers in Tasmania. And we found a lack of preparedness is related to people’s backgrounds (such as age and sex) and behavioural traits (such as risk taking).

Young men, for example, appear more likely to take risks, overestimating their skills and experience. Some tourist groups, who are unfamiliar with local weather conditions and landscapes, are also at higher risk.

In many accidents, inadequate clothing or footwear is a culprit, such as lack of woollen base layers, hats and gloves, and waterproof outer layers. This can result in hypothermia, frostbite, falls and other major problems.

Read more: We accidentally found a whole new genus of Australian daisies. You’ve probably seen them on your bushwalks

We were surprised by what many hikers didn’t carry, including maps, compasses, whistles, and first aid kits — essential items for all hikers. Some told us they didn’t own that equipment, others thought it was unnecessary.

People in a tour group were less likely to carry food, a first aid kit and safety items, believing their guide would carry it for them. But if group members become separated, the consequences can be fatal.

Our research also suggests hikers out for day trips or shorter walks, appear to feel there’s less risk and seem less prepared than if they were doing a longer trip.

They’re unlikely to take an emergency position indicating radio beacon (EPIRB) or personal locator beacon (PLB), which can send a distress signal and alert rescuers to your location in places with no phone reception. They may also wear sport shoes instead of hiking boots, and some don’t carry essential items for winter walking, such as a waterproof jacket or tent.

Being prepared with the right gear and experience is important regardless of how long you plan on being out. The reality is weather conditions can change suddenly, even if you’re not out for very long.

So how can you be better prepared?

In response to past hiker deaths, coronial inquests have identified better education, improved visitor management and safety measures as possible solutions.

But we’ve also identified a simple, but likely effective solution that could supplement a continued lack of appropriate gear: the use of a “gear library”.

A gear library would be set up at visitor centres where you’re usually expected to start hikes and would allow people to hire speciality gear items, such as personal safety devices (EPIRB, PLB). These can usually cost more than $200, but would be substantially cheaper in a gear library, ensuring rescue workers are notified and can find you after an accident.

Read more: Stick to the path, and stay alive in national parks this summer

It’s also important to keep a checklist to pack essential items. Some key items include:

• adequate supply of food and water, including contingency items for unexpected additional days hiking because of bad weather

• warm clothes, such as a waterproof jacket with hood and storm front, waterproof over-trousers, sturdy walking boots and warm clothing (a fleece or woollen jumper, thermal base layers, hat and gloves)

• appropriate footwear, such as hiking boots

• a tent for overnight hikes

• a first aid kit

• a torch.

There are plenty of resources for people seeking information about how best to prepare for their bushwalk, including national park visitor centres, Westpac Rescue Tas and the Parks and Wildlife Tasmania website. These websites provide essential bushwalking guides on what to pack and how to prepare for bushwalking.

Anyone can safely enjoy a good day out in the Tasmanian wilderness — it’s beautiful, but can also be deadly. You can never be too prepared.

Read more: Good signage in national parks can save lives. Here’s how to do it right

– ref. If you’re planning to hike this winter, invest in the right gear. Being unprepared for Australia’s harsh terrain can be deadly – https://theconversation.com/if-youre-planning-to-hike-this-winter-invest-in-the-right-gear-being-unprepared-for-australias-harsh-terrain-can-be-deadly-161509

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa Kang, Adjunct associate professor, University of Technology Sydney

Young people have a lot of questions about sex. I answered hundreds of them over 23 years for the Dolly Doctor magazine column, until the magazine closed at the end of 2016.

Many questions from girls suggested they needed information about desire and experiences of sexual pleasure. Those discovering sexual arousal and masturbation often seemed ecstatic (pun intended), although, even from a young age, these desires were often seen as problems and silenced.

Somewhere between the delights of sexual self-discovery during early puberty and becoming sexually involved with a partner later in adolescence, I had a sense young women fell into a chasm of sexual repression, objectification and instruments for male pleasure.

Read more: ‘She’s a slut’: sexual bullying among girls contributes to cultural misogyny. We need to take it seriously

Is it ‘normal’ to like sex?

In my analysis of Dolly Doctor questions, I found girls asking about masturbation regularly made up 5-10% of questions about sexuality. For instance, here is a question from the 1990s:

I have a problem; I masturbate ALL the time! Even when I’m in class I ask the teacher if I can go to the toilet and when I get there I finger myself. Can you tell me if there is something wrong with me and how can I stop!?

The concerns expressed about whether this is normal could, of course, signify typical developmental preoccupations with peer comparison: asking whether an observation or experience is “normal” was common regardless of the topic.

Read more: ‘Is it normal for girls to masturbate?’

But concerns could also emerge because adolescent girls received no information about female sexual desire, so their curiosity was mixed with alarm about the intensity and power of their urges.

Here is another question from the 2000s:

I always get horny! Everytime I see something about sex I get horny! But it feels good! Is this common or am I just not normal?

My view is that together with a lack of relevant information, these girls had absorbed messages of gendered shaming. Here is a question from from the 2010s:

Ok I need some help, I started getting interested in watching pornography and I used to touch myself while I watch it I knew it was wrong but my body craved it and it was pleasure like I was a magical feeling I cant explain it but I cant talk to my family and I cant talk to my friends. is this normal?? Dolly doctor please help me.

The shaming of girls’ and young women’s sexuality has been found in studies about diverse topics, such as sexting, sexually transmitted infections, seeking contraception and sexual violence.

Philosopher, Bonnie Mann, writes gendered shame may be “the mechanism … […] subordination of women across class and race (occurs)”.

Early adolescence marks a critical juncture in young people’s lives, powered by the intensity of puberty which marks the transition from childhood to adolescent sexuality.

Expressions of partnered interactions (such as kissing, sexting, oral sex and intercourse) in adolescence are similar to the way sex is experienced in adulthood and throughout life for most people.

This makes sex education that empowers young women with the appropriate knowledge about pleasure all the more important.

Is it normal to feel nothing?

The questions to Dolly Doctor from young women about sex with a partner were fewer in number — most Dolly readers were quite young adolescents.

A small proportion of these questions were concerned with lack of pleasure or orgasm. Such as this one from the 1990s

Dear Melissa, I am 17 […] and […] been sexually active since last year and every time I have had sex with my boyfriend I have never had an orgasm and I feel like he is getting all the fun and I get none.

Here is another one from the 2000s

i have had sex with my boyfriend a number of times but it seems to give me no pleasure. All my friends talk about how good it feels and i dont know this great feeling […] i have talked to my boyfriend and he feels it why dont i?

And another from the 2010s

[…] recently with my boyfriend we went to seconds but when he fingered me I didn’t feel anything at all. I have tried doing i myself but I dont feel any pleasure. Is there something wrong with me? What can I do to fix it? Thanks

Other questions included experiences of painful intercourse (with a male) or fear of pain despite a wish to begin a sexual relationship.

How can I better please him?

Questions about oral sex suggested adolescent women were keen to please. For instance:

I am wanting to give my boyfriend oral sex. I was wondering how to do it and for some techniques that he would enjoy and so my boyfriend is pleased.

and

How do you give a better blow job? Please help me.

Questions about receiving oral sex (by the young women) were very few in number and were often about girl-on-girl sex that was pleasurable, “She […] gave me oral sex, I liked it and I didn’t stop her”.

There is more analysis that could be done on Dolly Doctor questions that speak to constructions of female sexuality. But the analysis so far has provided me with unique insights about how young women respond to messages about their roles in heterosexual encounters.

Teachers must be supported to talk about sex

Good school-based sex education means providing teachers with the training and support they need without fear of backlash. In the first Australian study among health teachers about sex education, less than half had received sex education training during their undergraduate degree and 15.5% had received no training.

The topic areas where teachers felt they needed most assistance related to discussions about behaviour, emotions and feelings. And yet, teaching consent in sexual encounters needs to include truthful discussion on these exact topics.

Read more: Sexuality education can counter what kids learn from porn, but some teachers fear backlash when tackling ‘risky’ topics

Parents, teachers and young people need to find the right language and create safe spaces to allow teaching and learning about sexual consent, which by definition means talking about sex and pleasure in its various forms. This includes the normality, right and importance of female pleasure.

– ref. ‘I always get horny … am I not normal?’: teenage girls often feel shame about pleasure. Sex education needs to address this – https://theconversation.com/i-always-get-horny-am-i-not-normal-teenage-girls-often-feel-shame-about-pleasure-sex-education-needs-to-address-this-159543

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Siminski, Professor of Economics, University of Technology Sydney

A lot of us are pessimistic about our children’s future. According to the most recent data from the Pew Global Attitudes Survey (in 2019), just 29% of Australians believe today’s children will be better off financially than their parents.

Such pessimism is common in many developed nations. In Japan, just 13% believe children will be better off, in France 16%, in Britain 22%. Australians are still marginally less optimistic than Canadians (30%) and Americans (31%), and significantly less optimistic than Swedes (40%) and Germans (48%).

Our research shows things aren’t as bad as many fear, with 68% of millennials (those born between 1981 and 1987 for our research) earning more income than their parents did at the same age. This is close to the highest percentage among countries for which estimates are available. The experience of gen-Xers (born from the early 1960s to late 1970s) has been similar.

But it’s not all good news. That percentage is lower than the upward mobility enjoyed by baby boomers (born from 1946 to the early 1960s). For those born around 1950, 84% earned more at age 30-34 than their own parents did at the same age.

There are two prime reasons for this decline in absolute mobility since the 1980s. Lower economic growth leading to average incomes growing more slowly; and growing income inequality.

How we did our research

The share of people whose income is higher than their parents at the same age is known as “absolute income mobility”. It is an appealing indicator of economic progress because it captures aspirations for our children. It reflects economic growth, inequality and opportunity.

Estimating absolute mobility, though, is quite hard. The data we need to measure it directly – information about what people earned at a particular age compared to their own parents – does not exist for Australia.

To do this exercise, therefore, we’ve applied new statistical methods that have been developed in recent years to estimate absolute mobility without linked parent-child data. These methods, using separate generational data on income distribution, have been verified in research published in 2018 and in 2020.

Our own approach closely follows leading international studies. We used sources of data including the Melbourne Institute’s Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, data from Australian Bureau of Statistics surveys and income tax records.

What our research shows

The main results are below. Of people born in 1950, 84% had higher household incomes than their parents. This fell to about 68% for those born since the early 1960s. It has stayed roughly constant for gen-Xers and millennials.

The main driver of this change is slower economic growth. Boomers’ incomes were much higher than their parents particularly due to decades of uninterrupted economic growth from World War II to the mid-1970s.

The other driver has been rising income inequality over the past 40 years, after falling in earlier decades, as the next chart shows. The relationship between inequality and mobility is complicated, because high inequality for either generation lowers the rate of mobility.

Absolute mobility would be higher if income was adjusted for family size – 78% for millennials, because the younger generation have smaller families than their parents did at the same age.

Read more: What income inequality looks like across Australia

Complicating factors

Our results are for income earned in a single year (at about age 32). We have also found similar results when looking at income at around age 37.

Ideally, we’d like to calculate absolute mobility of lifetime income. But methods to do this have not yet been developed. So we don’t know what mobility in lifetime income is. The same could be said for indicators of income inequality, which mostly use single-year income measures as well.

You also might be wondering about how the cost of housing fits in – an important issue given the escalating cost of a home compared to the median wage.

In all the results shown, income is adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index. Housing is a big part of the index though costs such as the price of land and mortgage interest payments are not included.

The ABS does factor mortgage debts into its “Selected Living Cost Indices”, but these only go back to 1998, so couldn’t be used in these calculations. However, the changes in the CPI and the SLCI over the past 20 years are similar, which gives us some assurance our estimates account for the cost of housing. Further work could explore this in more detail.

Read more: For the first time in a long time, we’re setting up a generation to be worse off than the one before it

Valid concerns

Australia has achieved high levels of absolute income mobility for all generations since at least the 1950s. This is still the case. But the pessimism about our children’s financial future is rooted in some valid concerns.

Wage growth has been slow for years. Income inequality has been increasing for decades. So has the gap between young and old.

So there are clear threats for the prosperity of today’s children – even without factoring in concerns such as climate change.

– ref. 68% of millennials earn more than their parents, but boomers had it better – https://theconversation.com/68-of-millennials-earn-more-than-their-parents-but-boomers-had-it-better-161647

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paige Gleeson, PhD Candidate, University of Tasmania

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images and names of deceased people.

Every contemporary Australian has likely seen Gwoja Tjungurrayi’s image. Tjungurrayi, a stockman, traditional lawman, and survivor of the brutal 1928 Coniston massacre, is the Warlpiri-Anmatyerr Aboriginal man engraved on our two dollar coin.

Tjungurrayi (whose name is sometimes spelled Gwoya Tjungurrayi, Gwoya Jungarai or Gwoya Djungarai) first rose to unlikely fame not on currency, but on the face of a postage stamp. In 1950 he became the first living Australian — settler or Aboriginal — to be featured on a stamp.

From 1950 to 1966, 99 million stamps featuring Tjungurrayi’s portrait were sold, and he became known to Australia and the world as “One Pound Jimmy”.

Now, fresh research has revealed the 1950 stamp was, in fact, not the first to feature Tjungurrayi. The discovery is the latest twist in a life story told in images.

The face of Geelong

In 1938, a postage stamp was released to mark the centenary of the Victorian town Geelong. It has no decimal mark as it was not issued by the Post-Master General’s Department. Hence it could not be used to send mail but was produced by the city as a collector’s item.

While researching images of Aboriginal people on stamps, in an online stamp collecting forum, I realised the man on the Geelong stamp was unmistakably Tjungurrayi, pictured 12 years before the “One Pound Jimmy” stamp. It’s the first time the image has been formally identified as Tjungurrayi.

Both stamps are based on a Roy Dunstan photograph of Tjungurrayi that first appeared in the Australian National Travel Association magazine Walkabout in 1936. Tjungurrayi had encountered Dunstan and magazine editor Charles Holmes east of Alice Springs, allowing Dunstan to take his photograph.

This chance encounter had a lasting impact on Tjungurrayi’s life, transforming him into an enduring public figure.

A remarkable life

Tjungurrayi was born around 1895 in the Tanami Desert north-west of Alice Springs. He was a survivor of the 1928 Coniston massacre in which up to 70 people were brutally murdered.

One son described Tjungurrayi “worm[ing] his way out from among the dead and dying”. Another son said he was captured and chained to a tree, but freed himself. He fled to the Arltunga region.

Tjungurrayi was a stockman and station hand by trade. But he was also a traditional lawman, land custodian, cultural intermediary and guide for visiting anthropologists, and family man. He took his responsibility as a father and law custodian very seriously, and was dedicated to ensuring traditional law and knowledge of country was passed down to future generations.

Tjungurrayi died in March 1965, having lived many years in the Tanami region. Obituaries to him appeared in Northern Territory News and on the Centralian Advocate’s front page.

Between Federation in 1901 and the 1930s, Aboriginal people were conspicuously absent in visual representations of Australian nationhood, which centred on native flora and fauna.

The use of Aboriginal motifs on stamps prior to Tjungurrayi’s image in 1950 was rare. The first stamps to feature Aboriginal themes were released between 1934 and 1950 — but there were only four designs and they didn’t portray real people.

Still, the use of images like that of Tjungurrayi exemplify what academic Jillian E. Barnes calls the “pioneer tourist gaze”, presenting him as an adversarial “other”.

Australian modernist artists and writers at this time such as Margaret Preston and the Jindyworobak literary movement became interested in Aboriginal designs and mythology, often appropriating these in their work.

“Aboriginalia” souvenirs and bric-a-brac depicting Aboriginal people according to racial stereotypes were displayed in suburban homes. Aboriginal people’s creative works and performances meanwhile, were still commonly classified as “ethnography”, not art, thus they were not afforded the opportunity to represent themselves and their own culture.

The 1938 stamp shows an apparently “authentic” Aboriginal presence in Australia, but relegates it to a distant and ancient time. In doing so it suggests the contemporary presence of Aboriginal people was anachronistic.

Read more: Friday essay: the politics of Aboriginal kitsch

A new generation

The Geelong centenary stamp may have drawn inspiration from a 1934 Victorian centenary stamp. In both, a standing Indigenous figure is used to contrast the supposed “stasis” of Aboriginal pre-history with the “progress” and modernity of the Australian settler colony.

But as Tjungurrayi’s own life story demonstrates, Aboriginal people continued to survive and thrive, often against the odds. Tjungurrayi’s three sons became leaders in the Western Desert art movement in the 1970s.

One son, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, became one of Australia’s best known and well regarded Aboriginal artists.

In 1988, a new chapter in legacy of the family’s engagement with the postage stamp began.

The painting Ancestor Dreaming (1977) by Tjungurrayi’s son Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri was featured on an Australia Post stamp as a part of a series celebrating Western Desert art.

Unlike his father’s designation as “Aborigine” in 1950, or his anonymity on the 1938 stamp, Tim was showcased as a significant artist.

In 2019, the Northern Territory electorate formerly named Stuart was renamed Gwoja in honour of Tjungurrayi.

Contemporary Australia is finally willing and able to remember and celebrate Tjungurrayi as an Elder, lawman and survivor.

Read more: A stamp of approval for legendary sports commentators – but only the male ones

– ref. Elder, lawman, survivor: new stamp discovery is the latest chapter in Gwoja Tjungurrayi’s remarkable life in pictures – https://theconversation.com/elder-lawman-survivor-new-stamp-discovery-is-the-latest-chapter-in-gwoja-tjungurrayis-remarkable-life-in-pictures-161437

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

National cabinet on Friday is expected to consider whether COVID vaccinations should be made mandatory for workers in aged care.

Health Minister Greg Hunt on Monday said Scott Morrison and he had asked the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC) to reconsider the matter.

The AHPPC looked at the question early in the year and did not advise compulsion for medical reasons.

While there would be considerable support in principle, compulsion could raise more complex issues in practice, such as creating staff shortages if some workers refused to take the jab.

The review comes as the Victorian COVID outbreak has affected two nursing homes in Melbourne and once again exposed weaknesses in the Commonwealth-controlled sector.

Two aged care workers from Arcare in Maidstone have tested positive, as well as the son of one of them. One worker had received a first vaccine, while the other was not vaccinated.

One of the carers was also working at BlueCross Western Gardens in Sunshine.

One Arcare resident has been infected – a 99-year-old woman who has been moved out of the facility. The woman had received one vaccination shot.

All facilities in Victoria have now received their vaccinations, but most residents only have had the first dose.

The arrangements for aged care workers are haphazard. If they were present when the nursing home was being done, and there were vaccines left over, they could get their jabs. Otherwise they have needed to access them from their doctor or the vaccination centres.

The federal government is also under criticism for failing to ban carers from working in more than one facility.

It has now reactivated its program to subsidise workers to keep them to one facility, but this is not compulsory.

The subsidy program is turned on and off according to when there are COVID cases in the community. Providers in hotspots become eligible for the subsidy. It has been activated four times in Victoria, most recently last Thursday.

Hunt said that in the greater Melbourne region only about 4.7% of staff had worked across different sites.

Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said it was a risk to have carers working across sites.

The state government confines workers to single sites in the very small number of nursing homes it controls.

Acting Premier James Merlino told reporters that working across sites “is not happening in the public system, and as for [Commonwealth-controlled] private aged care, you should raise those questions with the federal government”.

Sutton said of the fight against the Victorian outbreak generally, “we are neck and neck with this virus and it is an absolute beast”. Merlino warned things could get worse before they got better.

There are now more than 50 active cases in Victoria.

– ref. Government asks health experts for advice on mandatory vaccination for aged care workers – https://theconversation.com/government-asks-health-experts-for-advice-on-mandatory-vaccination-for-aged-care-workers-161854

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

When he launched his defamation action against the ABC over an article reporting a claim of historical rape against him, Christian Porter boldly indicated he looked forward to going into the witness box to clear his name.

His lawyers said: “Mr Porter will have and will exercise the opportunity to give evidence denying these false allegations on oath”.

In the event, he never got near the witness box.

On Monday Porter settled for an ABC acknowledgement it hadn’t intended to suggest he was guilty, regretted some had read its article that way, and did not contend the accusations against him could be substantiated to a legal standard.

Both the ABC and Porter claimed vindication.

There were no damages and the ABC said the only costs (apart from its own) the ABC would be paying were the “mediation and related costs”.

The action centred on the ABC’s report of a February 2021 letter sent, together with accompanying material, to senior politicians, including Scott Morrison, detailing the allegation by “Kate” – who had committed suicide in 2020 – that Porter, as a 17 year old, had raped her when she was 16. Kate’s friends sent the anonymous letter.

While the ABC article referred only to a senior cabinet minister, Porter later identified himself, and strongly denied the accusation.

The fallout of the controversy that followed led Porter to lose his position as attorney-general and minister for industrial relations. He now holds the industry portfolio.

Porter could never clear his name via the legal system because the woman is dead. Also, she’d told police the day before she died she did not want to proceed with a complaint against him.

Both Porter and Morrison rejected the proposal advanced by many that the matter should go to an independent inquiry.

The action against the ABC seemed to Porter the obvious course. A win would be taken as some sort of clearance.

His decision to settle through mediation is pragmatic if surprising.

Yes, he has extracted some statements of concession from the ABC. But a court victory would have yielded much more.

One might suppose he judged the case increasingly risky. Certainly it was becoming horrendously expensive. Last week he suffered a severe blow when the federal court ruled top lawyer Sue Chrysanthou could not appear for him because of a conflict of interest.

With plenty of legal experience behind him, Porter presumably decided it was better to spin a settlement than play for more and possibly lose everything.

For its part, the ABC did its own spinning.

It was out of the blocks first, with a statement that Porter had decided to discontinue his defamation action (which was against reporter Louise Milligan as well as the public broadcaster).

The statement said it “regretted” some readers had “misinterpreted” the Milligan article as “an accusation of guilt” against Porter, which it hadn’t intended.

The ABC stood by the importance of its article, which remains online, saying it “reported on matters of significant public interest”. It also stood by Milligan, whom it described as “one of Australia’s foremost and most awarded investigative journalists”.

The editor’s note now posted with the story says: “The ABC did not intend to suggest that Mr Porter had committed the criminal offences alleged.

“The ABC did not contend that the serious accusations could be substantiated to the applicable legal standard – criminal or civil.

“However, both parties accept that some readers misinterpreted the article as an accusation of guilt against Mr Porter. That reading, which was not intended by the ABC, is regretted”.

Speaking outside the court, Porter cast his legal action not only as an exercise in protecting himself, but others more generally.

He condemned the article as “sensationalist, it was one-sided, it was unfair and[…] the sort of reporting that any Australian can be subject to unless people stand up to it.

“So I brought an action to stand up to that sort of reporting.”

“And the ABC said now, they regret the article. That rarely ever happens in those matters.”

“Had they not been challenged, had the ABC not been forced to acknowledge regret at the outcome of the article, had they been not forced to acknowledge publicly that the accusations could not be proved to any civil or criminal standard, then publishing accusations in a deliberately sensationalist way that leads ordinary readers to presume guilt, would have become the new and terrible standard in Australia.”

Porter said he hadn’t thought the ABC would settle.

“I never thought that they would concede that the accusations that were put in the article could never be proven […]

“I did not think, frankly, there was any chance of them making those types of statements to settle this matter,” he said.

“The whole point about bringing in an action like this and getting the ABC to say they regret the reporting is that ordinary readers will think again about the nature of the article.”

Porter’s comments fired up the ABC which issued a further statement, denying ever saying it regretted the article and insisting it “has never and still does not accept that the article suggested guilt on the part of Mr Porter”. Nor was the article “senationalist”, it said, among much else.

Porter said if the matter had gone to trial he would have said what he said now – that the alleged rape “simply didn’t happen”.

He also said he was not seeking the return his old portfolio (now in Michaelia Cash’s hands). Not that he would have got it.

More unexpected, he declared he will definitely stand at the election. There has been much speculation he might not recontest.

It remains to be seen whether the end of the legal action will still the voices of Kate’s friends. But they have achieved part of their objectives.

One of them, Jo Dyer, told the federal court last week Kate had said to her last year that “given how difficult it would be for her to pursue this case, a measure of success for her endeavours would be if Christian Porter did not become prime minister”.

To the extent that was Kate’s aim, she succeeded. Porter will never return to the list of future contenders for Liberal leadership.

– ref. View from The Hill: Porter decides it’s time to ‘fold em’ in ABC defamation case – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-porter-decides-its-time-to-fold-em-in-abc-defamation-case-161844

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Kenny, Professor, Australian Studies Institute, Australian National University

Scott Morrison can feel well satisfied after travelling to New Zealand for the final two days of May. Talks there with his prime ministerial counterpart, Jacinda Ardern, could have been uneasy. Instead, the warmth of the face-to-face meeting – a rarity in these pandemic times – underscored the geographic and cultural closesness of the two nations, the primacy of the bilateral relationship above individual irritants, and their uncommon success in keeping COVID under control.

As late as last week, before the current Melbourne lockdown, the two nations could lay claim to have functionally eliminated the virus. Both have had virtually zero community transmission in recent months.

For Morrison, the bilateral visit marked the first, and potentially simplest, of a series of international meetings this year, if only because of the exclusive travel bubble between the two ANZUS partners.

G7 talks in Britain later in June and a high-profile, high-expectation UN climate conference in Glasgow in November present Australia’s climate-intransigent PM with far pricklier problems.

Read more: Spot the difference: as world leaders rose to the occasion at the Biden climate summit, Morrison faltered

Pressure is mounting on Morrison to demonstrate material progress on emissions abatement, rather than a mere continuation of Australian special pleading and the usual raft of glib slogans such as “technology not taxes”.

But, for all the apparent closeness of the trans-Tasman relationship, some frictions inevitably framed the lead-up to the talks. China, with its growing influence and insensitivity to regional concerns, was principal among these.

The Australian government has been privately nonplussed that Wellington had been seen to adopt a more conciliatory tone towards Beijing, despite the latter’s aggressive trade penalties on Australia. This particularly pertains to barley, where claims of Australian dumping have seen punitive 80% tariffs applied.

In April, NZ Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta signalled New Zealand’s preference for restricting the Five Eyes alliance to its original remit of intelligence sharing between the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Read more: Twin challenges of China and trans-Tasman migration loom over Scott Morrison’s New Zealand visit

Her comments came just weeks after a first-ever leaders’ level virtual meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (“Quad”), made up of the US, Japan, Australia and India. It was one of several examples where Ardern’s Labour government has given vent to that country’s historically more non-aligned tendencies.

Beijing viewed the Quad meeting as a provocative escalation of a US-led and Australian-supported China containment strategy.

Mahuta’s comments – which tended to overshadow a speech more specifically critical of Beijing – were read in this light: evidence of a widening gap between the approaches to Beijing by the trans-Tasman countries.

New Zealand Trade Minister Damien O’Connor had previously gone as far as to chide Australia for a lack of sophistication in its dealings with Beijing. While announcing an upgraded free trade agreement, he said:

If [Australia] were to follow us and show respect, I guess a little more diplomacy from time to time and be cautious with wording, they too could hopefully be in a similar situation [with China].

But, in clear statement of support, New Zealand announced shortly before the talks that it would back Australia’s case on barley tariffs before the World Trade Organisation.

Paragraph 37 of the joint communique was the official, if somewhat Delphic, expression of this:

The Prime Ministers affirmed their strong support for open rules-based trade that is based on market principles. They expressed concern over harmful economic coercion and agreed to work with partners to tackle security and economic challenges.

There were also clearly stated objections to human rights abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, concerns over China’s actions in the South China Sea, and a pledge to “uphold sovereignty” in the Indo-Pacific.

The two leaders also committed to jointly work to counter foreign interference in “education, infrastructure, research, electoral processes, media, and communities”.

The other main matter of trans-Tasman friction derives from Australia’s practice of deporting New Zealand-born long-term Australian residents when they are convicted of a serious crime. This happens irrespective of whether they have any association or family ties to New Zealand.

Ardern has made no secret of her disappointment with Australian intransigence on the issue and has vowed to continue pressing it. Yet, speaking to TVNZ, there was a tone of resignation also in her words, as if she knew the smaller country would not get the larger one to cede ground.

I’ve raised this through the entire time that I’ve been in this role and not necessarily with an expectation that we’ll see a dramatic change in policy because Australia has been consistent in the fact that they don’t intend to change their policy on things like deportation […] so it’s something that I’ll continue to raise”.

But if these matters presented risk to the talks, their management appears to have been deftly handled in the broader interests of the relationship.

China’s response to New Zealand will be interesting, in the unlikely event that it expresses one.

– ref. As Morrison and Ardern meet, differences of opinion give way to the enduring close relationship – https://theconversation.com/as-morrison-and-ardern-meet-differences-of-opinion-give-way-to-the-enduring-close-relationship-161580