Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics, Monash University

There has been much debate recently about the way women who work in our federal parliament are treated. This discussion has highlighted that society continues to place very different values on the way women and men behave.

Language – as a behaviour – holds a mirror up to these values. And changing the way we think about language is an important step toward changing the way we think about gender.

Read more: From ‘arse-ropes’ to ‘flying venom’, a history of how we have come to talk about viruses and medicine

Smoke-and-mirror fixes for folksy sneer winces

Folk wisdom provides a dizzying array of misleading accounts of how women communicate, many of them riddled with sexism. Proverbs tell us “women’s tongues are like lambs’ tails; they are never still”. But research tells us men talk and interrupt more – especially when they’re speaking to women.

It’s hard to stop the proverb and folk juggernaut once it gets started. It’s much easier to tell tales. And these are tales of linguistic problems, particularly for women in the workplace. Descriptions like “shrill”, “hysterical”, “scold”, “emotional” – the list goes on – speak to the wider truth that women’s language is policed more aggressively and condemned more readily than men’s.

British TV producer Gordon Reece reputedly mused “the selling of [former UK prime minister] Margaret Thatcher had been put back two years” with the broadcasting of Question Time, as “she had to be at her shrillest to be heard over the din”.

More recently, Donald Trump said Hillary Clinton’s raised voice made her sound “shrill” and “too much”. And, of course, closer to home, Tony Abbott called Prime Minister Julia Gillard “shrill and aggressive”. Gillard suffered an onslaught of criticism for her accent and non-standard English, whereas Bob Hawke was celebrated for his.

Australian linguist Lauren Gawne also pointed to other features condemned in Gillard’s language, including sentence-final prepositions, passive voice and over-abundant adverbs. These are all features widely used by other politicians, and indeed by English speakers generally.

Sadly, the response to linguistic judgments seems to be a desire to “fix” women’s language. All kinds of advice literature instruct on how to replace these undesirable ways of speaking and writing with better ones.

Thatcher is probably the best-known example of someone who underwent a complete linguistic makeover. She famously altered her accent and her delivery and deepened her voice by nearly half the average difference in pitch between male and female voices.

In 2015, a Gmail plug-in (Just Not Sorry) was developed largely with women in mind. Like a grammar or spell checker, it highlighted for correction such features as hedging expressions like just, I think and sorry. The development of the Just Not Sorry plug-in was well-intentioned — it emerged from a networking event at which women worried words like these made them look like pushovers.

But quick fixes like the Just Not Sorry plug-in don’t engage with the broader issue that society shouldn’t be policing women’s language. Moreover, it doesn’t stop to consider that so-called women’s conversational styles — found in many studies to be more co-operative, polite and collaborative — might lead to better outcomes in the workplace.

Baronet, King Kong and the dame in the creek: what words tell us about society

“Shrill” hints at an English lexicon that does not reflect kindly on women. A lexicon is not an inanimate beast, but rather a social one. The social beast shines through in this Australian schoolyard chant:

Boys are strong,

like King Kong,

Girls are weak,

chuck ’em in the creek.

And the Oxford English Dictionary entry for “sex” highlights the corresponding linguistic imbalance. Here women are referred to as the “weaker”, “fairer”, “gentler” and “softer” sex, while men are the “stronger”, “sterner”, “rougher” and “better sex”. However, we might mention on an optimistic note that the adjectives associated with men are now listed as “rare”.

Synonym dictionaries like thesauruses are also revealing. The entry under “woman” shows an abundance of expressions for a sexually active or available woman. Many are appallingly derogatory.

The comparable set under “man” is considerably smaller and noticeably less negative. Labels like “rake” or “womaniser” have nothing of the same pejorative sense of sexual promiscuity — there’s nothing equivalent to “whore” or “slut”.

What has given rise to this imbalance is the fact that words referring to women are unstable and typically deteriorate with time. Words like “lady” or “dame” show the mildest form of deterioration. These referred to persons in high places but then became generalised — compare the stability of the once comparable “lord” and “baronet”, and others such as “governor”, “master”, “sir” versus “governess”, “mistress”, “madam”.

Even more striking is the way words meaning simply “young woman” take on negative connotations. Some expressions even start off referring to males, but once they narrow to female application they are quick to take on overtones of sexual immorality. This is true not just of old expressions like “whore”, “slut” and “slag” — in the case of Modern English’s “bimbo” and “skank”, the changes were extremely rapid.

Sissy pricks and twatty prats: insults and gender

While we’re on the subject of asymmetries, we might also point out the vast difference in wounding capacity between insults invoking male and female sex organs. The most striking is “cunt”, meaning “nasty, malicious, despicable”, versus “prick” meaning “stupid, contemptible, annoying”.

Moreover, while “cunt” (and its gentler counterparts “twat” and “prat”) freely apply to both males and females, females are rarely, if ever, abused by “prick” and “dick”. Should women be concerned by this, you’re probably wondering? Only in that it’s indicative of a more general story. Terms for women are insulting when used of men (for example, “throws like a girl”, “old woman”, “sissy”), but there’s no real abuse if male-associated words are used of women. In fact, “she’s ballsy” was said of Thatcher in praise of her strength of character.

Language is a mirror and a lens

Our language behaviour — perhaps best illustrated by the lexicon — provides particularly clear windows into speech communities. If you’re not convinced already, consider the staggering 2,000 expressions for “wanton woman” that English has amassed over the years. This says it all really: a linguistic tell-tale of sexual double standards. Even the adjective “wanton” no longer refers to men.

These asymmetries in our language are significant, and we haven’t even started on the maledictions invoking animal terms! Language both reflects and reinforces the thoughts, attitudes and culture of the people who use it, and that’s why language matters when it comes to talking about gender.

– ref. Shrill, bossy, emotional: why language matters in the gender debate – https://theconversation.com/shrill-bossy-emotional-why-language-matters-in-the-gender-debate-158310

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anita Foerster, Senior Lecturer, Monash University

In a great start towards net zero emissions by 2050, the Victorian Government recently released their Climate Change Strategy, committing to halving greenhouse emissions by 2030.

Victoria’s leadership, alongside commitments from other Australian states and territories, stands in stark contrast to the poor climate performance of our federal government.

But is it enough? Climate scientists are urging Australia to do more to reduce emissions and to do it quicker if we’re going to avert dangerous global warming. In fact, a recent Climate Council report claims achieving net zero emissions by 2050 is at least a decade too late.

We think the Victorian government has the legal mandate to do more. But we also recognise that ambitious climate action at the state level is hindered by a lack of commitment at the federal level.

Using law to drive emissions reductions

Victoria’s new strategy was developed under the Climate Change Act 2017, state legislation requiring the government to set interim emissions reduction targets on the way to net zero by 2050.

It spreads the job of achieving these targets across the economy, with different ministers responsible for pledging emissions reductions actions and reporting on progress over time.

Laws like this are emerging around the world to set targets and hold governments accountable for delivering on them. They’re a key tool to deliver on international commitments under the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2℃.

Although Australia has set a national target for emissions reduction under the Paris Agreement, it’s widely considered to be inadequate, and there’s currently no framework climate law at the national level. Independent Zali Steggall introduced such a bill in 2020, but the Morrison government hasn’t supported it.

Victoria’s new strategy lacks detail

Victoria’s Climate Change Strategy contains many exciting climate policy announcements, including:

• renewable energy zones and big batteries in the regions

• all government operations including schools and hospitals powered by 100% renewables by 2025

• targets and subsidies for electric vehicle uptake

• commitments to support innovation in hard-to-abate sectors such as agriculture.

It also recognises the need to phase out natural gas and accelerate Victoria’s renewable hydrogen industry.

These policies are designed to reduce emissions while supporting economic growth and job creation. Yet they are scant on detail.

There’s heavy reliance on achieving emissions reductions in the energy sector — arguably, this is the low-hanging fruit. Policies in transport and agriculture are far less developed, with no quantification of targeted emissions reductions to 2030.

This makes it difficult to assess whether the sector pledges will drive enough change to achieve the government’s interim targets (ambitious or otherwise) and support a trajectory to net zero.

It has taken several years to develop the Climate Change Strategy. This makes the lack of detail and the undeveloped nature of some pledges a big concern.

There are also few safeguards in the Climate Change Act to ensure pledges add up to achieving targets, or that ministers across sectors deliver on them. Much depends on the political will of the government of the day.

Why Victoria’s targets aren’t enough

The Victorian Government proposes targets to reduce emissions by 28–33% on 2005 levels by 2025, and by 45–50% on 2005 levels by 2030.

The government claims these targets are ambitious. Compared to current federal government targets, this is true.

Read more: Australia’s states are forging ahead with ambitious emissions reductions. Imagine if they worked together

However, the target ranges are lower than those recommended in 2019 by the Independent Expert Panel, established under the Climate Change Act to advise the government on target setting.

The panel recommended targets of 32–39% by 2025 and 45–60% by 2030 as Victoria’s “fair share” contribution to limiting warming to well below 2℃ in accordance with Paris Agreement goals. And it acknowledged these recommended ranges still wouldn’t be enough to keep warming to 1.5℃, in the context of global efforts.

Ultimately, Victoria’s targets don’t match what scientists are now telling us about the importance of cutting emissions early to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

A pragmatic approach or a missed opportunity?

In setting the targets, the state government has clearly taken a politically pragmatic approach.

The government claims the targets are achievable and suggests they would’ve set more ambitious targets if the federal government made a stronger commitment to climate action.

Yes, the current lack of climate ambition at the federal level in Australia is a very real constraint on progress in some areas such as energy, where a coordinated approach is crucial. But this shouldn’t outweigh aligning to best available science.

State governments have many regulatory, policy and economic levers at their disposal, with opportunities to drive significant change and innovation. And Victoria has already demonstrated strong progress in emissions reduction and renewables in the energy sector, easily meeting and exceeding previous targets.

Under the Climate Change Act, the Victorian Government will need to set new, more ambitious targets in five years.

But waiting five years goes against Victoria’s aim to lead the nation on climate action and contribute fairly to global efforts to mitigate global warming. More ambitious, science-aligned targets now would’ve been a valuable signal for industry and a sign of real climate leadership.

We need stronger laws

Without doubt, the new Climate Change Strategy is a significant step forward on an issue that’s plagued Australian politics for years. Victoria has showed framework climate laws can drive government action on climate change.

Read more: Conservative but green independent MP Zali Steggall could break the government’s climate policy deadlock

But there are also opportunities to bolster the Climate Change Act by aligning targets to science, strengthening legal obligations to drive timely progress, and including an ongoing role for independent experts to advise on target setting and oversee progress.

Finally, it’s important to get on with the job at a federal level.

Zali Steggall’s Climate Change Bill 2020 picks up on best practice climate laws from around the world. It’s also supported by industry groups and investors.

Victoria’s experience suggests it’s surely time for Australia to take this important step.

– ref. A great start, but still not enough: why Victoria’s new climate target isn’t as ambitious as it sounds – https://theconversation.com/a-great-start-but-still-not-enough-why-victorias-new-climate-target-isnt-as-ambitious-as-it-sounds-160364

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Niranjan Casinader, Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Education, Faculty of Education, Monash University

For people who experience racism, the pain sometimes comes as much from words as it does from actions. Indigenous people like Adam Goodes and Latrell Mitchell have spoken of the hurt they feel when they’re subject to racist slurs.

Words and actions used to demean people on the basis of race or colour can be found throughout everyday society and may even be seen as innocuous. Recent government bans on Australian citizens returning from India highlight one way non-white people can be excluded from society.

Read more: It’s not surprising Indian-Australians feel singled out. They have long been subjected to racism

People of Indian or African heritage who were born in Australia or, as in my case, the United Kingdom, often face questions like, “Where are you from?” The answer is regularly met with some disbelief.

To be subject to the continual presumption that skin colour other than white is country-specific and non-Australian is humiliating, no matter how subtle it may be.

Changing how people act in terms of race and colour means changing their attitudes towards difference. Learning about the context in which racial words originated and why they are hurtful is crucial to achieving this.

Why the history of words matters

Education is an important strategy in the campaign against racist behaviour and language. Intercultural understanding is part of the Australian Curriculum and mandated by its “general capabilities” — which must be taught throughout all learning areas where appropriate.

The current curriculum review recommends a reinforcement of this intercultural understanding. The draft changes offer greater emphasis on First Nations perspectives of Australian history and more acknowledgement of Australia’s multicultural society.

Read more: Proposed new curriculum acknowledges First Nations’ view of British ‘invasion’ and a multicultural Australia

But it’s not enough to just passively incorporate such education. Changing children’s attitudes towards race and, in particular, the idea (or irrelevance) of skin colour, can be best done if they learn by experiencing the negative feelings people of different races, and with different skin, colours can feel.

This kind of education is known as “pedagogies of discomfort”. It involves teachers deliberately placing students in situations where they feel uneasy. In this way students can critically engage with difficult topics that are often unacknowledged or silenced in the classroom.

The use of challenging scenarios in education is not new. One example that has been in place for many years is the blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment. In this scenario, students are told brown-eyed people are superior to blue-eyed people. The brown-eyed children, for a time, experience exclusion.

The roles are then switched so both groups can understand how the “minority” groups feel and how quickly prejudice can form.

More widely, Holocaust education is based on presenting current generations of children with the reality of the Holocaust in images, language and human actions, no matter how graphic.

Read more: It’s not just about the rise in anti-Semitism: why we need real stories for better Holocaust education in Australia

Similarly, understanding the history of words like “nigger” is important to empathise with the way they impact on people of colour.

Children need to learn that the word, which was used by slave owners, is derived from the African region of Niger from where many Africans were transported to the United States as slaves. Rather than calling African people by their names, slave owners used the word to dehumanise them. The word “nigger” is a derogatory term; in effect, it is historically interchangeable with “slave”.

The dilemma for teachers

Teachers find it difficult and troubling to use words like “nigger”, “Abo”, “negro” and “coon” in teaching about racism. Some teachers find it equally difficult to deal with words that might be less confrontational, such as “ape”. Research shows teachers of literature find discussing books with themes of racial or colour prejudice particularly difficult.

Australian research also indicates teachers are likely to only respond to student questions to such sensitive topics, rather than raising the issues themselves. This is partly because of the perceived difficulties about using troubling language.

In my experiences with student teachers, I’ve noticed many are reluctant to even have a discussion about how to employ examples of racist language in teaching about cultural understanding.

If teachers don’t accept the challenge of proactively educating children about racist language, young people may not understand its hurtful impact. And they may take this ignorance through into adulthood.

Teaching sensitively

Confronting topics when teaching about racism must be approached in a controlled environment. There are four main considerations to bear in mind:

1. Timing matters

The learning experience should be planned for a time in the school year when the teacher and students have built up a relationship of mutual trust. A debriefing discussion is essential.

Teaching about sensitive language is nuanced. It is more appropriate for the upper levels of primary school or in secondary school. The teacher knows their students and should be able to judge how these themes should be taught. This includes knowing if there are students in the class who may have been personally affected by the use of racist language or confronting educational scenarios.

2. Prior discussions are necessary

Teachers should discuss their plans with the appropriate school leadership so their learning intentions can be supported publicly, if necessary.

Read more: 9 tips teachers can use when talking about racism

Teachers should also have prior discussions with students who have been affected by racism and their parents. They can inform the students about the nature of the forthcoming lessons and come to an agreement with them as to their participation.

3. Teachers need personal and professional expertise

Research suggests teachers who have learned from personal and professional experiences involving “cultural displacement” are more likely to have developed the kind of expertise required to manage “pedagogies of discomfort” in cultural education. Including cultural pedagogies of discomfort in teacher education can significantly help prepare teachers to engage proactively with racist behaviours as part of their work.

Teaching kids about racism is rarely comfortable, but neither is being exposed to racial abuse. Kids need to face discomfort to truly empathise with how it feels.

– ref. To understand racism, kids must empathise with its impact — and teachers must embrace discomfort – https://theconversation.com/to-understand-racism-kids-must-empathise-with-its-impact-and-teachers-must-embrace-discomfort-144516

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

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg calls this a “pandemic budget” – one to sustain the economy in times that are still uncertain – but it also has a substantial element of an election budget.

That’s not to suggest Prime Minister Scott Morrison will rush to the polls this year. But given the election has to be held by May 21, 2022, this is likely to be the last budget of the cycle. Another could be squeezed in, as in 2019, but it would have to be brought forward from the normal time.

Last year the treasurer said budget repair and debt repayment – otherwise known as the hard and unpleasant decisions – wouldn’t be undertaken before unemployment was “comfortably” below 6%.

Read more: Vital Signs. The RBA wants to cut unemployment, and nothing — not even soaring home prices — will stand in its way

Now unemployment is 5.6% (the March figure) but Frydenberg has shifted the goal posts, so the emphasis remains on recovery, with more difficult reckonings a way off – beyond the election.

Given a grim COVID picture internationally and a long way to go with the vaccine program locally, that is sound – and also politically convenient.

In this budget, the government’s policy approach is firmly aligned with that of the Reserve Bank, with Frydenberg embracing the bank’s objective of pushing unemployment well below pre-pandemic levels, which means to a rate with a 4 in front of it.

Two central spending areas in the budget have been, in effect, imposed on the government.

It had to respond to the damning findings of the aged care royal commission. The fact most Australian COVID deaths occurred in aged care underlined how unfit for purpose the system is. Frydenberg told the ABC there will be more than $10 billion spending on aged care over the forward estimates.

The budget’s “women’s” focus — a sharp contrast to last year — has drivers that go beyond the urgent need to do more to combat violence against women, and other imperatives.

Morrison’s “women problem”, which exploded with the demonstrations following the high-profile allegations of rape, most obviously increased the attention on women in this budget, which will include a women’s statement with initiatives on health, safety, and economic security.

Also, Labor’s decision to make childcare one of its main policy pitches, promising a big spend, reinforced economic considerations pushing the government to produce its own childcare policy (which doesn’t start until July 2022).

Even in the middle of the pandemic last year, few would have thought that by now we’d still have no firm idea when our international borders will re-open.

Morrison is cautious about it, and judges that’s in line with the thinking of the Australians public at the moment. He can read those state electoral results as well as anyone — he knows people put health safety above all else.

“International borders will only open when it is safe to do so”, he said on Facebook at the weekend. “Australians are living like in few countries around the world today.”

On the other hand, the pressure for students to come, migration to resume and people to be allowed to travel must build sooner or later.

The budget’s assumptions will put the reopening in 2022, Frydenberg told the ABC at the weekend.

Read more: Frydenberg promises housing breaks in ‘pandemic budget’

Economist Saul Eslake says while keeping the country closed to the outside world is obviously not sustainable in the long run, it has, in a perverse way, some short run plusses for the government’s economic objectives.

“It’s very easy to get unemployment down when the border is closed. You only need to create 5000 new jobs a month to prevent unemployment rising.

“Previously [with migrants coming] you needed 16,000 new jobs a month. Currently we’re creating 60,000 a month,” Eslake says.

Migrants stimulate growth. But so does having Australians unable to travel overseas, Eslake says. They can only spend domestically – or save – the $55 billion they would normally be spending abroad. They appear to be spending quite a deal of it on things like home equipment, furnishings, renovations, cars, and even clothing.

While fiscal repair is formally delayed, the budget will show it is gradually, to a degree, repairing itself.

The quicker-than-expected bounce back of the labour market, which reduces welfare costs and boosts tax revenue, and the similar rebound in corporate profits, help the bottom line. Frydenberg says that, despite JobKeeper coming to an end, 105,000 people came off income support in April. High iron ore prices are also a godsend to revenue.

Chris Richardson, from Deloitte Access Economics, has forecast a deficit for this financial year of about $167 billion, compared with the December budget update figure of $198 billion. For 2021-22 , the Deloitte forecast is a deficit of about $87 billion compared with the update’s forecast of $108 billion.

Still, a balanced budget will be some years off, Richardson says.

He gives four reasons: substantial structural spending on aged care, mental health, childcare, disability and the like; low wage and price inflation (inflation helps budgets); missing migrants; and interest payments on debt (helped by low interest rates but still significant).

On what we know, the budget will be safe rather than adventurous. And while budgets can always unexpectedly trip over their own feet, and inevitably have plenty of critics, this will be the sort of benign one that doesn’t go out of its way to hurt or offend voters.

– ref. View from The Hill: a budget for a pandemic, with next year’s election in mind – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-a-budget-for-a-pandemic-with-next-years-election-in-mind-160594

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

Josh Frydenberg says he will bring down a “pandemic budget” on Tuesday, warning that despite Australia’s strong recovery, there is “still a great deal of uncertainty out there”.

The Treasurer points to new strains of the coronavirus, the COVID crisis raging in India, and local lockdowns. “We can’t take for granted the strong economic recovery we’ve seen. We’ve got to lock in those gains,” he said on Friday, speaking to The Conversation.

Touted as big spending, the budget will contain, besides a large reform package for aged care, significant outlays on mental health.

In measures on housing, it will increase from $30,000 to $50,000 the maximum amount of voluntary contributions aspiring home buyers can take from the First Home Super Saver Scheme.

This scheme allows people to make voluntary contributions to superannuation to save for their first home.

At present these contributions are capped at $15,000 a year and $30,000 in total.

With the rise in house prices, the current cap on the amount that can be released is a diminishing proportion of the deposit needed.

There will also be another 10,000 places added to the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme, which can only be used for new housing. This means-tested measure allows first home buyers to build a new home or buy a newly-built one with a deposit of as little as 5%.

The budget will have an “improved bottom line, particularly in 2021”, compared with the earlier forecasts, Frydenberg confirmed.

This will be thanks in large part to a stronger-than-expected labour market as well as high iron ore prices.

The aim of pushing unemployment down below 5% will be a central feature of the budget.

“There’s a historic opportunity to drive the unemployment rate back to where it was pre pandemic and even lower,” Frydenberg said.

“And that’s why in this budget, you’ll see significant investments in energy, infrastructure, skills, the digital economy and lower taxes. Strengthening our economy will lead to a stronger budget position.”

Frydenberg said the dire predictions about what would happen with the end of JobKeeper in late March had not been fulfilled. In fact fewer people had been on income support after JobKeeper ended.

“And what you’ll see is that the budget improves as a result of the labour market strength, even more so than it does as a result of the higher iron ore price, because you get lower welfare payments and you get more tax revenue coming in from people at work.”

The budget will push out the assumptions about when Australia will reopen its international border. Last October’s budget assumed the border closure easing by the latter part of this year.

– ref. Frydenberg promises housing breaks in ‘pandemic budget’ – https://theconversation.com/frydenberg-promises-housing-breaks-in-pandemic-budget-160561

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

Josh Frydenberg says he will bring down a “pandemic budget” on Tuesday, warning that despite Australia’s strong recovery, there is “still a great deal of uncertainty out there”.

The Treasurer points to new strains of the coronavirus, the COVID crisis raging in India, and local lockdowns. “We can’t take for granted the strong economic recovery we’ve seen. We’ve got to lock in those gains,” he said on Friday, speaking to The Conversation.

Touted as big spending, the budget will contain, besides a large reform package for aged care, significant outlays on mental health.

In measures on housing, it will increase from $30,000 to $50,000 the maximum amount of voluntary contributions aspiring home buyers can take from the First Home Super Saver Scheme.

This scheme allows people to make voluntary contributions to superannuation to save for their first home.

At present these contributions are capped at $15,000 a year and $30,000 in total.

With the rise in house prices, the current cap on the amount that can be released is a diminishing proportion of the deposit needed.

There will also be another 10,000 places added to the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme, which can only be used for new housing. This means-tested measure allows first home buyers to build a new home or buy a newly-built one with a deposit of as little as 5%.

The budget will have an “improved bottom line, particularly in 2021”, compared with the earlier forecasts, Frydenberg confirmed.

This will be thanks in large part to a stronger-than-expected labour market as well as high iron ore prices.

The aim of pushing unemployment down below 5% will be a central feature of the budget.

“There’s a historic opportunity to drive the unemployment rate back to where it was pre pandemic and even lower,” Frydenberg said.

“And that’s why in this budget, you’ll see significant investments in energy, infrastructure, skills, the digital economy and lower taxes. Strengthening our economy will lead to a stronger budget position.”

Frydenberg said the dire predictions about what would happen with the end of JobKeeper in late March had not been fulfilled. In fact fewer people had been on income support after JobKeeper ended.

“And what you’ll see is that the budget improves as a result of the labour market strength, even more so than it does as a result of the higher iron ore price, because you get lower welfare payments and you get more tax revenue coming in from people at work.”

The budget will push out the assumptions about when Australia will reopen its international border. Last October’s budget assumed the border closure easing by the latter part of this year.

– ref. Frydenberg says this will be a ‘pandemic budget’ to secure the recovery’ – https://theconversation.com/frydenberg-says-this-will-be-a-pandemic-budget-to-secure-the-recovery-160561

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

Ahead of the definitive official read of the economy from the treasury in the budget on Tuesday, the Reserve Bank has given us two special insights into its own thinking in the space of 14 hours.

They suggest that (first) the economy is improving, and (second) the bank is not going to let up on driving that improvement, not for anything — including concern about climbing home prices — until it has pushed unemployment down and wage growth back up to where it believes it should be.

The first insight was in Deputy Governor Guy Debelle’s Shann Memorial Lecture on Thursday night. The second was in Friday’s Statement on Monetary Policy

Growth without inflation

The statement emphasised that the although the bank expects economic growth to bounce back fairly strongly, getting inflation back within the bank’s 2-3% target band and getting wages growth up will take much longer

As the statement put it:

despite the stronger outlook for output and the labour market, inflation and wages growth are expected to remain low, picking up only gradually.

On one measure just 1.1%, the lowest on record, underlying inflation is to climb to 1.5% over the course of 2021 before gradually climbing to close to 2% by mid 2023.

It’s well short of the bank’s target of 2-3% which is only likely to be achieved with much higher wages growth driven by much deeper inroads into unemployment.

Read more: Josh Frydenberg has the opportunity to transform Australia, permanently lowering unemployment

Those inroads will be easier to achieve if COVID is firmly under control.

The bank explicitly linked its forecasts of an improving economy to an assumption that Australia’s vaccine rollout accelerates in the second half of the year. It could have added to that (but didn’t) the importance of getting purpose-built quarantine facilities up and running.

Its baseline forecast has economic growth of 4% in the year to June 2022 and 3% in the year to June 2023.

But there is a fairly wide range around its downside and upside scenarios.

Economic growth might be as low as 2.5% or as high as 5% in 2022 and as low as 2% and as high as 3% in 2023.

Similarly, the unemployment forecast is somewhere between 4.25% and 5.25% by June 2022 and in a very wide range of 3.75% and 5.5% by June 2023.

These forecasts produce below-target inflation forecasts of between 1.5% and 2% in June 2022 and 1.5% to 2.25% in June 2023.

What the bank will do to help drive the upside scenario, and what else will need to happen, was laid out by Debelle in Thursday night’s Shann Memorial Lecture.

The Debelle Doctrine

Adjectives like “seminal” are bandied about liberally these days, but for me, Debelle’s speech on Monetary Policy During COVID was a masterpiece.

He began by outlining the suite of measures the bank introduced from the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. They involved

• cutting the cash rate to a record low of 0.25% and then cutting it again to 0.1%

• undertaking to not increase the cash rate target until the bank is confident that inflation will be sustainably within the 2–3% target band

• cutting the rate paid on private banks’ exchange settlement balances with the bank to 0.1% and then to 0.0%

• buying enough three-year government bonds to target a yield of 0.25%, later 0.1%

• guaranteeing to buy $5 billion of five-year and ten-year state and Commonwealth week-in week-out whatever the economic circumstances

• buying bonds as needed to address the “dysfunction” in the bond market

• offering banks cheap lending finance through a new term funding facility

• ensuring that the financial system has sufficient liquidity

Debelle methodically described how each of these measures are likely to flow through into economic activity.

Read more: Exclusive. Top economists back budget push for an unemployment rate beginning with ‘4’

That is, he articulated what economists call the “transmission mechanism” — how the measures work.

As an example, the following chart he provided summarises the transmission mechanism for bond purchases.

And then he delivered the setup for the punchline.

The tools the bank is using might affect all sorts of things, including house prices. But the bank plans to focus on just one thing — getting unemployment down until it gets inflation back up to its target band.

Then the punchline itself: the bank will do this even if it leads to higher house prices

there are a number of tools that can be used to address the issue. But I do not think that monetary policy is one of the tools. Monetary policy is focussed on supporting the economic recovery and achieving its goals in terms of employment and inflation

It was important to remember that while housing prices may not rise as fast without low interest rates, unemployment would definitely be materially higher without low interest rates.

Unemployment has serious consequences.

What it all means

The Debelle Doctrine is that the bank will focus on a narrow range of objectives, and will not be timid about using the tools in its arsenal to achieve them.

This may not be a seismic shift, but it is significant.

It gives the bank a much clearer focus; it gives others a much better way to judge how it is performing; and it makes clear that if the government is concerned about rising house prices, it’ll have to do something itself (perhaps by tightening the tax rules governing capital gains and negative gearing).

Debelle produced a clear, precise, and authoritative statement of what the Reserve Bank can, should, and will do.

In a word, it was gubernatorial.

– ref. Vital Signs. The RBA wants to cut unemployment, and nothing — not even soaring home prices — will stand in its way – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-the-rba-wants-to-cut-unemployment-and-nothing-not-even-soaring-home-prices-will-stand-in-its-way-160171

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liza-Mare Syron, Indigenous Scientia Senior Lecturer, UNSW

Review: Dogged, directed by Declan Greene. Griffin Theatre Company in association with Force Majeure.

Dingo (Sandy Greenwood, a Gumbaynggirr, Dunghutti and Bundjalung actor) stands facing the audience, dressed in a muddied tracksuit with a dingo-like mask. Her opening speech signals concern; a longing for her lost pups.

We then meet Woman (Blazey Best). Woman is of good Scottish heritage, the daughter of homesteaders and sheep graziers. She is out hunting for wild dogs. Woman is preparing a kill, ripping out a souvenir from a bloodied carcass. Her companion is Dog (Anthony Yangoyan), eager for his own reward, a taste of the kill.

In the search for her lost pups, Dingo’s path eventually intersects with Woman and Dog. Why doesn’t Woman kill Dingo? Because she is overcome by the beauty of this ancient creature and invites the Dingo to share in their spoils. Together the three characters form an unusual trio. But around them lurks a malevolent presence: a pack of men on the hunt with their own dogs.

Dogged is unruly, both in its form and content. A feminist Wake in Fright, the play is a tale of two women: one dingo and one human.

Both share a love of country.

But beware: this is not a love story.

Histories in plain sight

Dogged is co-written by Catherine Ryan and Yorta Yorta/Gunaikurnai playwright Andrea James. James describes it as “a collaboration between First Nations and Settler artists”.

The play seeks to tell both sides of the Australian story, with ideas of territory, guilt and culpability.

Set designers Renée Mulder and mural artist Peter Waples-Crowe have created an imagined isolated bush environment from an assemblage of black synthetic materials highlighted with orange brushed flames.

The ceiling is coated in low hanging plastic bags, setting a gloomy tone. The grotto-like stage establishes the opening scene of a dingo’s lair.

The trio settle in and Woman falls asleep. But Dingo can’t stay. Not while her pups are out there somewhere alone. She runs off in search of them, Dog follows. Woman wakes to their absence, and chases screaming after them. Out there in the wild, they eventually all fall foul of the evil snares set by the surrounding male hunting expedition.

It does not end well.

Now just two, hiding in the bush, Woman and Dingo look for comfort. One searches for home: to her family, the farm, and her childhood memories. Dingo, on the other hand, only sees the Brabralung people who once lived where the Woman’s farm now sits.

Dingo tells Woman the tale of the violent history of the area and the injustices perpetrated by the her ancestors against the Brabralung people. Woman can hear her. She doesn’t know why, or how, but she listens. It is a story Woman doesn’t want to believe, or can’t.

In presenting two views of the one world, Dogged asks: will settler Australians ever see the world in the same way as the original inhabitants of the country do? Will our histories remain in the dark, hidden in a cave of ignorance, existing in the shadows? Like Dingo, we see only glimpses of her truth as she sneaks by, and we ask, was that real?

The Australian wilds

The Griffin production was developed in association with Force Majeure, one of Australia’s foremost dance theatre companies, which offers the animal performances a compelling physical presence. Kirk Page’s movement direction added depth to the corporal vocabularies of these dogs. In particular, some of the stronger canine postures reminded me of the Minimba Dingo dance.

Greenwood’s performance as Dingo is consistent and engaging throughout the performance, never wavering from of her hunger or wildness. Yangoyan gives us a polished embodied depiction of Woman’s faithful and loving companion Dog, and also plays a very frightening wild hunting dog in service of the male hunting pack.

As Woman, Best seemed a bit erratic on opening night compared to the anchored performances of her canine counterparts who are given a voice in the play. Perhaps the equal weight given to the canine and human characters creates an uneasy role for Best to play.

Dogged reminds us when you venture outside of the comforts of the home, there you will encounter the beauty and truth of this land, its people and nature. Outside the confines of modernity lurk the terrors of the past.

From a distance you may see farms and swimming holes, but we see these sites differently.

Step into the wild if you dare.

Dogged is at Griffin Theatre Company until June 5.

– ref. Australia’s settler and First Nations histories meet in the wild of the bush in Dogged – https://theconversation.com/australias-settler-and-first-nations-histories-meet-in-the-wild-of-the-bush-in-dogged-160522

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deborah Gleeson, Associate Professor in Public Health, La Trobe University

Yesterday, the US Biden administration declared its support for waiving intellectual property rights, including patents, for COVID-19 vaccines.

This decision represents a huge breakthrough in discussions at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that have been deadlocked for more than six months.

Shortly afterwards, New Zealand’s trade minister Damien O’Connor announced his country’s support on Twitter, quickly followed by Canada’s expression of support for the proposal.

Other nations that have so far resisted pressure to support the waiver are likely to fall like dominoes in the wake of the US in coming days.

Today, Australia’s trade minister Dan Tehan said the waiver “will be an important part of trying to get a resolution in the World Trade Organisation”, but it remains unclear whether Australia has unequivocally thrown its support behind the proposal.

Waiving intellectual property rights is a necessary first step to scaling up the global supply of COVID-19 vaccines and correcting worsening inequities in access to these desperately needed products.

A decision by Australia to support the waiver would indicate we value human lives more than pharmaceutical industry profits, and are committed to bringing the pandemic to an end globally.

Read more: Over 700 health experts are calling for urgent action to expand global production of COVID vaccines

Why do we need to waive intellectual property rights?

The exclusive rights to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines are currently held by a small number of companies that control the global supply. This is despite the huge amounts of public funding funnelled into their development.

Some of these companies have entered into licensing arrangements with other manufacturers to increase production, such as AstraZeneca’s contracts allowing CSL in Australia and the Serum Institute of India to make its vaccine.

But most have not. And no pharmaceutical company has taken steps to share its intellectual property, know-how, and technology through the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, a platform set up by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for this purpose almost a year ago.

The exclusive rights held by these companies are governed by the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, commonly known as “TRIPS”. WTO members are required by TRIPS to provide patent terms of at least 20 years, along with other types of intellectual property protection, such as protection of trade secrets.

Suspending patents and other intellectual property rights relevant to pharmaceuticals will remove legal barriers, allowing vaccine developers to enter the market more quickly without worrying about the prospect of litigation over potential infringements of intellectual property rights.

It will also mean vaccines manufactured in one country can be exported to others without having to navigate a legal maze.

What’s been happening at the WTO?

India and South Africa first put a proposal to the WTO in October 2020 for a waiver of certain intellectual property provisions in TRIPS for COVID-19 medical products for the duration of the pandemic. As envisaged by its sponsors, the waiver would apply to vaccines along with other medical products to fight the pandemic such as treatments, diagnostic tests and medical equipment.

Over the ensuing six months, more than 100 of the WTO’s 164 members moved to support the TRIPS waiver proposal.

But several countries have prevented negotiations from moving forward, including the US, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Japan, Brazil, Norway and Australia. If Australia now adds its wholehearted support to the US proposal for a waiver for vaccines, this could help shift the dynamics at the WTO further towards a resolution.

Meanwhile, the pandemic has been accelerating and inequities in vaccine access have been worsening. The director-general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noted in April that one in four people in rich countries had been given a vaccine dose, but only one in around 500 in low-income countries had received a dose.

It has become increasingly clear that unless governments take urgent action, the global supply of vaccines won’t be adequate to meet demand for a long time to come. COVAX, the global program for equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, has so far been able to deliver only 54 million of the two billion vaccine doses it planned to distribute by the end of 2021.

Read more: The best hope for fairly distributing COVID-19 vaccines globally is at risk of failing. Here’s how to save it

Why is the US about-face so significant?

Historically, the US has been the world’s staunchest advocate for intellectual property rights. It has demanded its trading partners provide high levels of protection for IP in exchange for access to US markets, and has named and shamed countries it sees as providing insufficient IP protection, singling them out for trade sanctions.

The change in the US position signals how clearly the success of every country in fighting the pandemic depends on vaccinating the whole world. The risk of variants emerging in areas of uncontrolled transmission means no country can gain control of the situation just by vaccinating its own population.

The US move will give confidence to other countries to support the waiver and will isolate any countries that continue to oppose it.

Does the US support for the waiver go far enough?

The US has agreed to support a waiver only for vaccines. This is short-sighted. COVID-19 treatments could become a more important part of the medical toolkit for fighting the pandemic further down the track — as treatments called “antiretrovirals” have proved crucial to reigning in the spread of HIV. And many countries are lacking sufficient diagnostic tests, which are critical for getting outbreaks under control.

The waiver also isn’t enough on its own: it’s necessary but not sufficient. Governments will need to incentivise pharmaceutical companies — or if they continue to drag their feet, force them — to share their knowledge of manufacturing processes and their technology through initiatives like the WHO Technology Access Pool.

And governments will need to invest in building production capacity in low- and middle-income countries and find solutions to problems like shortages of raw ingredients, rather than relying on the market to solve these structural problems.

What needs to happen next?

Given the consensus-based decision-making process at the WTO, the TRIPS waiver will still need to win the support of the remaining countries standing in the way.

Gaining the EU’s support will probably be the most difficult battle. The EU, where a large proportion of the world’s pharmaceutical companies are headquartered, has so far emphasised donations of vaccines as the way out of the pandemic. But European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has at least signalled the EU’s willingness to discuss the US proposal.

Once consensus is reached, it will be important for the negotiations to be transparent, with draft texts shared publicly, as the benefits that flow from the waiver will rely on the detail of its wording.

Negotiations will also need to progress at speed. There have been millions of deaths from COVID-19 since the proposal was first tabled six months ago. The world can’t afford another long wait.

– ref. US support for waiving COVID vaccine intellectual property is a huge step. Australia must follow – https://theconversation.com/us-support-for-waiving-covid-vaccine-intellectual-property-is-a-huge-step-australia-must-follow-160443

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

Michelle Grattan discusses the week in politics with University of Canberra Associate Professor Caroline Fisher.

This week the pair discuss India’s second coronavirus wave – and the Australian citizens stranded there. Also discussed is the defence review into the 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin by Chinese company Landbridge, and how it will be viewed in light of the Foreign Relations Act, recently used to tear up the “Belt and Road” agreement between the Victoria and Chinese governments. Lastly, Michelle provides insight into what we can expect from next week’s budget.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the Port of Darwin, India’s second wave, and next week’s budget – https://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-the-port-of-darwin-indias-second-wave-and-next-weeks-budget-160533

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Oliver Griffith, Lecturer, Macquarie University

With Mother’s Day around the corner, it’s a good opportunity to ask what being a mother looks like across the animal kingdom. Most of us have a solid concept of human motherhood, but in nature maternal care comes in many forms.

Let’s take a closer look at the diversity of ways animals provide care, to give young the best chance of success.

The power of the placenta

For many species, life begins in the womb. One of the most significant ways mothers support their young before birth is via a placenta, the temporary organ that grows inside the uterus to support a fetus. Placentas not only act as the interface between mother and baby, but can provide all fetal nutrition, allow for exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide with the mother, and even remove the fetus’s waste.

Read more: Using the placenta to understand how complex organs evolve

While our close relatives (eutherian or placental mammals) are known for having a placenta, we are not unique in having one. In fact, the placenta has evolved more than 100 times independently in the animal kingdom!

Other placental species include some reptiles such as the blue-tongued lizard, and many sharks including the Australian sharpnose. Even marsupials have a placenta, although it typically only supports young for a few days.

Marsupial mothers

Outside the womb, the queens of maternal care are marsupials such as kangaroos, koalas and Tasmanian devils. Marsupial mothers provide food and protection from predators through a prolonged period of lactation inside the pouch.

In marsupials, pregnancy is relatively short but young spend a long time in the pouch afterwards. For example, tammar wallabies’ pregnancy can be as short as four weeks, but mothers can provide milk to their young in the pouch for almost a year. During this time the babies increase in weight 2,000-fold. In comparison, human infants increase in weight threefold during their first year of life.

Egg-layers

In contrast to animals that develop a placenta, egg-laying animals typically lay nutrient-rich eggs to support development. Parents of some species consider their job done after the eggs are laid, but others continue to care for their young by protecting the eggs and providing food once the babies hatch.

Some egg-laying sharks continue to provide care after birth. Port Jackson sharks carry their eggs in their mouths until they find a protected rock crevice to hide them in.

In birds, mothers provide warmth and protection while incubating their eggs. In some bird species such as hummingbirds, only the mother provides care after birth. However, in other cases, such as penguins, it’s a team effort with mothers and fathers providing food and protection to their offspring.

For some, it takes a village

For some animals, motherhood extends beyond looking after your own children. Like humans, orcas (killer whales) forgo the potential to reproduce later in life by going through menopause.

Menopause may prevent them from raising any more children, but it allows them to divert their efforts to raising the next generation by looking after their grandchildren.

Many animals need even more support, so some species form societies where the whole community will care for the young, rather than just the parents. Meerkats live in groups of up to 30 individuals where parental duties are shared.

Younger females will “babysit” the pups while the rest of the mob forage for food, sometimes having to put their own lives in danger to protect the younger members of the group.

Within elephant herds, the mothers provide milk for their babies but other members of the herd (known as doulas, they can be either male or female) provide encouragement and physical support to both the mother and the growing calves. This same behaviour is seen in dolphins, as well as in several primates including chimpanzees and gorillas.

In a few species, it is the father that provides the most care for offspring. For example, seahorses exhibit male pregnancy, providing nutrition and protection from predators while inside his pouch. For a seahorse mother, her care responsibilities end once she has deposited her eggs into the male’s pouch.

If we can learn anything from the animal kingdom, it’s that motherhood comes in many forms.

– ref. From baby blue-tongues to elephant doulas: motherhood across the animal kingdom – https://theconversation.com/from-baby-blue-tongues-to-elephant-doulas-motherhood-across-the-animal-kingdom-160258

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Taylor, Early Career Research Leader, Emerging Viruses, Inflammation and Therapeutics Group, Menzies Health Institute Queensland, Griffith University

A COVID-19 vaccine from French company Valneva has yet to complete clinical trials. But it has caught the eye of governments in the UK, Europe and Australia.

One of the vaccine’s main selling points is its apparent ability to mount a more general immune response against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, rather than rely on the spike protein to do this.

This means the vaccine is more likely to be effective against the type of virus variants we’ve already seen emerging, and may emerge in the future. Some reports describe it as “variant proof”.

The hope is vaccines using this technology would be able to provide protection for longer, rather than keep being reformulated to get ahead of these new variants.

How does it work?

Valneva’s vaccine, called VLA2001, is based on tried and tested vaccine technology. It’s the technology used in the vaccine against poliovirus and in some types of flu vaccines. And the company already has a commercially available Japanese encephalitis vaccine based on the same technology.

VLA2001 uses an inactivated version of the whole virus, which cannot replicate or cause disease.

The virus is inactivated using a chemical called beta-propiolactone or BPL. This is widely used to inactivate other viruses for vaccines. It was even used to make experimental versions of vaccines against SARS-CoV, the virus that caused SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome).

This type of inactivation is expected to preserve the structure of the viral proteins, as they would occur in nature. This means the immune system will be presented with something similar to what occurs naturally, and mount a strong immune response.

Read more: From adenoviruses to RNA: the pros and cons of different COVID vaccine technologies

After being inactivated, the vaccine would be highly purified. Then, an adjuvant (an immune stimulant) is added to induce a strong immune response.

VLA2001 isn’t the first inactivated vaccine against COVID-19. Leading COVID-19 inactivated vaccines, such as those developed by Sinopharm and Bharat Biotech, have been approved for use in China and received emergency approval in other countries, including India.

However, VLA2001 is the only COVID-19 vaccine candidate using whole inactivated virus in clinical trials in the UK and in mainland Europe.

What are the benefits we know so far?

This approach to vaccine development presents the immune system with all of the structural components of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, not just the spike protein, as many other COVID-19 vaccines do.

So Valneva’s vaccine is thought to produce a more broadly protective immune response. That is, antibodies and cells of the immune system are able to recognise and neutralise more pieces of the virus than just the spike protein.

As a result, Valneva’s vaccine could be more effective at tackling emerging COVID-19 virus variants and, if approved, play a useful role as a booster vaccine.

Valneva’s vaccine can be stored at standard cold-chain conditions (2-8℃) and is expected to be given as two shots.

Read more: UK, South African, Brazilian: a virologist explains each COVID variant and what they mean for the pandemic

How about results from clinical trials?

According to the company, no safety concerns or serious adverse events were associated with VLA2001 in early-stage clinical trials.

VLA2001 was given as a low, medium or high dose in these trials with all participants in the high-dose group generating antibodies to the virus spike protein.

One measure of immune response in the high-dose group after completing the two doses indicated antibody levels were, after two weeks, at least as high as those seen in patients naturally infected with SARS-CoV-2.

Interestingly, VLA2001 induced immune responses against a number of virus proteins (including the spike protein) across all participants, an encouraging sign the vaccine can provide broad protection against COVID-19.

The vaccine has since advanced to phase 3 clinical trials in the UK. The trial, which started in April 2021, will compare its safety and efficacy with the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The phase 3 trial is expected to be completed by the northern hemisphere’s autumn this year. And if successful, would be submitted for regulatory approval after that.

Read more: A single vaccine to beat all coronaviruses sounds impossible. But scientists are already working on one

Who’s interested?

Despite phase 3 clinical trials only just starting, the UK government has pre-ordered more than 100 million doses of the vaccine from Valneva, with the option of buying more down the track. If trials prove successful and pass regulatory approval, this means the vaccine could be used as a booster in time for this year’s northern hemisphere’s winter.

Australia has confirmed it’s also in talks with Valeneva about importing the vaccine. Some countries in Europe are also reportedly keen to strike a deal.

As new cases of COVID-19 increase globally, we’ll continue to see new viral variants emerge that threaten to escape the protection existing vaccines offer.

Already, we are seeing vaccines from companies such as Moderna and Novavax begin to reformulate their spike protein-based vaccines to get ahead of emerging variants.

So Valneva’s vaccine, with the potential to elicit a more broadly protective immune response, may prove to be a useful tool to combat the rise of the virus and its mutations. However, whether the vaccine is really “variant proof” or merely less affected by emerging variants remains to be seen.

– ref. What’s the Valneva COVID-19 vaccine, the French shot that’s supposed to be ‘variant proof’? – https://theconversation.com/whats-the-valneva-covid-19-vaccine-the-french-shot-thats-supposed-to-be-variant-proof-160345

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Laurenceson, Director and Professor, Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI), University of Technology Sydney

After Australia’s foreign minister Marise Payne cancelled the Victorian state government’s memorandum of understanding to participate in China’s “Belt and Road” global infrastructure initiative a fortnight ago, she said she didn’t expect retaliation from Beijing.

That was always a hopeful message for a domestic audience.

Yesterday the Chinese government “indefinitely suspended all activities” with Australia under a framework called the China-Australia Strategic Economic Dialogue. China’s foreign ministry also warned Australia “not to walk further on the wrong path”.

The Chinese embassy had warned Payne’s “unreasonable and provocative” decision was “bound to bring further damage to bilateral relations”. It was right.

Why would China let Australia off the hook? It hasn’t shied away from retaliating against actions by the United States. Nor from punishing Australia by restricting imports of barley, beef, lobsters, wine and wood (though not iron ore).

If this is the full extent of the retaliation, though, the feeling in Canberra will be one of relief. The annual dialogue has been on ice since 2017. So this suspension doesn’t change that much.

It is, however, an important symbolic action. It will further weaken important connections between bureaucrats. It sends a strong diplomatic signal that China is prepared to escalate.

Origins of the strategic economic dialogue

The first China-Australia Strategic Economic Dialogue was in June 2014. It involved talks between Australia’s treasurer and trade minister and the chairman of China’s peak economic development and planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission.

Holding these annual talks was part of a package of closer relations the Gillard government secured with the Chinese government in 2013. That package also included an annual meeting between the two nations’ respective prime ministers – something China formally had only with Britain, Germany, Russia and the European Union.

Read more: An all-out trade war with China would cost Australia 6% of GDP

By the time of the first dialogue (in Beijing) Tony Abbott was prime minister. Still, the talks were successful enough for Australia and China to agree in November 2014 to call their relationship a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership”.

In June 2015 the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA) was finally signed after more than a decade of negotiations. In December 2015 Australia became a founding member of the China-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, committing US$738 million in capital to be the sixth-largest shareholder.

But by mid-2016 the bilateral political relationship was going downhill. The last strategic economic dialogue was in September 2017.

This is why China’s announcement yesterday has been described an “act of pure symbolism”, and even a sign China has “run out of ammunition” after its barrage of trade disruptions over the past year.

But it would also be a mistake to discount the importance of the symbolism.

Symbolism matters

In formally suspending the dialogue, Beijing has signalled its preparedness to suspend talks not just between politicians but also the bureaucrats who do the vast bulk of the work that makes bilateral relationships meaningful. This is why China’s state media has emphasised that suspension includes all activities between the National Development and Reform Commission and “relevant Australian ministries”.

To be clear, Australia’s diplomatic officials aren’t being prevented from seeing their Chinese counterparts, and bureacratic links have been strained since 2017. But the Treasury representative housed at the Australian embassy may now find meetings even harder to secure, if not impossible.

As Deakin University’s Chengxin Pan notes, “symbolism about something negative matters greatly in international relations”.

Symbolism, after all, was what motivated the Australian government to tear up Victoria’s Belt and Road Initiative agreement with China.

The deal was not legally binding and didn’t commit the Victorian government to anything. But the federal government wanted to send a message: it would do this and not be deterred by the threat of Chinese retaliation. It was a signal to Beijing that Canberra was not for turning.

Read more: Why scrap Victoria’s ‘meaningless’ Belt and Road deal? Because it sends a powerful message to Beijing

Beijing has now sent a message in return: Canberra shouldn’t expect to get off scot-free.

China might not suspend its demand for Australian iron ore and natural gas. But it could further disrupt imports such as dairy products, or flows of students and tourists as borders reopen – a threat made by ambassador Cheng Jingye a year ago. Such messages from government officials also send strong cues influencing Chinese companies and consumers.

Nor is the “nuclear option” – killing ChAFTA – off the table.

Another symbolic move – for example, a joint leaders’ statement reaffirming the importance of the comprehensive partnership – may be the the best way to turn things around.

But with both sides having spent the past year doubling down and hardening positions, that prospect seems remote.

– ref. China retaliates: suspending its Strategic Economic Dialogue with Australia is symbolic, but still a big deal – https://theconversation.com/china-retaliates-suspending-its-strategic-economic-dialogue-with-australia-is-symbolic-but-still-a-big-deal-160452

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martien Lubberink, Associate Professor of Economics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

Set against the backdrop of an economy healing from 2020’s annus horribilis, this week’s Financial Stability Report (FSR) from the Reserve Bank (RBNZ) was cautiously reassuring: the country’s financial system is sound, though vulnerabilities remain.

Banks have managed to increase their capital buffers, allowing them to better withstand losses on loans and mortgages, which has protected the financial system from the pandemic’s economic fallout. With profits stabilising, the outlook for New Zealand’s banks is bound to improve further.

On the other hand, the report expresses concern about increasing house prices and the strong growth of mortgage lending. Specifically, the RBNZ worries about lending to financially vulnerable first-time buyers and highly indebted borrowers.

RBNZ Deputy Governor Geoff Bascand said “risks are building up” and didn’t rule out a sharp correction in the housing market. Seemingly setting the stage for more initiatives to tame a hot housing market, he said “further resilience is needed”.

So, the FSR is a little two-faced. By comparing the present to the immediate past, it creates the impression all is well because important indicators of bank health have improved.

But the report is much less certain about the future. With the words “vulnerability” and “vulnerabilities” mentioned about 20 times in its 60 pages, the reader can be forgiven for thinking New Zealand’s financial system maybe isn’t that sound at all.

Speculation and confusion

The financial press reflects these concerns. One commentator recently warned about the dangers of extended credit growth in the hot housing market and called for lending restrictions.

Another feared the “amount of money being pumped purely into property, not any other assets, comes with huge financial stability risks”.

The trouble is, without proper empirical evidence, these worries are speculative at best, and certainly confusing. Unsupported claims about vulnerability in the banking system also enable officials to experiment with policies that haven’t proved their effectiveness.

A case in point is the proposed introduction of a debt-to-income tool (DTI), which would complement the current loan-to-value restrictions. According to the RBNZ, this would be the best option for supporting financial stability and sustainable house prices over the medium term.

Unfortunately, at the FSR press conference the RBNZ couldn’t clearly explain details of the DTI, nor could it define the concept of sustainable house prices over the medium term.

Politicians may respond to the confusion by promoting seemingly popular policies, but which might not be in the long-term public interest. For instance, the Green Party has called for rent controls, despite ample evidence from economists they’re not necessarily effective.

Let’s see the stress test results

Which brings us to the importance of stress-testing banks — more importantly, publishing individual bank stress test results, rather than the aggregated and anonymised data the RBNZ traditionally presents.

Such data are not helpful for investors and depositors because this approach hides weak banks that, if they were to fail, could put the financial system as a whole at risk.

Before the Global Financial Crisis, it was standard practice to keep stress test results confidential. However, the US Federal Reserve in 2009 took the then highly unusual step of publicly reporting its stress test findings.

It did this because it believed the disclosure would restore confidence in US banks at a time of great uncertainty. And it worked. Not long after the results were published, banks sprang into action and increased their capital buffers without the need for the government to step in.

Without doubt, the 2009 US stress test contributed to the recovery of the American financial system.

Read more: Without the right financial strategies, NZ’s climate change efforts will remain unfinished business

The European Banking Authority (EBA) learned about stress testing the hard way. It too started testing banks from 2009 on, but initially published only anonymised results.

Unfortunately, shortly after the publication of the results, two Irish banks failed, despite being given a clean bill of health. In 2011, Belgian bank Dexia failed after a good test result.

The EBA responded vigorously, going all out to improve stress test transparency. Since 2011 it has published all relevant data on stress testing: scenarios, time lines and individual bank results. This was as much to restore confidence in the EBA itself as to inform investors and depositors about the resilience of the European banking system.

Transparency is good for everyone

Two important lessons can be learned from the US and European experiences.

First, the publication of individual stress test results allows investors and depositors to see for themselves how resilient the banking system is. It nips unfounded speculation in the bud. This is important because, at the moment, the RBNZ and financial press feed speculative narratives about vulnerabilities in the New Zealand financial system.

Read more: Hostage to fortune: why Westpac could struggle to find the right buyer for its NZ subsidiary

Second, it contributes to the credibility of the RBNZ as a banking supervisor, as well as as to the quality of the stress test. Interested parties will comment on what is published, and this will help improve the stress test, which benefits us all.

As a bank supervisor that relies very much on market discipline and transparency, the RBNZ should consider expediting the publication of updated individual bank stress test results. It is clearly in the public interest, and it would end unfounded speculation about the vulnerability of New Zealand’s banking system.

– ref. Why now would be a good time for the Reserve Bank of New Zealand to publish stress test results for individual banks – https://theconversation.com/why-now-would-be-a-good-time-for-the-reserve-bank-of-new-zealand-to-publish-stress-test-results-for-individual-banks-160249

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martien Lubberink, Associate Professor of Economics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

Set against the backdrop of an economy healing from 2020’s annus horribilis, this week’s Financial Stability Report (FSR) from the Reserve Bank (RBNZ) was cautiously reassuring: the country’s financial system is sound, though vulnerabilities remain.

Banks have managed to increase their capital buffers, allowing them to better withstand losses on loans and mortgages, which has protected the financial system from the pandemic’s economic fallout. With profits stabilising, the outlook for New Zealand’s banks is bound to improve further.

On the other hand, the report expresses concern about increasing house prices and the strong growth of mortgage lending. Specifically, the RBNZ worries about lending to financially vulnerable first-time buyers and highly indebted borrowers.

RBNZ Deputy Governor Geoff Bascand said “risks are building up” and didn’t rule out a sharp correction in the housing market. Seemingly setting the stage for more initiatives to tame a hot housing market, he said “further resilience is needed”.

So, the FSR is a little two-faced. By comparing the present to the immediate past, it creates the impression all is well because important indicators of bank health have improved.

But the report is much less certain about the future. With the words “vulnerability” and “vulnerabilities” mentioned about 20 times in its 60 pages, the reader can be forgiven for thinking New Zealand’s financial system maybe isn’t that sound at all.

Speculation and confusion

The financial press reflects these concerns. One commentator recently warned about the dangers of extended credit growth in the hot housing market and called for lending restrictions.

Another feared the “amount of money being pumped purely into property, not any other assets, comes with huge financial stability risks”.

The trouble is, without proper empirical evidence, these worries are speculative at best, and certainly confusing. Unsupported claims about vulnerability in the banking system also enable officials to experiment with policies that haven’t proved their effectiveness.

A case in point is the proposed introduction of a debt-to-income tool (DTI), which would complement the current loan-to-value restrictions. According to the RBNZ, this would be the best option for supporting financial stability and sustainable house prices over the medium term.

Unfortunately, at the FSR press conference the RBNZ couldn’t clearly explain details of the DTI, nor could it define the concept of sustainable house prices over the medium term.

Politicians may respond to the confusion by promoting seemingly popular policies, but which might not be in the long-term public interest. For instance, the Green Party has called for rent controls, despite ample evidence from economists they’re not necessarily effective.

Let’s see the stress test results

Which brings us to the importance of stress-testing banks — more importantly, publishing individual bank stress test results, rather than the aggregated and anonymised data the RBNZ traditionally presents.

Such data are not helpful for investors and depositors because this approach hides weak banks that, if they were to fail, could put the financial system as a whole at risk.

Before the Global Financial Crisis, it was standard practice to keep stress test results confidential. However, the US Federal Reserve in 2009 took the then highly unusual step of publicly reporting its stress test findings.

It did this because it believed the disclosure would restore confidence in US banks at a time of great uncertainty. And it worked. Not long after the results were published, banks sprang into action and increased their capital buffers without the need for the government to step in.

Without doubt, the 2009 US stress test contributed to the recovery of the American financial system.

Read more: Without the right financial strategies, NZ’s climate change efforts will remain unfinished business

The European Banking Authority (EBA) learned about stress testing the hard way. It too started testing banks from 2009 on, but initially published only anonymised results.

Unfortunately, shortly after the publication of the results, two Irish banks failed, despite being given a clean bill of health. In 2011, Belgian bank Dexia failed after a good test result.

The EBA responded vigorously, going all out to improve stress test transparency. Since 2011 it has published all relevant data on stress testing: scenarios, time lines and individual bank results. This was as much to restore confidence in the EBA itself as to inform investors and depositors about the resilience of the European banking system.

Transparency is good for everyone

Two important lessons can be learned from the US and European experiences.

First, the publication of individual stress test results allows investors and depositors to see for themselves how resilient the banking system is. It nips unfounded speculation in the bud. This is important because, at the moment, the RBNZ and financial press feed speculative narratives about vulnerabilities in the New Zealand financial system.

Read more: Hostage to fortune: why Westpac could struggle to find the right buyer for its NZ subsidiary

Second, it contributes to the credibility of the RBNZ as a banking supervisor, as well as as to the quality of the stress test. Interested parties will comment on what is published, and this will help improve the stress test, which benefits us all.

As a bank supervisor that relies very much on market discipline and transparency, the RBNZ should consider expediting the publication of updated individual bank stress test results. It is clearly in the public interest, and it would end unfounded speculation about the vulnerability of New Zealand’s banking system.

– ref. Why now would be a good time for the Reserve Bank to publish stress test results for individual banks – https://theconversation.com/why-now-would-be-a-good-time-for-the-reserve-bank-to-publish-stress-test-results-for-individual-banks-160249

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Hocking, Curator of Vertebrate Zoology and Palaeontology, Monash University

Few fish can outswim a seal. Seals fly through the waves, predators in their natural element. But, unlike fish, seals are air-breathing mammals whose ancestors only returned to the water from a life on land some 30 million years ago.

On entering the water, seals had to adapt both their bodies and behaviour to become efficient underwater swimmers. Like penguins and sea turtles, they use streamlined limbs to propel themselves through the water.

Yet, there is a mystery here. Even though all seals and sea lions are descended from a common ancestor, they use two radically different modes of propulsion: true seals (phocids) swim with their feet; fur seals and sea lions (otariids) rely on their wing-like forelimbs.

How did these two related groups come up with such different swimming styles? Did they start from a common base, but then adapt to different circumstances? Or do we have it all wrong, and phocids and otariids have different ancestors after all?

To find out, we partnered with a team of engineers to combine cutting-edge computer simulations with anatomical and live animal observations. This multi-angled study, published today in Current Biology, allowed us to determine how, and how effectively, seals use their forelimbs during swimming.

Engineering a seal

Evolutionary biology and engineering might seem like strange bedfellows. Yet, ever since Leonardo Da Vinci, humans have sought to understand and adapt nature’s “designs”, giving rise to a field of engineering known today as biomimetics.

Engineering allows biologists to look beyond the mere shape of an animal, and instead ask how that shape is adapted to function within the physical limits set by its environment.

Applying this approach our question, we initially created 3D computer models of forelimb flippers representing each of the main seal families: from the bear-like paws of phocids (such as grey seals) to the wing-like flippers of fur seals and sea lions.

Next, we used computer-simulated fluid dynamics to model how water flows around the different flipper shapes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found the wing-like flippers of fur seals and sea lions produce little drag and considerable lift. The opposite is true of the clawed paws of true seals, which consequently make fairly poor tools for swimming.

Repeated evolution of forelimb flippers

So far, our results seem to confirm the fundamental difference between phocids and otariids. But there’s a twist to the story: streamlined fore-flippers are not unique to otariids.

Our results show that some rear-propelled Antarctic true seals independently evolved streamlined fore-flippers as well. This is taken to the extreme in leopard seals, whose flippers are almost indistinguishable from those of otariids. Out at sea, their massive forelimbs likely give them the speed and agility needed to pursue evasive prey such as penguins.

Read more: Scientists thought these seals evolved in the north. 3-million-year-old fossils from New Zealand suggest otherwise

The independent appearance of flippers within southern true seals provides a clue to how forelimb swimming may have evolved in the first place.

Early seals probably swam with their feet and, like their terrestrial ancestors and northern true seals today, used their clawed forepaws to catch and eat large prey.

Over time, otariids and southern true seals independently began to chase faster, more agile prey. This would have required their forelimbs to assume a more active role during swimming, which manifested itself in greater streamlining, reduced claws and — in otariids — a complete switch from foot to flipper-based propulsion.

Read more: Sharp claws helped ancient seals conquer the oceans

So there you have it: perhaps seals use different swimming styles not because of separate evolutionary origins, but because they adapted to different environments. And it seems they did so more than once!

This theory makes a lot of sense in light of how seals behave and look today. Its litmus test likely lies elsewhere, however: buried beneath rocks, rather than frolicking beneath the waves. Only fossils can tell us what early seals were really like and, if our idea is correct, we should ultimately find some that match it. Only time will tell.

– ref. Swim like a sea lion, splash like a seal: how evolution engineered nature’s underwater acrobats – https://theconversation.com/swim-like-a-sea-lion-splash-like-a-seal-how-evolution-engineered-natures-underwater-acrobats-160090

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carla Pascoe Leahy, Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, The University of Melbourne

Mothers have often been associated with conservatism: linked to cloyingly sentimental cultural ideals or depicted as victims of patriarchal oppression.

In the 19th century, the middle-class mother was idealised as the “angel in the house”, while during the boom years after the second world war she was depicted as a devoted homemaker in her suburban castle.

During the 1970s, second-wave feminists thoroughly critiqued the relegation of women to childrearing. This left some with a lingering sense that becoming a mother was an old-fashioned or politically regressive choice.

But in fact there is a long tradition of maternal radicalism in Australia. Mothers have been out on the streets, fighting for change, as frequently as they have kept the home fires burning. This tradition still thrives in the present day – as we saw recently when thousands of women joined the March4Justice to protest against gendered violence, often accompanied by their daughters and sons.

Mothers of the “first wave” of feminism in Australia were staunch advocates for social change.

The “woman movement” emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, led by feminists such as Louisa Lawson and Rose Scott. Activists drew on their status as mothers as the basis for their progressive political demands to grant married women rights over property, custody and inheritance, as well as voting rights.

Lawson argued:

If we are responsible for our children, give us the power and sacredness of the ballot, and we will lift ourselves and our brothers to a higher civilisation.

The effectiveness of these maternal activists was proven in 1894 when South Australia became the first electorate in the world to give women the vote.

Further evidence of the political power of first-wave feminists came in 1912, when the Commonwealth government approved the Maternity Allowance. This was radical in using government funds to provide state support to mothers as citizens, undercutting the authority of their husbands.

Read more: Mothers explain how they navigated work and childcare, from the 1970s to today

In the 1960s and 1970s, while women’s liberation movement activists such as Merle Thornton, Marcia Langton and Zelda D’Aprano were demanding equal rights for women, middle-class mothers around Australia were quietly rebelling against the medicalisation of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding.

The Nursing Mothers Association of Australia (later the Australian Breastfeeding Association) adopted guerrilla-like tactics, spreading through local cells in suburban kitchens around the country. Led by women like Mary Paton, the NMAA formed volunteer-based groups in local areas where veteran mums would offer cake, comfort and counsel to new mothers. Almost single-handedly, the NMAA reversed declining breastfeeding rates.

Meanwhile, the so-called natural childbirth movement sought to counteract the medicalisation of birth. Through groups like the Childbirth Education Association, reformers fought to grant women more information and choice about childbirth. They also worked to make the experience less frightening by creating more welcoming birthing spaces and allowing support people to attend labour. These are all changes we now take for granted.

Their legacy continues today through groups like Birth for Humankind, which provides childbirth support for disadvantaged women and supports Birthing on Country for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women.

Maternal protest continues in the 21st century. Amid the swelling ranks of environmental groups like Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Australian Parents for Climate Action (AP4CA), mothers and grandmothers (as well as fathers and grandfathers) are particularly prominent. Like the maternal activists who came before them, these women base their political claims in their care relationships with children.

One XR member and grandmother explains,

I don’t have a choice. If you see your loved ones coming to harm you protect them.

AP4CA member Corinne pleaded:

For this year’s Mother’s Day […] my wish is for the Australian government to take genuine action on climate change so that we, Mothers across Australia, can continue to raise our children, knowing that they will have a future worth living for.

Knitting Nannas Against Gas was founded in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales and has since spread around the world. Their “Nannafesto” explains that they base their opposition to the exploration and mining of coal seam gas and other non-renewable energy sources in their position as grandmothers, and their desire to “save the land, air and water for the kiddies”.

Mothers have a long history of political activism not just in Australia, but around the world. The caring for children that mothers perform is of course of the utmost significance. But to assume that mothers are essentially apathetic, passive or uninterested in issues beyond the home is to drastically underestimate their potential.

Read more: Brazen Hussies: a new film captures the heady, turbulent power of Australia’s women’s liberation movement

Not only are mothers politically active, but their causes are diverse, from economic and political rights, to childbearing and reproductive reforms, to environmental concerns.

Perhaps it’s time we viewed mothers as naturally politically inclined, as philosopher Sara Ruddick argues, and inherently future-oriented.

After all, anything that threatens the present and future worlds their children will inhabit matters deeply to them.

– ref. Looking for the perfect Mother’s Day gift? Why not smash the patriarchy – https://theconversation.com/looking-for-the-perfect-mothers-day-gift-why-not-smash-the-patriarchy-159335

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kristy Hess, Associate Professor (Communication), Deakin University

Newspaper readers in rural and regional Australia are five times more likely to go directly to their local newspaper website than Google or Facebook for local information, and almost 10 times as likely to go to their local news website over a council website for news and information.

Nearly two-thirds of local newspaper readers also indicate policies affecting the future of rural and regional media would influence the way they vote at the next federal election.

These are some of the key findings of a national survey of almost 4,200 Australian country newspaper readers we recently conducted as part of a project to drive greater innovation in the rural and regional media landscape.

Many small newspapers in Australia faced closure after their advertising budgets shrunk during the global pandemic, while others moved to digital-only editions to cut costs.

In our survey — the largest conducted of country press audiences in Australia — we found local newspapers still play a vital role in providing information to residents in these communities, even with the proliferation of news available on Facebook and Google.

This is a significant finding, given how much focus has been placed on the role of the tech giants as a central point for digital news and information.

The federal government recently implemented a mandatory news media bargaining code that forces tech companies like Facebook and Google to pay news producers for content that appears on their platforms.

Last week, the ACCC granted interim approval for Country Press Australia to negotiate with the tech giants on behalf of its 160 newspapers.

This funding is desperately needed to help support publishers of credible, reliable local news who are losing the advertising dollar to social media platforms — but for some, it still may not be enough.

Read more: As Facebook ups the ante on news, regional and elderly Australians will be hardest hit

Resistance to local papers going online only

Our survey also reveals just how passionate people are about local newspapers in rural and regional Australia — that is, the print version. In fact, the majority of country press audiences (71%) prefer to read their local paper in print than online.

Many respondents expressed resistance to their newspaper being made available in digital format only. They offered comments such as:

There is always room for improvement, but if this newspaper went digital, I would not be interested.

And this from another:

The day it goes digital only will be the day I stop reading it.

Our survey also found that respondents overwhelmingly (86%) view a printed copy of their newspaper as an essential service for their community.

This accords with our previous research that has advocated for the federal government to recognise the vital importance of the printed paper to regional communities.

While the average age of our survey respondents was 60-61, this demographic will continue to represent a large portion of local news readership for many years.

This means local news organisations need strategies to aid the transition for all audiences into digital formats and/or advocate for the survival of the printed product in the interests of social connection and democracy.

Locals want a say in the future of their papers

Our survey also found 94% of respondents want a much bigger say about government policies and decisions affecting the future of local newspapers. This finding sends a message to policymakers to rethink their strategies for engaging the public in ideas to support the future of local media.

When it comes to solutions for struggling rural and regional media outlets, our survey found:

• audiences believe local newspapers should be collaboratively funded by a range of relevant stakeholders (media companies, advertisers, subscribers, social media, government and philanthropic organisations) to ensure their future

• while some media lobbyists and academics — both in Australia and overseas — have called for newspaper subscriptions to be made tax deductible, 71% of respondents are not in favour of such initiatives

• respondents also overwhelmingly said any additional government funding for local news should be used to employ more local journalists (71%) over increasing digital connectivity (13%) and digital innovation products (17%).

Read more: Local news sources are closing across Australia. We are tracking the devastation (and some reasons for hope)

The voices of loyal readers must be heard

Our findings also reaffirm that local newspaper audiences are loyal and develop life-long connections with newspapers wherever they live and work. As an 88-year-old man from Victoria said,

I have always looked forward to the local paper, and whilst the format is now different, it is still a ‘must’ to catch up on whatever is happening in my town.

While there have been Senate inquiries into the future of public interest journalism, media diversity and the role of the ABC in regional and rural areas, the public submissions to these important policy discussions are lacking the voices of local newspaper readers like our respondents.

Read more: Local newspapers are an ‘essential service’. They deserve a government rescue package, too

This is not because people in the bush don’t care, but because such formal mechanisms are arguably not the best way to engage with and listen to media audiences beyond the major cities.

What is clear from our research is local independent newspapers really matter to their audiences, and many loyal readers are ready to defend them at the ballot box.

– ref. Print isn’t dead: major survey reveals local newspapers vastly preferred over Google among country news consumers – https://theconversation.com/print-isnt-dead-major-survey-reveals-local-newspapers-vastly-preferred-over-google-among-country-news-consumers-160353

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachael Murrihy, Director, The Kidman Centre, Faculty of Science, University of Technology Sydney

Two female Australian comedians recently revealed they’ve been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

In an interview before her shows at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Fiona O’Loughlin alluded to lifelong challenges including disorganisation and inability to sustain attention.

O’Loughlin, 57, described her diagnosis as a “seismic shift” in her life, and said medication has helped her immensely. But her struggle with focus will be a story familiar to many girls with ADHD.

And in an article published this week, Em Rusciano also revealed she’s been diagnosed with ADHD. For Rusciano, too, treatment has been transformative. The 42-year-old wrote on Facebook:

I don’t feel the world coming at me at 100 all the time anymore. The constant sensory overload has stopped. I don’t feel overwhelmed by life quite as much.

While some of us might perceive ADHD as a condition that affects males (particularly boys), it affects girls and women too. And it’s important to understand that the way it presents in girls can be quite different to the way it manifests itself in boys.

What is ADHD?

Best understood as a persistent, and sometimes lifelong, neurodevelopmental disorder, ADHD includes problems with sustaining attention, resisting distraction, and moderating activity levels to suit the environment (for example, sitting in a classroom).

Young people with ADHD vary considerably in their behaviours. A child might exhibit symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity (for example, fidgeting and squirming, or frequently leaving their seat in class), or inattention (careless mistakes, trouble focusing in class, difficulty keeping their belongings in order), or more commonly, both. Hyperfocus (an intense fixation on one activity) can also be a symptom.

Of course, these behaviours are common in childhood to varying degrees. Diagnosis is based on whether symptoms are excessive for the child’s age, developmental level, and cultural background (parents across different cultures may differ in whether they see a child’s behaviour as hyperactive or normal).

A diagnosis is only made if there’s clear evidence that the symptoms impair functioning across several life domains such as at school, at home and with friends.

Read more: It’s not a crime to have ADHD

Does ADHD look different in girls?

Researchers have only recently started to unravel the expression of ADHD in girls.

The way ADHD presents in girls and boys is in many ways similar, but there are a few noteworthy differences. Most importantly, while symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity are present across genders (with some studies showing more hyperactivity in boys), symptoms of inattention, which can be easier to overlook, are seen more frequently in girls.

Further, the onset of ADHD symptoms can differ across gender. Symptoms of hyperactivity tend to present early in school life. Inattentiveness, by contrast, has a slightly later onset. So girls with ADHD can often go undetected until academic and organisational demands increase in late primary and high school.

Girls with ADHD are also at higher risk of developing depression and anxiety than boys. If depression and anxiety occur at the same time as ADHD, it can be more difficult to diagnose ADHD.

A range of possible mechanisms have been implicated in the difference in ADHD expression between genders, from hormonal changes, to cognitive differences, to social factors. But we need more research to truly understand the reasons behind the disparity.

Boys versus girls

ADHD is the most common psychological disorder among Australian youth. The second Australian Child and Adolescent Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing, published in 2015, reported 7.4% of 4-17-year-olds had ADHD over the previous 12 months.

Interestingly, more than twice as many boys have ADHD than girls. The disparity in prevalence may be a result of ADHD being historically viewed as a male disorder.

This gender difference in prevalence has prompted controversy about diagnostic criteria and brought the female expression of ADHD into sharper focus.

There’s some suggestion the current diagnostic framework, developed on male-dominated samples, is inadequate for girls and sees more boys than girls get a diagnosis. Some researchers have suggested symptom thresholds for diagnosis in girls should be modified.

Are there female expressions of hyperactivity-impulsivity (for example, internal feelings of restlessness) that could be added to the diagnostic criteria? Should there be gender-specific cut-offs for current criteria (for example, a lower threshold for hyperactivity for girls)?

Until further research is conducted, the jury is out on any changes to the current system.

Read more: Imaging study confirms differences in ADHD brains

Importantly, many parents and teachers have long-held stereotypes of an ADHD child as a disruptive and hyperactive boy with difficulties staying still and keeping on-task. This perceptual bias influences who they recognise as potentially having ADHD and refer to treatment.

Research shows even when students display equivalent levels of impairment, teachers still refer more boys than girls for ADHD treatment.

Some signs of ADHD in girls

Does your child do the following more than other children of her age?

• make careless mistakes
• daydream or appear spaced out
• fail to pay close attention to details
• have difficulty remaining focused in class, reading, homework, conversations
• doesn’t seem to listen (appears distracted)
• have difficulty organising tasks and materials
• is reluctant to engage in tasks that require mental effort (schoolwork, homework)
• often loses everyday things
• is forgetful in daily activities.

Keep an eye out for an increase in symptoms in late primary or early high school, as workload increases.

A good rule of thumb for when it’s time to seek help is when a child is starting to fail, fall behind or perform significantly below their ability either in schoolwork, friendships or family relationships.

There’s no cure for ADHD, but treatment aims to manage symptoms. Across genders, the first line of treatment for children is stimulant medication (such as Ritalin, Adderall or Concerta) and behaviour management (parent training and classroom management).

As more research on female ADHD emerges, we can consider treatment modifications specific to gender.

For many girls, ADHD is a serious and debilitating illness. Ensuring girls are identified early and accurately and that they receive evidence-based treatment is crucial.

Read more: 3 out of 4 kids with mental health disorders aren’t accessing care

– ref. ADHD affects girls too, and it can present differently to the way it does in boys. Here’s what to look out for – https://theconversation.com/adhd-affects-girls-too-and-it-can-present-differently-to-the-way-it-does-in-boys-heres-what-to-look-out-for-158635

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zoe Doubleday, ARC Future Fellow and marine biologist, University of South Australia

This article is part of the “Who would win?” series, where wildlife experts dream up hypothetical battles between predators (all in the name of science).

If you’re anything like us, you may have wondered if an octopus and a seabird would ever end up in a fight. Well they do, and it’s a YouTube wormhole that can prove quite addictive.

I mean, how do these elusive aliens of the sea — more closely related to snails than fish, birds or humans — bring down our familiar feathered friends? Let’s take a closer look.

Why would they end up in tussle?

Contrary to popular belief, octopus don’t actually seek out birds to kill them, but there are some that may be in a bad mood and the bird is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

All octopus are carnivores and like to eat things such as shellfish, crabs and fish (and, yes, even each other), but never birds. The vast majority of the time, a fight between an octopus and a bird may break out because the bird is trying to get some dinner and the octopus and is just trying to live for another day.

We know seabirds eat octopus, but they aren’t a huge part of their diet — more like a snack.

Ocean-going seabirds such as shags, petrels, penguins and albatross eat octopus more often than birds such as seagulls. But in general, seabirds prefer fish or other cephalopods like squid.

Octopus are just too tricky to eat. Most live on the seafloor, rather than float in the water. They have no bones, just a tiny vestigial shell, which enables them to hide in the tiniest crevices and cracks (unlike squid which have a backbone-like structure called a pen).

Even though octopuses are good at hiding and camouflaging, sometimes the seabirds find them and then things get interesting.

Meet the opponents

Let’s get ready to rumble! In the red corner we have the octopus with eight muscular, hyper-flexible arms. But these aren’t any normal arms, they’re each equipped with their own “brains” and hundreds of grasping suckers that can independently sense light and taste by touch.

Read more: Curious Kids: could octopuses evolve until they take over the world and travel to space?

In the blue corner we have the bird with killer vision and two sharp claws that can catch prey with incredible speed and precision. You may be noting that the bird has a sharp beak to add to its armoury — but so does the octopus.

You wouldn’t want to be bitten by the octopus, though, because it has venom. The venom probably wouldn’t be enough to kill you (unless it’s a blue ringed octopus) but man, that would hurt. One big detail is that octopus can only breath underwater and cannot leap into the air — gravity makes life hard when you have no bones.

While it’s true seabirds can only breathe air, they are masters of both land and sea. Penguins are fast and agile swimmers, and wing-propelled diving birds can plunge deep beneath the surface of the water (five metres in the case of albatrosses and 10-20m in the case of petrels). They can also hold their breath for minutes at a time. But not forever.

How might a fight play out?

The bird sees the octopus from the surface and thinks it can snag it for a snack. It dives down and, as soon as it hits the water, the octopus comes out swinging, arms whipping and pulling the bird closer with every recoil.

Hundreds of suckers grasp and hold with dexterity and strength (did you know one sucker of a giant Pacific octopus can hold up to 16 kilograms? And there’s 250 of them per arm!).

The bird is pecking and clawing at the arms, but there’s too many of them. And if an octopus loses an arm or two in a battle, they don’t mind too much, they can always regenerate them.

The bird is trying to fly or swim away and the octopus is trying to keep it under…

So, who would win?

Depending of the size of both animals the fight could go either way. A bird could encounter anything from the giant Pacific octopus (weighing in at over 100 kg) to the featherweight pygmy octopus (weighing in at less than one gram).

If the octopus is small, then the bird gets a quick and easy snack. But when the octopus is larger or the same size of the bird, that’s when fights ensue (often on YouTube).

The remains of small octopus are not uncommon in the stomach of seabirds, but larger octopus remains have also been found.

At the smaller end, paper nautilus (an unusual type of octopus with an external shell) have been found in the stomachs of little penguins. At the larger end, the Maori octopus — which grows up to a hefty 12 kg and claims the weight record for the Southern Hemisphere — has been found in the stomachs of the southern royal albatross.

So at the end of the day, the outcome depends on the size, stamina and species of both animals.

A lot of the time, the bird wins as it is designed to dive and hunt marine animals, but as YouTube shows, sometimes the octopus gets away with it.

Read more: I’ve always wondered: who would win in a fight between the Black Mamba and the Inland Taipan?

– ref. Who would win in a fight between an octopus and a seabird? Two marine biologists place their bets – https://theconversation.com/who-would-win-in-a-fight-between-an-octopus-and-a-seabird-two-marine-biologists-place-their-bets-158520

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Duffy, Lecturer, School of Business, Western Sydney University

Issues that matter to families on a daily basis, such as childcare, parental leave and flexible working arrangements, are often referred to as “women’s issues”. This focuses policy interventions solely on mothers, limiting the solutions that are possible and concealing how these issues affect dads.

As part of an ongoing research project we analysed the parental leave policies of 36 Australian public universities. We have found a number of contradictions in the way parental leave is allocated to mothers and fathers. By requiring them to nominate themselves as primary and secondary carers, the effect of this system is to perpetuate the gap between genders.

The provisions for mothers aren’t perfect, but they do offer a meaningful amount of well-paid leave for women to bond with and care for their children. Although many universities avoid using the term maternity leave, we found it has simply been replaced with “primary carer”. The terms “primary and secondary carers” appear less gendered but are effectively proxy categorisations for the traditional mother as caregiver and father as breadwinner.

These terms create a divide between mothers and fathers, ranking them in an unhelpful way. It starts families on an unequal course that pigeonholes both parents. We suggest the terms should be dropped in favour of equal parental leave policies in name and in action.

Read more: Reforming ‘dad leave’ is a baby step towards greater gender equality

Parental inequality feeds into the gender gap

In March, the Australia Institute reported the gender pay gap is a staggering 31.2%. This gap between the average earnings of men and women is higher than the often reported 13.4%, because it includes part-time employees in the calculation. Excluding part-time working women is a glaring omission, which conceals the full story of the gap between what men and women earn.

The rates of women employed part-time are high in Australia compared to the OECD average. Australian mothers bear the brunt of domestic tasks and often work part-time so they have time for pick-ups, drop-offs and extracurricular activities. This penalises women financially, leaving them with lower earnings, less superannuation and limited career progression.

We know parenthood is a substantial contributor to the gender pay gap — it’s known as the motherhood penalty.

Read more: How parenthood continues to cost women more than men

With a gender pay gap of over 30%, it makes sense that most families opt to keep the higher-paid dad in full-time employment. At present, ABS statistics show women take 93.5% of primary parental leave and men take 96.1% of secondary parental leave. But that means dads lose out on time with their kids.

If we are going to do something about gender inequality, we need to do something about parental inequality.

Read more: Gender equality at home takes a hit when children arrive

We undervalue caring

Caring is undervalued in Australia. Our government parental leave scheme is one of the least generous among OECD countries. The policy also perpetuates parental inequality.

The Australian government offers 18 weeks of paid leave to the primary caregiver and two weeks to the secondary caregiver paid at the minimum wage. The 18 weeks for Australian primary carers is equivalent to 7.7 weeks average earnings. The two weeks for secondary carers – overwhelmingly dads – is equivalent to half a week of average earnings.

One month of parental leave reserved for Australian dads paid at a meaningful rate can help to establish a more equal share of family tasks from the beginning. Best practice is 80% of earnings, with a cap. The result will be happier families overall.

Read more: Father’s days: increasing the ‘daddy quota’ in parental leave makes everyone happier

There is a fatherhood penalty too

Our research indicates universities’ default assumption is that women are the primary caregiver and dads are not active parents. For dads, they typically have to prove they are the primary caregiver by offering verification that the mum is employed full-time. No such proof is required of mums.

At some universities, even with proof, dads are entitled to less leave as primary carers than mums, or no paid leave at all. Worse still, even when the dad’s partner works for another organisation, some universities deduct the leave the partner has taken from the dad’s entitlement. This doesn’t apply to mums with a partner who works for another organisation.

We often talk about the motherhood penalty, but maybe it is time to tackle the fatherhood penalty?

Read more: Paid parental leave plan ignores economics of well-functioning families

Ticking the parental leave policy box

Some universities have been publicly acknowledged for their progressive, generous, flexible and inclusive parental leave policies for new dads. To qualify among Australia’s top 20 parental leave employers, these universities must provide at least 12 weeks’ paid leave for primary carers and two weeks for secondary carers. They must also offer flexible work practices and primary carer’s leave for at least a year after the child’s birth.

However, the devil is in the detail, which sets a low bar. It allows universities to tick the “generous parental leave policy” box, without offering families real choices about how parents spend their time.

If universities fail to offer meaningful, easy-to-access parental leave to dads, they will fail to take it up. This indirectly strengthens the academic career model that values an employee with an unbroken commitment to work.

If we want to close the gender pay gap, we need to take steps towards parental equality and eradicate the terms primary and secondary caregivers. Some businesses in the private sector have done this, making parental leave policies gender-neutral, more flexible and easier for dads to access.

Our findings suggest universities are not the progressive institutions many of us expect them to be. Instead, they reinforce traditional, conservative values that block parental equality. Universities, other employers and the Australian government need to value both mums and dads and offer equitable parental leave policies in the true sense of the term.

– ref. The fatherhood penalty: how parental leave policies perpetuate the gender gap (even in our ‘progressive’ universities) – https://theconversation.com/the-fatherhood-penalty-how-parental-leave-policies-perpetuate-the-gender-gap-even-in-our-progressive-universities-160102

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mohammed Makki, Senior Lecturer in Architecture, University of Technology Sydney

“Among all species, it is perhaps only humans who create habitats that are not fit to live in.” – Stephen Marshall

It’s a damning statement but one that can be reasonably argued to be true. We don’t have the best track record in creating lasting and sustainable habitats, especially if one considers cities built in the past century.

The next 50 years will demand a new model of urban development. For a more sustainable future in a world of climate change, 21st-century cities must be based on models of adaptation that learn from natural systems. We now have the digital modelling technology to design such cities, rather than the fixed urban form that now dominates our world.

Read more: Future cities: new challenges mean we need to reimagine the look of urban landscapes

The legacy of cities built for cars

We are witnessing firsthand the destructive impact of an urban model that dates back to the early 1900s. The automobile was seen as the future of city planning. The city itself was designed like a machine: finite, predictable, perfect and, of course, shiny!

The “ideal” or “utopian” city, put forward as a visionary model for the 20th century, changed the course of city planning. It abandoned the traditional urban fabric of the previous five millennia for a modern urban order in which the car took centre stage. Car manufacturers even invested in 20th-century city design in the continuous pursuit of Utopia.

One of the most influential architects and urban planners of the 20th century, Le Corbusier, did not shy away from the role the automobile would play in city design. He even pursued sponsorship from companies like Citroen, Michelin and Peugeot to realise his vision. “The motor must save the great city,” he wrote.

A one-size-fits-all model of repetition

The vision for this city followed similar patterns: separated pedestrians and vehicles, sprawling low-rise suburbs and scattered open spaces of inordinate sizes – sound familiar?

Most important to this model was the concept of repetition. If it works in Chicago, it will work in Chandigarh.

As the “utopian” urban movement dominated, “Utopia” turned out to be not necessarily a good thing. As early as the 1960s this had become clear through the works of critics like Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander. As Jacobs wrote:

Le Corbusier’s dream city was like a wonderful mechanical toy. But as to how the city works, it tells nothing but lies.

Read more: What might Jane Jacobs say about smart cities?

Cities throughout the world, across a range of scales and locales, exemplify this. Brasilia (Brasil), Detroit (USA), Milton Keynes (England), Norilsk (Russia) – the list goes on – were designed as modernist visions of a single, finite solution. However, this vision quickly unravelled. Overpopulation, climate change, diminishing resources, rampant commercialisation and demographic change have destabilised the urban fabric of modernist cities.

This unfortunately did not deter the continued planning and construction of this “universal city”. All too often the urban pattern was repeated blocks distributed across a grid with little adjustment to the local ecology or environment. Factor in a rapidly changing climate and exponential population growth and mobility, and these cities no longer seem utopian.

Cities unable to adapt

The problem with a city detached from its context – one that is generic, repetitive and built around vehicle traffic – is that it resists adaptation. After all, it was not designed to adapt – it is “visionary”, a fixed solution to an ever-changing problem.

Unfortunately for us, the problem has been changing at an alarming rate. The original “solution” is becoming ever more problematic.

The paradox is that repetitive urban form seems to be the quickest solution for the rapid growth of urban populations globally, unfortunately with dire impacts. Cities are a leading source of carbon emissions that have made them increasingly vulnerable to climatic events, with rising sea levels threatening coastal cities around the world. In some cases, failed cities lie completely abandoned – such as in Spain or China.

Read more: Townsville floods show cities that don’t adapt to risks face disaster

However, some cities – examples include Shibam in Yemen, Fes el Bali in Morocco or the Hutongs in Beijing – have evolved over many centuries as they adapted to changes in their environment and climate. These cities survived in the face of changing conditions. They were built on a model of continuous change.

Unfortunately, changing the built forms and spatial patterns of a city is a slow process. The evolving cities described above managed this by being able to change at a rate that matched changes in local climatic conditions. Today, the pace of global climate change makes it almost impossible for mature cities to adapt.

We need a more sustainable model of urban development.

Read more: What next after 100 Resilient Cities funding ends?

Technology’s new role in designing cities

Technological advances in computation and data analysis allow us to create digital simulations of the evolution of cities over centuries. It is now possible to understand the inherent complexity of these systems. We can then replicate the conditions that result in an adaptive city as a whole.

These computational models draw on concepts from the natural world. They learn from how species adapt to their environment and how evolution enables adaptation. The result is urban models based on variation instead of repetition.

Research in this field by the likes of Michael Weinstock, Mike Batty and many others has increased over the past decade. This work builds on the criticisms made by Jacobs and Alexander in the 1960s, but is now supported by advanced technologies and digital simulations.

The stresses on future cities demand an approach that enables them to adjust to rapid change. Up to now, we have designed a city that is geared towards permanent configurations. It’s the opposite of what is required in a world going through radical changes across multiple frontiers.

– ref. Farewell the utopian city. To cope with climate change we must learn from how nature adapts – https://theconversation.com/farewell-the-utopian-city-to-cope-with-climate-change-we-must-learn-from-how-nature-adapts-157878

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leonora Risse, Lecturer in Economics, RMIT University

Australia’s COVID recession hurt women more than men, and not only in job numbers.

With schools and childcare centres closed, many women who remained in paid work had no choice but to take on more unpaid work, effectively working double shifts.

Yet much of the government’s budget response involved high-viz vests and hard hats.

These gender differences would have been apparent to the government if it had run its policy ideas through a “gender lens” – a process that used to be built into the government’s budget decision-making.

Promises of A$1.7 billion in childcare relief in Tuesday’s budget aim to lift women’s workforce involvement, but bigger steps beyond the perfunctory Women’s Economic Security Statement are needed to bring a gender lens to policy design.

With aggregate female and male employment numbers recovering, men are showing stronger keenness to return to the office, while more women are likely to continue working from home.

This can bring benefits for the women who opt for this, but also risks re-entrenching women’s traditional role as caregivers and squeezing them out of the career opportunities that the research on unconscious bias tells us tend to advantage those who are visible in the office.

Analysing these dynamics through a gender lens is not about pitting women against men.

It’s about appreciating the ways in which men and women tend to walk different life paths, navigate towards different industries and occupations and take different roles within households and society.

It can show up the ways in which men experience greater hardship than women.

Read more: Each budget used to have a gender impact statement. We need it back, especially now

During the crisis, the Melbourne Institute found that the group that suffered the largest surge in mental health distress was working fathers with young children.

A possible reason? Men are less accustomed to juggling work and home life. The risk of a toddler zoom-bombing your video call and detonating your professional reputation, seems to provoke more anxiety among men than women. It’s an example of gender differences in workplace culture and expectations.

Most government policy decisions are presented as if they are gender-neutral.

When he was treasurer, Scott Morrison claimed that the tax system “doesn’t look at what your gender is any more than it looks at whether you’re left handed or right handed, or you barrack for the Sharks or you barrack for the Tigers”.

As prime minister, when asked whether last year’s budget left women behind, Morrison pointed to the ways that women were just like men.

“Women run small businesses, women pay tax, women hire other Australians in their businesses,” he said. “Women want to drive on safe roads. Women want to go to university.”

Programs are rarely gender-neutral

But ignoring the ways men and women participate differently is precisely what can lead policies unintentionally advantaging one gender over the other.

The tapering of family and other tax benefits when added to childcare costs means second earners can find it financially unviable to work more than three days per week.

A gender lens would tell us that it is overwhelmingly women who find themselves in this situation, facing effective marginal tax rates of around 90% on these extra days’ earnings.

It’s an example of “pink tape” that holds back female employment, in the same way that red tape holds back businesses.

A gender lens would tell us that expanding the public provision of childcare and early learning, aged care, disability care, mental health services and community care would not only create more jobs in female-dominated sectors, but also free up unpaid carers – predominantly women – to contribute to the paid workforce.

Boosting the careforce could pay for itself

The measured size of Australia’s paid economy — gross domestic product — would be at least 1.6% bigger in ten years’ time with such investment.

Economic modelling commissioned by the National Foundation for Australian Women found that investment along these lines, including investment that lifted the wages of workers in caring industries, would largely pay for itself via the tax revenue that flowed back to the government’s budget.

The barrier to accepting such ideas is that governments usually only examine recurrent costs and ignore the future recurrent benefits.

Gender lensing can break down barriers against men.

Our parental leave system is built around the idea that one parent takes most of the leave.

Increasing paid parental leave for dads, and making it non-transferable on a “use it or lose it” basis, would legitimise men as carers.

Is it better for men to be the breadwinners and for women to look after the home and children? When asked in the Melbourne Institute’s Household, Income and Labour Dynamics survey, only 20% of men and 16% of women thought it was.

Efforts to economically empower women will have limited success in a society that is grappling with the concept of women being empowered.

New research by Australian National University economists finds that when a woman’s earnings begin to exceed those of her male partner, the incidence of domestic violence and emotional abuse rises.

Read more: A shocking finding that will change the way you think about gender pay

Any policy aimed at improving women’s economic security and safety has to go hand-in-hand with policies that empower men to embrace healthy masculinities and step beyond their traditional roles.

There’s more to it than economics

Many of our breakthroughs in equality have occurred during times of economic necessity. The Commonwealth bar on the employment of married women was removed at a time of labour shortages in teaching and nursing.

Right now it’s easy to argue that boosting women’s involvement in the workforce will help fuel the economic recovery, but the case for gender equity shouldn’t need to depend on that.

When so much depends on gender, applying a gender lens to policies is the responsible thing for governments to do. It’s worthya in its own right.

– ref. Applying a gender lens on the budget is not about pitting women against men – https://theconversation.com/applying-a-gender-lens-on-the-budget-is-not-about-pitting-women-against-men-160261

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hugh Breakey, President, Australian Association for Professional & Applied Ethics. Senior Research Fellow, Moral philosophy, Institute for Ethics, Governance & Law, Law Futures Centre., Griffith University

Love can seem a primal force, an intoxicating mix of desire, care, ecstasy and jealousy hard-wired into our hearts. The polar opposite of philosophy’s measured rationality and theoretical speculations.

Yet if you take any topic in the world, and keeping asking deep questions of it, you will ultimately wind up doing philosophy. Love is no different.

Indeed, many famous philosophers— Kant, Aristotle, De Bouvier — wrote about love and how it fitted into their larger theories of human reason, excellence and freedom.

Unsurprisingly, their historically-situated views tended to mirror the culturally valued types of love in their time. The Greeks eulogised the love of friendship. Scholars in the middle ages ruminated on the love of God. With the Renaissance, romantic love moved centre stage.

Today, philosophers continue to interrogate love and draw practical lessons about how we can approach it in our own lives.

Read more: Friday essay: finding spaces for love

What is love?

Think of the ways in which we distinguish love from other similar qualities. We can easily imagine someone saying: “It’s not love — they’re just friends.” Or “It’s not love —it’s just infatuation.”

Ideally, an account of love would distinguish it from (on the one hand) liking, friendship, respect, admiration and care, and (on the other) lust, infatuation and obsession. Love seems deeper than and different from these.

Perhaps we also need to consider whether we use the word love in different ways. When we speak of loving books, or a band, or our pets, are we using the same concept as when we speak of love of people?

Even focusing on love of people, we may want to distinguish between types of love — such as the passion shared by two honeymooners, compared to the committed companionship of an elderly married couple. Some might mark the distinction by saying the honeymooners are “in love”, while the elderly couple “love one another”.

Early philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle and St Augustine, developed intriguing concepts here, distinguishing eros (passionate desire) from philia (friendship) and agape (universal brotherly love).

Yet other philosophers, such as Susan Wolf, point out that, despite distinctions in their early stages, different types of love tend to grow more similar over time. Perhaps this suggests there is an underlying, shared essence of love.

The essence of love

Imagine you asked yourself what love is really, ultimately about. What would your answer be?

Would you say love is an emotion? Love can seem a perfect example of an emotion. However, compared to emotions like anger or sadness, love’s mental states are strangely changeable. Love can make us daydream and swoon — but equally it can drive us to jealousy, loss, confusion, aspiration, ambition and more. Love is not one feeling, but the fount of many.

Read more: There are six styles of love. Which one best describes you?

Perhaps you might instead focus on love as desire — either to improve the beloved’s life, or (in the case of romantic love) to be with them emotionally and physically. (Of course, the desire to be with the beloved often overlaps with the desire to do what is best for them. But tragedy is not far away when these two desires pull in different directions.)

Or you might wonder if love is a profound type of recognition — the ability to really see into another person’s normally hidden depths, and to realise how profound and important they are.

These are all good answers. Different philosophers defend each of these approaches, finding insight in each. One of the nice things about philosophy is that there may be no single correct answer to these questions. Some people might even hold that love is inherently ineffable — incapable of rational definition.

A puzzle

One important part of any account of love will include the way we value the beloved. But this presents an intriguing puzzle. We feel like we love another person on the basis of their lovable properties. We love them for their kindness, charm, beauty, intelligence, depth, sense of humour, or their eyes or smile. And we feel like we want to be loved by others on the basis of our own virtues.

While this seems reasonable, a moment’s reflection shows it can’t be right. If we really loved someone purely on the basis of their desirable properties, then we should rationally “trade up” any time someone came along who was even more beautiful and intelligent. But that’s not how love works. We love the whole person, not just their particular qualities, which might come and go.

But equally, it can’t be that we love someone just “because”, on the basis of no reasons whatsoever. That seems unsatisfying, and doesn’t mesh with the fact there clearly are things about our beloved that we cherish and that anchor our attraction. Equally, if our beloved starts treating us badly, we can respond to that — perhaps ultimately by withdrawing our love. We aren’t simply condemned to go on loving the person even when we have no reasons to do so.

Love as a verb, love as a history

Another dimension of love is the fact that love is not a simple state of existence, but occurs over and through time. After all, love is not only a noun, it’s also a verb.

Loving is an intention and an action that has consequences, and like other actions, it’s one that we can be responsible for and accountable for. Even though we can fall in love, it remains something that we can make choices about — we can work to remain in love, and we can strive to free ourselves from it.

For this reason, some philosophers, such as Raja Halwani, have stressed that love is ultimately about commitment.

It is when we start to own our feelings for another person, and become responsible for them, that love occurs. When we are merely gripped by them, or overthrown by them, it is just obsession or infatuation. From there it is up to us to commit, and this is where genuine love — love as a verb — emerges.

There is another way love occurs over and through time. The love between two people arises from a historical process in their lives. As romance books remind us, love often presents as a story, with events occurring between two people that change and challenge them as they come together and (all going well) seek to create a new union — a “we”.

(Of course, for romantic love, chemistry matters too. There is no guarantee that two people will “fit” merely because they both have wonderful virtues and compatible values.)

In other words, to say that a person is in love is not purely a statement about emotion or value. It is also telling us something about their history. They have lived and grown through their experiences with the beloved, and this has led to their deep attachment. This is at once one of the glorious parts of love, empowering intimate shared experiences, even as it is a way that drives the process of love forward.

One of the reasons we love him rather than someone else, is because we have had special intimate experiences with him, grown with him, shared memories with him, created a life with him.

The ethics of love

Is love ethically justifiable?

In many ways, love can seem like a moral danger. Love is often “blind” — it can beguile us into seeing the world wrongly. Love also stops us valuing others impartially — which can seem like the exact opposite of what ethics requires of us.

Also, love has a complex relationship with autonomy: the capacity to direct and control our lives, and a central part of being a free and responsible human being.

Love can threaten autonomy. When we invest emotionally in another person, plan our lives around them, and start to feel their gains and losses as our own, we relinquish the amount of control we have over both big and small life decisions.

Still there is another side to love, which sees it as ethically critical. After all, love extends us beyond ourselves, giving us an attachment to others that pushes us out of self-interested and self-absorbed ways.

The way we value our beloved can even parallel moral respect. We value and desire the person in and for themselves, similar to the way morality requires us to respect others for their own sake.

Finally, as far back as Socrates and Plato was the idea that love uplifts us morally by letting us see value and beauty in the world. By giving us reasons to live and get out of bed in the morning, love makes us aware the world houses wonderful, inspiring things, worthy of our care and protection.

Lessons

These philosophical ideas about love suggest some practical lessons.

First, love is complex and ambiguous — if thoughtful philosophers can’t agree on its qualities, different people may understand it in different ways.

This depth of disagreement matters. It means someone might truthfully say, “I love you”, but they might mean something completely different from what we imagine. They might be speaking of desire and passion, where we think of commitment and togetherness.

Secondly, love involves vulnerability — and therefore risk. All the features of love noted above — desire, value, commitment, care — create vulnerabilities. Love makes us open ourselves up for another person, showing intimate parts of ourselves, and hoping the support and care we feel for them will be reciprocated.

It is a difficult thing to pour so much concern, admiration and desire onto someone, investing our time and precious experiences into them, even defining ourselves in terms of them and feeling their pains as our own, if they do not meet us halfway.

Unfortunately, we often respond to being vulnerable by taking control. In some ways, this is healthy. It can prompt us to make sensible decisions about managing our lives. We can decide that a relationship is toxic or not good for us, and work to improve matters or to leave.

But there is a dark side to this desire for control. We may respond to our emotional vulnerability by trying to control parts of our beloved’s life. This can be harmful to them, and to the relationship. For this reason, care and respect are vital in relationships of love.

Thirdly, if we want to love, we must learn to love a changing person. As we saw above, there is a sense in which we love both the person themselves, and also their lovable qualities.

This gives rise to a practical challenge in maintaining love. We are challenged to continue finding lovable attributes in our partner, and creating new experiences with them, even as they change and grow.

And at the same time, we are challenged to keep nurturing our own lovable properties and virtues, to ensure our partner has continuing reason to remain in love with us.

Ultimately, love may be too wonderfully multifarious and dynamic to be pinned down by a definition or philosophical theory. But we can still benefit from thinking deeply about love’s nature and the challenges and promises it presents.

Hugh Breakey is the author of the romance novel The Beautiful Fall.

– ref. Friday essay: 3 ways philosophy can help us understand love – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-3-ways-philosophy-can-help-us-understand-love-155374

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

It became clear this week repatriation flights for Australians stranded in India would have to resume ASAP after May 15, whatever the COVID situation in that country.

By going too far in its effort to stop individuals using a third-country “loophole” to get home, the Australian government made it impossible to keep shut the direct flight pipeline.

Cabinet’s national security committee on Thursday approved the resumption as the government finalised arrangements with the Northern Territory, site of the Howard Springs quarantine facility where the arrivals will go.

Meanwhile Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly was drawing up fresh advice.

The government will give its reasons as to why arrivals from India have become more manageable (although the number will be modest). Notably, it will say the “pause” has provided time to reduce COVID overload in quarantine. By May 14 positive cases at Howard Springs are expected to number between 0 and 5, down from 55 on April 26.

A key reason, however, that won’t be included is that Scott Morrison needs to escape the branding of his government as a moral pariah.

The attack the prime minister has come under is justified, but its strength and breadth are still surprising.

The government would have anticipated criticism from the political left, human rights groups and the like. However, it’s those on the right of the spectrum who have been among the most ferocious, including commentators such as News Corp’s Andrew Bolt and Chris Kenny.

Morrison judged the “quiet Australians” were behind his action. Indeed, one Liberal MP says “80% of the public think the prime minister is a star”. After all, those premiers who closed their borders were heroes to their voters.

But objectively, circumstances are very different when we’re talking about the national border and excluded citizens who are in what amounts to a health war zone.

Even assuming the “quiet Australians” were with Morrison, he could not ignore the near-universal condemnation from a usually divided political class, and he would be disturbed by the sharp reaction from many in the local Australian-Indian community. Most voters will have long forgotten this issue by election time, but those Australians of Indian heritage – to whom Morrison has made a pitch via Facebook – will have longer memories.

It has been impossible to get details from the government about the Australians in India, beyond the basic numbers.

We do know from Australian High Commissioner Barry O’Farrell that the “vulnerable” among the 9,000 registered Australian citizens and permanent residents have increased from 650, the figure given last week, to 900.

We don’t know who the “vulnerable” are and the nature of their vulnerabilities. How many are ill or frail, how many are in financial strife, or homeless? O’Farrell has said they haven’t been asked if they have COVID-19. The Foreign Affairs Department is not answering questions about them.

After last week’s cancellation of all flights from India until May 15, the real trouble for the government came when it went a step further – by invoking the Biosecurity Act and pointing to the act’s penalties to prevent people coming via a third country.

The formal announcement was in a statement issued by Health Minister Greg Hunt, which hit inboxes in the early hours of Saturday morning.

In subsequent days, Morrison tried to row back on the question of penalties. He indicated no one would be sent to prison, and declared it was the media, rather than he or Hunt, that had highlighted jail. The fact the penalty was spelled out in Hunt’s media release was “simply a statement of what the Biosecurity Act does”, Morrison said.

But the government could have left the penalties out of the statement – and made it clear, to those who asked, that it was not on a punitive mission.

For a government so obsessive about controlling its messaging, it is very poor at injecting some subtlety into it.

Indeed, it let its ban appear even worse than it is.

That late-night statement said no one could arrive in Australia who had been in India in the preceding 14 days – meaning there is actually still an indirect long, slow way home (which would land someone here after May 15 if they had left India as soon as the ban came into effect).

Thus former Test cricketer Michael Slater – who has lambasted Morrison on Twitter – is in the Maldives serving out this period. Most of the Australian cricketers have followed him, after their tour was suspended.

On the other hand, most people caught in India don’t have the resources of elite cricketers and their accompanying entourage, and so the option of 14 days in another country is a theoretical one only.

One interesting issue in the use of section 477 of the Biosecurity Act is how the political and the medical elements interacted.

As Kelly noted in his advice to the government, this would be “the first time that such a determination has been used to prevent Australian citizens and permanent residents entering Australia”.

Kelly told the ABC “we were requested to provide advice” on the use of the act, indicating the initiative came from the government.

“There is a particular section under the act which requires that the minister, before he makes a decision, is provided with advice in relation to several matters,” Kelly said.

These include that a ministerial decision must be proportionate, no more restrictive than required, and in place only as long as needed.

Kelly gave the necessary ticks.

But in his written advice Kelly went out of his way to spell out bluntly what could be the bad outcomes of the decision, while arguing they could be mitigated. He covered his back.

“I wish to note the potential consequences for Australian citizens and permanent residents as a result of this pause on flights and entry into Australia,” he wrote.

“These include the risk of serious illness without access to health care, the potential for Australians to be stranded in a transit country and, in a worst-case scenario, deaths.”

Kelly is due to appear before the Senate’s COVID committee late Friday; he can expect to be pushed on the circumstances surrounding his advice.

Apart from the political pressure, one reason the government is anxious to have a plan in place for some, albeit limited, repatriation from India is that the legal challenge against the government’s action is in court early next week.

Read more: Is Australia’s India travel ban legal? A citizenship law expert explains

Regardless of the legal action’s prospects, by outlining its intentions the government will defuse the case’s impact.

And given the agitation among crossbenchers and even some in his own ranks, Morrison also wants to cool this issue, which has flamed out of control, before the start of budget week.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Unblocking the passage from India – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-unblocking-the-passage-from-india-160472

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Barnes, Research Fellow (Disaster & Urban Resilience), UNSW

To help Australia adapt to climate change and manage the disasters that come with it, the federal government this week pledged A$600 million towards establishing the National Recovery and Resilience Agency, and $210 million for the Australian Climate Service initiative.

The sizeable investments make sense, as Australia’s threat landscape has changed. Climate change, drought, land clearing, urban growth and other activities have significantly increased the chances of natural hazards and disasters Australia-wide. All of which are costly to recover from.

The new organisations could deliver revolutionary benefits to Australia by better aligning policy and practice in a more agile way that matches the complex set of threats we face.

There are, however, issues that warrant attention. It’s not yet clear how the government plans to bring together Australia’s best experts — including policy thinkers, emergency managers, researchers and practitioners — to address the complex, evolving threats. Currently, it seems the role of universities has not been adequately defined.

Australia’s recent disasters

The 2019-20 bushfire season was arguably the most extreme in living memory. It started earlier than what might normally have been expected and made history for its severity and widespread damage to life, property and the environment.

Bushfires weren’t the only natural hazard Australia dealt with during this period. Insurance claims from hailstorms, flooding and bushfire damage for the 2019-20 period exceeded $5.19 billion.

Then came the severe flooding across New South Wales in March, which peaked at 12.9 metres. As of March 23, policyholders had lodged up to 11,700 insurance claims associated with these storms.

Read more: The world endured 2 extra heatwave days per decade since 1950 – but the worst is yet to come

While these recent disasters were unprecedented in their scale and impact, we can expect disasters in the future to worsen due to climate change, from longer heatwaves to intensifying cyclones and a range of cascading and cumulative impacts on society.

This is why the federal government’s announcement this week is extremely important.

So what will these initiatives do?

The new organisations are in response to recommendations from the recent bushfire royal commission, and as part of next week’s federal budget.

The National Recovery and Resilience Agency will be led by former Northern Territory chief minister Shane Stone, and brings together the responsibilities of the national agencies in charge of flood and bushfire recovery.

Its job is to oversee $600 million that will go towards new programs for disaster preparation and mitigation. It’ll focus on minimising disruptive impacts on communities and assist in making them ready to face future disasters. It will also administer the $2 billion National Bushfire Recovery Fund on an ongoing basis.

Read more: Sydney’s disastrous flood wasn’t unprecedented: we’re about to enter a 50-year period of frequent, major floods

A key enabler of this is the National Climate Resilience and Adaptation Strategy, which is currently getting updated after its first release in 2015. The new strategy will be released later this year, and should be vital in underpinning the direction of the new agency.

The government must ensure the strategy provides guidance that matches the goals of the new agency – in particular that of building resilience. It’s important to recognise that while disaster response is generally similar across the board, the effects of disasters vary depending on the community, urban and physical features, as well as socioeconomic levels and access to services.

And the Australian Climate Service initiative will, according to Environment Minister Sussan Ley:

help provide an environmental road map in our planning for infrastructure, housing and basic services like power, telecommunications, and water [and in] anticipating and adapting to the impacts of [a] changing climate.

Together, the benefits of both new organisations have the potential to be revolutionary.

They — along with a new national research centre focused on hazard resilience and disaster risk reduction (announced in July last year) — may be the largest realignments in disaster management policy and practice for a generation.

But how they’re implemented and coordinated will, ultimately, determine this.

There’s more to do

A potential issue with the Australian Climate Service Initiative that might limit its effectiveness is its emphasis on the roles of the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Geoscience Australia.

This collaboration means the initiative has access to huge amounts of data, information resources, and links to the National Environmental Science Program and Great Barrier Reef Restoration and Adaptation initiatives.

Read more: ‘We know our community better than they do’: why local knowledge is key to disaster recovery in Gippsland

But we shouldn’t forget many Australian universities have considerable relevant expertise at their disposal, too. Not including the network of expertise and experience of universities means we may be shooting ourselves in the foot.

What’s more, the National Recovery and Resilience Agency intends to provide accredited training for people working in disaster recovery. The deep training and development expertise of universities is a perfect fit for this goal.

To really embed the benefits, we need to break down historical silos between national, state and local agencies. On-the-ground efforts for disaster risk reduction, emergency management and response, and the broad social aspects of recovery are largely state and local government responsibilities.

Crisis response planning and action is a team-based sport, so getting the federal, state and local governments — and the private sector — involved will help streamline the application of the new disaster policies and protocols embodied in the announced changes across the continent.

Read more: National and state leaders may not always agree, but this hasn’t hindered our coronavirus response

We saw this type of team-based effort at a national level when the emergency national cabinet was established to oversee collaborative decision-making in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s joined-up thinking that enables rapid and more complete decision- making.

In short, we need better collaboration. How we can work together and utilise all our capabilities and capacities are questions that need to be at the forefront of national thinking.

This story is part of a series The Conversation is running on the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience. You can read the rest of the stories here.

– ref. The government has pledged over $800m to fight natural disasters. It could be revolutionary — if done right – https://theconversation.com/the-government-has-pledged-over-800m-to-fight-natural-disasters-it-could-be-revolutionary-if-done-right-160348

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dean Narramore, Senior meteorologist, Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Waterspouts are extraordinary, impressive weather events. Observers describe them as looking like “the start of an alien invasion” and post their snaps across social media.

But what are these enigmatic offshore twisters, and what causes them to form?

What is a waterspout?

A waterspout is a spinning column of air that sucks up water (usually from the ocean) to make a twisting funnel of water and cloud connecting the sea and the sky.

They are spectacular but short lived, usually lasting no more than five minutes (but occasionally up to ten minutes). Winds inside the waterspout can be faster than 100 kilometres per hour, and they can do great damage to boats at sea.

If they drift ashore, waterspouts can create even more havoc: the Lennox Head tornado in 2010 destroyed a dozen homes in northern NSW.

Waterspouts are in some ways like the tornadoes that form over land. But where tornadoes are associated with huge supercell thunderstorms, waterspouts can form during smaller storms or even just showers or the presence of the right kind of clouds.

Read more: Tornadoes in Australia? They’re more common than you think

How do waterspouts form?

Waterspouts can form when winds blowing in two different directions run into each other. Along the line where the two winds meet (called a “convergence line” or “shear line”), there is a lot of rotating air near the surface.

The collision of the two winds makes air move upwards because it has nowhere else to go. This rising air carries water vapour high into the sky where it creates rain showers, storms and cumulus clouds.

As the air rises, it can tilt some of the horizontal spinning air near the surface into the vertical direction. When this vertical spin concentrates at a particular point it starts sucking up water — and you have yourself a waterspout.

Because waterspouts form on the line where two winds meet, you sometimes see a line of waterspouts in a row where the spinning low-level air is sucked upwards at a few different points.

When and where are waterspouts most common?

In Australia, waterspouts are most common along the NSW and Queensland coast.

Most mornings, cooler nighttime air blowing off the land meets warmer air sitting out to sea. Usually this results in a line of clouds sitting offshore where the two air masses meet.

Under the right conditions — most often in autumn and winter, when the land gets colder but the sea stays relatively warm — the collision becomes more dramatic and waterspouts appear.

Can we forecast waterspouts?

Waterspouts look very big and impressive to the casual viewer, but to a meteorologist looking at the world’s weather patterns they are quite small. This makes them very hard to forecast with any level of confidence.

Read more: Curious Kids: how do people know what the weather will be?

We know the kind of weather conditions that can lead to waterspouts, so if we see those conditions forming we might know there is a chance we’ll see some. But the small scale and short life of waterspouts mean forecasting the location or timing is almost impossible.

– ref. What are waterspouts, and how do they form? An expert explains – https://theconversation.com/what-are-waterspouts-and-how-do-they-form-an-expert-explains-159997

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By George Tan, Research Fellow, Charles Darwin University

The COVID-19 crisis has thrust a largely unseen part of Australia’s population firmly into the national spotlight.

These are the Australians who live and work abroad — our diaspora.

For more than a year, we have been hearing harrowing stories of Australians unable to get home. Most recently, there is the distress of those in India, currently banned from even trying to return.

But despite increasing awareness of this group, there is still much we don’t know about our diaspora. The bottom line is, we don’t have precise or up-to-date information about Australians overseas.

This lack of knowledge and understanding highlights the need for a national diaspora policy that truly reflects contemporary, multicultural Australia.

What do we know about Australians overseas?

Australia’s diaspora is estimated to include around one million people, but this would be significantly higher if former residents, such as international students, were included.

Large-scale studies in 2003 and 2006 told us Australians overseas tend to be highly educated and highly valued by employers. Many also retain links with family and friends in Australia. They continue to identify as Australian and intend to eventually come back.

In 2004, without putting a number on them, the Lowy Institute identified five sub-groups of expats.

1. The who’s who — people at the pinnacle of their careers in significant international positions
2. Gold collar workers — highly-skilled, well-paid Australians developing their careers on the international stage
3. Other professionals — including nurses or teachers
4. Return migrants — first or second generation Australians, going to their family’s original country for family or professional reasons
5. Rite of passage travellers — young Australians living or working overseas.

Organisations such as Advance (which is supported by federal government funding) work to connect Australians overseas with each other and Australia. The focus here is on high-profile or very successful expats and how we can leverage their skills and networks to Australia’s advantage.

Traditionally, the majority of departures from Australia have been to Europe, the United States and New Zealand. This has lead to a narrative that doesn’t necessarily reflect the make-up of Australia’s population living overseas and Australia’s multicultural story.

We know from immigration and short-term travel data (those away for less than a year) that Asia, and in particular countries such as India, China, Indonesia, Thailand and Japan, are increasingly important for Australians.

Read more: Is Australia’s India travel ban legal? A citizenship law expert explains

Long-term departure data present a similar picture. Our analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows India saw a 54% increase as a destination for Australian residents between 2007-08 and 2016-17.

So, the idea that Australia’s diaspora is largely made up of young Aussies backpacking in Europe, or hyper-successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley is an outdated one. There is every indication today’s diaspora is complex, and largely made up of everyday Australians doing everyday things.

Yet, we don’t have comprehensive or up-to-date data on where Australians are overseas, what they are doing and whether they are planning to come back.

Why don’t we have a clearer picture?

At a broader level, Australia’s national focus has been on our immigrants, for whom detailed data are recorded and available from the Department of Home Affairs and Bureau of Statistics.

Emigrants have long been an understudied element of Australia’s migration story.

One of the reasons for our limited and outdated information on our diaspora is the voluntary nature of registration with the Department of Foreign Affairs’ SmartTraveller program.

In 2017, Australia also stopped collecting information on intended destination and reasons for travel on outgoing passenger cards. This was to improve the “traveller experience” and streamline the border clearance process.

Meanwhile, despite recommendations from Senate committees in 2005 and 2013, Australia has not set up a dedicated diaspora policy and monitoring unit within government.

Why do we need a diaspora policy?

At a basic level, a diaspora policy would provide a formal commitment to strengthen links and maintain connections with Australians abroad.

Aside from taking advantage of the knowledge and skills of Australians overseas (which can influence bilateral trade, business and investment opportunities), a diaspora policy should also foster engagement by attending to the welfare of Australians overseas.

COVID-19 has shown us how important it is to understand where Australians are and their circumstances in a time of crisis.

This lack of information makes it difficult to plan and help people quickly. A holistic, consistent and ongoing dataset would tell governments where the pressure points are in times of crisis — where are most of our citizens? How old are they? How vulnerable might they be?

How can we do it better?

A commitment to deeper engagement with our diaspora is fundamental. In addition to a diaspora policy, a relatively easy way to get a better grip on Australians overseas would be to improve how Australians interact with SmartTraveller, so it becomes second nature for travellers to register and update their movements when overseas.

Read more: The crisis in India is a terrifying example of why we need a better way to get Australians home

Another alternative is to link in with other countries’ censuses at the turn of each decade and use data from destination countries. However, this means we are relying on other countries’ data collection, not our own. We could also look at regular large scale “census-like” surveys of Australians living overseas.

Getting a better grip on Australians overseas will have huge benefits in terms of planning, our economy and national identity. Bringing our diaspora back into our national population and migration story will help us understand its true character, nature and value.

Importantly, it will also move beyond the narrative of Australians overseas as either a “burden” or an “asset”.

– ref. COVID has made one thing very clear — we do not know enough about Australians overseas – https://theconversation.com/covid-has-made-one-thing-very-clear-we-do-not-know-enough-about-australians-overseas-159995

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicholas Wood, Associate Professor, Discipline of Childhood and Adolescent Health, University of Sydney

Investigations are under way to determine whether the deaths of two people in New South Wales who developed blood clots are linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine.

We’ve also heard today that 11 Australians have so far developed blood clots (thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome) linked with the vaccine.

But what are these investigations? And who decides whether events like these are actually linked to COVID-19 vaccines, or something else?

Read more: I’m over 50 and can now get my COVID vaccine. Is the AstraZeneca vaccine safe? Does it work? What else do I need to know?

What triggers the process?

There is a lot of interest in the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. So the public and health-care workers are “highly tuned in” to reporting suspected side-effects.

Anyone can report these to Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). Alternatively, people who have been vaccinated can do so when prompted with a survey via the AusVaxSafety system.

This is a good thing as it means we are likely to pick up any serious or unusual events. Every report is valuable and contributes to our safety monitoring. However, just because an event happened after a vaccine does not mean the vaccine caused it.

A serious event could be caused by an underlying medical condition, a medication the person was taking at the time, or some other factor unrelated to the vaccine.

For example, before COVID-19 and vaccines against it, dozens of people across Australia developed blood clots, in their legs, lungs, brain and other parts of the body, every day, often without warning or clear cause.

Read more: COVID vaccines have been developed in record time. But how will we know they’re safe?

What happens next?

When a person has a suspected vaccine side-effect it is usually reported to the state or territory health department; some reports go directly to the TGA.

Most reactions reported after vaccination are mild to moderate. AusVaxSafety surveys in more than 365,000 people in Australia confirm what we saw in vaccine trials. Up to two-thirds of people experience symptoms such as fever, muscle aches, joint pains and headache within the first one or two days after vaccination, which go away without treatment. This is the immune system responding to the vaccine.

What if it’s serious?

If the person dies or had a serious event needing hospitalisation within the days to weeks after vaccination — like the clotting cases you will have heard about, or there was an unusual unexpected event — there are further investigations.

Health department and TGA staff gather as much information as possible about the person, including their medical history, risk factors, any medications they are on, details and timing of the vaccine, hospitalisation records, any laboratory test results and whether they have recovered or have any ongoing issues. This will involve liaising with the person’s GP, specialists and the hospital.

Many states and territories then convene an expert panel of doctors to discuss a serious case. These panels often include the treating doctor, discuss the case in detail and may advise extra tests that may help them understand the event.

A full clinical dossier is then provided to the TGA, which then further reviews the case and decides whether a group of independent expert advisors, known as a “vaccine safety investigation group” or VSIG, is needed to review the case in detail and assess if the vaccine caused it.

The VSIG often includes independent medical experts in vaccine safety, infectious diseases, haematology, public health and vaccine confidence, other medical specialists, and a consumer representative.

The group reviews the clinical details of the event. It then uses an internationally accepted method to rate the level of certainty of a link between the serious event and the vaccine.

First, the group determines if there is enough clinical information to come to a decision, and if not, will request further information from the state/territory health department and may need to reconvene when that information is available.

The group then determines if the case is classified as:

• caused by the immunisation process (such as errors in vaccine technique) or the vaccine itself (the official terminology is “consistent causal association to immunisation”)

• uncertain if the vaccine or immunisation process caused the event (“indeterminate”)

• a coincidence (“inconsistent causal association to immunisation”). This could when because an underlying condition or something other than vaccine was the cause.

The TGA then publishes the results of this independent assessment on its website. This is accompanied by a summary of the case(s) and extra clinical advice for doctors. The TGA also feeds the results back to the state/territory health department and treating doctor.

This information will also be included in weekly updates published on the TGA website and is reviewed by other key advisory groups, including the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation and the government, who monitor the progress of immunisation programs, including for COVID-19.

Here’s the context

While such serious vaccine-related events grab the headlines, it’s important to remember they are rare. Most side-effects are mild-to-moderate and short-lived. On the other hand, the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination in ending the pandemic are enormous.

When concerning events occur after vaccination, it’s important to know Australia has strong systems to properly investigate them, look at any possible link and communicate the results to the public.

Read more: A balancing act between benefits and risks: making sense of the latest vaccine news

– ref. How do we actually investigate rare COVID-19 vaccine side-effects? – https://theconversation.com/how-do-we-actually-investigate-rare-covid-19-vaccine-side-effects-160000