Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frances Flanagan, Sydney Fellow, Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies, University of Sydney

After heated criticism from several quarters, the federal government last month announced a meagre rise in the JobSeeker payment for people looking for work. But at just $25 more a week, the subsidy remains the second-lowest in the OECD.

The government also announced a hotline for employers to “dob in” unemployed people who reject “suitable work”. These reports will contribute evidence that may be used to reduce or stop payments to JobSeeker recipients.

As many have observed, it is a policy with all-too-familiar resonances. A pallet of punitive and stigmatising measures have been rolled out in liberal economies worldwide over the past 40 years. These include drug testing, cashless welfare cards, mandatory job training and a variety of “mutual obligation” requirements.

As many academics have argued, these measures have done much to inflict misery, and little to create jobs or foster a genuine sense of mutuality. They have also propped up the myth that individuals are overwhelmingly responsible for their own wagelessness, regardless of wider labour market conditions.

Has it always been this way?

Read more: First lift JobSeeker, then add on fully-funded unemployment insurance

A long history of coercing people into work

The idea that it is desirable to use the law to coerce people into employment relationships they do not wish to be in has a long history around the world.

To understand it, we need to look to the origins of both labour law and welfare law. The English parliament passed the 1351 Statute of Labourers in the wake of another plague – the Black Death. It required any able-bodied person below the age of 60 to accept any offer of work.

The Old Poor Laws, introduced some 250 years later, were a landmark in the early history of welfare provision. They granted parishes the power to offer support to able-bodied people on the condition they could demonstrate they were “deserving”: that is, neither idle, dissolute, lazy, of poor character nor prone to vice. Together, these feudal and early modern laws reflected and encoded the practice of scrutinising the “unwillingness” of the wageless to work.

As the historian John Murphy has argued, lawmakers in the Australian colonies were adamant the Australian “new world” would not reproduce the injustices of the old. The colonies vigorously rejected enacting any equivalent of the Poor Law. However, in the context of a sparsely inhabited continent afflicted by labour shortages, colonial laws concerning work were nevertheless highly coercive.

Read more: New finding: boosting JobSeeker wouldn’t keep Australians away from paid work

British master and servant legislation, which granted employers sweeping powers over employees for absconding, disloyalty and desertion, backed by criminal sanctions, were adopted with even harsher penalties in Australia than in the UK.

The NSW 1828 Servants and Laborers Act provided for up to six months’ imprisonment for absenteeism or desertion: double the penalty of the equivalent UK legislation. In the 19th century, employers didn’t “dob” on workers who declined a job. Rather, they dobbed on workers who left without permission.

In the early 20th century the state intervened in labour markets with a very different objective: to enshrine the pre-conditions of “civilisation”. Justice Higgins’ famous Harvester Judgment required minimum wages calculated on the basis of “the needs of the average employee, regarded as a human being living in a civilised community”, rather than the “higgling of the market”.

In addition to establishing the legal and economic institutions for a “wage earners’ welfare state”, the imperative to break with stigmatising traditions was expressed through campaigns to entrench welfare systems in Australia that did not depend on people proving their poverty and good character as a precondition to accessing collective funds.

Instead, reformers argued welfare should be organised around the principle of contributory insurance. This involved workers, employers and the state compulsorily saving for future needs. Under such a model (which Australia later embraced on a national scale for superannuation) funds could be accessed in times of need without the taint of “charity”.

Enter the Great Depression

These interwar campaigns failed on the whole, with Queensland the only state to pass an Unemployed Workers Insurance Act in 1922 under the leadership of “Red Ted” Theodore. As unemployment rates soared over 30%, the plausibility of insurance models as solution to large-scale social need, or a panacea for welfare stigma, faded and the spectre of “deservedness” in welfare provision returned.

Depression-era systems enabled Unemployment Relief Councils to offer “sustenance work” to men below the basic wage. They also offered forms of “relief” that hinged on proof they had not only applied for work but had moved across the district in pursuit of it. Where the master and servant laws had once functioned to keep workers in place, in the 1930s “track rations” policies kept workers on the move.

The passage of wartime emergency laws added a new dimension to the state’s willingness and powers to intervene in individual employment relationships. These laws were aimed at securing the production of munitions and essential supplies and services.

The Manpower Directorate, Women’s Employment Board and National Security (Employment) regulations were used to scrutinise and curtail the movement of skilled workers between jobs. They were also used to keep “desirable” employees with particular employers and in jobs deemed essential.

These initiatives were introduced against a backdrop of Keynesian economics, which would expand after the war and drive a commitment to full employment as an economic objective. They would also engender more generous welfare systems, funded from general revenue, which required the needy to show they were “capable and willing to undertake suitable work” with no time limit on benefits or property means test.

‘Dobbing in’ may not have the desired effect

The notion of enlisting employers to “dob in” people unwilling to enter an employment relationship is likely to be ineffective, given the levels of under-employment in the labour market and the negative response the measure received from some employer groups.

Read more: No, people aren’t unemployed because they’re lazy. We should stop teaching children myths about work

It is likely, too, to deepen social division and increase the potential for exploitation of already vulnerable people. It is an illiberal policy, philosophically at odds with the notion that the parties in labour markets should be free to enter and withdraw from contracts as they see fit.

By placing the policy within the longer context of Australia’s 20th-century history of flawed “bold experiments” in regulating work and welfare, though, we can also see there are alternatives to coercing people into employment relationships.

States can actively intervene in labour markets on a principled basis to promote secure work that meets human need. They can pass policies that are designed to ameliorate, rather than inflame, ideas of “deservedness”. They can actively intervene in labour markets on the basis of the pursuit of a wider social “mission”.

It is important not to romanticise these policy initiatives in Australian history. Each one of them simultaneously deepened processes of exclusion for some, while reconfiguring new possibilities of fair treatment for others. Nevertheless, in an age of rising inequality, social fragmentation and climate change, it is worth remembering these experiments, if only as a stimulus to boldly proposing new ones for our times.

– ref. Australia has a long history of coercing people into work. There are better options than ‘dobbing in’ – https://theconversation.com/australia-has-a-long-history-of-coercing-people-into-work-there-are-better-options-than-dobbing-in-156296

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kelly Burrowes, Senior Researcher, University of Auckland

International Women’s Day celebrates women’s achievements and raises awareness of the continuing mission towards gender equality. So it’s a good time to be reminded we still need to correct decades — centuries even — of gender bias in medicine and medical research.

It’s no secret men and women are different. It’s why we have a whole genre of books and jokes about why “men are from Mars and women are from Venus”.

Mentally, physically and biologically, men and women are simply not built the same way. It sounds obvious, but we have only really begun to understand why.

These differences have not been reflected accurately in the field of medicine. Women’s health has too often been considered a niche area — even though it involves roughly 50% of the world’s population.

Under-researched and under-diagnosed

What we do know is that being female puts us at higher risk of some of the most challenging conditions. Autoimmune diseases, for example, affect approximately 8% of the global population, but 78% of those affected are women.

Females are three times more likely than males to develop rheumatoid arthritis and four times more likely to be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that attacks the central nervous system.

Women make up two-thirds of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and are three times more likely to have a heart attack than men. Women are at least twice as likely to suffer chronic pain conditions such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and chronic Lyme disease.

As author Maya Dusenbery made clear in her book “Doing Harm”, these conditions are under-researched and often go undiagnosed and untreated.

Different sex, different symptoms

Heart disease is another example where sex — or perhaps sexism — stills plays a huge determining factor. Women are less likely to experience the “classic” symptoms of a heart attack — symptoms that were discovered in research led by men, in which most of the participants were men.

Women’s most common heart attack symptom, as with men, is chest pain or discomfort. But women are more likely than men to experience some of the other common symptoms, particularly shortness of breath, nausea, vomiting and back or jaw pain.

Read more: Women’s health is better when women have more control in their society

But because the diagnosis method still favours male biology, many women experience a delayed diagnosis or a misdiagnosis.

On average, women are diagnosed with heart disease seven to ten years later than men. This often results in other chronic diseases being prevalent by the time of the diagnosis.

Male bias affects clinical studies

The reasons for women being this over-representated in some conditions is not clear. But genetic and hormonal factors are likely to be involved. Historically, however, medical research has often excluded women.

In 1977 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended women of childbearing age be excluded from clinical research studies. This was to protect the most “vulnerable” populations — unborn children — following the thalidomide scandal.

Read more: Women have heart attacks too, but their symptoms are often dismissed as something else

Another reason given for excluding women in clinical studies is that, depending on where a woman is in her menstrual cycle, the variation of her hormones “complicates” the results. This variability would mean more subjects were needed in clinical trials, thereby increasing costs.

Male-only studies were justified by a belief that what would work for men would also work for women. This erroneous assumption has had catastrophic results.

Every cell in a person’s body has a sex. This means diseases and medications used to treat them will affect women differently — as we have learned, often at a cost to their health.

Eight out of ten of the drugs removed from the US market between 1997 and 2000 were withdrawn because of side effects that occurred mainly or exclusively in women. Between 2004 and 2013, US women suffered more than 2 million drug-related adverse events, compared with 1.3 million for men.

Time to end the gender divide

The lack of recognition of sex differences in biology and medicine is a huge issue research has only recently begun to rectify.

In 1997, the FDA published a rule requiring manufacturers to show evidence of how their drug is safe and affected by age, sex and race.

When last measured in depth in 2016, it was clear there had been significant progress, with women accounting for roughly half of the participants in some clinical trials funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Read more: NZ’s Climate Change Commission needs to account for the huge potential health benefits of reducing emissions

Scientists are now required to account for the possible role of sex as a biological variable in both animal and human studies.

But the lack of funding for women’s health remains a huge issue. According to earlier analysis from the UK, less than 2.5% of publicly-funded research was dedicated to reproductive health. Yet one in three women will suffer from a reproductive or gynaecological health issue.

This means roughly 16% of the population will experience an issue that receives only 2.5% of the annual research budget. Although policies are being implemented to help address the huge gender divide in medicine, there is clearly still a long way to go.

– ref. Gender bias in medicine and medical research is still putting women’s health at risk – https://theconversation.com/gender-bias-in-medicine-and-medical-research-is-still-putting-womens-health-at-risk-156495

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Meru Sheel, Epidemiologist | Senior Research Fellow, Australian National University

COVID-19 vaccination is rolling out across Australia. So health authorities are keen to dispel myths about the vaccines, including any impact on COVID testing.

Do the vaccines give you COVID, or make you test positive for COVID? Does the vaccine affect other tests? Do we still need to get COVID tested if we have symptoms, even after getting the shot? And will we still need COVID testing once more of the population gets vaccinated?

We look at the evidence to answer five common questions about the impact of COVID vaccines on testing.

Read more: Do I need to register for a COVID vaccine? How will I know when it’s my turn? Vaccine rollout questions answered

1. Will the vaccine give me COVID?

The short answer is “no”. That’s because the vaccines approved for use so far in Australia and elsewhere don’t contain live COVID virus.

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine contains an artificially generated portion of viral mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid). This carries the specific genetic instructions for your body to make the coronavirus’s “spike protein”, against which your body mounts a protective immune response.

The AstraZeneca vaccine uses a different technology. It packages viral DNA into a viral vector “carrier” based on a chimpanzee adenovirus. When this is delivered into your arm, the DNA prompts your body to produce the spike protein, again stimulating an immune response.

Any vaccine side-effects, such as fever or feeling fatigued, are usually mild and temporary. These are signs the vaccines are working to boost your immune system, rather than signs of COVID itself. These symptoms are also common after routine vaccines.

2. Will the COVID vaccine make me test positive?

No, a COVID vaccine will not affect the results of a diagnostic COVID test.

The current gold-standard diagnostic test is known as nucleic acid PCR testing. This looks for the mRNA (genetic material) of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. This is a marker of current infection.

This is the test the vast majority of people have when they line up at a drive-through testing clinic, or attend a COVID clinic at their local hospital.

Yes, the Pfizer vaccine contains mRNA. But the mRNA it uses is only a small part of the entire viral RNA. It also cannot make copies of itself, which would be needed for it to be in sufficient quantity to be detected. So it cannot be detected by a PCR test.

The AstraZeneca vaccine also only contains part of the DNA but is inserted in an adenovirus carrier that cannot replicate so cannot give you infection or a positive PCR test.

Read more: How mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna work, why they’re a breakthrough and why they need to be kept so cold

3. How about antibody testing?

While PCR testing is used to look for current infection, antibody testing — also known as serology testing — picks up past infections.

Laboratories look to see if your immune system has raised antibodies against the coronavirus, a sign your body has been exposed to it. As it takes time for antibodies to develop, testing positive with an antibody test may indicate you were infected weeks or months ago.

But your body also produces antibodies as a response to vaccination. That’s the way it can recognise SARS-CoV-2, the next time it meets it, to protect you from severe COVID.

So as COVID vaccines are rolled out, and people develop a vaccine-induced antibody response, it may become difficult to differentiate between someone who has had COVID in the past and someone who was vaccinated a month ago. But this will depend on the serology test used.

Read more: Antibody tests: to get a grip on coronavirus, we need to know who’s already had it

The good news is that antibody testing is not nearly as common as PCR testing. And it’s only ordered under limited and rare circumstances.

For instance, when someone tests positive with PCR, but they are a false positive due to the characteristics of the test, or have fragments of virus lingering in the respiratory tract from an old infection, public health experts might request an antibody test to see whether that person was infected in the past. They might also order an antibody test during contact tracing of cases with an unknown source of infection.

Read more: Why can’t we use antibody tests for diagnosing COVID-19 yet?

4. If I get vaccinated, do I still need a COVID test if I have symptoms?

Yes, we will continue to test for COVID as long as the virus is circulating anywhere in the world.

Even though the COVID vaccines are looking promising in preventing people from getting seriously sick or dying, they won’t provide 100% protection.

Real-world data suggests some vaccinated people can still catch the virus, but they usually only get mild disease. We are unsure whether vaccinated people will be able to potentially pass it to others, even if they don’t have any symptoms. So it’s important people continue to get tested.

Furthermore, not everyone will be eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. For instance, in Australia, current guidelines exclude people under 16 years of age, and those who are allergic to ingredients in the vaccine. And although pregnant women are not ruled out from receiving the vaccine, it is not routinely recommended. This means a proportion of the population will remain susceptible to catching the virus.

We also are unsure about how effective vaccines will be against emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants. So we will continue to test to ensure people are not infected with these strains.

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

We know testing, detecting new cases early and contact tracing are the core components of the public health response to COVID, and will continue to be a priority from a public health perspective.

Minimum numbers of daily COVID tests are also needed so we can be confident the virus is not circulating in the community. As an example, New South Wales aims for 8,000 or more tests a day to maintain this peace of mind.

Continued vigilance and high rates of testing for COVID will also be important as we enter the flu season. That’s because the only way to differentiate between COVID and influenza (or any other respiratory infection) is via testing.

5. Will testing for COVID stop as time goes on?

It is unlikely our approach to COVID testing will change in the immediate future. However, as COVID vaccines are rolled out and since COVID is likely to become endemic and stay with us for a long time, the acute response phase to the pandemic will end.

So COVID testing may become part of managing other infectious diseases and part of how we respond to other ongoing health priorities.

Read more: Coronavirus might become endemic – here’s how

– ref. Will the COVID vaccine make me test positive for the coronavirus? 5 questions about vaccines and COVID testing answered – https://theconversation.com/will-the-covid-vaccine-make-me-test-positive-for-the-coronavirus-5-questions-about-vaccines-and-covid-testing-answered-155958

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Carr, Senior Lecturer, Environment and Society Group, UNSW

Days after US rioters stormed Capitol Hill in January, a manatee was found in a Florida river with the word “TRUMP” scraped into its back. The aftermath of the disturbing incident revealed a pervasive left-right divide that has long plagued environmental debate.

Polarised views dominate discussion on critical issues such as climate crisis and biodiversity protection. Typically, the left calls for more environmental protections, and the right claims these protections threaten economic prosperity or individual rights.

The election of the Biden administration raised hopes of a new dawn in environmental protections. Our research, however, suggests entrenched left-right views will continue to stymie effective environmental action in the United States – just as they do in Australia.

That’s because focusing on localised protections or individual rights leaves intact a cultural blind spot that conceals systemic issues threatening nature. Tackling these issues requires confronting environmental damage to which we all contribute.

The manatee incident

The Florida manatee is a large marine mammal, and one of the original species listed as endangered under the 1966 US Endangered Species Act. The animals are similar to dugongs found in Australia.

The January 11 manatee incident was quickly co-opted into the US political debate. Some on the left accused Trump supporters of inflicting the damage. Right-wing observers downplayed the seriousness of the incident and suggested claims of abuse were manufactured by the left out of hatred for Trump.

Others framed the incident as typical of stereotypes of Florida as home to reactionary politics and “trashy” culture.

It may be tempting to dismiss the incident as unique to the Trump era or Florida itself. But doing so risks ignoring important lessons. Our research shows how framing such events as political left-right issues prevents us from recognising the deeper causes of environmental crises.

Read more: Dugongs: looking to the gentle sea creature’s past may guard its future

The bigger picture

Media and politicians in the US and elsewhere often characterise the environmental threat as one posed by individuals. But in most cases, including manatees, threats extend far beyond a single bad act.

Before colonisation, wetlands accounted for up to two-thirds of Florida’s land mass. But rampant coastal development over the past 150 years destroyed more than 60% of these wetlands – dismantling habitat and preventing manatees from reaching warm springs needed to survive winter. Also, human climate disruption has led to frequent severe “red tide” algal blooms, which poison manatees.

But these broader threats to manatee survival are largely ignored by news media, environmental actors and even protection laws. Instead, the left tends to focus on individual threats, and the right on individual human or economic rights.

For example, in response to January’s incident, local news outlets published calls by environmental advocates to ban human contact with manatees. This approach echoes existing state and federal laws that prohibit people from harassing, hurting or killing manatees, but fail to protect the ecosystems manatees rely upon to survive.

Still, such manatee protection efforts meet backlash from the right. For example, in 2017, right-wing lobbyists successfully pressured the US government to downgrade the status of manatees from “endangered” to “threatened”, thus weakening manatee protections. The move was motivated by a desire to protect individual property and economic rights – in this case, development in Florida’s wetlands.

Clearly, manatees – and other vulnerable species – are threatened by the tireless expansion of human impact on every aspect of the ecosystems they need to survive. This includes our transport systems, housing, energy generation and over-consumption.

But debate and action on such issues tends to ignore the interconnected threats. For example, as coastal development in Florida destroyed warm-water springs, manatees have become reliant on warm waste water flowing from nearby power plants. Conservationists successfully sued to have manatee sanctuaries created around these artificial discharges, despite the broader damage the industries wreak on the planet.

Similar framing is seen in Australia where, for example, battles over protected marine zones largely revolve around how much commercial fishing is allowed. This obscures other systemic threats to oceans that threaten not just fish numbers, but the oceans’ abilities to support all life – including climate disruption, agricultural runoff, water pollution, and overfishing.

Environmental well-being requires reconsidering how our societies function. Instead, debate is often fixated on less central issues, such as how well or poorly our environmental efforts compare internationally.

Read more: Biden has pledged to advance environmental justice – here’s how the EPA can start

Inextricably linked

As COVID-19 has shown, humans and our systems are inseparable from nature. But global left-right environmental debate largely ignores this.

Instead, there’s a widely held belief humans are separate from, and even superior to, nature. This “human exceptionalism” can be traced back to Enlightenment thought and Judeo-Christian tradition that privilege humans above other species, and the planet as a whole.

As a result of this blind spot, personal economic opportunity is often seen as more important than ecological balance. And those who seek to protect nature often mobilise to protect specific areas or species from a narrow threat. This is compounded by an absence of institutional systems to address intertwined issues threatening large ecosystems.

Looking past the false separation of humans from nature is necessary, but confronting. It means seeing, questioning, and addressing the systems many of us – both on the left and right – take as a given.

– ref. A manatee with ‘TRUMP’ scraped into its back was itself disturbing. But it reflects a deeper environmental problem – https://theconversation.com/a-manatee-with-trump-scraped-into-its-back-was-itself-disturbing-but-it-reflects-a-deeper-environmental-problem-154189

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

Australian university leaders are nearly three times more likely to be a man than a woman.

Of 37 public university chancellors, just 10 are women (27%) and 27 (73%) are men. It’s exactly the same for vice-chancellors: 10 are women and 27 are men.

Together, this means men hold 54 of the 74 top jobs in Australian higher education.

Read more: Most of Australia’s uni leaders are white, male and grey. This lack of diversity could be a handicap

Last year presented a big opportunity for progress towards gender equity among university leaders. During 2020, vice-chancellors at 15 of Australia’s 37 public universities either announced their departure from the role, or actually left. This move of 41% of the vice-chancellors in a single year provided the best opportunity for improving gender equity in living memory.

Unfortunately, Australian university councils, which appoint vice-chancellors, did not take up the opportunity. The gender ratio didn’t change at all.

To date, women have been appointed in just four of the 15 (27%) interim or ongoing replacements made. Two of these four women moved from one vice-chancellor position to another. In 11 of the 15 announced vice-chancellor replacements – 73% of cases – a man won the role.

Men also dominate the upper levels of Australian academia. The latest available figures (from 2019) show:

• 86% more men than women at associate professor and professor levels D and E (10,363 men, 5,562 women)

• 11% more men than women at senior lecturer level C (6,355 men, 5,724 women)

• 25% more women than men at lecturer level B (7,428 men, 9,253 women)

• 15% more women than men at associate lecturer level A (4,426 men and 5,093 women).

Overall, the numbers of men and women employed as academics aren’t very different. In 2019, Australian universities employed 54,204 full-time and fractional full-time academics: 28,572 men (53%) and 25,632 (47%) women. It’s the seniority of the positions they hold that differs starkly.

These figures do not include casual staff.

Isn’t the gender balance improving?

Optimists often assure me leadership gender equity is improving. Granted, the percentage of female chancellors in Australian has increased in the past five years. In 2016, WomenCount reported 15% of Australian university chancellors were women. While the increase is positive, it remains disappointing that women occupy only about one-quarter of these increasingly powerful and important roles.

The shift in senior academic ranks has also been slow. In 2009, 73.5% of professors were men. Between 2009 and 2019, the proportion of female professors has risen from 26.5% to 35%. That’s an improvement of less than one percentage point per year on average.

At this rate, it will be the late 2030s before women make up half of the professoriate in Australia.

Read more: Female leaders are missing in academia

Why does gender inequity persist?

The most common reason put forward for gender inequity is related to women’s role in childbearing. But the fact that only women can grow, birth and breastfeed babies does not, on its own, explain why there are 86% more male associate professors and professors than women in these roles, nor why there are nearly three times more male than female vice-chancellors and chancellors. After all, these womanly activities take a relatively short amount of time and most women I know can skilfully multi-task while pregnant and breastfeeding.

However, the fact that women take on the bulk of child-raising duties might help explain the inequities. Of course, people of every gender can equally well raise children. But they don’t – it’s mostly left to the women.

Read more: Flexible work arrangements help women, but only if they are also offered to men

For women, the results of this unequal sharing of responsibility include:

• less time and energy for academic pursuits

• more teaching (often) and less time for research and publishing

• lower academic and leadership profiles (usually)

• fewer opportunities to engage in activities that count for promotion and for senior leadership roles.

Of course, not all women have children. And those that do find that they grow up, learn to feed, dress and eventually support themselves and move out of home. Is it also possible that Australian university culture and practices privilege men’s careers and hold back women’s advancement?

University decision-makers, including promotion committees, might well favour men because of:

• relatively uninterrupted and neat career trajectories

• relatively greater freedom to engage in research and publishing without the disadvantages of part-time employment, never mind the mid-afternoon school run

• more easily quantified outputs

• more frequent opportunities to lead

• the cumulative achievements, profile and trajectory that come with all of the above.

Read more: How COVID is widening the academic gender divide

Let’s shake up the status quo

Most universities try to redress gender inequity. Committees, agenda items, plans, targets and mentoring programs abound. But evidently these efforts aren’t working.

After many years in executive and governance leadership, I continue to observe decision-makers often thinking of men first, or only of men, when searching for suitable leadership candidates.

On the rarer occasions that women are offered leadership opportunities, they have to adopt the “right” style and carefully balance gravitas and humility. They must learn how to perform gender judo and ensure they don’t fall into the success versus likeability conundrum that Facebook chief operating officer and author Sheryl Sandberg made famous.

In short, to become academic leaders, women must skilfully navigate the unconscious bias and sexism that permeate universities.

While shifts are occurring, they are painfully slow, as the gender data over the past decade and predicted trajectories show. Might it be time for women (and enlightened men) to take matters into their own hands to begin to undermine the status quo? I think so – so I’ve written a book that proposes techniques to adopt to these ends.

What will you do to contribute to greater gender equity?

– ref. No change at the top for university leaders as men outnumber women 3 to 1 – https://theconversation.com/no-change-at-the-top-for-university-leaders-as-men-outnumber-women-3-to-1-154556

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

The New South Wales Education Department said last week said it would trial a program to hand out free pads and tampons in schools. Department secretary Mark Scott said:

We are developing work on a pilot program around this and details will be emerging on that shortly.

In a recent Australian study, more than one-third of young women said they missed at least one class, either at school or university, in the past three months due to menstrual symptoms, including pain and fatigue.

Despite the fact menstruation can have a significant effect on around 50% of a school’s population, access to period products (such as pads and tampons) is not yet universal. Not even in Australia.

Young women are missing school because of this. This affects their mental health as well as their ability to participate fully in life.

Missing out on education

Period poverty is the lack of access to sanitary products, menstrual hygiene education, toilets, hand-washing facilities and waste management.

It’s a a problem that has a greater impact on women who are already marginalised. Many young women in remote Indigenous Australian communities are not attending school for several days each month during menstruation.

Research suggests this is due to the high costs of feminine hygiene products, embarrassment and overcrowded bathroom facilities.

Read more: Indigenous girls missing school during their periods: the state of hygiene in remote Australia

While typically thought of as only physiological, periods and menstrual cycles are tied to psychological health. A lack of sanitary products can bring about feelings of profound shame and embarrassment.

Period poverty in developed countries is associated with a lower quality of life, poor self-esteem and mental-health issues.

While there is no Australia data on how many women are affected, a sample of college women in the United States found 14.2% experienced period poverty in the past year. An additional 10% experienced it every month.

Worryingly, nearly half of the respondents experiencing period poverty reported symptoms consistent with moderate to severe depression.

And having poor access to sanitation products during adolescence has long-term mental health effects throughout a woman’s life.

Seeing red: outrage about periods

Research has found stigma and taboo about menstruation continue to be a problem. Many girls feel embarrassed to talk about it or ask for help.

Read more: 3 out of 10 girls skip class because of painful periods. And most won’t talk to their teacher about it

Menstruation is frequently framed as troublesome, compared to the “exciting and powerful” bodily changes male teenagers go through when students are taught about them in sex education.

Society’s repulsion towards menstruation can be seen in ads for menstrual products that, until only recently, did not show blood. And when they did, it was met with considerable social outrage.

However, attitudes are starting to shift.

Since 2015, Australian charity Share the Dignity has been working to reduce the impact of period poverty by installing vending machines that dispense free period products in schools, homeless shelters and other locations.

Read more: Period poverty: why one in ten young women struggle to afford pads and tampons

In 2019, Australia removed the GST on period products. And this year Isobel Marshall was named the 2021 Young Australian of the Year in recognition of her work to fight menstrual stigma and period poverty.

But there’s more we can do.

Free period products in schools

Scotland was the first country in the world to make period products free to everyone who needed them in 2020.

New Zealand has announced the rollout of free period products in schools nationwide from June this year.

Victoria has installed dispensing machines for period products in every government school. And South Australia recently announced it would provide free sanitary products to all female students in year 5 and above.

South Australian Education Minister John Gardner has said:

We want to ensure that no girl or young woman in South Australia is missing school because they don’t have access to sanitary products.

This International Women’s Day it’s time to rethink menstrual education in schools to destigmatise periods, encourage young women to seek help, and put access to period products for all Australians on the agenda.

– ref. Imagine having your period and no money for pads or tampons. Would you still go to school? – https://theconversation.com/imagine-having-your-period-and-no-money-for-pads-or-tampons-would-you-still-go-to-school-156570

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sebastien Darchen, Senior Lecturer in Planning, The University of Queensland

Electronic music is the fifth-most-popular music genre globally. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating for the electronic music industry. Its estimated value fell from US$7.3 billion in 2019 to US$3.3 billion in 2020.

Hundreds of electronic festivals around the world have been cancelled. Some events have gone underground. In one case, more than 1,200 people were charged over an illegal rave party in Brittany that violated France’s COVID restrictions.

Electronic dance music uses specific spaces in a city, so it’s heavily affected by both cultural and planning policies. Our new book, Electronic Cities, studies these scenes. The contributors focus on 18 cities across the world as case studies in the development of electronic music.

The world of DJs has been studied before, but not the impacts of city policies on such a global scale. The book shows electronic music is not well integrated in cultural policies and gets little support. Music city policies often do not include this music genre.

Live venues are often not well protected by planning frameworks. This puts underground scenes that rely on small clubs at risk.

In Australia, we have seen some positive strategies, such as Agent of Change in Victoria, to protect inner-city live venues. Overall, though, electronic music is not well integrated in city policies.

The rise of a global phenomenon

Electronic music has grown from its origins in composers’ experimentation in the 1950s to encompass as many as 153 different genres. These range from commercial dance music and film soundtracks to niche/underground electronic music.

Broadly speaking, we can make a distinction between electronic dance music (EDM), also known as club music and made for dancing, and the more downtempo, conceptual intelligent dance music (IDM) made for listening at home.

Underground styles like acid techno are created by DJs, rather than musicians/producers, and are connected to specific clubs and audiences.

Australian dance music has been driven by an attitude of DIY self-reliance. Local producers such as Flume, Alison Wonderland, Will Sparks and Nervo have had international success.

All these different styles are sometimes grouped under the label of “electronic dance music culture”.

What role do cities have?

The first hubs for electronic music were in the US (Chicago and Detroit) and Germany (Dusseldorf and Berlin). Today, the culture has a global spread. Our book Electronic Cities analyses emerging electronic dance music cultures in places like Shenzhen in China, Tehran in Iran and Accra in Ghana.

Cities have used the music as a tool for city branding, to promote international tourism and to develop nightlife economies. Techno Week in Detroit, for instance, is a major drawcard for the city. In Cluj-Napoca, Romania, the Untold EDM Festival has been central to a strategy to attract tourists to this rural area.

Although some governments have embraced the industry, it has also suffered from official neglect. In large cities, small underground clubs, such as the former Club 414 in Brixton, are constantly under threat from redevelopment. These clubs have unique historic and cultural value but are not well protected by planning regulations.

What next?

Musician and record producer Mark Reeder lives in Berlin, a world centre for clubbing. He has seen the disruptions caused by the pandemic unfold. In an interview for Electronic Cities, he said:

This is the turning point that I thought would eventually happen. After 30 years of techno, it was on the brink. I believed something new was on the horizon. Obviously, I didn’t think it would be exactly like this.

Paul Curtis, the manager of Australian band Regurgitator, which straddles punk rock and electronica, had a similar vision:

We’d already been thinking for the last bunch of years – how the hell do we continue to do what we do in a world that we have to change?

The band had been operating for some time as a kind of small-scale economy, with sustainability as a focus. The collapse of venues in the wake of COVID forced some of their plans to change, but they started to rethink options.

Curtis was puzzled by the attitude of some music business colleagues:

They were saying, ‘As soon as this is over, and we get back to normal’, and I’m thinking, well that’s just delusion.

Curtis used the pandemic quiet to finish a live concert film of the band. He has been distributing it through independent cinemas and music venues that have geared up for screenings.

Australia responded to the economic impacts of the pandemic by introducing the JobKeeper payment to help businesses retain staff. But many venues and most artists and arts workers were ineligible.

Artists globally had similar experiences. In Helsinki, Finland, as Giacomo Botta explains in Electronic Cities, public support during the pandemic went only to recognised electronic dance music organisations. More marginal and underground communities, often most affected by the pandemic, were ignored.

On a more positive note, Sara Ross, speaking as part of a panel at CTM Festival 2021, explained that switching to online platforms such as Twitch – usually used by gamers – might help Toronto DJs widen their audience.

Reeder reflects on Berlin and what the future might look like:

I think this situation is having a profound effect on the way people consume contemporary music and especially what we perceived as the club scene.

He notes the desperation of DJs streaming from home, and the emphasis on nostalgia – “sounds of the past becoming the sounds of the future”.

– ref. Electronic cities: between COVID and gentrification, dance music is struggling to find its groove again – https://theconversation.com/electronic-cities-between-covid-and-gentrification-dance-music-is-struggling-to-find-its-groove-again-149168

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leah Ruppanner, Associate Professor in Sociology and Co-Director of The Policy Lab, The University of Melbourne

Flexible workplace policies designed to improve gender gaps in employment and pay might actually make things worse for women.

Flexible work has been on offer to both men and women in many companies for decades. However, it is usually women who are in non-standard employment such as part-time work, often to meet the demands of children, sick parents or partners needing extra care.

Flexible arrangements might support women in maintaining a work-life balance. But policies that make it easier to transition to a part-time job or take leave may actually be weakening their position in the labour market and their lifetime earnings potential, therefore widening gender gaps in pay.

This highlights the need for equal policies for women and men.

COVID-19 and the labour market

The world changed under COVID-19 and the movement towards more flexible work may be one of the silver linings of the pandemic.

Read more: COVID forced Australian fathers to do more at home, but at the same cost mothers have long endured

This International Women’s Day (March 8), we are in a unique position to tap into the learnings from the COVID-19 lockdowns, during which many men and women were working from home and sharing housework, home-schooling and childcare responsibilities.

Research shows Australian fathers stepped into more involved roles in the household during the lockdowns and have maintained higher levels of involvement in housework and childcare as things return to normal.

Job flexibility and gender pay gap

New research from the Melbourne Institute suggests flexible work conditions such as part-time hours could be a driving factor in the career decisions of women, but not men, and a key reason why the gender divide in employment is not narrowing.

Gender differences in labour force participation, wages and working hours in Australia are very similar to those in the Netherlands, so a study from there offers valuable insights for policymakers in Australia.

Researchers (including one of us, Jordy Meekes) used data from Statistics Netherlands to analyse how men and women respond to job loss.

The study found women remained unemployed for longer than men. When they did find new jobs, women also experienced a larger reduction in working hours than men, which reduced their annual earnings.

It appears women tend to put more emphasis on job flexibility than men, an explanation for why it is hard for women to return to the workforce. Women may even be willing to pass up job opportunities in favour of the flexible work conditions they rely on to balance work and family life.

Women remain largely responsible for the organisational and physical work of making sure kids are completing homework, lunches are prepared and attending numerous after-school activities.

Since work and school schedules are seldom aligned, someone has to do the juggle. To keep the family humming, mothers spend more time on housework and care and less time on employment after the birth of the first child.

Part-time mothers

The career penalty for women that comes with having a child in the current system is felt long beyond the period of maternity leave.

It is commonly acceptable for women to return to work in a part-time capacity. And it is often women who are culturally and socially expected to use flexible conditions to leave work and care for a sick child, for example. Less so for men.

The Melbourne Institute study found men who worked part-time in their previous role took longer to secure another job and were more likely to have to take a pay cut than men who worked full-time.

Men who previously worked part-time earned on average 10% less in the new job. This finding suggests employers attach a penalty to part-time work for men, explained by the fact it is relatively uncommon for men.

Equal policies for women and men

Our beliefs about gender norms are shifting but this is not reflected in workplace and government policies on paper or in practice.

Read more: That extra you’re about to get in super, most of it will come from you, but don’t expect the ads to tell you that

A review of existing policies is an important step in determining how suitable workplace policies are to support all employees.

Having written policies to support diversity and inclusion or flexible work practices is positive but it is not a sign of success. Particularly if, in practice, only a small number of employees can avail of the benefits – and at what cost?

The COVID-19 lockdowns, while challenging for many, have given us an insight into what flexibility could truly look like for men and women alike.

– ref. Flexible work arrangements help women, but only if they are also offered to men – https://theconversation.com/flexible-work-arrangements-help-women-but-only-if-they-are-also-offered-to-men-155882

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dawn LaValle Norman, Research Fellow, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University

When we conjure up ancient philosophers the image that springs to mind might be a bald Socrates discoursing with beautiful young men in the sun, or a scholarly Aristotle lecturing among cool columns.

But what about Aspasia, the foreign mistress of the foremost politician in Athens who gave both political and erotic advice? Or Sosipatra, mystic, mother and Neoplatonist who was a more popular teacher than her husband, Eustathius?

Women also shaped the development of philosophy. Although their writings, by and large do not survive, their verbal teaching made a significant impact on their contemporaries, and their voices echo through the ages.

More than two millennia later, intelligent, verbal women still struggle to have their own voices heard. So here are six ancient female philosophers you should know about.

Read more: How women historians smashed the glass ceiling

1. Aspasia of Miletus

Aspasia of Miletus (most active around 400 BCE) was the most famous woman in Classical Athens — or should we say infamous? Although a foreigner, she became the mistress of Pericles, the leader of Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War.

She was not only remembered for her captivating beauty, but also for her captivating mind. Socrates himself called Aspasia his teacher and relates he learned from her how to construct persuasive speeches. After all, he tells us, she wrote them for Pericles.

She plays a verbal role in at least three philosophical dialogues written by students of Socrates: Plato’s Menexenus and the fragmentary Aspasia dialogues by Aeschines and Antisthenes.

2. Clea

Clea (most active around 100 CE) was a priestess at Delphi — a highly esteemed political and intellectual role in the ancient world. The religious practitioners at the shrine received frequent requests from world leaders for divine advice about political matters. Clea was part of this political-religious system, but she believed in the primary importance of philosophy.

She found many opportunities for in-depth philosophical conversations with Plutarch, the most famous intellectual of his time. Plutarch tells us in the prefaces to On the Bravery of Women and On Isis and Osiris how these invigorating conversations on death, virtue and religious history inspired his own work.

Read more: Hidden women of history: the priestess Pythia at the Delphic Oracle, who spoke truth to power

3. Thecla

When she first appears on the scene in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, Thecla (most active around 1st century CE) is leading a normal middle class life, sequestered at home and about to make an advantageous marriage. But leaning out of her balcony, she hears the dynamic preaching of Paul and decides on a radically different path.

She follows Paul around, resists a variety of amorous advances and survives being thrown to carnivorous seals in the arena. Finally, she is confirmed as a teacher in her own right and begins an illustrious career. Although it’s been speculated Thecla never really existed, her legend inspired many women to pursue a life of philosophy.

Some 250 years later, Methodius of Olympus wrote a philosophical dialogue full of women, with Thecla as the star participant, and Macrina (see below) was given a family nickname of Thecla, inspired by her philosophical and religious mission.

4. Sosipatra

Sosipatra (most active around 4th century CE) lived the dream: she had a successful teaching career along with a content family life. After an education in mysticism by foreigners, Sosipatra became a respected teacher in the Neoplatonic tradition, interpreting difficult texts and mediating divine knowledge.

She was surrounded by male experts, one of whom was her husband Eustathius. But according to Eunapius’ biography in his Lives of the Philosophers, her fame was greater than any of theirs, and students far preferred her inspiring teaching.

5. Macrina the Younger

Macrina (circa 330-379 CE) was the oldest of ten in an expansive, influential well-educated Christian family in Cappadocia.

She kept the family together through her sharp mind, devout soul and strong will, ultimately transforming her ancestral estate into a successful community of male and female ascetics.

Her brother, Gregory of Nyssa, commemorated her wisdom both in a biography Life of Macrina and also in a philosophical dialogue On the Soul and Resurrection.

The latter depicted a conversation about death between the siblings as Macrina lay dying, in which she displays wide knowledge in philosophy, scripture and the physical sciences.

6. Hypatia of Alexandria

Most famous for her dramatic death at the hands of a Christian mob, Hypatia (circa 355–415 CE) was a Neoplatonic teacher admired for her mathematical and astronomical works.

One of her successful students, the Christian bishop Synesius, wrote glowing letters to her, exchanging information not only about philosophy but also about obscure mathematical instruments.

She edited her father Theon’s astronomical commentary, which he acknowledged at publication.

Recalling the wisdom of ancient women both expands our view of history and reminds us of the gendered elements of modern complex thought.

This is particularly true in the field of philosophy, which consistently rates as one of the most gender-imbalanced in the humanities in modern universities.

The ancient world found space to include women’s voices in philosophy, and so must we.

Further reading: for Aspasia: Plato’s Menexenus and Plutarch’s Life of Pericles; for Clea: Plutarch’s On the Bravery of Women and On Isis and Osiris; for Thecla: the anonymously written The Acts of Paul and Thecla and Methodius’ Symposium; for Sosipatra: Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers; for Hypatia: the letters of Synesius of Cyrene and Socrates Scholasticus’ Church History.

– ref. Wise women: 6 ancient female philosophers you should know about – https://theconversation.com/wise-women-6-ancient-female-philosophers-you-should-know-about-156033

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Camilo López-Aguirre, PhD Candidate, UNSW

Scientists have found another piece in the puzzle of how echolocation evolved in bats, moving closer to solving a decades-long evolutionary mystery.

All bats — apart from the fruit bats of the family Pteropodidae (also called flying foxes) — can “echolocate” by using high-pitched sounds to navigate at night.

An international study led by us, published today in Current Biology, has shown how the capability for sophisticated echolocation not only evolved multiple times in groups of bats, but also that it never evolved in fruit bats.

The remarkable sounds of bats

To navigate using echolocation, bats produce high-frequency calls in their larynx (voice box) and emit these through their nose or mouth. These calls, usually made at higher frequencies than humans can hear, echo off objects and bounce back.

From this feedback, bats can extract information about the spatial and textural properties of their surroundings.

For three decades, scientists have tried to understand how echolocation evolved in bats and why this adaptation didn’t extend to fruit bats. So far, they’ve struggled to reach a consensus.

Some evolutionary biologists think fruit bats could once echolocate like their modern counterparts, but at some point lost this capability. Others propose fruit bats never acquired this trait in the first place and that it evolved several times in different bat groups.

Embryos help unpack an evolutionary mystery

Uncovering the history of bat echolocation was always going to be a hard task. There are more than 1,400 species of bat, making up about a quarter of all mammal species on Earth. As such, they come in a remarkable range.

However, bat fossils are notably scarce and fragmented. Scientists lack the specimens needed to reconstruct the 65-million-year evolutionary history of bats.

Also, the genetic information of today’s echolocating bat species has done little to help us understand how the sonar-like system actually works.

Read more: Our laws failed these endangered flying-foxes at every turn. On Saturday, Cairns council will put another nail in the coffin

We took a different approach. Rather than focusing on bat genes or fossils, we examined the very early development of their ear and throat bones.

Evolutionary studies have shown that if a group of species ends up losing a trait its ancestors possessed, not all aspects of the trait are completely lost. Instead, the trait often starts to develop in the very early stages of life, but doesn’t progress.

So if echolocation was present in the common ancestor of all bats, we would expect modern fruit bats to show some developmental trace of this in their ear and throat development.

Our research group, which included biologists from City University of Hong Kong, University of Tokyo and the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, studied hundreds of bat embryo specimens from all around the world.

We used a modern imaging method to digitally reconstruct the soft tissue structure of the embryos in microscopic detail. We compared fruit bats to echolocating bats and also non-echolocating mammals, such as mice.

Striking results

Our analysis revealed fruit bats were indistinguishable from non-echolocating mammals in all aspects of their early ear bone development.

There were also no features which were similar to those observed in bats that do have sophisticated echolocation capability. In other words, there was no evidence to suggest fruit bats would ever have been able to echolocate.

This raised several questions for us. Does this mean the common ancestor of all bats didn’t have the echolocation skills afforded to future bats? This is a possibility.

Alternatively, this common ancestor might have only had a very primitive version of echolocation. If so, it may have looked and sounded strikingly different to what we see in today’s sophisticated echolocators.

Unfortunately, we can’t know for sure which is correct. Pteropodids have the most incomplete fossil record of all bat lineages, so we can’t study how their ear bones changed over time.

Confirming previous theories

Our team also discovered the two major groups of sophisticated bat echolocators, Rhinolophoidea and Yangochiroptera, have different patterns of ear and throat development to one another. This suggests they evolved their sonar independently.

This conclusion also fits in with the latest insights from bat genome sequencing, which indicate that if the ancestor of all bats did echolocate, this was likely some kind of primitive echolocation — not the deft laryngeal echolocation found in modern bats.

The next step will be to combine insights from developmental analysis with bat genomic data.

By studying how the hearing-related genes of bats are expressed during early development, we could find out whether fruit bats completely erased a primitive echolocation system present in an ancestor, or whether it was ever there at all.

Read more: Some bats find their way around like people do: why this is useful to know

– ref. Fruit bats are the only bats that can’t (and never could) use echolocation. Now we’re closer to knowing why – https://theconversation.com/fruit-bats-are-the-only-bats-that-cant-and-never-could-use-echolocation-now-were-closer-to-knowing-why-153721

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jordy Meekes, Research Fellow, Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research, The University of Melbourne

That Australian women earn less than Australian men is well-known. The latest calculation put the gap – the extent to which the average female full-time wage is less than the average male full-time wage – at 13.4%.

Women are also less likely to be employed than men, about 14% less likely, in part because women give birth to and are more likely to care for children.

What is less well known is that women are 32% less likely to work full-time than men and have an average commute that is 20% shorter.

Could women’s shorter hours (even when working full-time), and shorter commutes be part of the reason for the gender gaps in wages and employment?

If women are willing to endure longer periods of unemployment and lower rates of pay in order to get a job that provides their preferred working hours and commuting distances, it could be.

The Netherlands has similar gaps to Australia on all of these metrics.

Women commute shorter distances

In a study with Wolter Hassink of Utrecht University I used ten years of administrative micro data from Statistics Netherlands to examine differences in the experiences of men and women who had lost their jobs.

We limited the analysis to people who had lost their jobs when their employer went bankrupt, an event that affects men and women equally, and further limited it to workers with a job tenure of at least three years who had worked at least 20 hours a week before job loss.

The data covered the entire population of Dutch individuals, households and firms, providing precise information on the dates that jobs ended and the employment experience that followed.

Getting reemployed takes longer

We followed each individual worker for 61 months: two years before until three years after they lost their jobs. We defined workers who lost their jobs as a result of bankruptcy as those who lost their jobs between six months before and one year after a Dutch court declared their employer bankrupt.

Only six in 10 women were re-employed six months after losing their job, compared to seven in 10 men. Encouragingly, the women who did regain employment did it at no lower hourly wages relative to men than before.

Intriguingly, after the sacked workers were reemployed, the gender difference in both their hours of work and commuting distance became larger.

Read more: Sorry, men, there’s no such thing as ‘dirt blindness’ – you just need to do more housework

Women seemed to hold out longer for shorter hours and commutes.

An important reason would be that women spend about twice as much time on unpaid housework and childcare than men, leaving less time for paid work and travelling to and from work.

If men were more present at home…

Part of the reason women spend more time on domestic duties than men, but certainly not the only or biggest reason, might be that in countries such as Australia and Netherlands flexible work is more readily available for women.

This would mean that government policies that enable women to take parental leave and transition from full-time to part-time work on the birth of a child might have the unintended effects of stimulating gender gaps in employment and (through loss of general skills) wages.

Australia’s paid parental leave legislation scheme is built around the idea of a single “primary carer”. That person (99.5% times the mother) gets the leave.

The father can only access two weeks of “dad and partner pay”, at the minimum wage.

Elsewhere, fathers can take much more. Sweden (and Iceland) provide three months paid leave to each parent and a further ten months (and in the case of Iceland, three months) for parents to divide as they wish.

In 2007, Germany gave fathers eight weeks leave. It seems to have made mothers more likely to return to the labour market.

Our Netherlands research showed men who had worked part time before their firm went into bankruptcy lost far more of their hourly wages on obtaining reemployment than either men and women who had worked full time or women who had worked part time. This suggests employers see a part-time employment in a man, but not in a woman, as signalling low productivity.

Promoting flexible work and parental leave for men (and removing the negative signals associated with them) is a promising avenue for progress on closing gender gaps and shifting societal norms. But it is not without its challenges.

– ref. Why do women get paid less than men? Hours and commuting provide clues – https://theconversation.com/why-do-women-get-paid-less-than-men-hours-and-commuting-provide-clues-155883

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deborah Gleeson, Associate professor, La Trobe University

News of the blockage of a shipment of 250,000 COVID-19 vaccines from Europe to Australia has caused concern and outrage.

The immediate problem will probably be quickly solved through diplomatic channels. Even if it is not, onshore manufacturing of the AstraZeneca vaccine will soon make up for any shortfall in Australia’s vaccine supply.

But to avoid these types of supply shortfalls in future, it’s important to address the underlying problems behind this example of vaccine nationalism. Australia is both a victim of these problems, as well as a contributor.

Why has Australia’s shipment of vaccines been blocked?

Italy has blocked the shipment of AstraZeneca vaccines based on export authorisation rules introduced by the European Union in January. These rules require vaccine manufacturers in the EU to seek authorisation to export vaccines to some countries outside the bloc.

This is the first time this process has resulted in a planned delivery of vaccines being blocked. The EU could have objected to Italy’s action, but did not.

The EU introduced the authorisation requirement due to concerns it was not receiving the quantities of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines that the companies had agreed to provide within certain time frames.

How much of a problem will the blockage be for Australia?

The immediate problem will probably be quickly solved through diplomatic negotiations. The EU is also likely to face intense criticism and pressure from other countries that fear the more widespread use of export restrictions.

So, it’s unlikely the export ban on these 250,000 vaccines will remain in place for long, or that Australia will face further export restrictions.

Read more: Vaccine nationalism will block our path out of the pandemic – so how do we resist our tribal instinct?

Even if the shipment never arrives in Australia, onshore manufacturing of the AstraZeneca vaccine by CSL will soon fill the gap, with the first locally produced doses expected to be available around the end of March. Any resulting delay in the rollout of Australia’s COVID-19 vaccination program is likely to be shortlived.

But the blockage of a vaccine shipment points to bigger problems that threaten to undermine the global distribution of vaccines and the world’s recovery from the pandemic.

The bigger picture of vaccine nationalism

The global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines has so far been extremely inequitable. By November 2020, governments had negotiated pre-purchase agreements for almost 7.5 billion doses, 51% of which had been reserved by wealthy countries representing only 14% of the global population.

In mid-January, the director-general of the World Health Organization warned of a “catastrophic moral failure”. He said that 39 million vaccine doses had been administered in high-income countries at that time, but just 25 doses had been provided in “one lowest-income country”.

At this rate, it could be 2023 or 2024 before vaccination brings the pandemic under control globally.

Studies by the RAND Corporation and the International Chamber of Commerce have found that hoarding of vaccines by wealthy countries could cost the global economy trillions of dollars.

Uncontrolled transmission of the virus in some parts of the world also raises the risk of more variants emerging that are resistant to existing vaccines.

Read more: Herd immunity is the end game for the pandemic, but the AstraZeneca vaccine won’t get us there

The underlying problem of artificial scarcity

Much of the reporting on vaccine nationalism tends to focus on the hoarding of vaccines by particular countries. But we should question why the supply of vaccines is so limited in the first place.

This comes down to privately held monopolies on the intellectual property and other types of knowledge, data and information needed for making vaccines. While there is manufacturing capacity available globally to ramp up vaccine production, the exclusive rights to make and sell the vaccines are held by a small number of companies. This is despite a huge investment of public funding in the development of many vaccines.

The intellectual property rights that impede rapid scaling-up of vaccine production are enshrined in the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). This agreement requires that WTO members make available 20-year patents for new pharmaceutical products, along with other types of intellectual property protection.

TRIPS includes safeguards like compulsory licensing, which governments can use to enable patented inventions to be produced without the consent of the patent owner in situations like a public health emergency.

But these are time-consuming and difficult to use, and they only apply to patents and not the other types of knowledge, data and information that are needed to manufacture vaccines.

Read more: 3 ways to vaccinate the world and make sure everyone benefits, rich and poor

Australia’s support needed for global solutions to vaccine scarcity

Two important mechanisms have been proposed to solve this problem of artificial vaccine scarcity and enable production of COVID-19 medical products to be rapidly scaled up. Neither has received Australia’s support to date.

India and South Africa put a proposal to the WTO in October 2020 that certain intellectual property rights in the TRIPS agreement be waived for COVID-19 medical products during the pandemic. This proposal, known as the “TRIPS waiver”, is supported by many developing countries, but opposed by the EU, US and other wealthy countries, including Australia.

The World Health Organization has also set up a mechanism for sharing intellectual property, knowledge and data for COVID-19 products, known as the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP).

C-TAP has been endorsed by 40 countries and many inter-governmental and civil society organisations, but lacks support from many high-income countries, including Australia. So far, it has been unused.

To address the real problems underlying the current supply blockage, Australia will need to reconsider its opposition to these proposed global solutions.

– ref. Yes, export bans on vaccines are a problem, but why is the supply of vaccines so limited in the first place? – https://theconversation.com/yes-export-bans-on-vaccines-are-a-problem-but-why-is-the-supply-of-vaccines-so-limited-in-the-first-place-156569

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Stern, Professor of Geophysics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

A sequence of three major offshore earthquakes, including a magnitude 8.1 quake near the Kermadec Islands, triggered tsunami warnings and evacuations along the east coast of New Zealand this morning.

By early afternoon, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) lifted the evacuation order but stressed that people should stay off beaches and the shore.

All three earthquakes happened along the Tonga Kermadec subduction zone, where the Pacific tectonic plate dives under and then sinks beneath the Australian plate.

This subduction zone is the longest and deepest such system on Earth. It spans from just north of the East Cape, some 2600km to the north-east in an almost straight line to south of Samoa.

One of the questions seismologists around the world are now trying to answer is whether the three quakes were linked and the earlier ruptures triggered the magnitude 8.1 quake.

Potential links between ruptures

The Tonga Kermadec subduction zone terminates north-east of the East Cape, where it then becomes the Hikurangi subduction zone. The first 7.3 magnitude rupture struck at 2.27am, 174km off the east coast, where the Hikurangi and Tonga Kermadec systems merge.

The US Geological Survey recorded this event at a depth of 21km, not 95km deep as the first reports in New Zealand suggested. This quake had an unusual mechanism — an element of sideways movement known as strike-slip.

The other two quakes were about 900km north, but just west of the Tonga-Kermadec trench and at depths of about 56km (for the 6.40am magnitude 7.4 event) and 20km (for the magnitude 8.1 quake at 8.28am). These later events had thrust, or compressive, mechanisms, in which one body of rock compresses against another, sliding up and over it during the earthquake.

This is what we might expect in a subduction zone where one tectonic plate is sliding under another and creating a collision, which in turn gives rise to compression.

As the Pacific plate starts to slide under the Australian plate, it starts off at a shallow angle and then turns along a curved trajectory to finally fall away at a very steep (60 degrees) angle. But when it’s at a shallow level, it is only dipping at say 10-20 degrees and creates a lot of friction with the overlying (Australian) plate. This is typically where these large earthquakes occur.

Triggering sequence

Magnitude 8 quakes in these subduction zone settings are not unusual. Indeed, quakes up to magnitude 9 can occur, such as Japan’s 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, the undersea earthquake off Sumatra that set off the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and quakes in Alaska in 1964 and in Chile in 1960.

Read more: Japan’s experience with earthquakes can help teach us to learn to live with floods

What is curious about this sequence offshore from New Zealand is whether or how the ruptures relate to each other. Certainly, the first of the two later quakes, located within tens of kilometres of each other, can be regarded as a foreshock, followed by the main magnitude 8.1 shock. But was the earliest 2.27am earthquake north of East Cape related?

Generally, seismologists regard a 1000km distance as too far for even a magnitude 7.4 rupture to disturb the ground enough to trigger another. But increasingly there are arguments that the Earth is critically stressed in plate boundary settings to such a level that just a small nudge can set off another event.

After the 2004 Sumatran quake, scientists made a good argument that it triggered further quakes an hour later, some 11,000km away in Alaska. But in this case, they were smaller events following a large triggering quake.

Read more: A new way to identify a rare type of earthquake in time to issue lifesaving tsunami warnings

It’s also interesting that large earthquakes have happened off the Kermadec Islands in the past. In 1976, a magnitude 7.7 event was followed 51 minutes later by a magnitude 8 event. This mirrors what we saw today.

Both events in 1976 were thought to be thrust earthquakes like today’s shocks. Then in 1986, at a depth of 45km, a magnitude 7.7 event displayed both thrust and sideways strike-slip motion. The interpretation of this event was that it was not a plate interface event, but had happened within the subducted and bending Pacific plate.

This could explain the second earthquake this morning, as its depth of 56km seems to place it within the Pacific plate. We will need to wait until the final depths and mechanisms are resolved.

– ref. Following 3 major quakes off New Zealand, questions remain about how they might be linked – https://theconversation.com/following-3-major-quakes-off-new-zealand-questions-remain-about-how-they-might-be-linked-156562

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

University of Canberra Professorial Fellow Michelle Grattan and Director of the Institute for Governance & Policy Analysis Dr Laine Dare discuss the week in politics.

This week the pair discuss some of the 148 recommendations made by the Royal Commission into Aged Care, including the likelihood and feasibility of their adoption. Also discussed, the allegations against Christian Porter, the national accounts figures released on Wednesday, and Linda Reynold’s political future.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the royal commission into aged care, Christian Porter and Linda Reynolds – https://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-the-royal-commission-into-aged-care-christian-porter-and-linda-reynolds-156575

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Collins, Laureate Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Newcastle

Celebrity testimonials abound for pills, potions and creams that purport to make you look younger.

This time collagen supplements are in the spotlight, after Jennifer Aniston became the face of one wellness brand’s collagen campaign in late 2020.

While some research has found benefits of collagen supplementation for some aspects of skin health, it’s a case of buyer beware. The evidence is generally weak, with many of the studies claiming to find positive effects from collagen supplementation funded mostly by industries that manufacture these products. Therefore, the results need to be interpreted with caution.

When you’re reading articles promoting these products, be especially wary of phrases such as “we may receive compensation for some links to products and services”. These statements often mean the publication has negotiated some kind of payment for featuring products in its editorial coverage. Therefore, what you’re reading isn’t necessarily an independent evaluation of the product’s effectiveness.

Rather than spending a lot of money on collagen supplements that promise to defy signs of ageing, smooth wrinkles and renew your skin, spend it on healthy food. You will get better value in terms of your health and well-being in the long-term.

Read more: What is a balanced diet anyway?

What does the science say?

Normal ageing is associated with loss of connective tissues within the skin, leading to a reduction in elasticity and development of wrinkles and creases.

A 2019 review of collagen supplements, conducted by US university researchers, found four of the five studies included had reported some degree of improvement in some skin variables.

This included improvements in: skin moisture and collagen density; skin hydration, wrinkling and elasticity; skin elasticity but not moisture content; and skin moisture, elasticity, wrinkles and roughness.

Read more: Wrinkles, liver spots, crows’ feet: what happens to our skin as we age?

Across the studies, closer scrutiny of the methods by the reviewers found many were rated as being of low methodological quality. The reviewers flagged a number of limitations of the studies. These included that the supplements differed across the trials, as did the types of people included in the studies, meaning you can’t compare results between trials.

It also wasn’t clear how the results translated to actual changes in skin appearance and whether this was noticeable to other people.

Amino acids needed to make collagen can be found in other foods containing protein. There’s no reliable evidence amino acids in collagen supplements speed up the process by which the body makes collagen.

What’s more, most of the studies were either fully or partly funded by cosmetic or supplement companies. This means the results of the research should be interpreted with caution, especially when the affiliation statement shows the study authors were also employed by the supplement manufacturer. Further high quality, independent research studies are needed.

What is collagen and where does it come from?

Collagen is the major structural protein in skin and other connective tissues such as cartilage, bone, tendons and ligaments.

It has a triple helix structure. Imagine three slinkies coiled around each other, and that’s roughly what collagen looks like.

The triple helix shape makes it very strong and flexible.

Vitamin C is essential for the chemical pathway that makes collagen in the body. Without adequate vitamin C, the collagen would be unstable, meaning the coils would unfurl, and you would develop scurvy.

Before you grab a bottle of collagen supplements, you may want to consider where it came from. Rich sources of collagen include pig skin, cattle hide, pork and cattle bones, tendons and cartilage, chicken cartilage and fish scales.

Read more: The skin is a very important (and our largest) organ: what does it do?

A complete diet is better value for money

A 2019 survey reported 37% of Australians spent up to A$20 a month on cosmetics and personal care, with 26% spending between $21-50 and 15% spending $51-200 a month.

A bottle of collagen supplements costs anywhere between roughly A$15-20 to over $100. Each capsule, or per serve, contains roughly between half a gram up to five grams of collagen.

By comparison, you can get better value for money by eating foods rich in protein like meat, chicken, fish, eggs, milk, cheese, nuts, tofu, dried beans and legumes. This will provide the amino acids your body needs to make collagen.

Because collagen would be unstable without vitamin C, it’s also important to regularly eat foods rich in it. Good sources include broccoli, Brussels sprouts, capsicum, tomatoes, spinach, kiwifruit, lemons and oranges.

Also aim to regularly eat foods rich in other nutrients needed to help keep skin healthy. This includes:

• zinc, which is found in seafood, meat, chicken, dried beans and nuts. Inadequate zinc intake can lead to skin conditions including acne and some types of dermatitis.

• vitamin A, from oily fish, egg yolks, cheese, tofu, nuts, seeds, whole grains and legumes. Vitamin A helps immature skin cells develop into a mature skin layer which forms the body’s first layer of protection. “Beta-carotene” found in vegetables can be converted into vitamin A in the body. Good sources include pumpkin, carrots and leafy green vegetables.

• and foods rich in polyphenols. These are small chemicals found in vegetables, fruit, herbs and spices that help plants grow well or protect them from pathogens. Studies suggest higher intakes are associated with slowing some of the skin damage caused by exposure to the sun.

If you’re interested in recipes that are fast, inexpensive and designed to help promote healthier skin, check our No Money No Time website, which we developed at The University of Newcastle.

Read more: Monday’s medical myth: chocolate causes acne

– ref. Thinking about trying collagen supplements for your skin? A healthy diet is better value for money – https://theconversation.com/thinking-about-trying-collagen-supplements-for-your-skin-a-healthy-diet-is-better-value-for-money-152240

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Luke Heemsbergen, PhD, Media and Politics, Deakin University

A couple of days ago, the musician Grimes sold some animations she made with her brother Mac on a website called Nifty Gateway. Some were one-offs, while others were limited editions of a few hundred – and all were snapped up in about 20 minutes, with total takings of more than US$6 million.

Despite the steep price tag, anybody can watch or (with a simple right-click) save a copy of the videos, which show a cherub ascending over Mars, Earth, and imaginary landscapes. Rather than a copy of the files themselves, the eager buyers received a special kind of tradable certificate called a “non-fungible token” or NFT. But what they were really paying for was an aura of authenticity – and the ability to one day sell that aura of authenticity to somebody else.

NFTs are a cultural answer to creating technical scarcity on the internet, and they allow new types of digital goods. They are making inroads into the realms of high art, rock music and even new mass-markets of virtual NBA trading cards. In the process, they are also making certain people rich.

Read more: A token sale: Christie’s to auction its first blockchain-backed digital-only artwork

How NFTs work

NFTs are digital certificates that authenticate a claim of ownership to an asset, and allow it to be transferred or sold. The certificates are secured with blockchain technology similar to what underpins Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

A blockchain is a decentralised alternative to a central database. Blockchains usually store information in encrypted form across a peer-to-peer network, which makes them very difficult to hack or tamper with. This in turn makes them useful for keeping important records.

Read more: Blockchain is useful for a lot more than just Bitcoin

The key difference between NFTs and cryptocurrencies is that currencies allow fungible trade, which means anyone can create Bitcoins that can be exchanged for other Bitcoins. NFTs are by definition non-fungible, and are deployed as individual chains of ownership to track a specific asset. NFTs are designed to uniquely restrict and represent a unique claim on an asset.

And here’s where things get weird. Often, NFTs are used to claim “ownership” of a digital asset that is otherwise completely copiable, pastable and shareable – such as a movie, JPEG or other digital file.

So what is an authentic original digital copy?

Online, it’s hard to say what authenticity and ownership really mean. Internet culture and the internet itself have been driven by copying, pasting and remixing to engender new forms of authentic creative work.

At a technical level, the internet is precisely a system for efficiently and openly taking a string of ones and zeroes from this computer and making them accessible on a that computer, somewhere else. Content available online is typically what economists call “non-rivalrous goods”, which means that one person watching or sharing or remixing a file doesn’t in any way impede other people from the doing the same.

Constant sharing adds up to a near-infinite array of material to view, share, copy or remix into something new, creating the economies of abundance on which online culture thrives.

TikTok is built around reimagining common audio loops with seemingly endless but unique accompanying visual rituals, which are themselves mimicked in seemingly endless variations. On Twitter, tweets are only valuable to the extent they are retweeted. Fake news only exists insofar as Facebook’s algorithm decides sharing them will increase engagement via driving more sharing.

Information wants to be free

The life and longevity of digital content has depended on its ability to spread. The internet’s pioneering cyber-libertarians had a motto to describe this: information wants to be free. Attempts to stop information spreading online have historically required breaking aspects of technology (like encryption) or legal regimes like copyright.

NFTs, however, bring code and culture together to create a form of control that doesn’t rely on the law or sabotaging existing systems. They create a unique kind of “authenticity” in a otherwise shareable world.

What’s next?

Nearly 40 years ago, Canadian science-fiction writer William Gibson famously described cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination” in which billions of users agreed that the online world was real. NFTs take this to the next level: they’re a consensual hallucination that this string of ones and zeroes is different and more authentic than that (identical) string of ones and zeroes.

NFTs work by reintroducing a mutual hallucination of scarcity into a world of abundance. There is no shortage of buyers: the NFT market is already worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Even humble sports trading cards will never be the same.

Are NFTs different enough to break the internet?

The real function of NFTs is to create a clear delineation between ordinary creators and consumers of online content and those privileged enough to be paid to produce content or claim to own “authentic” work. The internet decentralised content creation, but NFTs are trying to recentralise the distribution of culture.

NFTs facilitate the exchange of fungible money for non-fungible authenticity. It’s a well-known move that occurs in all sorts of industries, and one with a long history in, well, art history.

Read more: After GameStop, the rise of Dogecoin shows us how memes can move markets

How the culture-code of NFTs will evolve is anyone’s guess, but at the moment, it is opening a lot of new ways to make new money change hands.

At first take, it might seem that this presents artists everywhere with a recourse to get paid for their otherwise copy-pastable work. Yet creating normative rules around paying for content online has not so far gone smoothly: think of the lacklustre payments musicians receive from streaming services like Spotify.

NFTs have also been criticised for their profligate energy consumption, because they depend on a lot of computer power to encrypt their tokens. According to the online calculator at CryptoArt, the computations required to create NFTs for each of Grimes’ animations would have used enough electricity to boil a kettle 1.5 million times – and resulted in around 70 tonnes of CO₂ emissions. I’m not sure that cost for future generations was priced into the current market value, or any appreciation as tokens cryptographically change hands.

Other than their tonnes of CO₂ emissions, what’s real about NFTs is how their creation of technical scarcity enables a new cultural agreement about how something can be authentic and who controls that authenticity. NFTs create new forms of hierarchy, power and exclusion on the wider web. They have already created a new type of haves and have-nots.

– ref. NFTs explained: what they are, why rock stars are using them, and why they’re selling for millions of dollars – https://theconversation.com/nfts-explained-what-they-are-why-rock-stars-are-using-them-and-why-theyre-selling-for-millions-of-dollars-156389

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dave Parry, Professor of Computer Science, Auckland University of Technology

Although international travel restrictions for Australia have been extended to at least June, there may still be potential for a trans-Tasman bubble with New Zealand (and maybe some other countries), according to reports.

Air New Zealand will begin trialling digital vaccine passports (or “immunity passports”) on routes to Australia in April. Ideally, these digital certificates will allow authorities to quickly check whether prospective travellers have been vaccinated.

The specific passport system New Zealand is set to adopt — along with Qantas, Malaysia Airlines, Singapore Airlines and Qatar Airways — is the International Air Transport Association (IATA)‘s digital Travel Pass app.

But to be effective, this system would need to meet several key criteria. The vaccine passports would need to be linked securely to travellers, comply with different countries’ regulations and be almost impossible to illegally copy or modify.

How would it work?

It’s expected at least the vast majority of people travelling on an airline using the IATA software will have to use the pass. The system has four steps:

1. a vaccine-recording component for when a person is first vaccinated

2. the transfer of this person’s vaccine-related and personal data to the IATA software

3. verification of the data by an authorised party

4. digital cross-checking, to ensure a government’s travel requirements are applied to all travellers entering or leaving that country. This would also make sure each traveller has the necessary prerequisites needed to enter their destination country.

The software would work by establishing an international network of trusted vaccine providers. The IATA is already compiling this list. These providers, including hospitals and clinics, would receive access to the software’s vaccine-recording component.

With this they’d log information about a patient’s vaccination and identity details (such as passport number). So you’d almost certainly need to present a valid passport when getting vaccinated.

For those already vaccinated by the time the system is rolled out, an option would be needed to transfer existing records to the app. Again, this would require confirmation the person requesting the data transfer is the same person who was vaccinated.

Read more: A COVID ‘vaccine passport’ may further disadvantage refugees and asylum seekers

Before-departure checks

Once your vaccine and identification details are logged, this would generate a data file to be sent securely to the app’s software. This file would be encrypted and stored on the device itself, only to be retrieved by an authorised person with your consent.

Border and airline staff could check whether the lab identification is valid by comparing it to the IATA’s list of trusted vaccine providers. This check would be done using a wireless near-field communication system, similar to that used for contactless payments.

At this point, the border control unit would also confirm if the identification you presented when getting your vaccine is still valid. They could also check your passport against the national passport database, which is standard procedure.

Such a system could be set up to flag important updates. If a vaccine batch failed quality control, or a certain provider was removed from the approved providers list, this would need to be reflected quickly.

Security advantages of vaccine passports

A notable advantage of vaccine passports is they’re hard to forge compared to paper records. The IATA software would unbreakably link your identification details with your vaccination status.

Even if someone stole your phone or copied its data, this data would match only your passport. If they stole your passport, too, they’d likely still get caught during normal passport checks.

On Apple (iOS) smartphones the in-built “secure enclave” feature would prevent your Travel Pass app information from being moved remotely to another device without the right permissions. Android and other operating systems have similar tools used for smart wallets.

Using vaccine passports also minimises data sharing. In each case of information transaction, such as when crossing border control, the only data shared are your identification details and vaccine information.

An achievable set-up

Most countries are requiring that all COVID vaccines administered be recorded on a national register. In Australia, this is the Australian Immunisation Register.

The IATA will publish the Travel Pass app’s software interface, which is what enables other programs to transfer data to and from the software.

With the interface available, countries should be able to simply integrate the software into their own vaccine management systems. Governments could even apply their own rules to the software.

For instance, one may decide to reject vaccine records from a particular provider, or demand a longer waiting period once a vaccine is received.

This could obviously cause problems for travellers who may be planning to go to a destination with different protocols to the origin country. That’s why this would have to be sorted prior to travel, just as visas often are.

Minor issues and loopholes

For now, a digital vaccine passport would only be available for people with a smartphone or tablet. Also, each traveller in a group would need their own vaccine passport.

This could be tricky for families with young children or other dependants who don’t (or can’t) use smart devices. One fix would be for parents or carers to store dependants’ information on their own device.

The only credible route for vaccine passport forgery would be if a vaccination management system, such as one used by a GP or hospital, somehow recorded patient data incorrectly.

This could be done by someone deliberately impersonating someone else. Then again, the impostor would have to convince both the health worker administering their vaccine and staff at the airport. This would be difficult if a passport is used.

Similarly, a hacker could potentially attack the Australian Immunisation Register (or other vaccine registers) to generate false data to feed into the IATA system. But these registries tend to be well-protected.

And if one were compromised, it would be simple to invalidate vaccine certificates tracing back to it for as long as the issue wasn’t resolved.

Read more: Before we introduce vaccine passports we need to know how they’ll be used

– ref. How would digital COVID vaccine passports work? And what’s stopping people from faking them? – https://theconversation.com/how-would-digital-covid-vaccine-passports-work-and-whats-stopping-people-from-faking-them-156032

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jamie Triccas, Professor of Medical Microbiology, University of Sydney

The United States’ drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said last week COVID vaccines updated for variants won’t need to go through full randomised controlled clinical trials.

The booster shots will only be required to undergo initial testing to check they are safe and produce an immune response. They won’t need to go through lengthy “phase 3” efficacy trials which would normally enrol tens of thousands of participants.

The European Medicines Agency hasn’t published formal guidelines, but has taken the same position. Chair of the agency’s vaccine evaluation team, Marco Cavaleri, told Reuters: “We will ask for much smaller trials, with a few hundred participants, rather than 30,000 to 40,000”. The focus would be primarily on safety and immune response data.

This is encouraging news, because it means we could get access to booster shots much more quickly than if they went through full trials. And because drug companies will have to prove they’re using the same technology and manufacturing process as the original vaccines, we can still be assured they’ll also be safe.

Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has not yet confirmed whether it’ll do the same, but history tells us we can probably expect it to follow suit.

Why do we need boosters?

Variant strains of the virus have been detected around the world, including those originating in the UK, South Africa and Brazil. People infected with these variants have been found in Australian hotel quarantine, and the B.1.1.7 strain, first found in the UK, has escaped the quarantine system several times.

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

For those tested, the current crop of vaccines still perform relatively well against the B.1.1.7 strain.

And data suggest most COVID vaccines will still be somewhat useful in preventing hospitalisation and death from these variants.

However, efficacy against mild to moderate illness, and against transmission of the virus, has likely dropped off sharply against some of these variants.

For example, preliminary data suggest vaccine efficacy for AstraZeneca’s vaccine dropped to just 10% against mild-moderate illness from the B.1.351 variant which originated in South Africa. Efficacy of Novavax’s shot slid from 89% to 60% against this variant. These data were from small trials and more studies are needed, but it’s still very concerning.

We don’t have solid real world data yet about the performance of the Pfizer vaccine against the B.1.351 variant.

Read more: South Africa has paused AstraZeneca COVID vaccine rollout but it’s too early to say Australia should follow suit

Why don’t we need full trials again?

Drug companies have flagged the need to develop updated booster shots to cover these new variants, which would involve tweaking their sequences.

Some scientists were worried this would mean drug companies would have to go through full randomised controlled clinical trials, including large phase 3 efficacy trials, to get these booster shots to market. These phase 3 clinical trials include many thousands of volunteers and the primary aim is to determine if the vaccine can prevent people from getting the disease.

By the time these trials were completed, it may be too late to control outbreaks caused by variants, and new variants may emerge that we’d need coverage for. In a pandemic, we don’t have the luxury of time.

But the FDA has dispelled this fear. The drug regulator seems most interested in ensuring any booster shots are safe and the manufacturing process hasn’t been modified from the original vaccines it approved.

The boosters will still require smaller trials to show they’re safe and generate an immune response. The trials typically involve a few hundred people and would examine the percentage of vaccinated volunteers who make antibodies to the variants, as well as the strength of the immune response.

This would be similar to what’s done for annual flu shots, although not exactly the same. We get very different flu strains circulating every few years, but current COVID-19 vaccines and variant “boosters” could be sufficient to use for several years — we don’t know yet.

The FDA also indicated boosters won’t necessarily need to undergo animal testing before progressing to human testing, which will also save time. But this may be encouraged if results from human trials are ambiguous.

How do we know they’ll be safe and effective?

Any potential side effects from a vaccine are mostly based on how the vaccine is made, the technology and how it’s delivered.

If drug companies keep all these factors the same, and only make minor sequence changes to cover variants, then we can expect the boosters to still be very safe vaccines.

The US and EU drug regulators would like to see data where the booster is given to people who’ve already had an original COVID vaccine, given this will be the likely scenario for most people receiving a booster shot by the time they’re approved.

The boosters will probably also be tested in people who haven’t had any COVID disease or vaccine. This is to ensure the boosters can induce strong immune responses like the original vaccine.

When required, the TGA will independently review all of this data. It will also likely seek advice from internal and external experts.

Read more: How do we know the COVID vaccine won’t have long-term side-effects?

It’s also unclear when booster shots will be available or if they will be necessary in the short term. Melbourne-based biotech company CSL, which is producing the AstraZeneca vaccine onshore, said this week booster shots to cover coronavirus variants probably won’t be available until the end of the year.

US pharmaceutical company Moderna has already sent a new COVID vaccine booster shot for phase 1 testing, to target the B.1.351 variant. Pfizer is also planning to develop a booster to cover this variant, either as a third dose or a reformulated vaccine.

New variants will continue to arise, but the best chance we have of stopping or slowing this process is by continuing public health measures to ensure as few people as possible become infected.

This includes vaccinating as many people as possible globally with the currently approved vaccines, which underscores Australia’s responsibility to assist countries in our region in getting vaccinated.

Read more: 3 ways to vaccinate the world and make sure everyone benefits, rich and poor

– ref. Why we’ll get COVID booster vaccines quickly and how we know they’re safe – https://theconversation.com/why-well-get-covid-booster-vaccines-quickly-and-how-we-know-theyre-safe-156120

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Milte, Matthew Flinders Senior Research Fellow, Flinders University

The final report from the aged care royal commission this week was damning. Speaking of a system in crisis, it calls for an urgent overhaul.

The Morrison government has been facing difficult questions regarding which of the 148 recommendations it will adopt. It also needs to grapple with how to pay for the much-needed changes.

Read more: 4 key takeaways from the aged care royal commission’s final report

On this question, the royal commissioners disagree. Commissioner Lynelle Briggs calls for a levy of 1% of taxable personal income, while commissioner Tony Pagone recommends the Productivity Commission investigate an aged care levy.

A 1% levy could cost the median person who already pays the medicare levy about $610 a year, while boosting funds for the aged care sector by almost $8 billion a year.

So far, the government has played down the idea of new taxes. There is a view this would be hard sell for a Coalition elected, at least in part, to lower taxation.

But as debate continues about how to make the changes we need to aged care (and not just talk about it), our research suggests many Australians support a levy to improve the quality and sustainability of our aged care system.

Our research

In September 2020, we surveyed over 1,000 Australians aged 18 to 87 years, representative by age, gender and state. We wanted to find out how the pandemic influenced attitudes to health, well-being and caring for others.
Our findings indicated overwhelming public support for aged care reform, to ensure all older Australians are treated with dignity.

Read more: Paid on par with cleaners: the broader issue affecting the quality of aged care

The vast majority of our respondents (86%) either “strongly agreed” or “agreed” Australia needed more skilled and trained aged care workers. On top of this, 80% thought aged care workers should be paid more for the work that they did.

More than 80% also either “strongly agreed” or “agreed” that nurses working in aged care should be paid at an equivalent rate to nurses working in the health system. Currently, nurses working in aged care are paid, on average, about 10-15% less.

The crunch point

Importantly, 50% of our respondents showed a willingness to pay additional tax to fund better pay and conditions for aged care workers. Of those willing to pay more tax, 70% were willing to pay 1% or more per year.

This finding supports previous larger-scale research we undertook for the royal commission, before the pandemic.

Here we found similar levels of public support for increased income tax contributions to support system-wide improvements. This suggests politicians seem to underestimate the public appetite for improvements to the system, and people’s willingness to contribute to achieve this.

Changing ideas about economic ‘success’

Our survey findings also highlighted a growing recognition among Australians of the importance of a broader range of social and economic goals.

For some time, economists, academics, organisations and peak bodies have been calling for a move away from traditional economic indicators (such as economic growth and expanding gross domestic product) at any cost, towards a broader definition of success.

Read more: Despite more than 30 major inquiries, governments still haven’t fixed aged care. Why are they getting away with it?

This would see governments focus on policies that promote a more equal distribution of wealth and well-being, where the fundamentals of community cohesion are highly valued and our natural resources are protected.

We asked our survey respondents to rank the relative importance of seven key areas of public policy in framing Australia’s pathway to recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, including:

• dignity (people have enough to live in comfort, safety and happiness)
• nature and climate (a restored natural world which supports life into the future)
• social connection (a sense of community belonging and institutions that serve the common good)
• fairness (equal opportunity for all Australians and the gap between the richest and the poorest greatly reduced)
• participation (having as much control over your daily life as you would want)
• economic growth (an increase in the amount of goods and services produced in Australia), and
• economic prosperity (full employment and low inflation levels).

The criteria ranked most important by the largest proportion of our survey respondents were dignity (20.1%) and fairness (19.3%).

Traditional economic indicators were not the highest priorities for the Australians we surveyed. Instead, economic growth and prosperity were only ranked as a top priority by 15.3% and 15.2% of our respondents respectively.

This suggests the general public recognises the importance of moving beyond the traditional markers of a successful society.

What Australians want

Our research shows significant aged care reform is entirely consistent with the current priorities of the Australian public.

The burning question now is whether the Morrison government will step up to the challenge.

– ref. 50% of Australians are prepared to pay more tax to improve aged care workers’ pay, survey shows – https://theconversation.com/50-of-australians-are-prepared-to-pay-more-tax-to-improve-aged-care-workers-pay-survey-shows-156299

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David John Eldridge, Professor of Dryland Ecology, UNSW

After 200 years of European farming practices, Australian soils are in bad shape – depleted of nutrients and organic matter, including carbon. This is bad news for both soil health and efforts to address global warming.

The native Australian echidna may hold part of the solution. Echidnas dig pits, furrows and depressions in the soil while foraging for ants. Our research has revealed the significant extent to which this soil “engineering” could benefit the environment.

Echidnas’ digging traps leaves and seeds in soil. This helps improve soil health, promotes plant growth and keeps carbon in the soil, rather than the atmosphere.

The importance of this process cannot be underestimated. By improving echidna habitat, we can significantly improve soil health and boost climate action efforts.

Nature’s excavators

Many animals improve soil health through extensive digging. These “ecosystem engineers” provide a service that benefits not only soils, but plants and other organisms.

In Australia, most of our digging animals are either extinct, restricted or threatened. But not so the echidna, which is still relatively common in most habitats across large areas of the continent.

Echidnas are prolific diggers. Our long-term monitoring at Australian Wildlife Conservancy’s Scotia Sanctuary, in southwest New South Wales, suggests one echidna moves about seven tonnes – about eight trailer loads – of soil every year.

Soil depressions left by echidnas can be up to 50cm wide and 15cm deep. When ants are scarce, such as at highly degraded sites, echidnas dig deeper to find termites, making even larger pits.

This earth-moving capacity unwittingly provides another critically important function: matchmaking between seeds and water.

Playing cupid

For seeds to germinate they must come together with water and soil nutrients. Our experiment showed how echidna digging helps make that happen.

We tested whether seeds would be trapped in echidna pits after rain. We carefully marked various seeds with different coloured dyes, and placed them on the soil surface in a semi-arid woodland near Cobar, NSW, where we’d dug pits similar to those echidnas create. We then simulated a rain event.

Most seeds washed into the pits, and those that started in the pits stayed there. The experiment showed how echidna pits encourage seeds, water and nutrients to meet, giving seeds a better chance to germinate and survive in Australia’s poor soils.

The recovering pits then become plant and soil “hotspots” from which plants can spread across the landscape.

Our research has also found pits also harbour unique microbial communities and soil invertebrates. These probably play an important role in breaking down organic matter to produce soil carbon.

It’s no wonder many human efforts to restore soil imitate the natural structures constructed by animals such as echidnas.

Read more: Curious Kids: How does an echidna breathe when digging through solid earth?

Echidnas as carbon farmers

Our recent research also shows how echidna digging helps boost carbon in depleted soils.

When organic matter lies on the soil surface, it’s broken down by intense ultraviolet light which releases carbon and nitrogen into the atmosphere. But when echidnas forage, the material is buried in the soil. There it is exposed to microbes, which break down the material and release carbon and nitrogen to the soil.

This does not happen immediately. Our research suggests it takes 16-18 months for carbon levels in the pits to exceed that in bare soils.

This entire process of echidna digging, capture and buildup creates a patchwork of litter, carbon, nutrients, and plant hotspots. These fertile islands drive healthy, functional ecosystems – and will become more important as the world becomes hotter and drier.

Read more: The secret life of echidnas reveals a world-class digger vital to our ecosystems

Harness the power of echidnas

Soil restoration can be expensive, and impractical across vast areas of land. Soil disturbance by echidnas offers a cost-effective restoration option, and this potential should be harnessed.

Australia’s echidna populations are currently not threatened. But landscape management is needed to ensure healthy echidna populations into the future.

Echidnas often shelter in hollow logs, so removing fallen timber reduces their habitat and feeding sites. Restrictions on practices such as firewood removal are needed to prevent habitat loss.

And being slow-moving, echidnas are often killed on our roads. To address this, shrubs and ground plants should be planted between patches of native bush, creating vegetation corridors so echidnas can move safely from one spot to the next.

And while an echidna’s sharp spines give it some protection from natural predators, they’re less effective against introduced predators such as foxes and cats. So strategies to control these threats are also needed.

The health of Australia’s fragile environment is in serious decline. Echidnas are already providing a valuable ecosystem service – and they should be protected and nurtured to ensure this continues.

Read more: 10 million animals are hit on our roads each year. Here’s how you can help them (and steer clear of them) these holidays

– ref. Dig this: a tiny echidna moves 8 trailer-loads of soil a year, helping tackle climate change – https://theconversation.com/dig-this-a-tiny-echidna-moves-8-trailer-loads-of-soil-a-year-helping-tackle-climate-change-155947

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zoe Vaill, PhD Candidate Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology

Students are heading off to universities around Australia, whether for the first time or as returning students, with expectations of a year of learning, making friends and enjoyable socialising. For some students this will not be the case. Bullying by other students continues to be a serious but neglected problem at Australian universities.

Our recent study of 39 Australian universities found 20 did not have an anti-bullying policy relating to students. The other 19 had a mix of student-specific policies and staff policies with students added on.

Read more: Bullying in regional universities is a serious problem that needs addressing

Internationally, researchers have identified bullying at universities as a problem. Students have reported both traditional bullying and cyberbullying.

With growing numbers learning online, it is more important than ever to ensure universities are properly protecting their students. Students need accurate, relevant and usable information to counter bullying.

First, a little context

Despite the evidence of the harm bullying in universities does, it hasn’t received the same attention as bullying in schools or workplaces.

Australia has laws to ensure workplaces and schools have anti-bullying policies for employees and students. Each state’s department of education provides a template and guidelines on what must be included in school policy and how it should be communicated to staff, students and parents.

Read more: Not every school’s anti-bullying program works – some may actually make bullying worse

Policies are a great prevention and intervention strategy as part of efforts to stop student bullying. The problem is this government-based approach to bullying has not included tertiary education.

So what are universities doing?

The support provided for students who are bullied varies from university to university. But, overall, policy-based support is lacking.

The numbers found in our recent study are worrying. Only 66% of university policies defined bullying and 69% mentioned cyberbullying. Only 23% provided contact details for students to report the bullying to their university.

The study assessed universities’ policies for quality and usability of content. This revealed an important problem in addition to the overall lack of information. Where these policies exist, they lack accurate and usable information.

How useful are these policies?

We checked the information provided against a list of 37 items, including:

• definitions of bullying

• practical information on how to report and what support is available

• usability of information – is the policy easy to find and understand?

• overall prevention and intervention strategies.

On average, universities in Australia included only 15 of the 37 items in their anti-bullying policies. This means the existing policies are not providing important information to students about bullying and what to do if they are bullied.

Analysis of the content universities provided to students in each state and territory clearly shows how widespread the issue is. All on average included less than half of the items they should have included. The averages were:

• 9 of 37 in Australian Capital Territory, Northern Territory and Tasmania

• 14 of 37 in Victoria and Western Australia

• 17 of 37 in Queensland and New South Wales

• 18 of 37 in South Australia.

As well as the information left out, the information provided by anti-bullying policies was often incorrect or contradicted by the university’s other policies, procedures or information pages. This is especially true of the definitions of bullying. The words bullying, harassment and discrimination are often used interchangeably.

Read more: Sexual abuse, harassment and discrimination ‘rife’ among Australian academics

The usability of these policies is another issue. Some are hard to find. The policies also do not use student-friendly language and are difficult to understand.

Many policies do not use student-specific examples of bullying behaviour. This is especially true of staff policies that have had students added on. Information about reporting the bullying, and who they should talk to for advice and support, is often relevant for staff only.

How can this situation be fixed?

These problems should be tackled on several fronts, including:

• state governments mandating that each university has a student-specific anti-bullying policy using a provided template so information is accurate and consistent across all universities

• universities drawing on well-developed policies and practices such as those in the UK, which use online reporting forms and have student advice lines

• universities actively promoting a bully-free culture on campus and online, and ensuring students know of the policies and their options.

Universities have a duty of care to students. This mean they must make sure students can learn in a safe and supportive environment. Universities must take a firm stance on bullying and ensure students know how to identify and report bullying, and trust their university to believe and support them when bullying does occur.

Read more: Brutal rituals of hazing won’t go away — and unis are increasingly likely to be held responsible

– ref. Half of our unis don’t have bullying policies for students. This is what they need to protect them – https://theconversation.com/half-of-our-unis-dont-have-bullying-policies-for-students-this-is-what-they-need-to-protect-them-156108

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jan Thomas, Vice-Chancellor, Massey University

As first-year students flooded onto campuses around the country this week, gripped with uncertainty and curiosity about their new lives, I too returned to university to learn.

For the first time since what feels like forever, but in reality was 1997 when I finished my PhD, I am now a bona fide university student.

It’s confronting to go back as an undergraduate online student (I’m doing a BA, through my own university, Massey University). But at the same time, it’s exciting and new. And for me, with a science background, stepping into the humanities is a whole other world.

The last time I was a student I used the scientific method; I tested, palpated and measured as a veterinary science undergraduate. In the humanities, it feels more fluid, more open to interpretation. As Vice-Chancellor I’ve known this, but to now be in it, well … I’ve surprised myself, because I’ve found I really like it.

I haven’t yet told my mother I’m doing a BA — she’ll find out when she reads this (sorry, Mum). I’ve been nervous about telling her; as a scientist in a family full of humanities graduates, I’ve always been a bit of a black sheep and was enthusiastically critical of my siblings’ choices as a youngster.

But increasingly I began to recognise our different disciplines have different ways of looking at the world, and that’s incredibly valuable for critical and creative thinking.

Into the third space

I’m now stepping into a new space. In the Aboriginal world, in my native Australia, they talk about the “third space” — a place where white people and Indigenous people come together to begin to understand the other’s perspective.

You don’t have to agree to it, but it’s essential to understand it, otherwise you’re constantly in tension. The two separate worlds just keep flowing on in parallel, and nothing ever truly changes.

My first course is He Tirohanga Taketake: Māori Perspectives, taught by Te Rā Moriarty at Te Putahi-a-Toi. We’re studying perspectives from Māori authors, through Māori teachers, alongside Māori and non-Māori students, gaining a deeper understanding of concepts such as tapu, mana, and whakapapa.

We’re examining social structures within Māoridom, the influence of colonisation, and the Māori world view on things such as the environment, family and personal characteristics such as humility and respect for kaumātua.

Read more: A century that profoundly changed universities and their campuses

I’m asking myself as I go, if I am standing in a Māori person’s shoes, what does the world look like?

Well, it looks pretty different. And that’s why I believe fostering understanding is essential to constructing the way forward together.

Although I managed to pass te reo Māori to level 5 at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa over three years, I feel I’ve still got so far to go. I’m not even dipping a full toe into the water yet — maybe just the toenail.

Strength and direction

The world has changed dramatically over the past five to ten years, and many businesses and institutions now have strong aspirations to incorporate Te Tiriti o Waitangi into how they operate. Massey is no exception.

But it’s got to be more than just lip service, more than just te reo greetings in corporate emails. If we’re going to get the partnership right (and I recognise there’s a better word than “partnership” — perhaps fusing or blending), the responsibility has to fall on all of us.

Everyone has to work on it. And for me, entering the third space, I’m not trying to “be Māori”, but I know I’ve got to understand Māori perspectives and why others might want certain things.

Read more: Guaranteed Māori representation in local government is about self-determination — and it’s good for democracy

Sure, it might help me avoid giving offence, and that’s essential. But more than that, we might find areas of common interest, things that make meaning for both parts of the partnership. I know if I’m going to lead a university that upholds diversity, equity and excellence in Aotearoa, I need to engage fully.

There are te reo Māori terms for the sides of the stream and the middle of the stream. The sides are “au taha” — the side currents, where the water doesn’t flow swiftly. In the middle, it’s “au kaha”, which has more strength, direction and forward momentum.

Historically, we’ve had Pākehā on one side of the stream and Māori on the other. We’ve got to get into the middle of the stream together, au kaha, and move forward together down the river.

Don’t be satisfied paddling in the easy bits on the side, but find moments to meet in the middle. Get right into the stream, and be brave enough to work in that (sometimes) turbulent place.

– ref. Honouring Te Tiriti means ‘getting into the stream together’ — so this vice-chancellor has become a student again – https://theconversation.com/honouring-te-tiriti-means-getting-into-the-stream-together-so-this-vice-chancellor-has-become-a-student-again-156198

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

After years of repeatedly missing its inflation target through too timid monetary policy, in the past week the Reserve Bank has decided to get tough.

Not only did it hold its closely watched cash rate target steady at 0.10% at Tuesday’s board meeting, it ramped up its efforts to defend its separate 0.10% target for the three-year government bond rate in the face of a mini-revolt by bond traders.

A few weeks back, some of the traders in Australia and elsewhere got it into their heads that big borrowing by governments would force up bond rates – a relationship that was once thought to be clear cut but hasn’t held for some time.

The traders sold government bonds issued by Australia and other nations, which in the case of the bond market, forces up the bond interest rate.

Then other traders piled on, partly because economic outlooks are improving and they thought governments might soon be issuing fewer bonds, and partly because they thought other traders might agree with the traders.

That’s right: “thought other traders might agree with the traders”.

Beauty contests can make markets mad

In financial markets you don’t make money by correctly guessing what will happen, you make it by correctly guessing what other traders think will happen.

One of the founders of modern economics, John Maynard Keynes, described it as a beauty contest in which judges are rewarded not for picking the most beautiful face, but for picking the face other judges will think is the most beautiful.

It works a bit like this in Family Feud.

The yield on Australian Commonwealth 10 year bonds climbed from 0.98% at the start of the year to 1.11% a month later, to an extraordinary 1.87% a month after that – a near-doubling in a matter of weeks.

Even the yield on three year bonds, which the Reserve Bank has pledged to keep at 0.10% crept up to 0.13%.

Last Friday, the Reserve Bank fought back.

It bought extra bonds a day after completing its usual purchases on Thursday.

This Tuesday, in its statement after its monthly board meeting, it added nine words to its usual acknowledgement that “wage and price pressures remain subdued”.

Those words were: “and are expected to remain so for some years”.

And then it released a separate statement reiterating that when its A$100 billion program of buying $5 billion of government bonds each week expires in May it will launch another $100 billion program, taking the scheduled bond buying through to November.

Read more: 5 ways the Reserve Bank is going to bat for Australia like never before

Since the program began last November, the bank has bought $74 billion of bonds. Its message was that if traders thought it was within $26 billion of running out of ammunition, it had another $100 billion. It doubled the size of its knife.

The bank can’t afford to lose

Keeping control of rates is a fight the Reserve Bank has to win. When it announces a change in an interest rate, usually the cash rate, it uses words along the lines of “the board decided to lower the cash rate,” implying that it can.

The more accurate words it used to use were “the bank will be operating in the money market this morning to reduce the cash rate,” an admission that it could only try to move the cash rate, by trading in financial instruments.

So effective have its pronouncements become that in recent years it hasn’t needed to do much trading to move the cash rate – it has just announced the move knowing that traders will fall into line because it could buy or sell financial instruments if it wanted to.

If it loses a battle with traders over rates, what it says will have much less force.

It has the resources it needs to win

The bank will win whatever battle it chooses to fight because it has unlimited resources. Unlike traders, it can create as many Australian dollars as it needs in order to buy as many bonds as it needs.

So far it has chosen to defend its ground on the cash rate and the three-year bond rate. It wants both at 0.1%.

It said on Tuesday it would “not increase the cash rate until actual inflation is sustainably within the 2 to 3% target range”.

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

It added that for that to occur, wage growth will have to be “materially higher”, which would require significant gains in employment and a return to a tight labour market.

And then the killer sentence, the last, aimed directly at the traders: “The Board does not expect these conditions to be met until 2024 at the earliest.”

Although it released the statement one day before Wednesday’s national accounts that showed the economic recovery continuing, it would have been aware of what they were likely to show.

It remains resolute.

– ref. Vital Signs: In the battle over interest rates, it’d be unwise to bet against the RBA – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-in-the-battle-over-interest-rates-itd-be-unwise-to-bet-against-the-rba-156410

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter McNeil, Distinguished Professor of Design History, UTS, University of Technology Sydney

It’s Sydney Lesbian and Gay Mardi Gras festival time. LGBTQI people are enjoying what some call “gay or lesbian Christmas”. It’s not quite the same in the era of COVID, but a contained version of the famous street parade will be beamed into living rooms on Saturday.

The public face of Mardi Gras, which began in 1978 with a protest parade, is remarkable in a nation that has been deeply prejudiced toward gay and lesbian people. Part of the power of Mardi Gras for older generations was that it removed queer sexualities from the “secret” confines of semi-legal bar and club locations and private parties to the public street. Being on the front page of the newspaper no longer meant you might be going to jail.

Still, Australian queer people did not suddenly emerge in the 1960s and 70s, the years of gay liberation. Where were they before and how can they be identified? Because male homosexuality was criminalised, much can be discovered from the press and crime reports. Letters, memoirs, diaries, art, photographs and the memories of gay, lesbian, and transgender people also provide clues.

From the bush to the boudoir

The Australian colonies were marked by a shortage of women and the dominance of homosocial environments. Francis Forbes, former Chief Justice in the colony, when questioned at the so-called Molesworth inquiry into convict transportation in the 1830s, had to admit Sydney “had been called a Sodom”. Sodomy in the Tasmanian coal mines was also the subject of a British government inquiry.

Read more: Debauchery on the fatal shore: the sex lives of Australia’s convicts

There is evidence of what historian Robert Aldrich calls “conjoined” same-sex male couples in 19th-century Australia, including the famous bushranger Captain Moonlite (Andrew George Scott). As he waited to be hanged in Darlinghurst Jail in 1880, he wrote of his fellow ranger James Nesbitt: “We were one in heart and soul, he died in my arms and I long to join him …”

Homosexuality was often associated with foreigners and cosmopolitan affectation. George Francis Alexander Seymour, future Marquess of Hertford, lived in Queensland briefly around 1895. Likely inspired by international dance sensation Loie Fuller, he shocked locals by wearing sequins and a veil for “skirt dancing” performances in front of “kanakas” (South Pacific men coerced to work in the canefields).

William Lygon, later 7th Earl Beauchamp — the governor of New South Wales for a short time from 1899 — travelled with a retinue of good-looking footmen and lavished praise on the natural grace of Australian athletes and lifesavers.

He was disgraced as a homosexual by his brother-in-law in 1931 and became the subject of the famous statement by King George V: “I thought people like that always shot themselves.”

He subsequently inspired the famous novel by Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited.

Interwar life: fashion and fancy

In the inter-war years, there was a marked queer presence in the worlds of Australian art, design, entertainment and retail. This was the period of art deco and Australian “genteel modernism”. Art Deco (called moderne or futurist style at the time) was inseparable from fashion and fantasy and frequently derided as an effeminate style — it has even been called the “International Style in drag”.

Cultural nationalist and the director of Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria from 1936–1941, J. S. MacDonald, claimed this type of art and design had been promoted by women and “pansies”, meaning homosexual men.

Smith’s Weekly, The Bulletin and the New Triad mocked the “wasp waists” and “goo goo boys” who worked in retail and enjoyed theatre.

Some queers worked as entertainers or drag queens. In NSW this was a summary offence of indecency (still used by police in the 1970s). Drag queens and cross-dressers had to wear male underwear or else risk arrest.

Cross-dressing was also associated at the time with street prostitution. A police mugshot from 1942 shows two cross-dressed male sex workers wearing women’s coats, one with huge rabbit-fur-trimmed sleeves, as well as a turban and makeup. The men still look very male and defiant, suggesting a part of their sexual charge came from precisely this lack of ambiguity; it was clear they were not women.

Clearly annoyed, one of the pair remarked to the tabloid Truth:

We were bundled out of the police cell, and snapped immediately. My friend and I had no chance to fix our hair or arrange our make-up. We were half asleep and my turban was on the wrong side.

Gay male artists and commercial designers in Sydney lived their queer lives discreetly on moderate incomes. The flower painter Adrian Feint, who lived in Elizabeth Bay, produced many bookplates depicting languid young men with a queer mood.

His disguised self-portrait etching of a dandy entitled The Collector (1925) carried the suggestion of eye and lip makeup, depicting archaic Edwardian dress, a top hat, a cane, plaid suit and cape.

His remarkable cover for the upmarket magazine The Home (July 1929) featured a “Rum Corps” officer whom Feint transformed into a languid, heavily made-up beauty, recalling both the Ballets Russes, who were touring Australia, and the famous queer movie star Rudolph Valentino.

The culture of hedonism, promiscuity, heavy drinking, pub life and mixed-class socialising that characterised life in the colonies pervaded Australian gay life until recently. Pubs and clubs were crude, brash and fun. Bohemian ideas were also important. All sorts of behaviour were excused at the Artists’ Balls, which were held in Sydney from the 1920s until 1964. Gay balls were often accompanied by a blind orchestra (not unusual at the time due to war injuries) so the goings on could not be observed.

A 1925 sketch by Mandi McCrae of one such ball in The Home, September 1925, delineates a transsexual, two men with arms akimbo, and several gender-indeterminate figures. The press loved running stories of cross-dressed men whose dresses were so large they had to arrive in delivery vans. One told of a live bird in a cage worn as a Marie Antoinette-style headdress.

Urban subcultures

In the interwar years, a queer urban subculture coalesced for the first time in Sydney around art deco sites and buildings: city hotels, the Archibald Fountain by night for cruising, and the new high-density housing of Kings Cross, Potts Point, Darlinghurst and East Sydney.

Boonara, a middle-class block of flats in Woollahra, built by a widow and a “spinster” in 1918, was let only to women and one male artist, William Lister Lister. Restaurants catering to a homosexual clientele included Madame Pura’s Latin Cafe in the now demolished Royal Arcade.

Many Australian artists and writers became expatriate in this period to escape wowserism, censorship and the anti-art tenor of Australian society. They included Nobel winning novelist Patrick White, who conducted one of the great same-sex love affairs with Manoly Lascaris from 1941 until White’s death in 1990. White spent his youth in England, writing from a desk designed by the queer interior decorator and later famed artist Francis Bacon.

Back home in the 1940s, a group of queer artists, dancers and designers lived in Merioola, a run-down mansion in Edgecliff known then as “Buggery Barn”. They included artists Donald Friend and Justin O’Brien, acclaimed costume designer Loudon Sainthill and his partner, the theatre critic and gallery director Harry Tatlock Miller. The landlady was the butch looking Chica Lowe. She provided a set-like stage on which residents performed their counter-cultural lives.

Wealthier queers conducted their lives at private dinners, where ironic cross-dressing provided entertainment. They used camp girls’ names such as Connie, Simone, Zena and Maude. Cross-dressing was a popular diversion for groups of gay friends, who hired country and beach houses for private parties around the country.

A queer sensibility can tell us as much as a queer identification at a time when non-binary sexuality could lead to financial ruin for both women and men.

Australia’s first interior decorator, Margaret Jaye, was almost certainly a lesbian, and one of the nation’s first industrial designers, Molly Grey, was photographed in 1935 with a Sapphic hairstyle and severe dress of oversize mannish collar, bow tie, and cuffs. Interior design, being connected to domesticity and the home, was one of the few professions where married women and gay men could work undisturbed.

The author Eve Langley (who changed her name to Oscar Wilde by deed poll in 1954) and her sister June cross-dressed in country Gippsland when young, where they were known as the “trouser women”. Eve continued to wear mannish attire in her old age in the Blue Mountains.

Sydney: from port to gay city

World War II was a watershed for Australian queer identity. Historians such as Garry Wotherspoon have noted how port cities such as Sydney and San Francisco threw large numbers of young men together, away from their families, in new types of housing such as bachelor flats. These cities were the ones that later developed the first large homosexual communities, often in neglected inner-city areas, in the 1960s and 1970s.

World War II also threw into the mix female impersonators who performed for the forces. The Australian armed forces had 20 concert party groups and gave 12,000 shows in Australia, the Middle East and the Pacific. The Kiwi (New Zealand) Concert Party wore drag made from muslin, dishcloths and silver paper as well as real fashions. They continued to perform for nine years after the war ended.

Academic Chris Brickell has made the important point that although many of the performers pretended to be co-opted for their roles, most were more than willing. Their drag acts “drew from, and subsequently inspired, gay civilians’ own drag performances”.

Read more: ‘I didn’t know that world existed’: how lesbian women found a life in the armed forces

1950s Australia saw an increasing witch hunt around queer sexuality, fuelled by the churches, the demands of the police and Cold War anxiety about Communist inflitration. The tabloid press continued earlier sensational reporting: (“Degenerate Dressed up as a Doll … St Kilda Sensation—Man-Woman Masquerader”) with headlines such as “Police War on this Nest of Perverts”. Even the famed 1950s American muscle culture magazines were banned under strict censorship here.

Lesbian butch and femme subcultures had emerged by this time, in which one partner was styled in a hyper-feminine way, the other donning trousers and shorter hair. Writer Gavin Harris notes that Lillian Armfield, NSW’s first policewoman, claimed department stores blacklisted lesbians who were trying to “recruit” from among their “innocent” customers.

Blak and queer

Queer Indigenous people have been prominent for several decades in art forms such as dance, where they contribute to new formulations of ideas of “blak beauty,” blak being a term consciously deployed by contemporary queer visual artists, including Brook Andrew.

The biography and survival story of Indigenous dancer and choreographer Noel Tovey (born 1934) charts a trajectory from abandonment and abuse to a life as a successful actor and dancer in London in the 1960s. Here Tovey mixed with gay circles and gained resilience and self-esteem.

Tovey described in his autobiography Little Black Bastard the Artist’s Ball in Melbourne as “the only night of the year when the police turned a blind eye to the number of drag queens looking for a cab”. Characters who might turn up there included “Puss in Boots” or a reclusive “Greta Garbo”: the latter refused to talk to anyone all night. Tovey was later involved with the spectacular Awakenings opening dance sequence at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games

From blending to assertion

William Yang has been photographing queer Brisbane and Sydney since 1969. In that year, he photographed David Williams, or Beatrice, who performed in drag at the Purple Onion Club, Sydney (opened 1962), singing “The Sound of Mucus” and “A Streetcar Named Beatrice”. The clothes matched the crude titles: synthetic crinolines and huge feather hats.

Yang also photographed gays who wished to blend, whose clothes appear very ordinary, with a slight edge that can only be read through the focus on casual softness.

Calls for an end to the criminalisation of homosexuality in Australia appeared by the early 1960s, following the UK Wolfenden Committee report of 1957, which recommended decriminalisation. The concept of “gay liberation” spread from activism in Sydney with the formation of CAMP Inc group in 1970, and at the University of Melbourne in 1971, into the wider public domain.

Sydney’s notorious street protest, the first Sydney Gay Mardi Gras (later Gay and Lesbian), took place in 1978. The first march was notorious for the arrests and the violence directed at the participants at the old Darlinghurst Police Station (now closed) and created a catalyst for further activism. Many more bars, clubs and community organisations opened and provided relatively safe spaces for LGBTQI to gather.

Read more: Friday essay: on the Sydney Mardi Gras march of 1978

In recent decades we have witnessed a massive shift from situational, private and criminalised sexualities to open, liberationist and perhaps also commodified ones.

But there are gays and lesbians everywhere if you look carefully in the past, even if not all were as striking or spectacular as the ones outlined here.

– ref. Friday essay: hidden in plain sight — Australian queer men and women before gay liberation – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-hidden-in-plain-sight-australian-queer-men-and-women-before-gay-liberation-155964

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

Scott Morrison has a near obsession with control. But suddenly – in the course of only weeks – he has found himself presiding over a government in a shambles, where he is reacting rather than driving.

All the mayhem flows from a common source – two rape allegations, one involving staffers in a minister’s office in 2019, the other relating to a minister accused of assaulting a woman, now dead, years before he entered politics.

Waves from these allegations have embroiled the Prime Minister’s staff in a “who knew what” inquiry, threatened the futures of two members of his cabinet, and are now complicating the progress of a key part of the government’s policy agenda.

Attorney-General Christian Porter and Defence Minister Linda Reynolds are still standing, walking wounded anxiously hoping Morrison does not kick away their crutches.

But they are both on leave, coping with stress. Other ministers are having to rush around filling the gaps they’ve left.

Porter is also industrial relations minister. He was due, when parliament meets for the week starting March 15, to steer the government’s workplace legislation through the Senate. Ahead of that, he’s been negotiating on the detail with crossbenchers crucial to its fate.

If the bill isn’t finalised that week, there won’t be another opportunity until the budget session.

Porter’s mental health leave appears open-ended – maybe a fortnight, perhaps longer. Employment Minister Michaelia Cash is filling in for him in the two portfolios, as well as continuing her own work. It’s hardly ideal when the government wants the IR bill done and dusted ASAP so it doesn’t have to talk about it anymore.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne, standing in for Reynolds, this week has had to deal with the backlash over the miscued remarks from Chief of the Australian Defence Force Angus Campbell. However well intentioned, Campbell’s reported advice to cadet officers for keeping safe – guard against “four As”, namely alcohol, out after midnight, alone and attractive – was seen as sexist. In Reynolds’ absence, Payne gave Campbell a mild verbal clip over the ear.

Read more: View from The Hill: Despite his denial, Christian Porter will struggle with the ‘Caesar’s wife’ test

Reynolds this week took another hit when it was leaked that she’d called Brittany Higgins, who alleged a colleague raped her in the minister’s office, “a lying cow”. Reynolds, who made the remark on February 15 within the open section of her office, wasn’t doubting Higgins’ allegation but rather, her claim about the inadequate level of support she received after making it.

Morrison, while condemning Reynolds’ “offensive” remark, for which she later apologised to staff, defended her, saying among other things that it had been made in a “stressful week”. But Higgins on Thursday threatened to sue unless she received an apology.

Reynolds was due back at work next Monday but is extending her medical leave.

Most difficult for Morrison now is how the Porter story will pan out. The Attorney-General’s Wednesday statement, denying the deceased woman’s allegation, has done little but further polarise attitudes.

Like Tony Abbott before him, Porter has become a lightning rod for the passionate determination of activist women campaigning on a range of issues, in this case violence against women.

Calls for Morrison to establish an independent inquiry into the historical rape claim have met a brick wall, as the PM casts the issue as a test of the “rule of law”.

So it is, but it is equally a test of the power of mobilising emotion and anger as a political force, and that is proving extremely potent.

On Thursday the woman’s family issued a statement via a lawyer, saying they were “supportive of any inquiry which would potentially shed light on the circumstances surrounding the deceased’s passing”.

The Prime Minister’s Office reads this in the context of a South Australian inquest into her death, but the statement puts strong new pressure on Morrison. If he continues to fend off calls for an inquiry, he could find himself at odds with the family.

If he did a highly unlikely u-turn and agreed to an inquiry, it would be very hard for him not to require Porter to stand aside while it was held. Given the range and centrality of Porter’s job, that would impede significant parts of the government’s work in the coming months.

Even the police are feeling the heat, and a need to explain themselves. NSW police declared the case closed on Tuesday but on Thursday put out a detailed account of their handling of the matter.

The woman making the allegation had met police in Sydney in February 2020. According to the account, during that meeting she disclosed she had health issues and said she dissociated “and wanted to ensure when supplying her statement that she was ‘coherent and as grounded as possible’”.

Investigators had contact with her at least five times in the next three months, the police statement said.

On June 23 2020 the woman had emailed the police “indicating she no longer felt able to proceed with reporting the matter, citing medical and personal reasons. The woman very clearly articulated in that email; that she did not want to proceed with the complaint.” She took her own life the following day.

Innocent or not, there is no obvious way Porter can get out of the morass he’s in. Morrison needs a circuit breaker and the most obvious would be for Porter to quit the ministry.

The government argues this would set a precedent of forcing someone out even though he has not been found guilty of anything.

But there is a point when a minister, fairly or unfairly, has become damaged goods, and keeping them extracts too high a price. This especially applies when we are talking about the attorney-general.

Read more: Where do we go from here with the allegations about Christian Porter?

Although the circumstances were different and the consequences less far reaching, Bridget McKenzie had to fall on her sword after the sports rorts affair.

If Porter went to the backbench, this would facilitate a degree of reset for the government. The debate about Porter would continue, but its political impact would be defused.

Porter’s departure from the ministry would trigger a reshuffle, which would enable Morrison to move Reynolds into a portfolio better suited to her than defence is.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Scott Morrison can’t get circuit breaker while Porter remains – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-scott-morrison-cant-get-circuit-breaker-while-porter-remains-156517

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rick Sarre, Emeritus Professor of Law and Criminal Justice, University of South Australia

A great deal has been written and said in the last few days about the next steps in the historic claim of rape against Attorney-General Christian Porter.

There are mounting calls for an independent inquiry amid constant references to the decision of the NSW police to close their investigations. But our attention should now switch to the South Australian coroner. I’ll explain why.

How police decide a case can be pursued

One of the frequently asked questions about this case is how the NSW police prosecutors determined, seemingly very quickly and without questioning Porter, that they would not be proceeding with any more investigations — let alone criminal charges.

As far as they were concerned, the matter was now closed.

Why do NSW police have the final determination and how could they move so quickly? Well, the alleged victim was South Australian and the alleged perpetrator was Western Australian, but the assault was alleged to have taken place in NSW. Hence, it fell to that state’s police to make an investigation and consider their options.

At the early stages of any investigation, police are the “gatekeepers” for decisions that might lead to a prosecution. The guidelines used by police prosecutors are straightforward: they decide whether the evidence is capable of leading to a successful conviction, and whether it is in the public interest for a prosecution to proceed.

They do not, and cannot, go on “fishing” expeditions. They cannot launch a prosecution hoping something will emerge down the track that might lead to the conviction of the accused.

In this case, we can assume the police decided the fact the complainant was deceased (and could not give evidence) and that the alleged offence happened more than three decades ago provided too little evidence to go on.

In their statement, the police used the term “admissible evidence”. By that, one can assume, they meant any hearsay evidence that was not capable of being corroborated could not be taken into account.

Read more: Has Christian Porter been subjected to a ‘trial by media’? No, the media did its job of being a watchdog

The complainant’s testimony is not essential

It may seem to many that the idea of deciding not to proceed without questioning the alleged perpetrator was a little odd, but the discretion attached to pre-trial decision-making is broad.

It is important to note that the inability of a complainant to give evidence for any reason (including death) is not the end of the matter. I know of no jurisdiction in Australia where a prosecution will be abandoned solely on the lack of a complainant’s testimony.

That was not always the case. In days gone by, once a complainant withdrew his or her complaint, a prosecution was inevitably withdrawn.

Read more: View from The Hill: Despite his denial, Christian Porter will struggle with the ‘Caesar’s wife’ test

The rules of evidence have also been reformed to make it easier for prosecutors to lead at trial with evidence of the propensity of an accused to commit offences of a sexual nature.

Nevertheless, the chances of a prosecution in a sexual offence case leading to a conviction remain slim.

As criminologist Kathleen Daly pointed out a decade ago, of 100 complaints recorded by the police in Australia at that time, only 28% proceeded past the police to prosecution, 20% were finally prosecuted at trial, and only 11.5% resulted in convictions to any sexual offence. It would not be too much different now.

Over to the coroner

So where to from here? There have been calls for the launching of some form of inquiry into the entire matter from a number of quarters, including some MPs, the bereaved family and their friends.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has made it very clear such an inquiry is not going to take place, and that is his, and no one else’s, political judgement call to make.

But those seeking some form of external review can take heart from the words of South Australia Coroner David Whittle on Wednesday:

On the morning of 1 March 2021, an investigation file regarding the death of a woman in June 2020 was delivered to me by South Australia Police. The woman’s death and related matters have been the subject of media reporting in recent days. Whilst SAPOL has provided information to me, I determined that the investigation is incomplete. This was particularly evident having regard to information contained in recent media reports.

The coroner has yet to decide whether to hold an inquest. He awaits further investigation by SA Police. But if he does, his power to draw matters to his attention, including from the statements of witnesses he may call (but not compel), is considerable.

Read more: Women are (rightly) angry. Now they need a plan

It is not the state coroner’s role to establish whether a crime has been committed or to find a person guilty of that crime. But the coroner has considerable power fashioned over the centuries to get behind matters and dig deep. Remember, too, he is not bound by the rules of evidence.

The story has not ended just yet.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call the 1800 Respect national helpline on 1800 737 732 or Lifeline on 13 11 14.

– ref. Where do we go from here with the allegations about Christian Porter? – https://theconversation.com/where-do-we-go-from-here-with-the-allegations-about-christian-porter-156497

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carola Garcia de Vinuesa, Professor and Co-Director, Centre for Personalised Immunology, NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence, Australian National University

Some 90 prominent scientists, including Nobel laureates and other leading Australian and international researchers, today called for convicted child murderer Kathleen Folbigg to be pardoned and released from jail.

They say genetic evidence published in November 2020 shows some of the children had genetic mutations that predisposed them to heart complications. They argue these mutations are what likely led to their deaths.

This evidence was not available at the time of Folbigg’s conviction in 2003. Instead, she was convicted of smothering her children. She remains in jail and maintains her innocence.

I was one of the scientists who published the genetic evidence behind today’s petition to pardon Folbigg, which I signed. I was also an unpaid expert witness in the recent judicial inquiry into her conviction. Here is what our genetic analysis found. Here is also what I learned from my experience as a first-time expert witness.

Conviction and inquiry

In 2003, Folbigg was convicted of murdering her children Patrick, Sarah and Laura, and of manslaughter of Caleb. They ranged in age from 19 days to 18 months when they died.

Based on existing medical and pathological evidence, a petition to re-examine the possibility the children had died of natural causes led to a judicial inquiry, which was heard in April 2019.

The inquiry heard Sarah and Laura had a never-before reported mutation in the CALM2 gene, which controls how calcium is transported in and out of heart cells. Mutations in this gene are one of the best-recognised causes of sudden death in infancy and childhood.

In May 2019, after the hearings had concluded, a similar mutation in two siblings in the United States caused one of them to die of an irregular heartbeat (cardiac arrhythmia) and the other to have a heart attack (cardiac arrest).

Based on this evidence and before the judge made his findings, we wrote a report concluding this mutation was likely to be the cause of Sarah and Laura’s deaths. World experts in the genetics of cardiac arrhythmias (Professor Peter Schwartz) and of cardiac conditions caused by CALM genes (Professor Michael Toft Overgaard), endorsed this conclusion and alluded to the need to reopen the inquiry to further discuss the mutation.

Read more: What causes SIDS? What we know, don’t know and suspect

In July 2019, the inquiry found there was no reasonable doubt as to Folbigg’s conviction, based principally on interpretation of her diaries and the rarity of many cases of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) in one family.

Since then, I was part of an international group of researchers who has published further evidence showing the CALM2 mutation impairs how calcium is transported. We also found it is as severe as other known CALM mutations that cause sudden death in infants and children, while awake or asleep.

We concluded that mutations in the female Folbigg children likely led to disruptions in their heartbeats resulting in sudden cardiac death.

Let’s unpack that genetic evidence

At the time of the 2003 trial, genomics was in its infancy and the geneticists involved in the case could not find a genetic cause for any of the children’s deaths.

However, in 2018, I was approached by Folbigg’s solicitors and asked whether current gene sequencing technologies would now enable finding a possible genetic cause for their deaths. This was indeed possible: in the past decade numerous genetic causes of sudden unexpected deaths have been discovered.

My team first sequenced Folbigg’s genome from saliva and swabs taken from the inside of her cheek, since there was a possibility she was a carrier of one of these mutations. We were surprised to find she had the never-before reported CALM2 mutation.

In early 2019, I was officially asked to form part of a team of geneticists to analyse the genomes of Folbigg and her children as part of the inquiry into her convictions.

From a technical perspective, it was an incredible achievement. The Victorian Clinical Genetics Service sequenced the entire genomes of two of the children from blood samples on heel-prick cards babies typically have at birth. These samples were more than 20 years old. Frozen tissue and immortalised cells were available from the other two children.

We found the two girls had the same mutation as their mother in the CALM2 gene, known as variant G114R.

The study published into the impact of this variant show it affects the way calcium binds and moves through the heart cells, affecting how the heart muscle contracts.

Read more: Explainer: what happens during a heart attack and how is one diagnosed?

We concluded this variant likely contributed to the natural deaths of the two girls by altering the heart’s normal rhythm. This may have been triggered by infections both girls had around the time they died and the medication they were given, which combined with their mutation, made them particularly susceptible to heart complications.

Laura, in particular, had such extensive myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) that all three professors of forensic pathology present at the 2019 inquiry stated, prior to the hearings on genetic evidence, they would have listed Laura’s cause of death as myocarditis.

The two boys also had medical conditions that point towards dying of natural causes. One had difficulty breathing due to a floppy larynx, the other had epilepsy and blindness.

Only recently, as we were re-analysing the Folbigg genomes, we found the two boys had two different novel and rare variants in a gene known as BSN (or Basoon), one inherited from their mother and the other presumably inherited from their father.

This is a gene that when defective in mice, causes early onset lethal epilepsy — mice die young during epileptic fits. We are currently investigating whether the variants found in the Folbigg boys can cause disease.

What can we learn from this?

I have not been involved in any other legal proceedings before the judicial inquiry into Folbigg’s convictions. But I want to talk about my experience as a scientist expert witness.

My experience left me thinking it had several blind spots when it comes to evaluating scientific evidence.

As a scientist and trained medical doctor, I found the procedure of the inquiry bewildering. Even before we made the genetic findings, there was credible medical and pathology evidence to indicate the Folbigg children had died of natural causes.

In this case, and as far as I can tell, Folbigg was selected for investigations because of the rarity of the events, with circumstantial evidence gathered from interpretations of her diaries presented as evidence of her guilt. Such an approach forgets that rare events do occur. And in genetics, one-off events are commonplace.

Then there was the notion of expertise. In the lead-up to the inquiry, I was expecting subject matter experts to be called to give evidence. But there was not a single expert in the genetics of heart arrhythmias, nor an expert in CALM genes.

Read more: Mad or bad? Expert witnesses and the Anders Breivik trial

This absence of safeguards to ensure the evidence presented was robust and well-informed made for a negative experience. It has discouraged me from engaging in similar court cases in the future. If my experience is not unique, and this is common, the law runs the real risk that career scientists will not want to engage in legal matters.

If we want scientists to participate in cases involving complex or technical scientific issues, I think we need to improve the process of recruiting expert witnesses. We should be choosing scientists who support their reasoning based on peer-reviewed scientific evidence.

I also hope the experience of giving evidence could be made less combative. I felt intimidated throughout the hearing, being forced to answer yes or no to many questions and being cut off repeatedly. The natural world rarely exists in binary.

If scientists do not feel they are treated as equals to their legal peers, they are unlikely to volunteer their time to assist the court. Instead, the law will be left with only a handful of professional expert witnesses that are unlikely to be representative of their respective fields.

I hope that in coming years, we will see an increased appreciation for the scientific method in a legal setting. Complex cases like this one are likely to become more frequent as our scientific tools improve and increasingly find their way out of the lab and into the courtroom.

The latter part of this article was based on an edited version of a speech I gave last year to a joint symposium of the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Law. The original speech is available here.

– ref. Kathleen Folbigg’s children likely died of natural causes, not murder. Here’s the evidence my team found – https://theconversation.com/kathleen-folbiggs-children-likely-died-of-natural-causes-not-murder-heres-the-evidence-my-team-found-156487

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

The Royal Commission into Aged Care has now delivered its final report, and its findings are an indictment of the inadequacies of the present system. The report calls for a refocus within the aged care system, placing the people receiving care at the centre.

However the feasibility and affordability of the 148 recommendations are yet to be assessed.

Patricia Sparrow is CEO of Aged & Community Services Australia, a peak body which represents not-for-profit members providing residential care for some 450,000 people throughout the country.

Speaking to Michelle Grattan, she says she is disappointed the commmission did not provide estimates of the funding needed to reform the system.

“Royal commission research showed that Australia spends around 1.2% of its GDP on aged care, but other comparable countries in the OECD, the average they spend is around 2.5%.

“I’m not saying that’s exactly what’s needed, but I think it gives us a sense of the scale and the scope of what’s going to need to be considered.”

As for fears the government might fall short of serious change when it releases its full response around budget time, “I think the indications are that they will do a serious response, but [there have been] 20 reports over 20 years and that hasn’t happened.”

“We want to ensure that…there is a desire to fundamentally reform the system. Because anything short is not going to cut it.”

Additional audio

A List of Ways to Die, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Patricia Sparrow on the Royal Commission into Aged Care – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-patricia-sparrow-on-the-royal-commission-into-aged-care-156501

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mary Iliadis, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Deakin University

The continuing media coverage of rape and sexual assault allegations faced by current and former political figures has put many sexual abuse survivors at risk of being traumatised all over again.

Widespread media attention features near-constant social media updates and extensive commentary. It means many sexual violence survivors are directly exposed to triggering and retraumatising content that resurfaces the pain of their own past experiences.

The impacts of sexual violence are often long-lasting and hard to overcome. How an individual survivor is affected can depend on a range of factors, including the level of trauma that a person has already experienced in their life, their relationship to the perpetrator, and whether the violence was prolonged or repeated.

Sexual violence can affect survivors in a many different ways: emotional, physical, psychological and social. The list of common impacts is vast, and includes fear, shock, grief, shame, confusion, denial, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), insomnia, nightmares and other sleep disturbances, intrusive thoughts and flashbacks, nausea, loss of appetite and gastrointestinal issues, reduced libido and/or difficulty engaging in consensual sexual activity, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, sexually transmitted infections or blood-borne viruses, unwanted pregnancy, social withdrawal, and difficulty trusting others.

All sexual violence survivors will respond in different ways. They may experience some, none or all of the impacts described here. These effects may ease over time, especially with appropriate support. Healing and recovery from sexual violence is certainly possible.

As an aside, we should note here that it is simplistic to view sexual violence purely through a trauma lens. This is not to deny the very real harms experienced by survivors, but rather to point out that framing sexual trauma as a series of symptoms requiring treatment puts the onus on individual survivors to “fix the problem”, and allows society to avoid grappling with the underlying causes of sexual violence.

Read more: Sexual assault: what can you do if you don’t want to make a formal report to police?

What is retraumatisation?

Retraumatisation (also known as “secondary trauma” or “secondary victimisation”) is a common experience for many survivors. This can happen when a survivor is exposed to a “trigger” that reminds them of past sexual violence, causing the body to go into a fight, flight or freeze response. In other words, the body responds as if there is a direct and immediate threat.

Survivors can be triggered in many ways, and by things specific to their individual experiences or by more general exposure to discussions of sexual violence. This can occur at different stages, depending on each survivor’s individual recovery journey.

The role of the media and authority figures

Saturation media coverage of stories involving sexual violence can also trigger retraumatisation. This is particularly the case when people in power, including senior members of the government, publicly deny, downplay or refuse to act on allegations of sexual violence.

The rapid dissemination of information through media platforms re-exposes survivors to a stream of violence. It also reinforces how the structures of society sustain men’s power and privilege over women.

There are guidelines for news media outlets reporting on violence against women. These include respecting the dignity of survivors and their families, and providing details of appropriate support services at the end of a story.

Media outlets need to be mindful that many survivors will be exposed to their content. Respect and dignity should be extended to these survivors as well as those featured directly in the story.

Comments that seek to apportion blame to survivors, or which suggest they may be lying or exaggerating — evident in the media coverage of the historical rape allegations against federal Attorney-General Christian Porter, which he has denied — do not just discredit one survivor, but all who have been treated similarly.

Read more: Complex trauma: how abuse and neglect can have life-long effects

Retraumatisation can also be exacerbated by false myths and stereotypes, such as Australian Defence Force chief Angus Campbell’s advice, widely criticised as victim-blaming, that female cadets should avoid alcohol, going out alone and being “attractive”.

All of this serves to challenge the credibility and truthfulness of survivors, and intensifies the barriers that women encounter in having their stories heard in male-dominated institutions. This might remind survivors of their own experiences of being blamed or disbelieved, and thus minimise and silence their voices.

How to guard against retraumatisation

Self-care strategies can help individual survivors manage their trauma during times of heightened media reporting or exposure to other triggers.

There are comprehensive guides available for survivors, and those who support them, outlining effective strategies for coping with trauma.

Some common suggestions for self-care include:

• limiting exposure to media content (and other triggers) on sexual violence

• meditation, breathing and grounding exercises

• speaking with a trusted friend or professional

• writing about what you are feeling, such as in a personal diary or journal

• taking care of your general health and well-being, such as through exercise and healthy eating

• engaging in enjoyable and calming activities, such as cooking, being outside, reading, or spending time with a pet.

Read more: Speaking out about sexual violence on social media may not challenge gendered power relations

As renowned Black Feminist Audre Lorde said:

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Self-care is an act of resistance in a world that is all too often hostile towards sexual abuse survivors. By engaging in self-care, we can continue to do the important (but difficult) political work of fighting for change to the underlying structural and cultural causes of sexual violence.

If this article has raised issues for you, please contact 1800 RESPECT through their toll-free national counselling hotline or online. You can also find support through Lifeline on 13 11 14.

– ref. This week’s news has put sexual assault survivors at risk of ‘secondary trauma’. Here’s how it happens, and how to cope – https://theconversation.com/this-weeks-news-has-put-sexual-assault-survivors-at-risk-of-secondary-trauma-heres-how-it-happens-and-how-to-cope-156482

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Annabelle Lukin, Associate Professor in Linguistics, Macquarie University

The word “sophistry” – defined as “the use of clever but false arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving” – comes from Ancient Greek. For more than 2,500 years, politicians have understood language is a tool, even a weapon, for climbing up the political ladder and clinging to power.

So it’s no surprise modern politicians such as Prime Minister Scott Morrison have a bag of rhetorical strategies and tricks they bring into parliament and to every press conference.

As a linguist, I have followed Morrison’s rhetorical development from his budget speeches as treasurer, his defence of himself and his government in the face of the 2019-2020 bushfire crisis, and now allegations of rape against a senior staff member then in the defence minister’s office, and another against Attorney-General Christian Porter.

Under the pressure of these complex political matters, Morrison has developed his trademark, slippery rhetorical style.

In response to questions he doesn’t like, he dismisses “the Canberra bubble”, aligning himself with the ordinary people not driven by the insiders’ navel-gazing.

He regularly rejects the premises of the questions put to him, speaks in language so general and contentless that he could be answering a thousand different questions, or answers specific questions with broad generalisations or policy statements. When it suits, the matter just doesn’t fall within his sphere of influence.

And he also brings a belligerence to his rhetorical game.

Read more: View from The Hill: Despite his denial, Christian Porter will struggle with the ‘Caesar’s wife’ test

While Victorian Premier Dan Andrews fronted daily press conferences on Victoria’s lockdown, answered every question and rarely responded with impatience or anger, Morrison tries to wield his power to control speaking turns of journalists at press conferences, as this Tik Tok mashup of “Andrew, you don’t run this press conference” reminds us.

Being aggressive to journalists is an extension of his “man in the street” impatience with the “Canberra bubble” insiders. Until now, it has been a successful strategy for containing questions and dodging accountability.

But while a rhetorical strategy can work a treat in one context, it can be a total train wreck in another.

To contain the growing political problem now engulfing the government, Morrison has gone back to his belligerence. At a press conference ostensibly for releasing the report into the Aged Care Royal Commission report this week, Morrison lectured and belittled journalists.

To avoid dealing with the rape allegations, he strung out the questions on aged care as long as he could. On three occasions, a journalist tried to ask him about the historical rape allegation against one of his cabinet ministers.

But Morrison insisted such questions had to wait until he was ready. Rape, it seems, could wait her turn.

Morrison answered 45 questions on aged care. To some, he gave lengthy, if empty, answers. The average overall was 86 words per answer.

When these questions looked like drying up, he drummed up more business. He answered every single question on aged care.

When discussing aged care, his authority appeared to have no limits. He interrupted a legitimate question about the government’s position to remind the journalist that he was the prime minister, and that he and his cabinet would take the necessary decisions.

But on the rape allegation, his power suddenly evaporated. “See, I’m not the commissioner of police” and “I’m not the police force”, he told assembled journos. It was the sexual assault version of his famous line “I don’t hold a hose, mate”.

After fielding 26 questions – many of which he answered in the most minimal of terms, and now averaging just over 50 words per answer – Morrison actively shut down the questioning.

For so many women, their experience of sexual violence is made even more traumatic by the symbolic violence that follows it. They are told they are to blame, it’s all in their head, just get over it.

Or they are deliberately silenced.

Morrison’s “everyman” pantomime, his artful dodging and his dismissive belligerence are now coming up against a rising tide of anger. And, so far, none of his standard strategies have cut through.

Read more: Has Christian Porter been subjected to a ‘trial by media’? No, the media did its job of being a watchdog

– ref. Can Scott Morrison’s rhetorical style cut through the rising tide of anger? – https://theconversation.com/can-scott-morrisons-rhetorical-style-cut-through-the-rising-tide-of-anger-156220

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Peterson, Associate Professor, Flinders University

Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by Benjamin Britten, directed by Neil Armfield, Adelaide Festival.

Transfixed, Transported. Transfigured. Three hours pass in the blink of an eye.

How did this happen, or was it all just a dream? For a start, there’s the play, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For many, it is the Shakespeare play we encountered first.

On playing the king of the fairies at age 16, director Neil Armfield recalls:

I cut a rather dashing Oberon – swathed in brown chiffon with knee high lace-up boots and butterfly wing eye make-up.

His words hint at why some of us cringe at this play. We have seen so many dreadful amateur productions that we have forgotten the power and the magic of this work.

The story is both simple and complex. Set in a mythical Athens, one couple (Lysander and Hermia) runs away to elope; another (Demetrius and Helena) is hot on their heels in the forest.

Meanwhile, the power couple ruling the fairy world (Oberon and Tytania) are having marital problems. Enter the sprite Puck, whose misunderstandings of his master Oberon’s instructions cause endless complications until order is restored.

Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is not merely a play, but an opera. When it premiered in 1960, Britten was already an accomplished composer and librettist.

And what Britten does departs radically from grand opera of the 19th century. Unlike the great classic Italian operas, there are no “hit” tunes. (Think Nessum Dorma from Puccini’s Turandot. You know this song even if you think you don’t.)

There are no stand and deliver moments in Britten’s opera where an emotive tune is belted out by a static singer. Instead, Britten’s music is inextricably linked to the mood, character, and dramatic action.

Britten excels in marshalling the sounds of a vast orchestra to support action. He conjures the fairy world with the light touch of harps, lively percussion, and stringed instruments sliding between notes, known as glissando .

And Britten likes brass. The unique capacity of the trombone to bellow and slide underscored the play’s comic moments. Muted trumpets, similarly, are particularly good for farting sounds when onstage ridiculousness is at a fever pitch. Who knew?

Superb vocal pairings

Yet despite these musical instructions, Britten’s music is open to a range of interpretive possibilities. And it’s in this space that the creative team led by Armfield and set and costume designer Dale Ferguson weave their extraordinary magic.

Armfield has had lifetime love affair with Britten’s operas, and is the leading interpreter of his work internationally. Having previously directed this opera for the Houston Grand Opera, the Canadian Opera Company, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Adelaide Festival production is its Australian premiere.

It’s a big ticket item, with ticket prices to match. But the creative and human forces required to stage this production are nothing short of gargantuan. Joining a large cast of opera performers of international stature was a sizeable contingent of musicians from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and the Young Adelaide Voices choir.

One of the unique features of this opera is its vocal pairings. The most famous is that of the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Tytania.

Playing Oberon is American opera superstar Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, who arrived from New York in early January to undergo quarantine. Cohen is one of the few opera singers globally who sings in the vocal range pitched above a tenor, known as a countertenor.

His richly supported voice is beautifully paired with Rachelle Durkin’s Tytania. Durkin’s role relies on the otherworldly vocal embellishments of a coloratura soprano. Together the couple sounds enchanted, not of this world.

The “young” lovers Lysander (Andrew Goodwin) and Hermia (Sally-Anne Russell) and Demetrius (James Clayton) and Helena (Leanne Kenneally) are equally well cast. Their superb musical timing and strong, clear characterisations are a source of delight.

The royal couple, Theseus (Teddy Tahu Rhodes) and Hippolita (Fiona Campbell), who kick off Shakespeare’s play, don’t appear until the final scene. Along with the two couples, they assemble to watch the Mechanicals stage the “tragic comedy” Pyramus and Thisbe. This famous scene has rarely been more hilarious than in the delightful, comic hands of Warwick Fyfe (Bottom) and Louis Hurley (Flute).

Ferguson’s costumes are sensational, particularly the spangly, sequined, form-fitting creations worn by Oberon and Tytania. His superbly magical set is dominated by a translucent, shimmering, floating sheet above the stage.

It’s as if the sky breathes in sync with the orchestra and the audience. As Armfield observes:

Britten’s extraordinary music floats and shimmers, drifts and breathes with the hypnotic pulse of the human body. We are, in a sense, inside the mind, inside a kind of released imagination where the translucent skin of reality lifts and falls with the slow rhythms of enchanted sleep.“

This is a superbly well crafted production. The sure-footed direction, the subtle vocal shadings, brilliant comic timing, orchestral precision, and magical presence of Young Adelaide Voices transported the audience into a world of dream and wonder.

In reviewing the opera’s premiere in 1960, famed music critic Howard Taubman predicted, “The chances are that Mr. Britten’s ‘Dream’ will reach many stages of the world.”

Fortunately for us, his prediction has proven true.

– ref. Enchanted voices: A Midsummer Night’s Dream transports audiences to a place of wonder – https://theconversation.com/enchanted-voices-a-midsummer-nights-dream-transports-audiences-to-a-place-of-wonder-156298