Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Cowling, Associate Professor – Information & Communication Technology (ICT), CQUniversity Australia
Apple has released its new smartphone, the iPhone 12, without an accompanying charger or earbuds. Users have harshly criticised the company for this move and will have to purchase these accessories separately, if needed.
While some see it as cost-cutting, or a way for Apple to profit further by forcing customers to buy the products separately, the technology giant said the goal was to reduce its carbon footprint.
This is the first time a major smartphone manufacturer has released a mobile without a charger. Earlier this year, reports emerged of Samsung considering a similar move, but it has yet to follow through.
But even if abandoning chargers is a way for Apple to save money, the action could have a significant, positive impact on the environment.
Australians, on average, buy a new mobile phone every 18-24 months. In Australia, there are about 23 million phones sitting unused — and therefore likely a similar number of accompanying chargers.
Just as single-use shopping bags contribute to plastic waste, unused and discarded electronic appliances contribute to electronic waste (e-waste).
You can reuse a shopping bag, so why not your phone charger?
Just over a decade ago, Australia started to ban single-use plastic bags, starting with South Australia. Today, every state and territory in Australia has enforced the ban except New South Wales — which intends to do so by the end of 2021.
Since South Australia implemented its ban in 2008, state government estimates suggest it has avoided 8,000kg of marine litter each year — and abated more than 4,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
The benefits for the environment have been clear. So, why are we so hesitant to do the same for e-waste?
E-waste is a real, but fixable, environmental issue
E-waste includes different forms of discarded electric and electronic appliances that are no longer of value to their owners. This can include mobile phones, televisions, computers, chargers, keyboards, printers and earphones.
Currently there are about 4.78 billion mobile phone users globally (61.2% of the world’s population). And mobile phone chargers alone generate more than 51,000 tonnes of e-waste per year.
On this basis, the environment would greatly benefit if more users reused phone chargers and if tech companies encouraged a shift to standardised charging that works across different mobile phone brands.
This would eventually lead to a reduction in the manufacturing of chargers and, potentially, less exploitation of natural resources.
Who needs a charger with an Apple logo anyway?
Citing an increase in e-waste and consumer frustration with multiple chargers, the European Parliament has been pushing for standardised chargers for mobile phones, tablets, e-book readers, smart cameras, wearable electronics and other small or medium-sized electronic devices.
This would negate the need for users to buy different chargers for various devices.
Digital consumption is on the rise and unlikely to slow down any time soon. Recycling is one option, but how else can tech companies innovate to reduce environmental harm?Shutterstock
Also, there’s no doubt phone companies want people to regularly buy new phones. Apple themselves have beenaccused of building a feature into phones that slows them down as they get older. Apple responded by saying this was simply to keep devices running as their batteries became worn down.
But even if this is the case, Apple’s decision to ship phones without chargers would indeed reduce the use of precious materials. A smaller product box would let Apple fit up to 70% more products onto shipping pallets — reducing carbon emissions from shipping.
However, it remains to be seen how much this cost will reduce and assist in Apple’s environmental goals, especially if many consumers end up buying a charger separately anyway.
Apple equates its recent “climate conscious” changes to the iPhone 12 with removing 450,000 cars from the road annually — contributing to its target of becoming carbon-neutral by 2030.
Are wireless chargers the answer?
It’s worth considering whether Apple’s main incentive is simply to cut costs, or perhaps push people towards its own wireless charging devices.
Without a shift to a standardised plug-in charger, a wireless charging boom could be an environmental disaster (even though it’s perhaps inevitable due to its convenience). But wireless charging consumes around 47% more power than a regular cable.
This is potentially concerning, as the sustainability advantages of not including a charger may come alongside increased energy consumption. Currently, the Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) sector is responsible for about 2% of the world’s energy consumption.
How many unused devices do you have lying around the house?Shutterstock
The case for a universal plug-in charger
Perhaps one solution to this dilemma is device trade-in services, which many companies already offer, including Apple and Samsung.
Ultimately, however, the best solution would be for tech giants to agree on a universal plug-in charger for all small or medium-sized electronic devices, including mobile phones.
And hopefully, just as we all now take reusable bags to the grocer with us, in a few years we’ll be able to use a common charger for all our devices — and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.
Last week the World Health Organisation’s special envoy on COVID-19, David Nabarro, said:
We in the World Health Organisation do not advocate lockdowns as the primary measure for the control of the virus.
This has created confusion and frustration, as many people have interpreted this as running counter to WHO’s previous advice on dealing with the pandemic. Haven’t most of us spent some or most of the past few months living in a world of lockdowns and severe restrictions, based on advice from the WHO?
Dig a little deeper, however, and these comments are not as contrary as they might seem. They merely make explicit the idea that lockdowns are just one of many different weapons we can deploy against the coronavirus.
Lockdowns are a good tactic in situations where transmission is spiralling out of control and there is a threat of the health system being overwhelmed. As Nabarro says, they can “buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources”.
But they should not be used as the main strategy against COVID-19 more broadly. And the decision to impose a lockdown should be considered carefully, with the benefits weighed against the often very significant consequences.
Lockdowns also have a disproportionate impact on the most disadvantaged people in society. This cost is greater still in poorer countries, where not going to work can mean literally having no food to eat.
So if lockdowns are best used as a short, sharp measure to stop the coronavirus running rampant, what other strategies should we be focusing on to control the spread of COVID-19 more generally? Here are four key tactics.
1. Testing, contact tracing and isolation
The key pillars in the public health response to this pandemic have always been testing, contract tracing, and isolating cases. This has been the clear message from the WHO from the beginning, and every jurisdiction that has enjoyed success in controlling the virus has excelled in these three interlinked tasks.
No one disputes the importance of being able to identify cases and make sure they don’t spread the virus. When we identify cases, we also need to work out where and by whom they were infected, so we can quarantine anyone who may also have been exposed. The goal here is to interrupt transmission of the virus by keeping the infected away from others.
Testing is a cornerstone of any successful coronavirus response. You can’t control the spread if you don’t know who is infected.LYNN BO BO/EPA/AAP
Time is of the essence. People should be tested as soon as they develop symptoms, and should isolate immediately until they know they are in the clear. For positive cases, contact tracing should be done as quickly as possible. All of this helps limit the virus’s spread.
Responding to disease clusters in an effective, timely manner is also vitally important. We’ve all seen how certain environments, such as aged-care homes, can become breeding grounds for infections, and how hard it is to control these clusters once they gain momentum.
Bringing clusters under control requires decisive action, and countries that have been successful in combating the virus have used a range of strategies to do it. Vietnam, which has been lauded for its coronavirus response despite its large population and lack of resources, has worked hard to “box in the virus” when clusters were identified. This involved identifying and testing people up to three degrees of separation from a known case.
Once a cluster of infections is identified, a fast and effective response is vital.JAMES GOURLEY/AAP
Another crucial element of a successful coronavirus response is giving the public clear advice on how to protect themselves. Public buy-in is vital, because ultimately it is the behaviour of individuals that has the biggest influence on the virus’s spread.
Everyone in the community should understand the importance of social distancing and good hygiene. This includes non-English speakers and other minority groups. Delivering this message to all members of the community requires money and effort from health authorities and community leaders.
4. Masks
After some confusion at the beginning of the pandemic, it is now almost universally accepted that public mask-wearing is a cheap and effective way to slow disease transmission, particularly in situations where social distancing is difficult.
As a result, masks — although unduly politicised in some quarters — have been rapidly accepted in many societies that weren’t previously used to wearing them.
US private equity firm Bain Capital won’t formally assume control of Virgin Australia until November. But its coup this week against chief executive Paul Scurrah, dumping him for Jayne Hrdlicka, a former Bain employee with a reputation for toughness, signals the start of a classic private equity smash-and-grab operation.
When Virgin’s administrators and creditors formally accepted Bain’s bid for the stricken airline, they did so in part due to undertakings job losses would be minimised. Administrator Vaughan Strawbridge optimistically said in September the deal would provide “certainty for employees and customers” as well as “maintaining a competitive Australian aviation industry for the benefit of consumers”.
Now, just weeks later, Scurrah’s exit indicates Bain’s intentions. He was reportedly reluctant to undertake the cost-cutting Bain wants as part of a plan to position Virgin Australia between Qantas and its budget carrier Jetstar.
Hand-picked appointment
Hrdlicka spent about 15 years working for Bain in both the US and Australia. She joined Qantas as a senior executive in 2010, where she reportedly gained a reputation for being tough on unions. She was appointed group chief executive of Jetstar in 2012 (a position she held until 2017).
Replacing the existing boss with a hand-picked replacement is standard practice in private equity deals. It is one of the most important strategic decisions (and typically the first) a private equity owner makes.
As such, the choice says a great deal about what an owner hopes to achieve, and how it plans to achieve it.
In contrast to the chief executive of a public company (the shares of which are traded on a stock exchange) who must act on behalf of a multitude of shareholders, the head of a private-equity company answers solely to the private equity owners.
This relationship, therefore, is an intensely personal one, with private-equity partners being very “hands-on” owners.
Leaving post-haste: Virgin Australia chief executive Paul Scurrah in August 2020, announcing cutbacks including the sacking of 3,000 employees. Now he’s joining them.Darren England/AAP
Urgency trumps empathy
What are the qualities private-equity owners look for in a chief executive?
According to researchers who interviewed 32 managing partners of private-equity firms to find out what they valued, a handful of key qualities are particularly sought after.
They want candidates with a track record in overcoming setbacks, who are team builders, and who won’t shy away from telling their bosses (the private equity firm) how things are. Previous experience is less important. So too is empathy. As one interviewee told them:
I’m not down on empathy, but there are times when empathy needs to take a back seat to urgency. Some highly empathetic leaders are not able to make the tough personnel decisions that need to be made – which compromises performance.
In this vein, Bain’s jettisoning of Scurrah for Hrdlicka is highly suggestive of the management approach Bain would like to see.
Among other things, it is likely to involve a more combative approach to employee relations with a view to aggressively, and quickly, driving down Virgin’s cost base.
Scurrah’s dumping has already reportedly led to the Transport Workers Union (representing the biggest proportion of Virgin Australia employees) suspending negotiations with management. Unions had reportedly been assured months ago Hrdlicka would not be made chief executive.
Private equity’s poor track record
Yesterday, Virgin’s administrator Vaughan Strawbridge again (somewhat optimistically) “reaffirmed” that “Virgin Australia will not be repositioned as a low-cost airline”:
Virgin Australia will be a ‘hybrid’ airline, delivering high value to its customers by delivering a distinctive Virgin experience at competitive prices.
But Bain’s dumping of Scurrah for Hrdlicka fits the classic narrative of how private-equity players squeeze money for themselves out of takeover targets before bailing out before those companies nose-dive.
As I wrote after Virgin Australia’s August announcement that it would axe its budget brand Tigerair and sack about 3,000 of its 9,000 staff:
Private-equity owners have a poor track record in creating strong, sustainable companies with long-term prospects. At their worst they can act a bit like used-car salesmen who know how to spruce up and turn a profit on a vehicle with underlying mechanical problems.
If the typical private-equity experience is anything to go by, Bain, having acquired Virgin with mostly borrowed money, will seek to maximise cash flow by operating only high-margin, high-volume routes (consistent with servicing “premium corporate” and “budget-focused” travellers). It will abandon other low-margin, mostly regional routes to the vagaries of the Qantas monopoly.
Bain will also likely seek to reduce staffing costs through renegotiating pilot and cabin-crew employment contracts, using the threat of further redundancies as leverage. On the most popular trunk routes, where it will provide a parallel service to Qantas, customers will face cosy duopoly prices.
The upshot of all this: to allow Bain and its co-investors to pay themselves handsome dividends upfront, thereby facilitating an exit at the earliest opportunity at a tidy profit. This would be a classic debt-fuelled private-equity play.
In public-interest terms, however, it will be a costly missed opportunity to build a robust long-term domestic competitor to Qantas.
Inevitably, once the private equiteers have left the building, a once-proud airline will be left labouring under a mountain of debt, marking time until it capitulates at the onset of the next economic crisis; the unfortunate plaything of financial, not aeronautical, engineers.
Today, October 16, marks the 45th anniversary of the Balibo Five – the five Australian-based Australian, British and New Zealand – journalists murdered in East Timor in 1975. Their case remains unsolved.
Roger East, a former ABC journalist, was later murdered when in Timor-Leste investigating the earlier killings and running a Timorese news agency.
This was a marked moment in press freedom history in Australia, yet after investigations were launched to find those responsible and prosecute them, after 1868 days – according to the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) – the AFP (Australian Federal Police) had not made one attempt to question the suspect identified by a prior inquest.
The investigation was subsequently dropped.
Since then, nine other Australian journalists have also been murdered, again with complete impunity, reports the Brisbane-based Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom (AJF).
Globally, impunity in cases of journalist murders remains at almost 90 percent.
Professor Peter Greste, director and spokesperson of the AJF, said:
“This trajectory shows a broad and continuing failure of our judicial process, and a lack of political will to address one of the most egregious attacks on the media in our history.
“A liberal democracy stands on the shoulders of a sound legal system, a free press, transparent governance and security forces that protect both the people and the integrity of the system itself.
“Failure to hold those responsible for the Balibo Five murders and those subsequent to them is a failure of our democracy. If we hope to be a strong and flourishing country in the region in future, we must ensure this never happens again.”
Murdered were the three-man Channel Seven crew reporter Greg Shackleton, (29), New Zealand cameraman Gary Cunningham, 27; and 21-year-old sound recorder Tony Stewart; and the two-man Channel Nine crew Scottish-born reporter Malcolm Rennie, 28, and British cameraman Brian Peters.
Journalist Roger East … murdered during the 1975 Indonesian invasion of Timor-Leste. Image: ABC
Roger East opened a one-man news agency in Timor-Leste, stringing for both ABC Radio in Darwin and the AAP news agency in Sydney.
He filed reports on East Timor’s calls for international support and provided the first accounts of the killing of the five journalists at Balibo.
As the sole remaining foreign reporter in East Timor his stories described the approaching Indonesian forces and the plight of the civilian population.
Roger East’s final story for ABC Radio was heard on Correspondents Report on the afternoon of 7 December 1975.
Murdered journalists … Gary Cunningham (New Zealand, from left), Malcolm Rennie, Greg Shackleton, Tony Stewart and Brian Peters (United Kingdom). Image: MEAA
The AJF promotes press freedom and the right of journalists to report the news in freedom and safety. This includes working with Australian governments to ensure legislation supports press freedom. Professor Peter Greste is a director of the AJF and is UNESCO chair in journalism and communication at the University of Queensland (UQ).
With much of the world in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, there is some talk of cancelling Halloween celebrations this year.
It’s only natural to wonder if we should celebrate an event that, on the surface, seems frivolous and unimportant when so many people around the world are suffering and dying because of the deadly virus.
But it’s precisely because of the current situation that it’s essential to hold on to customs that bring the community together.
Halloween is a celebration of both the living and the dead. The fun and entertaining aspects — sweets, parties, carved pumpkins and over-the-top costumes and decorations — don’t take away from its importance.
The question is: how to celebrate Halloween and stay safe within any local rules you have to follow on social distancing and other measures as part of coronavirus prevention strategies?
Perhaps it’s time to create new traditions to keep the spirit of Halloween alive, without forfeiting our health. The origins and aims of Halloween may provide some good ideas on how to move forward.
A brief history of Halloween
Halloween has a mixed historical heritage. It’s often claimed it originated in Europe in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. This was celebrated (roughly) in November, starting on the evening of October 31 — known as “the eve of Samhain”.
Samhain was both a community and a spiritual event, when bonfires were lit and food offered to the spirits who had crossed over from the Otherworld for the night.
Carved vegetables, such as turnips, were placed outside doors to both guide and ward off evil spirits.
Masks were worn as part of the celebration: the aim was either to scare off the spirits or to honour them, depending on which source you consult.
Some claim that when Christianity arrived in the Celtic world in the fourth century it tried to incorporate some of the existing pagan festivals into its rituals, with an aim to perhaps become more appealing to new followers.
Some see the influence of Samhain on the Christian season of Hallowtide, which the church formally established in the ninth century. This incorporates All Hallows’ Eve (October 31), All Saints’ Day (November 1) and All Souls’ Day (November 2). Hallowtide was, and still is, a time to commemorate the dead and celebrate our ongoing connection to them.
Across the centuries, many practices have been part of the Hallowtide celebrations, including “guising”, where children dress up in whimsical costumes and go door to door demanding offerings of foods for the departed.
This practice survives today and most will recognise it by its American name “trick or treating”.
Trick-or-treat is now part of the Halloween tradition for many children.Shutterstock/Rawpixel com
Whether you wish to acknowledge the influence of either pagan or broad Christian belief on Halloween, what remains true is that on this night the boundary between this world and the next is meant to be at its thinnest. Spirits, then, can cross over to visit.
What better way to celebrate the occasion — even if you perceive it as completely secular — than to indulge in fancy dress, games and delicious food.
Halloween traditions 2020 style
This is where our cultural creativity comes in. We need to rechannel what’s at the heart of Halloween, and consider how we can still make celebrations easy and accessible — especially for children.
Remember that Halloween is all about the sharing of food, community celebrations, the appreciation of each other and, above all, a layer of spiritual awareness that keeps us connected to our dearly departed.
If we think about the event in these terms then we can reshape and re-invent our traditions to fit our changed world.
For example, rather than taking our children from door to door to collect sweets, take a leaf from the “Easter egg hunt” and organise a “Halloween treats hunt” at home instead.
This still places an emphasis on finding and collecting food, which is what children tend to be most interested in. The treats don’t have to be sugar-filled and can be adapted to meet the health sensibilities of each home.
A Halloween hunt done in costume provides a good photo/video opportunity for families.
If you can’t imagine not being out in the streets, a useful alternative is to take socially distanced COVID-safe Halloween walks. That way children can still see their friends’ costumes, and show off their own.
If houses are decorated to match the Halloween spirit, inside and out — whenever possible, both physically and financially — this could add an extra touch to the experience of Halloween.
Similar to the 12 days of Christmas, set up a Halloween countdown. The “13 days of Halloween” has an irresistible sound to it. It provides an opportunity to do something a little bit special each day, whether baking Halloween cookies, crafting your own masks, or watching an (age-appropriate) spooky movie.
Spooky!
Carving a pumpkin will, of course, be an unmissable part of the countdown.
While Halloween might be different this year, by embracing new traditions we show the resilience of the event, as well as our own, during difficult times.
The spirit of Halloween must certainly live on.
Follow any local guidelines to stay safe such as wearing a mask.Shutterstock/DavidCarpio
What tips do you have to play safe this Halloween? Share your ideas in the comments below, and remember to follow our community standards.
Same story, in Britain, France and the Low Countries. Chart by Keith Rankin.
Analysis by Keith Rankin.
Exponential growth of cases from late June. Chart by Keith Rankin.
This week’s first chart looks at a familiar island country with the same population as New Zealand. The chart shows daily cases at the top, and daily deaths at the bottom; and it includes world averages for comparison.
The most striking recent feature on the Ireland chart is the straight-line (exponential) growth of cases from late-June to mid-October. While the growth is not as rapid as in March, it is more persistent and more consistent. While this exponential pattern cannot continue forever, with the onset of winter in Ireland, this trend line could project forward for another month. 100,000 daily cases per 100 million people would be equivalent to one percent of the population testing positive over a ten-day period. That would be like 50,000 positive cases in New Zealand over ten days; fortunately, New Zealand has fewer than 2,000 known cases in total.
While death rates are much lower in Ireland now than they were in April and May, they are nevertheless at the world average and are likely to get much higher for the remainder of 2020. Latest death rates per capita can be seen to be about one percent of case rates 15 days prior. The true case fatality rate is probably 0.5 percent, meaning that Ireland’s recent undiagnosed Covid19 cases would be about the same as the recent diagnosed numbers. By way of contrast, at the time of the April peak of the previous Covid19 wave in Ireland, the true number of cases was probably ten times higher than the then known number of cases; that is, an April peak of 200,000 actual cases per 100 million people.
Same story, in Britain, France and the Low Countries. Chart by Keith Rankin.
While Netherlands and Belgium are worst for new cases, France and the United Kingdom are not far behind. Netherlands is of particular note, because it essentially followed the Sweden model of minimal restrictions, though with less honesty than Sweden in its published death tolls. Belgium’s published statistics were the worst of all these countries, and still are. There is no sign at present that Belgium or Netherlands have gained anything like ‘herd immunity’, despite their high early infection rates.
Sweden is looking better now, but only in comparison to these other egregious cases. Sweden’s cases are still on the rise; and its main protection is its much lower population density, and its cultural propensity towards a degree of physical distancing as its norm.
As in the case of Ireland, if you look at the latest death rates, and compare them with the case rates 15 days earlier, we find a (known) case fatality rate of about one percent. (Lower for Sweden, which is most likely now finding a greater proportion of its actual cases, thanks to much higher recent testing rates.)
Covid19 is basically out of control in the featured countries here. While death rates may be ameliorated by better knowledge of effective treatments, these countries certainly look to be in for a grim winter. And the numbers of Covid19 survivors still suffering from long-term after-effects in 2021 can be expected to be one of the biggest media stories next year.
Since 2018, we have tracked public perceptions of the leadership of various Australian institutions — including government — as part of our Australian Leadership Index.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic worsened in Australia in March, public perceptions of the federal and state governments were consistently poor. Political leaders were seen to be serving themselves and other vested interests, rather than the public interest.
However, since the start of the pandemic and the establishment of the National Cabinet in March, this has begun to change.
We collected data at three points during the pandemic — March, June and September. And for the first time since our data collection began in 2018, a majority of people said they felt the federal and state governments were exhibiting leadership for the greater good.
Author provided
State government leadership has improved since March
We have also tracked how the public has viewed the leadership of individual state governments.
While all state governments improved in our surveys from March to September, there have been marked differences in their approval ratings.
The government of WA Premier Mark McGowan has consistently been viewed as displaying the most leadership for the public good — topping out at 65% of respondents in September.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s government, meanwhile, has been at the bottom. Just 30% of our respondents said her government has shown a high degree of leadership for the greater good in September — up from 19% in March.
Author provided
These findings are consistent with other surveys — Newspoll and Vox Pop Labs/ABC — from the first wave of the pandemic.
However, perhaps no other leader in the country has been under greater scrutiny than Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.
Unlike other states, Victoria’s numbers were relatively static from June to September during the state’s harsh second lockdown. In June, 44% of respondents said they believed the Andrews’s government was displaying a high degree of leadership for the greater good, and this modestly improved to 46% in September.
This could be seen as an unexpectedly good result in the context of the hotel quarantine debacle and the prolonged lockdown.
Andrews’s government was not nearly as popular as McGowan’s in our surveys, but it has tracked quite closely to NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s government from March through September, and ahead of the Queensland government.
Closed borders and a budget surplus have helped buoy McGowan’s popularity in WA.Richard Wainwright/AAP
Given the markedly different experience of Victoria and NSW residents during the pandemic, it is instructive to compare public perceptions of both governments’ leadership.
According to the model that underpins the Australian Leadership Index, the public regards an institution as leading for the greater good when it creates social, environmental and economic value for the whole of society in a way that is transparent, accountable and ethical. At least, this is how people judge leadership in normal times.
Among NSW residents, there were some changes in the factors that underpinned perceptions of state government leadership through the pandemic. Transparency became increasingly important, for instance, while balancing the interests of different stakeholders became less so.
There was also a shift in what people felt was needed most by society. In March and June, respondents said good leadership involved creating positive social outcomes for people, but in September, this shifted to creating positive economic outcomes.
Author provided
By contrast, among Victorians, there was a marked shift how people viewed good leadership from the first wave (March-June) to the second wave (June-September).
During the first wave, Victorians thought leadership for the common good was served by balancing the needs of different groups and focusing on the creation of positive social outcomes.
By September, however, far more people were concerned about the ethical standards of the government and its accountability.
Author provided
Will people continue to rate state governments highly?
Despite the furious debate taking place in the media about personal freedoms and the proportionality of government measures to control the pandemic, at the community level, there appears to have been a more settled attitude to the reality of living in a COVID-19 world.
However, there are signs the public mood is turning and politics-as-usual is returning. State premiers are faltering. Federal and state government solidarity is ebbing away. None of this bodes well for community perceptions of government leadership.
Although leadership for the greater good is a complex, evolving phenomenon, people know it when they see it. Let us hope that political leaders have the moral conviction and imagination to sustain it.
Our research shows some people lack access to the essential services and amenities that support healthy and liveable places during the lockdown. We tracked 80,000 location-based tweets from January 2020 to September 2020 to understand how people are responding to Melbourne’s lockdowns.
Social media such as Twitter can provide a window into how people are emotionally managing during the lockdown and how well their neighbourhood meets their needs in this challenging time. This is particularly important as policy conversations turn to the importance of 20-minute neighbourhoods and living locally in the post-COVID city.
Research has shown the inequality of neighbourhood access to services and amenities can have serious physical and mental health impacts. These differences raise issues of equity and whether responses are proportionate to the threat. It also means some neighbourhoods are ill-equipped to support the anticipated increase in people working from home during and after the pandemic.
On August 2, the Victorian government established strict restrictions on movement including a 5km travel bubble and curfew in Melbourne. In a cross-discipline collaboration between Monash’s Art, Design & Architecture and Data Futures Institute, our analysis of Twitter data focused on neighbourhood amenity and opportunity at this point. Our findings reveal the differences in resident well-being across different suburbs during lockdown.
Residents of the suburb of St Kilda have been more likely to keep smiling under lockdown than the city as a whole.Alexa Gower, Author provided
With the introduction of the first lockdown, the number of tweets posted about people’s local neighbourhoods increased by 158% compared to January and February 2020. This highlights how the lockdown turned people’s attention towards their residential area. It also indicates neighbourhood amenities became more significant for people who are no longer commuting to work in Melbourne’s CBD or other places.
People living in areas with poor access to amenities expressed higher levels of negative sentiment about their neighbourhood during the lockdown periods. Sentiment in these areas dropped three times in the year. There was a 13% drop in sentiment in March when the first lockdown came in and another 15.5% fall with the June lockdown 2.0. Sentiment continued to fall by 30% in August.
In contrast, tweets about amenity-rich areas revealed a 4% rise in positive sentiment. These residents detailed how their neighbourhood amenity helped their well-being during this time.
We see contrasting trends in sentiment in tweets from high-amenity and low-amenity neighbourhoods under lockdown.Author provided
We also see that not everyone is as supportive of remote working arrangements as some studies claim. Before the lockdown, tweets about places in Melbourne often highlighted satisfaction with working environments. These tweets spoke of walking between meetings, and places to gather and eat out:
Beautiful day in the city – just perfect for walking between meetings and lunch at the cafe. (Outer Melbourne, March 6).
Under lockdown, the number of tweets with negative sentiment about residential neighbourhoods throughout Melbourne increased by 124%. People posted negative opinions about what was missing from their local area and expressed longing for the amenities found in their workplace. People also missed their daily commute and the opportunity to walk between places outside their neighbourhood:
Although I’m loving working from home, one thing that I really miss is my walk to the office from the station. (Outer Melbourne, July 9).
Moreover, tweets highlighted that some people don’t have enough space to work from home
When I am working at home I’m currently sharing space with the indoor clothes hangers. (Outer Melbourne, April 16).
These tweets remind us of the challenges some people face when working from home and indicate how commuting enables access to amenities that their neighbourhoods lack.
Some areas make work from home a joy
In comparison, tweets that expressed positive neighbourhood sentiment during the lockdown referred specifically to the benefits of parks and public facilities. In high-amenity areas, people expressed gratitude for these places.
Social isolating done right … I’m so #grateful to have these sort of parks right on my doorstep so I can exercise both me and the dogs ?? (Inner Melbourne, March 29)
Being able to experience the natural environment improved their mood.
I went outside for a walk and took a moment to stand in a spot where the onshore bay breeze could freely hit me in the face while I listened to Sign ☮️ the Times. I needed that so badly. #starfishandcoffee’ (Inner Melbourne, April 16)
Some were happy to spend more time locally even when lockdown measures had eased.
The joys of working from home and walking to support our local coffee shop. Then you are pleasantly surprised by Teddy and his marmalade skills. Just sweet! (Outer Melbourne, May 27)
Increased positive sentiment about local amenity continued longer into the year than negative tweets, highlighting the broad benefits local amenities provide to communities.
How people fare under lockdown has a lot to do with where they live.Author provided
Work to be done on neighbourhood amenity
Comparing Melbourne’s Twitter data across different places provides insight into the impacts of neighbourhood amenity on resident well-being during lockdown. It also shows the uneven access to important neighbourhood facilities in different places and the consequences for remote working.
The lockdown experience highlights that if Melbourne is serious about achieving a city of 20-minute neighbourhoods, there is immediate work to do to improve access to everyday amenities and support remote working.
University of Canberra Professorial Fellow Michelle Grattan and University of Canberra Assistant Professor Caroline Fisher discuss the week in politics.
This week the pair discuss a week of ICAC hearings, and evidence concerning Premier Gladys Berejiklian and former MP Daryl Maguire, as well as the resignation of head Victoria bureaucrat Chris Eccles, and scandal for the LNP leading up to the Queensland election.
Three of the world’s most populist leaders of modern times – Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, have handled the COVID crisis badly.
All three have caught it.
In the Financial Times, chief economics commentator Martin Wolf has asked whether this spells the end of the sort of right wing aggressive populism that has been so successful in recent times.
Martin Wolf – will Covid-19 kill off populism?
Part of his answer is that populism hasn’t lined up neatly against relative success in keeping populations safe.
In the Anglosphere, Trump and Johnson have indeed been much more chaotic in tackling COVID than Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
But other populist governments such as those in Hungary and Poland have done well.
“The really interesting question” he says, turns out to be “is a government actually interested in governing?”.
Trump and Bolsonaro are basically interested in politics as performance.
They don’t care about government but they don’t really understand what government is for and they’re indifferent to it. In some ways and in some cases, they’re actually trying to dismantle the state.
As Wolf says, it’s obvious if that’s what you want to do, you can’t manage a disease well.
But there are other autocratic and indeed populist politicians who understand that ultimately their claim on power depends on being reasonably effective in dealing with such things.
The populists who don’t care about government are likely to be disposed of.
It’s possible for populists to govern well
But, what will replace them will not necessarily be a more effective democratic government, it could just as easily be a more effective dictator who understands the importance of delivering what people care about.
Wolf says that’s what Hungary and, in a different way, Poland has shown.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s concepts of “internal” and “external” goods offer some useful tools with which the think about these issues.
MacIntyre explains them with an example in which a child is taught to play chess and rewarded with candy if she wins.
The skills required for excellence in chess are “internal goods”. They include spatial vision, computational accuracy and competitive intensity. They are “internal” because they emerge organically from the activity.
Candy is an “external good” because it is provided from outside the game.
All of the practices that have acquired any significance in the world, from chess playing to accountancy, from business management to political statesmanship are all entanglements of internal and external goods mutually supporting each other.
Rewards matter, but they are not everything
The internal goods of a practice can’t prosper – can’t exist in the world as more than a hobby – without the external goods such as money (and sometimes candy), power and esteem.
Thought of economically, they enable the practice to bid resources (of people’s attention, time and money) away from other activities.
Medicine is a practice with its own internal goods, but there wouldn’t be much of it unless practitioners were paid.
The converse is also true. People are prepared to part with their scarce resources to fund medicine or some other practice only because they value what it produces. Equally medicine can’t function without internal goods – such as the skills taught at med school.
However, although they complement one another, internal and external goods are in tension.
The girl in pursuit of candy will be tempted to cheat, undermining her incentive to acquire the game’s internal goods. A doctor will be tempted to over-service to obtain more external goods at the cost of sacrificing internal goods.
MacIntyre says it is virtues that keep this from happening.
Without them, in particular, “without justice, courage and truthfulness, practices could not resist the corrupting power of institutions”.
Leaders are getting skilled, at the wrong things
As MacIntyre sees it, the skill of political performance is actually an internal good of politics. It’s an important skill that helps one excel at politics. But it’s a particular kind of internal good.
Many internal goods are unquestionably meritorious unless they’re deliberately used for some nefarious purpose. Such skills include an astronomer’s or a chess player’s accuracy in calculation or the sensitivity of a medical professional’s skills of observation and diagnosis.
External rewards for sport mater more for sport than they used to.
On the other hand the business person’s focus on profit, the sportsperson’s competitive intensity and the politician’s capacity to perform are internal goods that are, in their respective areas, most closely associated with acquiring external goods.
This makes them more morally ambiguous than other internal goods.
This has been true since ancient Athens, but in my view what has changed is the fast foodification of our culture; the growing focus of our institutions on the external rewards of profit, power and prestige.
As fast food is to ordinary food, so porn is to sexuality, memes are to culture and to our capacity to concentrate, auto-tuned formulaic pop is to popular music, and linkbait and trolling are to journalism.
It was MacIntyre’s horror that this was increasingly the case in modern liberal capitalist democracies that motivated his thinking. As he put it
if in a particular society the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound.
So how did we get here and what can we do about it?
It seems to have arisen from the way the markets or “theatres of action” have scaled.
A generation ago, party politics had deep roots into the community across the Western world with party membership of around 14% of population.
By the turn of this century average membership had fallen to just 5% of the population and active membership had fallen to a mere fraction of that.
Politicians doorknock less than they used to. After COVID they mighn’t do it much at all.
The mass scale of campaigning has forced politics to be conducted through media far more than it used to be, making the external goods of power and prestige much more dependent on performance in the media.
Fast food media, fast food politics
But the media has been driven by its own competitive imperatives to attract audiences, and so has concentrated on reporting the theatrics of political performance – intensifying the vicious cycle which hollows out political discourse as loss of members and local action has hollowed out party membership.
Citizen juries might be better than politicians.
So much so that politicians do increasingly farcical things for the cameras – none more so than the famously irreligious (or perhaps “areligious’”) Trump photo-op, bible in hand, at a church outside the White House, having walked through public space that had been cleared of demonstrators with tear gas.
Because these phenomena have developed deep structural roots, I’d expect there to be strict limits to the extent that they can be addressed within the existing system – though measures within it to improve integrity such as fundraising limits on political parties might be helpful.
Wolf may also be right that the extraordinary incompetence of the worst of the populists will trigger a backlash against them.
But I fear we’re in the grip of something bigger.
This analysis points to the possible healing qualities of injecting into our system small-scale deliberation of the kind of I have argued for elsewhere through mechanisms that aren’t “scaled” via media performances such as citizen’s juries.
We are prepared to do it for court cases. We are prepared to appoint as our representatives a jury of twelve ordinary people chosen without reference to performance or external rewards.
That Western democracies used to deliver good outcomes is not a good argument for maintaining the status quo. If we care about our institutions we will try to improve them.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Todd E. Caissie, PhD Candidate in Art History and Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies. Lecturer, Rutgers University
Kyniska (or Cyniska), a Spartan princess, was the daughter of King Archidamus II and sister to King Agesilaus.
She owned a sizable estate where she bred, raised and trained horses, and in 396 BCE, when she was probably between 40 and 50 years old, she became the first woman to participate in the Olympic Games.
Spartan culture believed stronger children come from parents who were both strong, an unusual concept in Ancient Greek society. Spartan authorities encouraged women to train both mind and body.
Unlike Athens and the other Greek city-states where girls were hidden from the public and learned only domestic skills, Sparta held races and trials of strength for girls as well as boys.
Kyniska’s childhood would have been full of athletic training: running, jumping, throwing the discus and javelin, perhaps even wrestling.
Spartan girls married later, allowing more years in education. Aristocratic girls such as Kyniska learned poetry and also trained to dance and sing competitively, so she may have even been literate.
Bronze figure of a Spartan girl running, 520-500 BCE.Wikimedia Commons
Kyniska had wealth and status – but it was her ambition that made her a legend.
This ambition drove her to compete in the four-horse chariot race, or tethrippon, at the Olympics in 396 and 392 BCE.
Her chariot team won both times.
No women allowed
This feat was especially impressive because women could not even step foot on the sacred grounds of the Olympic Sanctuary during the festival. Married women were forbidden on penalty of death from even attending as spectators.
To compete, Kyniska cleverly exploited loopholes.
In sports like wrestling or javelin, the victors individually competed on the field. In the chariot race, the winners were the horse owners, not the riders – who were almost always slaves. Much like with the modern Kentucky Derby or Melbourne Cup, the victors are the horse and its owner, not the rider.
Kyniska didn’t have to drive the chariot to win.
Chariot owners did not have to be the ones physically racing at the games to win.Getty Museum
In fact, chariot team owners did not even have to be physically present at Olympia during the games. Kyniska could enter her chariot team in the race without ever stepping foot on the forbidden sacred grounds.
But Kyniska’s role was not secret. News of an Olympic victory was carried by fast messengers to the victor’s home city, where preparations to celebrate their return were begun at once. News that a woman had won an Olympic contest would have spread quickly.
What motivated a Spartan royal to break through the difficult glass ceiling of male-dominated Olympic competition and culture? The scant sources we have offer different opinions.
The Greek writer Pausanias said Kyniska had personal ambitions to win at Olympia, but Xenephon and the philosopher Plutarch credit her brother, King Agesilaus, for pressuring her to compete.
The answer may involve a bit of both.
Her legacy
Many ancient Greek women won Olympic victories after Kyniska, but none were as famous as she.
Kyniska erected at least two life-size bronze statues of herself at Olympia. The inscription on a remaining fragment of her marble statue base reads:
Kings of Sparta were my fathers and brothers. I, Kyniska, victorious at the chariot race with her swift-footed horses, erected this statue. I claim that I am the only woman in all Greece who won this crown.
Kyniska relished her fame. Agesilaus may have been the catalyst, but Kyniska herself probably decided to compete – at least the second time.
Other women would go on to compete in the chariot races, and by the 1st century CE women were competing directly against men in foot racing events – and winning.
The fact Kyniska didn’t physically compete has caused history to discount her achievements, but this argument marginalises her larger accomplishment. Amid enormous cultural barriers, Kyniska broke gender norms and glass ceilings.
By boldly and proudly celebrating her trailblazing victories with commemorative statues, she transmitted this message to women across the Greek world.
Fuelled by Spartan pride, Kyniska’s accomplishment to be the first woman to compete, and win, in the male-only Olympics is a startling and memorable achievement that deserves a prominent place in Olympic lore.
Shifting Australia to a low-emissions energy system is a big challenge. Much has been said of the need to change the electricity generation mix, from mostly fossil fuels to mostly renewables. Yet our electricity transmission network must also be overhauled.
The transmission network largely consists of high-voltage cables and towers to support them, as well as transformers. This infrastructure moves electricity from where it’s generated, such as a coal plant or wind farm, to an electrical substation. From there, the distribution network – essentially the “poles and wires” – takes the electricity to customers.
On Australia’s east coast, increased renewable energy generation is already stretching the capacity and reach of Australia’s ageing transmission network. New capacity is being built, but is struggling to keep up.
In his budget reply speech last week, Labor leader Anthony Albanese pledged to create a A$20 billion corporation to upgrade Australia’s energy transmission system. So let’s take a look at what work is needed, and what’s standing in the way.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s budget reply speech included a $20 billion plan to upgrade transmission networks.Mick Tsikas/AAP
Starting with the basics
The electricity grid covering Australia’s east is part of the National Electricity Market (NEM). It’s one of the largest interconnected electricity networks in the world, and covers every jurisdiction except Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
The NEM comprises:
electricity generators (which produce electricity)
five state-based transmission networks, linked by interconnectors that enable electricity to flow between states
the distribution network (poles and wires)
electricity retailers (which sell electricity to the market)
customers, such as homes and businesses
a financial market in which electricity is traded.
The NEM’s transmission grid currently has a long, thin structure, running from the north of Queensland to the south of Tasmania and the east of South Australia. This reflects the fact that electricity has traditionally been produced by a small number of large, centralised (mostly coal and gas) generators.
Electricity transmission infrastructure is expensive and complex to upgrade.
Who owns and runs transmission networks?
Australia’s electricity networks were originally built and owned by state governments, mostly during the latter half of the 20th century. Over several decades, interstate transmission interconnectors were built to share resources more efficiently across borders. The NEM was formally created in the late 1990s.
Between 2000 and 2015, several states either partly or fully privatised their transmission networks, leading to the mixed model of today. The transmission companies are monopoly providers, and the prices they charge are set by the Australian Energy Regulator (AER).
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) operates the national market and is responsible for transmission planning. In Victoria, AEMO also decides on transmission investments. In the other jurisdictions, that role rests with the transmission companies.
In the past, electricity companies made some infrastructure investments far beyond what was needed – mostly in distribution networks, but also in transmission. This so-called “gold plating” of networks led to inflated costs for consumers, who ultimately pay for the investments via their power bills.
The cost of transmission upgrades is passed onto power consumers.Julian Smith/AAP
Why do the transmission networks need fixing?
Renewables have increased the total NEM generation capacity from 40 gigawatts to 60 gigawatts since 2007. More than 30 gigawatts of renewable generators and 12 gigawatts of energy storage are expected to come online by 2040.
In mid-2017, a panel led by Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel recommended a plan be drawn up to create “renewable energy zones”. These would coordinate the development of new renewable projects with new grid infrastructure.
The zones were contained in AEMO’s 2018 “Integrated System Plan (ISP). It identified transmission projects that should start immediately, and possible future projects.
Two initial projects involve expanding the system’s capacity between Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Possible future projects include a second interconnector between Victoria and Tasmania.
But upgrading the transmission grid is easier said than done. The large size and cost of new transmission lines means planning and approval is subject to lengthy, intensive economic assessments.
What’s more, renewable energy generators are often built in regional areas, where solar and wind energy are plentiful. In many cases the electricity grid in those areas, designed in a different era, doesn’t have the capacity to accommodate them.
In September, the Energy Security Board (ESB), created by COAG energy ministers, said the transmission grid must be reconfigured along the lines of the ISP to suit the emerging mix of renewable generation and storage. This means upgrading existing interconnectors, and building new interconnectors and intrastate transmission from regional areas to coastal centres.
The Energy Security Board has called for transmission infrastructure upgrades.Shutterstock
Weighing the political promises
Labor leader Anthony Albanese last week released a A$20 billion “Rewiring the Nation” policy to upgrade the grid. It would establish a government-owned body to partner with industry, providing low-cost government finance for the upgrades.
The Morrison government, for its part, is also working on transmission solutions. It’s supporting projects prioritised in the ISP, including up to A$250 million allocated in this month’s federal budget.
Some states have separately accelerated their own high-priority transmission projects. However, none of the above measures effectively solve two big impediments to modernising the transmission network.
First, the processes to identify, analyse and build transmission projects is too slow. Second, a state’s transmission infrastructure is currently paid for by consumers in that state – a poor fit for the increasingly integrated, and therefore shared, national grid.
Much work must be done to address these issues. Perhaps a government-owned national company could be established. It would own the shared transmission system, while AEMO would drive what gets built. Operations could be outsourced to a private company to deliver efficiencies.
Separating planning from owning would minimise the perverse financial incentives that led to past “gold plating”.
To minimise the risk of white elephants being built, strong, up-to-date benefit-cost assessments would be required.
Such alternatives will come with their own challenges. But the transition towards low emissions is too important for radical solutions to be ignored.
Three of the world’s most populist leaders of modern times – Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, have handled the COVID crisis badly.
All three have caught it.
In the Financial Times, chief economics commentator Martin Wolf has asked whether this spells the end of the sort of right wing aggressive populism that has been so successful in recent times.
Martin Wolf – will Covid-19 kill off populism?
Part of his answer is that populism hasn’t lined up neatly against relative success in keeping populations safe.
In the Anglosphere, Trump and Johnson have indeed been much more chaotic in tackling COVID than Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
But other populist governments such as those in Hungary and Poland have done well.
“The really interesting question” he says, turns out to be “is a government actually interested in governing?”.
Trump and Bolsonaro are basically interested in politics as performance.
They don’t care about government but they don’t really understand what government is for and they’re indifferent to it. In some ways and in some cases, they’re actually trying to dismantle the state.
As Wolf says, it’s obvious if that’s what you want to do, you can’t manage a disease well.
But there are other autocratic and indeed populist politicians who understand that ultimately their claim on power depends on being reasonably effective in dealing with such things.
The populists who don’t care about government are likely to be disposed of.
It’s possible for populists to govern well
But, what will replace them will not necessarily be a more effective democratic government, it could just as easily be a more effective dictator who understands the importance of delivering what people care about.
Wolf says that’s what Hungary and, in a different way, Poland has shown.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s concepts of “internal” and “external” goods offer some useful tools with which the think about these issues.
MacIntyre explains them with an example in which a child is taught to play chess and rewarded with candy if she wins.
The skills required for excellence in chess are “internal goods”. They include spatial vision, computational accuracy and competitive intensity. They are “internal” because they emerge organically from the activity.
Candy is an “external good” because it is provided from outside the game.
All of the practices that have acquired any significance in the world, from chess playing to accountancy, from business management to political statesmanship are all entanglements of internal and external goods mutually supporting each other.
Rewards matter, but they are not everything
The internal goods of a practice can’t prosper – can’t exist in the world as more than a hobby – without the external goods such as money (and sometimes candy), power and esteem.
Thought of economically, they enable the practice to bid resources (of people’s attention, time and money) away from other activities.
Medicine is a practice with its own internal goods, but there wouldn’t be much of it unless practitioners were paid.
The converse is also true. People are prepared to part with their scarce resources to fund medicine or some other practice only because they value what it produces. Equally medicine can’t function without internal goods – such as the skills taught at med school.
However, although they complement one another, internal and external goods are in tension.
The girl in pursuit of candy will be tempted to cheat, undermining her incentive to acquire the game’s internal goods. A doctor will be tempted to over-service to obtain more external goods at the cost of sacrificing internal goods.
MacIntyre says it is virtues that keep this from happening.
Without them, in particular, “without justice, courage and truthfulness, practices could not resist the corrupting power of institutions”.
Leaders are getting skilled, at the wrong things
As MacIntyre sees it, the skill of political performance is actually an internal good of politics. It’s an important skill that helps one excel at politics. But it’s a particular kind of internal good.
Many internal goods are unquestionably meritorious unless they’re deliberately used for some nefarious purpose. Such skills include an astronomer’s or a chess player’s accuracy in calculation or the sensitivity of a medical professional’s skills of observation and diagnosis.
External rewards for sport mater more for sport than they used to.
On the other hand the business person’s focus on profit, the sportsperson’s competitive intensity and the politician’s capacity to perform are internal goods that are, in their respective areas, most closely associated with acquiring external goods.
This makes them more morally ambiguous than other internal goods.
This has been true since ancient Athens, but in my view what has changed is the fast foodification of our culture; the growing focus of our institutions on the external rewards of profit, power and prestige.
As fast food is to ordinary food, so porn is to sexuality, memes are to culture and to our capacity to concentrate, auto-tuned formulaic pop is to popular music, and linkbait and trolling are to journalism.
It was MacIntyre’s horror that this was increasingly the case in modern liberal capitalist democracies that motivated his thinking. As he put it
if in a particular society the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound.
So how did we get here and what can we do about it?
It seems to have arisen from the way the markets or “theatres of action” have scaled.
A generation ago, party politics had deep roots into the community across the Western world with party membership of around 14% of population.
By the turn of this century average membership had fallen to just 5% of the population and active membership had fallen to a mere fraction of that.
Politicians doorknock less than they used to. After COVID they mighn’t do it much at all.
The mass scale of campaigning has forced politics to be conducted through media far more than it used to be, making the external goods of power and prestige much more dependent on performance in the media.
Fast food media, fast food politics
But the media has been driven by its own competitive imperatives to attract audiences, and so has concentrated on reporting the theatrics of political performance – intensifying the vicious cycle which hollows out political discourse as loss of members and local action has hollowed out party membership.
Citizen juries might be better than politicians.
So much so that politicians do increasingly farcical things for the cameras – none more so than the famously irreligious (or perhaps “areligious’”) Trump photo-op, bible in hand, at a church outside the White House, having walked through public space that had been cleared of demonstrators with tear gas.
Because these phenomena have developed deep structural roots, I’d expect there to be strict limits to the extent that they can be addressed within the existing system – though measures within it to improve integrity such as fundraising limits on political parties might be helpful.
Wolf may also be right that the extraordinary incompetence of the worst of the populists will trigger a backlash against them.
But I fear we’re in the grip of something bigger.
This analysis points to the possible healing qualities of injecting into our system small-scale deliberation of the kind of I have argued for elsewhere through mechanisms that aren’t “scaled” via media performances such as citizen’s juries.
We are prepared to do it for court cases. We are prepared to appoint as our representatives a jury of twelve ordinary people chosen without reference to performance or external rewards.
That Western democracies used to deliver good outcomes is not a good argument for maintaining the status quo. If we care about our institutions we will try to improve them.
With under 48 hours until polls close in the 2020 election, 1,565,421 New Zealanders have made an advance vote. This represents 60% of the total number of votes cast in the 2017 general election and is the most advance votes ever cast in a New Zealand general election.
Is it possible to read the tea leaves in these numbers and predict what’s going to happen on Saturday?
Earlier this century and facing plummeting voter turnout, the Electoral Commission surveyed non-voters as to why they had not cast a vote. Respondents said they simply forgot or were otherwise busy on election day, away or overseas.
To mitigate these factors, the commission has made it easier for people to vote when and where it suits them. It has opened polling booths two weeks ahead of the election day in a range of locations, including school and church halls, mosques, marae, universities, clubrooms, libraries and pop-ups in retail spaces.
As a strategy to increase the total vote, this appears to have worked. Turnout has risen from a record low of 74.2% of enrolled voters in 2011 to 77.9% in 2014 and 79.01% in 2017.
Advance voting is not the only factor in these statistics. Voter advice applications such as Massey University’s On The Fence have helped first-time voters feel more confident about the voting process. This has led to higher youth voter turnout, contributing to the rise in overall turnout.
Locking in the result: Jacinda Ardern votes in Auckland on the first weekend polls opened.GettyImages
Who benefits from advance voting?
Our major political parties have cottoned on to the advantages they can gain by promoting advance voting. Core major party voters tend to decide their voting choices well before the official campaign period. It’s therefore in major party interests to lock those votes in before random campaign events shake voters’ confidence in their choices at the last minute.
Parties only have to look back at the 2002 election to see the impact of this. When Labour entered the campaign it was hovering around 53% support. Following a random media storm over genetically engineered corn, which blew over as quickly as it arrived, Labour’s vote dropped over ten points to 41.26% on election day.
It was therefore no surprise to see our major party leaders, Jacinda Ardern and Judith Collins, casting their votes on the first weekend polls were open, projecting confidence and role-modelling the acceptability of advance voting. Green co-leader James Shaw and ACT leader David Seymour also voted that weekend, hopeful of locking in the opinion poll gains their parties had made in the middle of the campaign period.
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has said he will wait until tomorrow to cast his vote. On the grounds of “clanger after clanger after clanger being dropped every day now”, he has warned “only a fool tests the water with both feet”. He has encouraged voters to wait until election day so they know all the facts before casting their votes.
This isn’t just Peters playing amateur philosopher. Currently languishing in the polls, it has never been more important for New Zealand First to discourage advance voting. Peters will know that many of his supporters in previous elections have been protest voters who opted for New Zealand First as a matter of last resort because they liked neither of the major parties’ offerings or leaders.
Unfortunately for the party, some of the clangers this week are own goals. News about the financial scandal concerning the New Zealand First Foundation is more likely to hurt than benefit the party’s election fortunes this close to election day.
The impact of late strategic voting
At least a million voters are still to cast their votes today and tomorrow. History shows many will end up voting the same way they would have two months ago, irrespective of what has transpired during the campaign.
But a good proportion will also have been waiting for last night’s opinion poll to decide how to strategically cast their vote to influence the composition of the next parliament.
If it looks like their preferred party is “safe”, they may give their votes to a minor party to help them form part of a final coalition. If their preferred party is looking unsafe, they may give their votes to a minor party to send a message of disappointment for poor performance.
Since the MMP system began, the minor party vote has been highest in the elections where the pre-election poll gap between the major parties has been widest. With last night’s gap between Labour and National remaining a whopping 15 points, it looks like the Greens and ACT will be the beneficiaries of late strategic voting, not either of the major parties.
This won’t be the result Ardern and Collins were hoping for when they cast their advance votes two weeks ago, but democracy in New Zealand will ultimately be stronger for it.
I recently encountered the concept “pay it forward”, with reference to a debt. While it was in a personal context that I came across this concept, on reflection I am wondering why – as a follower of news media – I have never heard the concept in any current affairs discussion. There is so much hand-wringing about debt – especially government debt – yet so little useful commentary.
In its most simple sense, paying a debt forward is to repay a debt to a third party, and not to the original creditor. In a particularly important sense, however, it is the idea of paying to the future rather than paying back to extinguish a past contract. Thus a generation, raised by its previous two generations, in turn raises the next two generations. We are in debt to our parents (and grandparents) – our specific parents and our parents’ generation – and we pay that debt forward by raising our children and our children’s generation. We also service that debt by enabling our parents’ generation to enjoy the latter part of their lives free from the requirement to be in paid work until they die; and our children service their debt to us in the same way.
By thinking of our existence as a form of debt, we find ourselves under some obligation to lead good lives; good lives which can be understood as including both debt servicing and paying our existential debt forward by reproducing ourselves.
Further, we can extend that thinking back in time to our ‘origin myths’ – eg Adam and Eve, or Ranginui and Papatūānuku. And back further, to the beginning of the universe. ‘God’ becomes the original creditor. (See my Existential Concerns.) Human existence (and other life) is a perpetual process of paying debts forward, until a critical mass of people reneges on that demographic contract.
Personal Debt versus Existential Debt
We can think of debts as sitting on a spectrum, with life-creating existential debts at one end, and simple personal debts at the other end. In the middle are bank debts.
The best example that I can make of a simple personal debt is the situation where two colleagues each want to buy a car, but each only has $10,000 and a car has a $20,000 price tag. So, one friend (Jan) lends $10,000 to the other (May), who goes ahead and buys a car. Each expects to save $11,000 in the next five years. They make a contract that, in five years time, May will pay Jan $11,000, and Jan will use the $11,000 plus her savings to buy a $22,000 car. Each of Jan and May gets something (a car) and gives up something. May gives up the opportunity to buy a better car, and Jan has to wait to buy her car. In the contract, Jan is the creditor and May is the debtor. May services her debt ($1,000 interest) and pays back the debt ($10,000 principal). There is no question that there is a debt contract which involves ‘paying back the debt’, and the whole matter is settled – ie extinguished – once the debt is repaid and both Jan and May have their cars. In this example, there is a clear and unambiguous relationship between creditor and debtor; and the debt contract is terminated by the creditor making her delayed purchase.
Most of the financial debts that most of us participate in involve financial intermediaries, with ‘banks’ being the most familiar and important type of intermediary. Thus, a person who makes a bank deposit is a creditor, and a person who takes out a bank loan (which could be a credit card purchase) is a debtor. Further banks create new debts, through double-entry bookkeeping, enabling their collective balance sheets to expand. These new debts become new deposits, which, when spent, continue to be deposits – albeit deposits owned by someone else. The depositors are creditors of the banks, and the borrowers are debtors of the banks. Debts are assets of the banks. A person who becomes a net creditor runs a financial surplus, and a person who becomes a net debtor runs a deficit. (A person paying back debt is also running a surplus, and a person withdrawing deposits is also running a deficit.) The sum of all surpluses must equal the sum of all deficits; that’s called an ‘accounting identity’. Public deficits necessarily mean private surpluses, and vice versa.
When a person (say, debtor A) repays a debt to a bank, to debtor A it’s a personal debt paid back; but to the bank, that debt is existential. Banks’ responsibility to their shareholders is to maintain or preferably expand their balance sheets; not to allow them to contract or extinguish. Thus, the last thing that banks want is for their assets to disappear. Too much contraction of a bank’s balance sheet would mean the end of the bank’s’ existence.
So, when a loan is repaid by debtor A, a bank must find a new debtor (debtor B) to replace debtor A. The net effect is that the debt of A is paid forward to B; and then B will pay their debt, via the bank, to debtor C; and so on. In this sense, the bank acts as a facilitator in the paying forward process. This is a good process so long as that chain of forward debt contributes to the economy, and does not feed into a process of speculation in financial or property assets.
The banks – necessarily – expand their balance sheets by creating new debts, and prevent their balance sheets from contracting by facilitating the paying forward of existing debts that, from the point of view of borrowers, are being paid back.
The Reserve Bank and Government Debt
The Reserve Bank is essentially the banks’ bank; it can also be the government’s bank. The key assets of the Reserve Bank are the existential debts that constitute a country’s monetary system; thus the Reserve Bank acts to make sure that the banking system is creating new debts – including government debts – at a sufficient pace to support an equitable and sustainable economy.
The Reserve Bank is officially indifferent as to whether bank debt supports private sector business investment spending, government spending, or household spending on newly produced goods and services. Each of these forms of spending constitutes the economy. In times of recession – or near recession – the Reserve bank understands the accentuated need to support government spending and household spending as means to raise business confidence. In non-recessionary times, when business confidence is high, then the Reserve Bank expects banks to be lending in large part to private sector businesses in the economy.
In the years from 2010 to 2016, the New Zealand economy was for the most part in near recessionary conditions. In 2020 it has been in recession. Thus, in the eight mentioned years, the focus should have been for the banking system to expand government debt and consumer debt, with consumer debt including mortgages to support the building and upgrading of houses. Instead, what we found for these years is far too much debt going to the wrong places; in particular into the speculative purchase of existing assets, with the residential land market and the sharemarket being the most obvious examples of this misallocated debt.
In the years from 2011 to 2014, the government – by its own misguided choice – borrowed and spent far too little, meaning that far too much bank lending was deflected into the wrong places. In the years from 2015 to 2017, the government repaid debt – debt that was subsequently paid forward into the property market – while it should have been borrowing more and addressing the issues of inequality and poverty. From 2018 to 2019, while the New Zealand was close to full employment, interest rates had to stay low to maintain this; the government could have taken better advantage of these low rates. The governments – whether National-led or Labour-led – saw themselves as equivalent to personal debtors, having to pay back debt in the same way that May had to pay back the debt she incurred to buy her car. Governments are notoriously insensitive to interest rates; for them, low debt is a misplaced moral imperative.
So the governments repaid debt, and the banks paid that debt forward into the residential land market and into the sharemarket. The net effect was that – by repaying its ‘personal’ debt rather than addressing the problems that governments are expected to address – the government paid much of its debt forward into speculative markets.
In 2020 this unintentional funnelling of debt into secondary (speculative) markets is very clear. The Reserve Bank is injecting massive new amounts of existential debt into the banking system in order to support the Covid19 recessionary economy. The absolute priority is that this new money gets into the hands of governments, and needy households. As Keynes showed in the 1930s, by far the most effective means of getting new money where it is needed is through large deficits in governments’ Budget.
If the newly created debt does not get into the right hands, then it gets into the wrong hands. That’s double jeopardy. Not only are the needy missing out, but the greedy are getting it instead, and speculating with it, on residential land and shares. By not taking on as much debt as it should, the government is fast-tracking the paying forward of debt into the property market.
Monetary policy is not just about the quantity of existential debt required to support the economy; it is also about the service price – the interest rate – on that debt. Thus, in the ‘raining’ 2020 environment, in order to have the amount of existential debt that economies need, existential debt is available at record-low interest rates. New spending is induced by cheap consumer debt, and by discouraging people from holding money in term deposits and savings accounts; to spend their erstwhile ‘rainy day’ money on goods and services. We see this in a number of ways, ranging from home improvements, domestic travel, and such things as laser eye surgery. Monetary policy is about induced spending. Governments, unlike rational households and businesses, are unresponsive to monetary policy; they confuse personal debt with existential debt.
Three Rooms – Three Doors
We can imagine this situation. The Reserve Bank creates new existential debt. That debt can flow into any of three ‘rooms’: government; business; financial speculation (the financial ‘casino’, if you will).
A recessionary environment is an environment of private economic caution. Thus, the ‘business confidence’ door to the business room is at best ajar in a recession. A recessionary environment is when the government door should be wide open to compensate for the ajar business door; instead, the government door is also ajar and with tight springs holding it in that nearly closed position. The result is that the debt being pushed towards the business and government doors is deflected towards the third speculative door, into financial and property assets.
The solution is conceptually simple. In a recessionary environment, the government should open its door, both because of the unmet needs that can be easily resourced, and in order to keep that debt from flooding into the financial markets. The government should not pretend that its debt is equivalent to personal debt. It should understand that, from a wider economy point of view, it is dealing with existential debt. If governments do not spend the Reserve Bank’s existential debt, then that debt will circulate elsewhere – eg raising house prices and house rents to increasingly unaffordable levels – or it will become inert, creating economic inertia or collapse.
The Banks have to push to avoid this inertia, especially the Reserve Bank. Governments need to open their doors, so that the debts created by the banks’ flow into where they are needed, and do not flow to where they are not needed. The consequences of governments committing financial suicide – by not spending what they are required to spend – are dystopic.
Some say that the Reserve Banks try too hard because they err in favour of doing too much rather than too little, to get their countries’ economies moving. Maybe. But they shouldn’t have to push so hard against obstinate governments.
Human Sacrifice
In ancient times, people understood that they were in debt to the Gods. When things went wrong, they performed sacrificial rituals to pay back some of that debt. Some societies practiced sacrifices routinely, as insurance against things going wrong. These practices didn’t work, though – through coincidental timing – they sometimes appeared to work. This approach to debt led to perpetual underachievement.
We still have human sacrifices today, albeit the sacrifices of neglect and bureaucracy. We see far too many people, in New Zealand, subject to oral health disasters because of the ‘financial risk’ of addressing these issues. We see people with untreated cancer (and delayed treatment) and other life-threatening and painful conditions because of the ‘financial costs’ of timely diagnosis and treatment. We have become familiar with seeing people unnecessarily living in appalling housing conditions, or homeless, due to government perceptions that it is financially inconvenient to address these problems. We would rather have another ‘great depression’ and/or rows of near-empty million-plus dollar residential properties, than address these problems. If that’s not human sacrifice, I do not know what is.
Paying the Debt Forward
There are two ways that governments can pay their debts.
They can pay back their debts to the banking system, obliging the banking system to pay forward these debts, either into the private economy (a good thing in principle, though not always in practice) or into the speculative markets (a bad thing). In the latter case, the lives of future generations are undermined, as diminishing numbers of people gain control over the world’s resources. This is what happens, but should not.
Or governments can take a more worldly view, by understanding that our economies are underpinned by existential debt. Thus governments can choose to spend that debt, by investing in their countries’ futures; that’s what paying forward is really about, in spirit. We invest in the future by spending the debt – not extinguishing it – and we service existential debt by leading good lives (and paying the interest!). Public debt should be perpetually rolled forward, growing in recessionary times.
Rolling back the banking system debt – or governments refusing to participate in an economically rational way – is one route to existential disaster. Existential financial debt underpins our economic existence. To sustain future generations, we pay existential debt forward, not back.
New Zealand’s Labour Party leader Jacinda Ardern today spoke on national radio about why she should continue as prime minister on the last day of campaigning before the general election tomorrow.
While Collins this week has been often on the attack, Ardern has largely stuck to maintaining her positions and avoiding upsetting the personal popularity she enjoys.
Collins has evoked a response by continuing to claim Ardern would go back on her word and introduce the Green Party’s wealth tax policy. Ardern has rejected that as desperate tactics and misinformation.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in the RNZ interview. Video: RNZ
Ardern has also been challenged on her government’s record on various measures and commitments it promised at the last election to meet, including child poverty, housing, light rail in Auckland, and climate change.
She told RNZ today her government had been progressive but needed more time to tackle the difficulties presented by covid-19.
Social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and our own genetics are among the factors influencing us beyond our awareness. This raises an ancient question: do we have control over our own lives? This article is part of The Conversation’s series on the science of free will.
Are criminals responsible for their actions? It’s a question philosophers, criminologists and jurisprudence experts have grappled with for centuries.
Some philosophers and scientists argue no-one has free will and no-one is ever responsible for any crime, no matter how serious. They suggest the impact of genes and formative social environments on us mean there’s no room left for free will.
This radical view, however, is not held by the majority of philosophers working on free will, nor is it held by the courts.
The criminal justice system presupposes people generally are free to decide whether or not to engage in criminal behaviour. If they do choose to commit a crime, it is presumed that they are responsible for what they’ve done.
However, the courts acknowledge not everyone has free will. For example, those who are very young, or sleepwalking, or severely mentally ill may not be held responsible for an offence. You might think of these people as lacking free will because they are unable to reason properly about what to do.
But even before getting to the question of whether a defendant in a criminal proceeding deserves to be punished for an offence, there can be doubt about whether they are sufficiently rational to be tried at all.
Though the law sees most defendants as able to properly participate in their trial, it recognises others cannot.
A defendant’s mental condition may deprive them of the free will needed to properly instruct their lawyers, present their version of events, or follow court proceedings.
This was one of the issues in relation to James Gargasoulas, who is currently serving at least 46 years in prison for killing six people and injuring 27 others in Melbourne’s 2017 Bourke Street massacre.
The law acknowledges some may lack the kind of free will necessary to properly participate in their trial.David Crosling/AAP
Gargasoulas’ actions in driving a car into a busy mall, and his conduct in the run-up to the trial, raised significant questions about his mental health.
Expert witnesses were reportedly divided on whether Gargasoulas had the capacity to properly participate in his trial, despite suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and delusions.
A psychiatrist for the defence said Gargasoulas’ delusional belief system “overwhelms him”; the psychiatrist expressed concern Gargasoulas was using the court process as a platform to voice his belief he is the messiah.
A second forensic psychiatrist agreed Gargasoulas was “not able to rationally enter a plea”.
However, a psychologist for the prosecution assessed him as fit and the prosecution argued there was evidence from recorded phone calls that he was capable of rational thought.
Notwithstanding the opinion of the majority of expert witnesses, the jury found Gargasoulas was fit to stand trial, and later he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Working from media reports, it is difficult to be sure precisely what happened in court, and we cannot know why the jury favoured the evidence suggesting he was fit to stand trial. However, it is interesting to consider whether research into the psychology of blame and punishment can shed any light on their decision.
Questions of consequence
Some psychologists argue judgements of blame are not always based on a balanced assessment of free will or rational control, as the law presumes. Sometimes we decide how much control or freedom a person possessed based upon our automatic negative responses to harmful consequences.
we simply don’t want to excuse people who do horrible things, regardless of how disordered their cognitive states may be.
When a person has done something very bad, we are motivated to look for evidence that supports blaming them and to downplay evidence that might excuse them by showing that they lacked free will.
Were the jurors who found Gargasoulas fit to stand trial influenced by how horrendous his actions were? Would their decision have been different had they not known what he’d been charged with?
We may never know. What is clear, though, is that questions about free will continue to challenge the criminal justice system — and will likely continue to do so in the future.
Many of the minor parties vying for votes in the Queensland election will already be very familiar to Australians.
But Pauline Hanson, Clive Palmer and the Katters are not the only minor party players worth watching in the lead up to October 31.
A new party has recently emerged in northern Queensland, with crocodiles and the balance of power on its mind.
It is also a prime example of how issues in northern Queensland can vary wildly from those in the south.
North Queensland First
North Queensland First was set up in October 2019 by member for Whitsunday, Jason Costigan.
Jason Costigan has been the member for Whitsunday since 2012.Glenn Hunt/ AAP
Costigan was expelled from the Liberal National Party earlier last year, following harassment allegations (the woman who made the complaint has since withdrawn it and apologised).
NQ First is aimed at appealing to voters disillusioned with the major parties. It lists establishing a separate state of “North Queensland” among its primary aims and is promoting itself as a possible balance of power holder.
Some north Queenslanders feel every inch of their distance from the state government in Brisbane: the notion of resources being extracted by a negligent, remote government has featured in northern politics for over a century.
That sense of remoteness also manifests itself in policies against crocodiles. Katter’s Australian Party and Bob Katter himself periodically make announcements about killing crocodiles.
Anti-crocodile policies are common in north Queensland.www.shutterstock.com
Last last month, NQ First sought to establish its northern credentials by announcing a “shoot to kill” policy.
This “croc culling” polling has a focus on “public safety”, according to Costigan.
If there is a crocodile on one of our beaches in a populated area, perhaps a tourist spot or in a swimming hole or where workers are at risk of being attacked, it’ll be shot by a licensed contractor whose job it will be to go in and deal with the problem as a matter of urgency.
Do Costigan’s crocodile proposals make sense?
Costigan’s policy was triggered by a September 23 crocodile attack on a snorkeler off Lizard Island.
By the time Costigan released his policy, that crocodile had already been euthanised by government wildlife officers. The current Queensland government crocodile management plan allows for the removal of crocodiles located near centres of population or that attack humans. So, further legislation, as proposed by Costigan, would not speed up that process.
In fact, NQ First’s enthusiasm for killing more large crocodiles might be counterproductive and increase the number of crocodile attacks.
Crocodiles are territorial and when large crocodiles are removed, other crocodiles move in. When the crocodile hierarchy is disturbed, it increases the risks to humans and livestock.
Why do politicians want to kill crocodiles?
Northern Australia is crocodile country, and saltwater crocodiles are capable of killing and eating humans. Australian crocodiles have been fully protected from hunting since 1974 and populations have recovered from heavy hunting after the second world war.
But living with crocodiles can be frightening. Costigan’s press release described crocodiles as “maneaters” and “monsters”, playing on primal human fears.
Politicians talking tough about crocodiles are speaking to residents of northern Australia’s suburban frontier, which is pressing into crocodile habitat as urban areas expand. Crocodile sightings and attacks are increasing as more humans spend time in regions where crocodiles have always lived.
Politicians also target crocodiles because hunting — of other animals, particularly pigs — is popular in the north and big game hunting is big business. Australia still has a safari hunting industry, which started by hunting crocodiles, but now targets other species.
Politicians promoting crocodile shooting appeal to a sense of rugged Australian individualism and environmental competence among their constituents.
However, the reality of legal crocodile hunting in Australia is very different. Safari hunting tends to be restricted to the wealthy.
Will being tough on crocodiles help Costigan?
Costigan has been elected to the seat of Whitsunday three times before, but all three times he was a member of the LNP and only won by slender margins (in 2017 he won by 372 votes). In 2020, he faces numerous challengers.
Both major parties are fielding candidates in Whitsunday, as are the Greens, One Nation, Katter’s Australian Party and the United Australia Party.
Costigan faces numerous challengers to be re-elected on October 31.www.shutterstock.com
Those last three parties are all vying to occupy similar populist territory to Costigan.
Whether suggesting crocodiles should be shot will help Costigan retain his seat remains to be seen. One danger is NQ First’s policy may in fact alienate tourist operators and residents who live off the crocodile’s back.
However, promising even a limited ability to “shoot to kill” crocodiles will still resonate with some north Queenslanders.
Indeed, with a high profile as the sitting member and the LNP struggling with internal divisions and questions about donations, NQ First may well be part of the next Queensland parliament.
Toxoplasmosis, cat roundworm and cat scratch disease are caused by pathogens that depend on cats — pets or feral — for part of their life cycle. But these diseases can be passed to humans, sometimes with severe health consequences.
In our study published today in the journal Wildlife Research, we looked at the rates of these diseases in Australia, their health effects, and the costs to our economy.
Professor Sarah Legge discusses the key findings of the study.
Based on findings from a large number of Australian and international studies, Australian hospital data and information from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we estimate many thousands of people in Australia fall ill or sustain a minor injury as a result of cat-dependent diseases each year.
Our estimations suggest more than 8,500 Australians are hospitalised and about 550 die annually from causes linked to these diseases.
We calculated the economic cost of these pathogens in Australia at more than A$6 billion per year based on the costs of medical care for affected people, lost income from time off work, and other related expenses.
Toxoplasmosis
Toxoplasmosis in an illness caused by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. It’s the most serious cat-dependent disease.
Newly infected cats shed millions of T. gondii oocysts (like tiny eggs) in their poo and these can survive many months in the environment.
Humans become infected when they ingest these oocysts, which are in the soil and dust in places where cats have defecated, especially sandpits, vegetable gardens or kitty litter.
Humans can also become infected from eating undercooked meat, if those farm animals have come into contact with cat-shed oocysts.
Up to one-third of people globally are infected with T. gondii, most without knowing it. Australian studies have reported infection rates between 22% and 66%.
Once infected, about 10% of people develop illness; the other 90% have no symptoms.
Based on overall infection rates and Australia’s population size, we estimate there are more than 125,000 new infections in Australia each year.
Of these, around 12,500 people get sick, mostly with non-specific, flu-like symptoms that resolve within a couple of weeks; 650 require hospitalisation, and 50 die, with these more serious cases often experiencing brain swelling and neurological symptoms.
People with compromised immune systems, such as those with cancer or HIV, are at highest risk.
Toxoplasmosis is caused by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii.Yale Rosen/Flickr
More than 20%, or about 50 of these babies, will have symptoms that require life-long care, including impaired vision or hearing, and intellectual disabilities. Another 90 babies will develop symptoms, usually related to vision or hearing, later in life.
Toxoplasmosis carries unique risks for pregnant women.Freestocks/Unsplash
Long-term impacts of latent infection
Even if the initial infection causes little illness, the T. gondii parasite stays with us for life, encased in a cyst, often in the brain. These “latent” infections may affect our mental health and behaviour, such as delaying our reaction times.
T. gondii infections also appear more common in people with mental health disorders such as schizophrenia, and in people who attempt suicide. Reviews across many studies suggest that without T. gondii infections, there could be 10% fewer suicides and 21% fewer schizophrenia diagnoses.
There’s still debate over whether the parasite causes car accidents and mental health disorders, or whether the association is explained by another shared factor. But it is possible T. gondii infection is a risk factor for these issues, in the same way smoking is a risk factor for heart attacks.
Scientists are still discovering how T. gondii influences the brain, but studies on rodents suggest it may involve changed brain chemistry or inflammation.
Putting it all together
If we accept T. gondii infections do increase the risk of car accidents, suicides and schizophrenia, then considering the incidence of these accidents and health issues in Australia, without T. gondii, we estimate we could potentially avoid:
200 deaths and 6,500 hospitalisations due to car accidents
300 suicides and 4,500 suicide attempts
800 schizophrenia diagnoses each year.
Combining deaths from car accidents and suicide with the 50 deaths from acute toxoplasmosis, we reach a total of 550 deaths related to T. gondii infection per year.
The hospitalisation total for T. gondii includes 650 for acute toxoplasmosis, 50 for congenitally infected babies, 6,500 for car accidents, and 800 for schizophrenia. We didn’t include hospitalisations for suicide attempts, as we didn’t have statistics on that. So this could be a conservative estimate, notwithstanding the fact there are other factors involved in car accidents and mental health issues.
Cat scratch and roundworm
Cat scratch disease is a bacterial infection (Bartonella henselae) that people can contract if bitten or scratched by an infected cat.
Typical symptoms include sores, fevers, aches and swollen glands. But more serious symptoms, such as inflammation of heart tissue, cysts in the organs and loss of vision, can also occur.
Prevalence figures are not available in Australia, but based on rates in the United States and Europe, where cat ownership patterns and cat infection rates are similar, we estimate at least 2,700 Australians get sick annually from cat scratch disease, and 270 are hospitalised.
Cat roundworm is a parasitic infection (Toxocara cati) that people and other animals can contract by accidentally consuming the parasite’s egg, which infected cats shed in their poo.
Most cat roundworm infections cause mild symptoms, but the migration of the larvae through the body can cause tissue damage, which can be serious if it occurs in a place like the eye or heart.
An adult cat round worm.Beentree/Wikimedia commons, CC BY
What can we do?
Some 700,000 feral cats and another 2.7 million pet cats roam our towns and suburbs acting as reservoirs of these diseases.
There are no human vaccines for these diseases. Treatment for T. gondii infection in cats isn’t considered useful because cats usually shed the oocysts without the owner even realising the cat has the parasite. Cats can be treated to rid them of roundworm, but treatment for B. henselae (the bacteria that causes cat scratch) may not be effective.
But if you’re a cat owner, there are some things you can do. Keeping pet cats indoors or in a securely contained outdoor area could reduce the chance your pet will contract or pass on a disease-causing pathogen.
If cats are always kept indoors they have a low risk of catching and spreading the disease.Jaana Dielenberg, Author provided
Cats should be kept out of veggie gardens and children’s sandpits. Washing hands after handling kitty litter and gardening, and washing vegetables thoroughly, can also reduce the risk of transmission.
As T. gondii can be contracted from infected meat, cooking meat well before eating, and not feeding raw meat to pets, can also help.
The urban feral cat resevoir could be reduced by preventing access to food sources such as farm sites, rubbish bins and tips. We could do this with improved waste management and fencing.
People shouldn’t feed feral cats, as this can lead to cat colony formation, where infection rates are also higher.
Pet cats should also be desexed to prevent unwanted litters that end up as free-roaming ferals.
These steps would cost us and our pet cats little, but could prevent unnecessary impacts on our health and well-being.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra
The International Monetary Fund this week delivered a somewhat surprising message. It warned Earth was on course for “potentially catastrophic” damage under climate change, and called for green investment and carbon prices to put the global economy on a stronger, more sustainable footing.
Of course, the message itself makes a lot of sense. The surprising part is that the IMF is the outfit delivering it.
The Washington-based IMF cannot be dismissed as a bunch of latte-sipping leftists. The organisation has traditionally been a bastion of free market economics and fiscal austerity, long detested by socialists.
It’s now abundantly clear Australia’s climate policies are at odds with even the most conservative approach to economic management. Increasingly, the Morrison government is an outlier on the world stage.
The IMF has called for a green-led pandemic recovery.Shutterstock
IMF calls for climate action
The IMF’s biannual World Economic Outlook projected a deep recession for 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global economic output is expected to shrink by 4.4% this year.
The IMF noted while the recession has reduced emissions, the decline is temporary. It warned policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions were “grossly insufficient to date” and global temperatures could increase by up to 5℃ by the end of this century. This would lead to “physical and economic damage, and increasing the risk of catastrophic outcomes across the planet”.
It said “an initial green investment push, combined with steadily rising carbon prices, would deliver the needed emissions reductions at reasonable output effects”. It went on:
The package would initially boost global GDP, supporting the recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, but then weigh on global activity for a period, as the impact of the investment push wanes and carbon prices continue to rise.
In the second half of the century, the reduction in emissions would place the global economy on a stronger and more sustainable path.
So in other words, the IMF recognises that now is a good time to undertake green investment, because it has long-term benefits and can act as a useful short-term stimulus.
The outlook suggests the stimulus effect of the investment push fades after the first decade. But any slowing in annual economic growth is trivial. The longer term economic benefits of avoiding catastrophic climate change far outweigh any transitional costs.
And in a transition to a low emissions economy, fears of net job losses appear misplaced. The IMF says says “the evidence indicates that environmental policies have succeeded in reallocating jobs from high- to low-carbon sectors”.
The transition to a low-carbon future will not lead to net job losses, the IMF says.Shutterstock
What is the IMF proposing?
The IMF’s proposed package involves the following tools:
an 80% subsidy rate for renewable energy production
a 10-year green public investment program in renewable energy, low-carbon transport and energy efficient buildings
carbon pricing, calibrated to achieve an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050, after accounting for emission reductions from the green fiscal stimulus
compensation for poor households whose purchasing power is dampened by a carbon price.
The IMF says the plan is “growth friendly”, especially in the short term. The policies are designed to increase the price of fossil fuel energy relative to low-carbon energy, and reflect the harm fossil fuels cause through air pollution and global warming.
The IMF is not alone in its thinking. Some 27 Nobel laureates in economics have endorsed a price on carbon. And recent research has conclusively found carbon pricing lowers growth in greenhouse gas emissions.
The IMF has called for a price on carbon.Shutterstock
An unexpected turn
The IMF has long been a cheerleader for neoliberalism – a belief in free markets, free trade and small government.
But in this case it’s calling for market interventions: a new tax and government subsidies for certain industries. It’s not the first time the IMF has looked to be questioning its own neoliberal agenda, but it’s a twist nonetheless.
The IMF’s calls contrast starkly with the approach of the Coalition government. It dismantled the Gillard government’s carbon price in 2014, and has remained opposed to the measure ever since.
The Morrison government has refused to commit to net-zero emissions by 2050, nor will it target any further increases in renewable energy beyond this year.
Most recently, it is pushing for a “gas-led” recovery from the pandemic. This month’s federal budget included A$52.9 million to support the gas industry – including opening up five new gas basins.
It also allocated money to refurbish the Vales Point coal-fired power station in New South Wales, and A$50 million for carbon capture and storage technologies. Investment in renewable energy was scarce.
The Morrison government’s federal budget included money for gas and coal.Lukas Coch/AAP
Australia adrift
As the IMF notes, limiting global temperatures will require a global effort. Calls to address climate change though a global green-led recovery have come from far and wide, including banks and investors.
South Korea has seizing the opportunity presented by the pandemic recovery, through a US$61.9 billion green plan aiming to create 659,000 jobs by 2025. China recently committed to net-zero emissions by 2060, and the European Union’s new climate target may see it exit the coal industry by 2030.
Democratic US presidential candidate Joe Biden, the election favourite, is running on a highly ambitious US$2 trillion climate platform, leaving Scott Morrison exposed.
It’s clear Australia is being left on the wrong side of history. And when even the IMF starts calling for dramatic climate action, Australia starts looking more isolated than ever.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maggie Walter, Pro Vice Chancellor (Aboriginal Research and Leadership) and Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of Tasmania
We seek the wisdom of Aboriginal leaders with their deep knowledge of Country as we explore how to be a university with place at the centre of its thinking. – Acknowledgement of Country, University of Tasmania Strategic Plan, 2019-2024
The University of Tasmania and others are acting on the Indigenous Strategy of Universities Australia.Universities Australia
Interpretations of what Indigenising the curriculum means, and how best to achieve it, vary widely. Universities Australia reports in detail how different Australian universities are approaching the task.
The University of Western Australia, for example, is ensuring all faculty staff are trained to deliver Aboriginal content as part of its program to Indigenise its Juris Doctor program. At UTAS, we use the definition of Canadian Mohawk scholar Marlene Brant Castellano:
Indigenizing education means that every subject at every level is examined to consider how and to what extent current content and pedagogy reflect the presence of Indigenous peoples and the valid contribution of Indigenous knowledge.
We incorporate Indigenous knowledge into the curriculum as an integral, interwoven aspect of students’ degrees. Under the foundation principle of Indigenous leadership, we have developed our process based on five key criteria.
place-based: Indigenous peoples and knowledge systems primarily in focus are Palawa, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people
Indigenous knowledge-based: Indigenous scholarship and expert Indigenous voices are prioritised, helping students learn from rather than about Indigenous peoples
partnership-based: Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics collaboratively and equally share content development and teaching
progression-based: Indigenous content is built to form a coherent body of knowledge across courses
experientially based: students directly engage with Indigenous knowledge, which includes guided on-Country experiences.
Our flagship Indigenous Lifeworlds units demonstrate how these criteria can be implemented. These will be offered in 2021 to all first-year Bachelor of Arts students. There are two versions: humanities (story, history, country) and social science (sovereignty, justice, society).
The place-based criterion draws on an array of electronic and document resources related to Palawa. For instance, records of Tasmania’s history of colonisation are easily found in texts and archives. A selection of Palawa cultural practice materials, such as firestick burning or mutton-birding, is also available.
There are 14 official Aboriginal or dual names in Lutruwita (Tasmania). These names are in palawa kani, the revived language of Tasmanian Aborigines.Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre
But not all sources are of equal value. Nor do they cover the breadth of topics needed for an undergraduate unit.
The second criterion, Indigenous Knowledge as foundational, guides resource choices. Indigenous scholarship, particularly Palawa scholarship, is prioritised for inclusion. We use the voices of Palawa expert knowledge holders to fill identified content gaps.
All resources, whether published scholarship or commissioned, need to be curated appropriately. For this task we are using Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels.
TK labels are electronic tags that allow Indigenous protocols and educative and culturally relevant information to be attached to resources. This information might include the significance to the local community and any restrictions on use. Our use of TK labels on curriculum material is the first time they have been used in this way, nationally and internationally.
The third criterion of teaching as a collaborative partnership between Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics facilitates a shared responsibility for Indigenisation and two-way scholarship and teaching mentorship.
The progression-based criterion avoids the common trap of curricula being restricted to a limited and often repeated trope of Indigenous content.
Our development of a central pool of curated resources, including instructions for best usage, supports criteria 4 and 5. There are records of when and where that resource has been used.
Access to this collection reassures lecturers they are using quality, appropriate content. The breadth of the categorised content helps lecturers develop their units within the broader building of students’ understanding of Indigenous knowledge across their studies and degrees.
Country is integral to Palawa knowledge, identity and well-being. This relationship to Country forms a central learning component. To learn from personal experience of Palawa knowledge, students complete a series of virtual tours of Country.
The unit culminates in a physical Walking on Country experience at culturally important sites. Guided by Palawa Elder and knowledge holders, students directly share traditional stories and knowledge of Country, its historical significance and meaning within Palawa worldviews.
Being on Country (this property is in the Central Highlands) helps students grasp its significance and meaning within Palawa worldviews.Matthew Newton/Tasmanian Land Coservancy/AAP
Indigenous knowledge systems, like Western knowledge systems, are complex and sophisticated. They are increasingly recognised as presenting viable alternatives in addressing contemporary issues. Indigenous knowledge also equips our medicine, education, law and social work students (among others) to be culturally competent professionals.
Embedding the vibrant and thriving realities of Palawa life, perspectives and community into the curriculum locates our students’ knowledge journey in this place, our place, Lutruwita/Tasmania.
As lockdowns ease, it’s logical to cautiously move from protecting jobs in struggling sectors to generating new jobs in growing ones.
For the next year, employers who take on a new worker who has been on JobSeeker or a related benefit will receive A$200 per week for up to 12 months if the worker is aged 16 to 29 years, or $100 per week if aged 30 to 35 years.
The employer will have to demonstrate that the new worker will increase overall headcount and payroll, and the payment will top out at $10,400 per position.
Many will simply be brought forward, created earlier than they would have been; but this itself should be helpful, contributing to a virtuous cycle of employment, confidence, and consumer demand.
Past experience suggests that about 10% will be truly additional – jobs that wouldn’t have been created without the subsidy.
Cheaper per job than tax cuts
But even then, unlike the personal tax cuts, which the Australian Council of Social Service believes will cost $475,000 per job created, the cost per job would be a more modest $80,000.
More importantly, the hiring credit could prompt employers to take on people they might not otherwise have considered – those facing prolonged unemployment.
It is likely that by next year, more than a million people will be on unemployment payments for over a year – three times the peak in long-term unemployment after the early-90s recession.
Young people – those under 35 – have been targeted because they lost far more jobs in this recession than older people.
Limited work experience and qualifications means many young people will find themselves out of paid work for a long time.
But they’re not the only ones. There are already over 600,000 people long-term unemployed on benefits for more than a year, most of whom are over 40. Older unemployed people are right to be concerned the wage subsidy might encourage employers to overlook them for younger applicants.
Room for improvement
It’d be better to also target the subsidy to the duration of unemployment; for example to young people unemployed for six months, and others out of paid work for at least a year.
Otherwise a large and diverse set of talents might be wasted.
The subsidies might also be too low. $200 per week is around a quarter of the full-time minimum wage, enough to encourage employers to expand entry-level jobs of around 20 hours a week but perhaps not enough to encourage employers to expand full-time jobs.
This could hasten the shift already under way from fulltime to part-time employment in entry-level jobs in retail, hospitality and other industries. That might reduce unemployment in the short-term, but at the expense of entrenching higher levels of under-employment (people lacking the paid working hours they need).
Another issue is administration. An employment service on the ground would be better at matching the needs of workers and employers and organising pre-vocational training than workers and employers left to their own devices.
It’ll be important to avoid abuses
That could also help ensure the integrity of the scheme. Wage subsidy schemes give rise to concerns that existing workers may be displaced, or that people could be laid off when the subsidy ends regardless of their performance.
Guaranteeing the integrity of the scheme will be vital to ensure it’s fair to all involved and to sustain public support for it.
JobMaker is a welcome innovation, the logical next step after JobKeeper.
If, together with a scaling up of existing wage subsidy schemes, it generates full and part-time jobs for people of all ages who would otherwise be left behind, it could make a real difference.
Much of the focus of Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s budget reply speech was around Labor’s proposal to expand childcare subsidies – a policy with some flaws but which moves in the right direction.
Labor’s plan to modernise the electricity grid by setting up a “Rewiring the Nation Corporation” with A$20 billion in government support was also met with general approval.
What got less attention was the third pillar of Labor’s budget strategy – a big push toward more local manufacturing jobs.
Albanese wasn’t shy about what he meant. He lamented the loss of Australia’s car-making industry:
Australians will never forget that it was this government that drove Holden, Ford and other car makers out of Australia, taking tens of thousands of jobs in auto manufacturing, servicing and the supply chain with them.
He then announced Labor would create a “National Rail Manufacturing Plan” to expand Australia’s boutique train-building industry:
We will provide leadership to the states and work with industry to identify and optimise the opportunities to build trains here in Australia – for freight and for public transport.
The economics of pillars 1 and 2 make sense. Pillar 3 involves trying to turn back the clock on the irrepressible, tectonic forces of globalisation and automation to pretend we should make things here we shouldn’t.
Understanding comparative advantage
Countries benefit from trade rather than seeking to produce everything they need locally. This is due to the idea of “comparative advantage”, originated by David Ricardo in his 1817 book On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.
One country (call it country A) might be more efficient than another (country B) in absolute terms at producing, for example, T-shirts and wine. It is tempting to think, then, that country A should produce both T-shirts and wine.
But what if country B is really inefficient at producing T-shirts but reasonable at producing wine? If country A specialises in producing T-shirts and country B specialises in producing wine, they can trade and both be better off.
Why? Because country A produces T-shirts much more efficiently than country B, and country B is only a little less efficient at producing wine. Overall, both economies get more efficient, raising living standards.
Holden’s factory in Elizabeth, Adelaide. Its closure in October 2017 marked the end of car making in Australia.Holden/AAP
Making cars and trains in Australia
Does Australia have any comparative advantage at producing cars or trains?
With cars the evidence speaks for itself. Local manufacturing only survived for decades because of huge government subsidies. Without them Australian-made cars couldn’t compete.
Only part of that was to do with labour costs – and we should be rightly proud of our comparatively high wages and good working conditions. Germany – home of BMW, Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen – also has high wages and conditions.
What about trains? Some trains are made in Australia – by Downer EDI and Canadian multinational Bombardier. That’s good for a few thousand jobs. But the market is domestic, with the customers being state governments who buy with an eye on local jobs.
There’s not a lot to suggest it can become an export industry, competing for example with Japan, which has been making bullet trains since the early 1960s. Or France, whose train builders have sold hydrogen trains to Germany and high-speed freight trains to Italy.
With these competitors having such an edge, and the well-known phenomenon of “learning-by-doing”, are we really going to catch up?
A train being built for the Queensland government at the Downer Rail factory in Maryborough, Queensland, in 2017.Dan Peled/AAP
There are many other sectors in which Australian producers are internationally competitive, such as agriculture, services and areas of high-tech manufacturing. Building on and expanding comparative advantage in these areas makes a lot more sense.
The case for strategic manufacturing
That said, the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us how fragile certain parts of our economy are. The same logic of comparative advantage that has done so much to improve living standards has also made us vulnerable in some areas.
Having little or no manufacturing capacity in personal protective equipment or pharmaceuticals like insulin, EpiPens and antibiotics is potentially very dangerous. Importing more than 90% of our pharmaceuticals puts us in a vulnerable position if a state actor that controls important parts of the global supply chain decides to cut supply. This is what economists call the “hold-up problem”.
So it makes sense for Australia to have more presence in strategic manufacturing like pharmaceuticals and personal protective equipment, even if producing these goods locally is not as efficient as buying them from overseas.
From just-in-time to just-in-case
The pandemic has taught us that we have, as a nation, moved a little too far towards the efficiencies of “just-in-time” supply chains. We need to move back somewhat, but certainly not completely, in the direction of “just-in-case” – to a little less efficiency but a little more insurance.
That should involve a push for strategic manufacturing. We should at all times be looking to build on and expand our comparative advantage.
But trying to go “Back to the Future” and build an Australian De Lorean makes no sense.
With a mischievous smile, Damien Wright gives the exhibit an unceremonious kick. The enormous, curved slab of river red gum rocks back and forth on the gallery floor, casting a wavering shadow over the “Do Not Touch” sign at its base.
A couple of anxious visitors shuffle over to investigate as Damien tells me how he made this wobbling wooden bowl, and why he chooses to work with the hardest, most challenging timbers.
Damien Wright, ‘Food Bowl’, 2017. Recovered Red Gum, 2800 x 1300 x 250mm.Fred Kroh
The river red gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) once grew on the banks of the Murray River. Damien discovered the thick slab in a miller’s yard in Wodonga, where it had lain exposed to the elements for years, slowly warping in the heat. What others had dismissed as damaged wood, Damien saw as creative possibility: he relished the opportunity to work with wood that had been “cooked, cured and crazed by the sun”.
In his workshop in Northcote, Melbourne, he worked to accentuate the warp in the wood by curving the edges of the slab, creating a long, bowing channel, almost three metres in length and over a metre wide. Like all his work, this object is an argument he has made with his hands.
The rough, red, cracking grain of the wood runs lengthways across the piece, like gullies and rivulets spreading across a parched, burnt land. Damien encourages this comparison with his title, which is a pointed commentary on the mistreatment of the waterways on which the tree grew.
“It’s called Food Bowl”, he tells me. And then, gesturing to a knot in the centre, “It drains in the middle”.
Damien Wright, left, and miller Kelvin Barton with the slab that became Food Bowl, Wodonga, 2017.Fred Kroh
For Damien, wood is a way of thinking about place and time — even deep time. A river red gum may grow for anywhere between 400 and 1,000 years before it falls. And as it decomposes over centuries it becomes a home for new life. Murray cod lay their eggs in drowned red gums.
To work with wood is to think beyond a human lifespan. When you look at something like the Murray-Darling system from the perspective of a grand old red gum, you see the fragility and inter-connectedness of the waterway, and how rapidly it has degraded with recent human interventions.
“And if you have that conversation about deep time in this country”, says Damien, “you have to talk about Indigenous people and this continent as an occupied and cultural space, not just a physical place”.
River red gums were a part of Australia’s environment long before people arrived here. They grew beside the Murray River when it was a wide, cold, fast-flowing stream; they witnessed its transformation in the late Pleistocene into a narrow, sinuous, seasonal river; and they have remained, over the past 13,000 years, as the water has slowed and warmed, forming swamps, low sand dunes and small lakes along the channel, and seasonal wetlands in the wider riverine plain.
These mighty trees have also been absorbed into the social and cultural worlds of Indigenous Australians. Their roots have been dug and hollowed out to create bowls, their bark cut to craft canoes, and their limbs burned to warm camps and cook food. In recent millennia, they presided over the most densely populated areas of the continent.
A red gum along the Wagirra Trail in Albury, 2017. Before European settlement, wooden canoes were cut from the trees and used by the Wiradjuri people on the Murray River.Sarah McPhee/AAP
Damien tells me how he seeks to evoke this deep history through his craft as he shows me two of his other pieces: a striking lantern (Black Lighthouse) he made in collaboration with Yolngu craftsman Bonhula Yunupingu, which glows like a fire through thin, black wood; and an elegant reading chair and angular side table called Ned — a riff on Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly helmet, which it closely resembles.
Each piece of furniture has been made from red gum in a stage preliminary to fossilisation. The wood is black and almost as hard as stone. It is known as ancient red gum.
While other native timbers enable Damien to explore relationships with the Australian environment, the ancient red gum opens a conversation about deep time on this continent.
Geomorphologist Jim Bowler was the first to identify the material as red gum; he used radiocarbon dating to place its age at about 8,000 or perhaps 10,000 years old. Later I call him and, over the phone, he sketches out the wood’s journey from the banks of the Murray River to the workshops of inquisitive artisans like Damien.
The tree would have seeded after the end of the last ice age, at a time when sea levels were rising and the climate was warming.
The rapid snowmelt in the Victorian Alps caused the mountains to shed huge amounts of gravel, which was then swept into the Murray River. As red gums fell into an ancient channel they were covered by this new gravel, which sealed them in the riverbank.
Preserved from decay by the acidity of the water, the entombed wood slowly absorbed enormous amounts of iron and silica. This oxidising and ebonising process is what makes it black through to the centre and hard, much harder than other red gum.
Articulating a future
Jim first became aware of the red gum when he received some samples at the Melbourne Museum in 1990. The damp and fibrous wood had been unearthed in a quarry on Yorta Yorta land in Wodonga, where it was regarded as a nuisance by those more interested in the gravel around it.
Jim and his wife Joan Bowler recognised the significance of the timber and were eager to see it preserved and used. They helped arrange for the director of the museum to provide “authentications” for woodworkers to make it into furniture, and Joan and her friend Annetine Forell travelled the country over the following two decades, drawing the remarkable material to the attention of millers and craftspeople.
The late Kelvin Barton, a miller, woodworker and seventh-generation farmer, became a crucial intermediary. He collected the ancient red gum in Wodonga, reducing its water content in his ersatz kiln to turn it into workable timber. This was how Damien, a long-term friend and collaborator, came to encounter the ancient red gum — indeed it was in Kelvin’s yard that he found the much younger slab that became Food Bowl.
Ancient red gum, Wodonga, 2004.Damien Wright
Damien uses the ancient red gum to articulate his vision for Australia. He sees craftsmanship as a language: a practice that is refined over time to communicate knowledge, beauty and ideas.
He considers his furniture — in its functionality as well as its elegance — as an embodiment of this philosophy. Objects tell stories. They become part of our everyday lives and express everyday futures:
My argument is that to take a material that is ten thousand years old and to articulate that in a beautiful and passionate way and to make that a relevant thing to our lives or to peoples’ lives is a way of articulating a future for this continent. It’s a way of understanding our place in time. It’s a way of dealing with people. It’s a way of projecting forward.
Damien Wright, Reading Chair and Ned, 2017. Ancient red gum and recovered black bean.Fred Kroh
Joan Bowler shares this vision for the ancient timber. In 2008, her company Australian Ancient Redgum donated a six-metre “Fossil Tree” to the Children’s Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, so that “children can sit under this ancient tree and look up through the hollowed out centre and dream of what was and what might be”.
Trees that were seeded after the end of the last ice age, that survived the ruptures of invasion and industry, have reemerged to offer a deep-time perspective of the continent.
It is a scale that reveals the long-term costs of short-term exploitation, and renders processes like the degradation of the Murray-Darling river system into sudden events.
Ancient red gum also invites a longer view of Australian history. And in the hands of Joan and Damien, it calls for the acknowledgement of cultures and histories that for so long have gone unrecognised.
The last opinion poll before Saturday’s general election on Saturday last night put Labour on 46 percent and National on 31 percent. Both are down 1 percent.
Behind is ACT on 8 percent and the Green Party on 8 percent, up two.
New Zealand First is up on 3 percent, according to the 1 News Colmar Brunton poll.
It would mean Labour would get 59 seats, 40 for National, 11 for the Greens and 10 for ACT. Labour would need the Green Party to form a government on these results.
In the preferred prime minister stakes, Jacinda Ardern is on 55 percent and Judith Collins is on 20 percent.
More than 1.5 million people have already voted.
The poll was conducted by landline and mobile phone between October 10-14.
What the commentators think Former National MP Jonathan Coleman thinks Labour will not be pleased with the result.
“I think people might be quite surprised they have gone to 46 percent,” he said.
New Zealand First’s slight increase might “make things interesting”.
“New Zealand First voters might be the sort of people who don’t necessarily tell pollsters how they are going to vote, so I wouldn’t say this is exactly how it’s exactly going to play out on election night.”
But former Green Party policy director, now consultant, David Cormack, said today’s results were “effectively an exit poll”.
“We’ve had such a large chunk of the electorate already vote, so I think this is going to be the most accurate representation of what is going to be the final result.”
Coleman said polls had been incorrect in the past, but Cormack said this was best poll he had seen in a long time.
‘Terrifying scenario’ “We get out of the terrifying scenario of Labour governing alone. The Greens look well comfortable.”
Coleman thinks opposition leader Judith Collins has done an excellent job with the leadership of National.
“Judith has an opinion and many people will back her on that. She’s had to make some calls, I think at times she’s been let down by people on her team who should have backed her up.
“They should have at least stayed quiet because that’s what you do. You back the leader if you want to win.”
Cormack is standing by his call that NZ First will be gone at the election.
But Coleman said Winston Peters had surprised in the past and said there could be twists and turns before the election results were known.
Vanuatu’s opposition leader is calling for engagement with New Caledonia’s anti-independence side to convince them of a viable Kanaky.
New Caledonia last week narrowly rejected independence from France, but a third referendum is likely in 2022.
Ralph Regenvanu, who is a staunch advocate for decolonisation in the region, says New Caledonia is Vanuatu’s closest neighbour and home to the largest group of ni-Vanuatu abroad.
He says New Caledonia’s independence is the goal of the Melanesian Spearhead Group, for which it was set up.
“We also need to convince the anti-independence lobby that New Caledonia can be a viable state in the Pacific like the other states in the Pacific,” he said.
“I know that the anti-independence lobby in New Caledonia often likes to point over to Vanuatu and say, ‘look, you could become like that if you become independent’.
“For us, it is quite amusing because we think we have got a very good development model happening here,” Regenvanu said.
This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.
If any other Australian leader had given the sort of evidence Gladys Berejiklian did to the Independent Commission Against Corruption on Monday, they’d probably have been out of their position by the end of the day.
The NSW premier was protected, in the immediate term, in part because the disclosures about her five-year secret relationship with the disgraced former Liberal MP Daryl Maguire seemed so bizarrely out of character with her unsullied past and apparent conservatism in her private life.
Also, she has been a highly competent premier, especially during COVID. The pandemic fireproofed her.
Her political performance this year is certainly one reason why the Prime Minister is standing with her. As Scott Morrison has said repeatedly, NSW has set the “gold standard” during the coronavirus crisis.
But Berejiklian’s personal and political reputation should not obscure the seriousness of her actions, or rather her inactions, in relation to Maguire.
She didn’t just make a bad judgement about a sub-optimal boyfriend which can be written off as having “stuffed up” her personal life. She made a series of decisions that were inappropriate.
When in 2015 she changed the nature of her relationship with the then member for Wagga Wagga from friendship to a “close personal” one, she failed to disclose this to colleagues.
Her supporters say her private life was no one else’s business. If her relationship had been with the plumber down the street who was unconnected with government, that would be absolutely correct. It’s another matter when those involved are a senior minister, who then became premier, and one of her party’s MPs.
The premier could affect the fortunes of the MP; the MP could use the relationship, even if undeclared, to further his own interests by suggesting he could deliver access.
As Berejiklian has said, there is nothing wrong per se with two members of parliament having a personal relationship. But, given the position of one of them, in this case it should have been put on the record – at least to cabinet colleagues.
When Maguire fell foul of ICAC in 2018, Berejiklian should have belatedly admitted to the relationship, informing senior colleagues, so there would be no time bombs. Certainly she should have broken off the connection with Maguire immediately, rather than continue it until this year, when he was back in ICAC’s sights.
Most compromising however, is the material captured by phone taps of Maguire’s conversations with Berejiklian.
Maguire told her of his lobbying for developers. The activities referred to might not have been illegal – Berejiklian makes the point MPs are allowed to engage in business – but for any premier they would be very uncomfortable.
Berejiklian certainly seemed uncomfortable and on two occasions said “I don’t need to know”.
She explains her apparently dismissiveness of what Maguire was saying as boredom with his big-noting. It sounded, however, more like she did not want him to give her information she preferred not to receive. She had a deaf ear to clues she should have picked up.
Imagine the reaction if Morrison had given such evidence, or been embarrassed by such tapes. People would not be looking for reasons to excuse him.
The line that everyone makes mistakes in their private life – “people have all made personal decisions I’m sure they regret, that’s human,” Morrison says – won’t wash.
Berejiklian can be forgiven for initially being taken in by Maguire. But persisting with the relationship after he was found out is surely harder, if not impossible, to justify, regardless of her explanation he was in a “very dark place”. After all, she removed him from the Liberal party and pushed for his resignation from parliament in 2018.
To maintain that different, tougher standards apply to women leaders may often be true, but it doesn’t apply in this instance. If anything she is being given a softer run.
Morrison has said “it would be a bit of a numpty of a decision” to replace her.
Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull praised her integrity and also said, “Her leadership of this state has been tried and tested in the toughest circumstances this year, from the bush fires to now the pandemic and she has excelled.” And, he pointed out, “Let’s be frank – leaders of her calibre are not easily found.”
If the point is that the alternatives on offer – and it is not clear who would become leader if she went – wouldn’t do as good a job, that might be a valid argument on strictly utilitarian grounds (although if she survives, this scandal will make it much more difficult for her to govern effectively).
When you compare the way the NSW and Victorian governments have handled the pandemic, NSW has been way ahead (the Ruby Princess debacle notwithstanding).
Yes, she would be hard to replace. But this should not be confused with a clear-eyed view about the ethical shortcomings in her behaviour over Maguire.
In recent decades we’ve seen declining trust in political institutions. The pandemic has led people to reattach to these institutions and all Australian leaders – Morrison and the premiers – saw their ratings rise.
What we don’t yet know is whether trust in general will again plummet when the pandemic subsides.
If politicians seem to be holding their noses when there’s the whiff of impropriety or corruption in the air, they are trifling with the public’s trust in them and in the political system. They are treating the electorate with disdain.
The ICAC hearings this week have reinforced the case for a federal integrity body. But the reactions of Liberal politicians show why they want it to be relatively toothless.
It is not being suggested Berejiklian, whose leadership hangs by a thread, has personally engaged in wrongdoing; her appearance at ICAC was as a witness in an investigation into Maguire’s alleged wrongdoing.
But on what we have heard this week, she has fallen short of the standards that should be expected of a premier. Federal and state colleagues who are defending her are being tribal or expedient or both.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicholas Wood, Associate Professor, Discipline of Childhood and Adolescent Health, University of Sydney
In last week’s federal budget the Australian government announced it had given the suppliers of two COVID-19 vaccines indemnity against liability for rare side-effects.
Although details are unclear, it appears the government would foot the bill for compensation if a member of the public wins legal action against the drug company.
This is in contrast to 25 other countries with no-fault compensation schemes for rare vaccine side-effects.
Here’s the little we know about Australia’s latest indemnity deal and what we could be doing better.
What do we know about Australia’s new deal?
The deal relates to two vaccines the government had previously announced it would supply, should clinical trials prove successful.
These are the University of Oxford vaccine, from AstraZeneca, and the University of Queensland vaccine, from Seqirus (part of CSL).
However, it is not entirely clear what this indemnity deal means in practice. The budget papers say the government will cover:
certain liabilities that could result from the use of the vaccine.
The government considers further details “commercial in confidence”.
For instance, we don’t know how serious or disabling a side-effect would have to be to qualify or whether there is any cap on the amount of compensation.
We also don’t know what would happen if there were errors involved, or contaminants introduced, while manufacturing the vaccine. These would still be the company’s liability, but it may be hard to determine where boundaries lie.
This deal is not entirely new or unexpected. The government has provided some indemnity to pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines against smallpox and influenza.
The governments of many other countries have also agreed to indemnify COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, including governments in the UK, US and theEuropean Union.
The manufacturers believe that as the use of their vaccine is for the benefit of society, they should not be held financially accountable for any consequences from a vaccine reaction.
If a person in Australia believes they have been injured by a vaccine, including future COVID-19 vaccines, they will need to pursue compensation through the legal system.
Under the latest agreement, it would appear the government, rather than the drug company, would pay that compensation, should the person win their case.
However this is not ideal. The person still has to engage with the legal system, which is both costly and complex, and there’s no guarantee of success.
Under the latest indemnity deal, it seems that people would still need to go through the legal system, with no guarantee of success.www.shutterstock.com
Compensation may not even be possible via our legal system. That’s because in most cases, it will be difficult to show in court a serious side-effect was due to a fault in the vaccine composition or negligence in the way it was administered.
So in Australia, people with a vaccine injury, either COVID-19 or other vaccine, will likely bear the costs of their injury by themselves, and seek treatment by our publicly-funded or private health systems.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme helps fund therapies for people with a permanent and significant disability but does not cover temporary vaccine-related injuries.
Participants in COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials can be compensated for temporary and permanent vaccine injuries.
In the US, people with a rare but serious reaction to a COVID-19 vaccine will be able to access a special compensation scheme. This is designed to provide compensation for the use of COVID-19 pandemic medications and vaccines.
However, applicants only have one year from the date they had the vaccine or medicine to request benefits.
The US already has a vaccine compensation scheme for vaccines other than COVID-19. This is an example of a no-fault compensation scheme. These compensate for specific vaccine reactions, without having to go to court to prove the vaccine manufacturer is liable.
Australia, in contrast to 25 countries including the US, UK and New Zealand, does not have a no-fault vaccine compensation scheme, and does not have the equivalent of the US COVID-19 vaccine compensation scheme.
How would a no-fault system work?
There are numerous benefits to a no-fault vaccine compensation system. These include simplified access to compensation, and avoiding a lengthy, costly and complex encounter with the legal system, with no guarantee of success.
Most are government funded. The US government funds it by a flat rate of US$0.75 for each disease prevented for each vaccine dose.
Finland and Sweden fund their programs via insurance payments from pharmaceutical companies marketing their products there.
The New Zealand scheme includes compensation for vaccine-related injuries, as well as for accidents and treatment injuries. This is funded through a combination of general taxation, and levies collected from employee earnings, businesses, vehicle licensing and fuel.
However, compensation awarded via such no-fault schemes is usually lower than you would receive after a successful liability lawsuit.
To encourage people to receive COVID-19 vaccines for the benefit of the entire community, we need compensation schemes to be in place if there is a rare but serious side-effect.
Should options to increase vaccine uptake include mandates or penalties — such as employment or travel restrictions if not vaccinated — this would make a no-fault vaccine compensation scheme even more essential.
Although it is important manufacturers receive indemnity for “certain liabilities”, we still need to look after our community. That means a compensation system the public can easily access and which provides appropriate support.
Following in the footsteps of Samsung, Apple has released its first high-spectrum 5G smartphone, the iPhone 12. But only US customers will benefit.
High-spectrum 5G uses millimetre-wave frequencies in the 26GHz range (25.1GHz to 27.5GHz). But Australia’s mobile phone networks, although they can access the mid-range 5G spectrum, don’t have access to these high frequencies.
Unlike the US version, the iPhone 12 model for Australia lacks the distinct millimetre-wave antenna necessary to access them. In other words, Australians who purchase an iPhone 12 wouldn’t be able to access high-spectrum 5G even if it was available here.
This is another stark reminder of the effort needed to enable Australia’s “fourth industrial revolution”. Not having high-spectrum 5G available for the public and businesses right now is a letdown and will set the country back as it struggles to recover from a recession.
How did we fall so far behind?
Using millimetre waves (such as the 26GHz frequency range) allows massive data transfer capacity over short distances.
Millimetre waves are what will help US iPhone 12 users reach speeds of up to 4Gbps (gigabits per second). The extra bandwidth will be especially useful in public spaces that require higher data capacity throughput, such as shopping centres and sport stadiums.
In the US, Samsung’s Galaxy S20+ and Galaxy S20 Ultra (launched in March) both support millimetre-wave frequencies. Telcos AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile had rolled out the network even before the millimetre wave 5G-capable smartphones were released.
Meanwhile, individual customers and businesses in Australia are still limited to 5G in the sub‑6 GHz range (not millimetre-wave frequencies).
The high-frequency 5G technology is currently only available in the US, but has also been assigned in Italy and Finland. Several other countries are planning to upgrade soon including Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Local licenses are also available in the UK.
According to a European Commission report, 15 of the European Union member states, as well as the UK, have already completed at least one 26GHz spectrum auction. In 25 countries, as well as the UK, at least one spectrum auction was scheduled for this year.
On the other hand, the Australian government is planning to auction off the use of the 26GHz frequencies in March next year, for the first time ever. This leaves us trailing behind.
The longer the delays in bringing the millimetre wave spectrum to Australia, the longer we’ll have to wait before benefiting from it.
Following the scheduled auction, Australians may not be able to experience any 5G millimetre wave connectivity until late 2021 or even early2022.
The result will depend on the best business cases put forth by mobile companies, as well as how telcos allocate the bandwidth between individuals and business customers. The millimetre-wave spectrum will likely be prioritised for industrial use first, before it’s rolled out to residential customers.
That said, if businesses such as manufacturers, sports stadiums, shopping malls, offices and high-rise residential buildings benefit, then individual customers are likely to benefit as well. This is because costs will likely drop and prices will soon follow.
This was the strategy followed in the US and which Optus has indicated it will also likely follow.
What speed tests in Australia reveal
During isolated tests in Australia, non-millimetre wave 5G speeds were recorded to be at least 3.9 to 4.6 times faster than 4G, for Optus and Telstra. But this is still slower than the 1Gbps speeds usually associated with 5G.
According to a Telstra report from last month, millimetre-wave tests conducted by the company promised speeds of 4.2Gbps. While this was for a data call, as opposed to wifi access, theese results are positive and on par with what Apple is promising for new iPhone 12 users in the US (but not yet the UK).
Telstra claims it already has live mobile sites that can support millimetre-wave frequencies on its network, ready for deployment. The company says it has spent the past 18 months laying the foundations for a millimetre-wave 5G network to come into use once these frequencies become available — after which all telcos will purchase their own share.
Apple iphone pro pacific blue Full Bleed.Apple
We’re letting ourselves down
In today’s age, compounded by a global pandemic and severe economic downturns the world over, it matters whether or not a nation has millimetre-wave 5G.
This technology has been available in the US since 2019 and its adoption is separating the world’s trailblazers from those trailing behind.
Millimetre-wave frequencies are need for advanced manufacturing processes, self-driving vehicles, factory automation and reliable communications across hospitals and the (now heavily remotely-operated) educational sectors. These are just some areas where high data capacity is a necessity.
Once millimetre wave-enabled industrial applications are rolled out, we should see customers in high-density public places prioritised for such services, before this rolls down to individuals in their homes. A focus on boosting business will likely underpin this sequence.
Australia wants to upscale its emerging technologies, research and manufacturing capacity, with a focus on the COVID-19 bounce back. But to do this, we’ll need an even speedier resolution than under normal circumstances.
But heritage — collections, buildings, archaeological sites, cultural traditions and other intangible traces of the past — matters in different ways to different people.
New analysis shows public heritage — professionally run historic monuments, archaeological ruins, state memorials, national museums and grand homes — does not have broad appeal. Private family histories, meanwhile, have wide appeal.
The most recognised, visited and liked heritage site in Australia is the Australian War Memorial; the least liked is Port Arthur.
We surveyed 1461 Australians, including a main sample and “boost” samples for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and Italian, Lebanese, Chinese and Indian Australians. We asked about heritage visitation and memberships, and presented lists of types of heritage, so participants could nominate the ones they liked most and least.
Similarly, participants ranked a list of Australian and international places of heritage according to those they’d heard of, visited and/or liked.
We found Australians’ tastes are heavily influenced by demographic variables like education, occupation, age and location.
More than half of those surveyed were almost completely disengaged or lacking in knowledge about public history: they rarely used the internet to search for it, did not hold national park or museum memberships, and they visited very few, if any, places of heritage in the year prior.
Still, some 41% of Australians hold multiple memberships and subscriptions to heritage organisations. Some are connected to a local history or archaeology club (4%), the National Trust (3%), a local or national museum (14%), a national park (8%), the History Channel (17%) or an online family history website (13.4%). They also use the internet on a monthly (17%) or weekly (19%) basis to seek out heritage information.
Those with tertiary and postgraduate qualifications are much more likely to have an active interest in public heritage. The same is true of those employed in managerial and high-level professional roles.
Some 23% of heritage lovers will engage with some of Australia’s heritage but are most interested in international places, such as Stonehenge, Angkor War, the Vatican Museums and Te Papa Tongarewa in New Zealand. This group, largely urban dwellers aged mid-30s to mid-40s, express interest in Aboriginal and migrant heritage too.
Another group (21%) has a deep interest in local area heritage, as well as cultural landscapes, open-air museums and sites depicting colonial/settler heritage, such as Port Arthur, Sovereign Hill and Fremantle Prison. These Australians are highly engaged at the domestic level, but have only a mild interest in international heritage. They tend to be in their mid-40s to mid-60s and live in small towns, semi-rural and rural/remote locations.
Family history — under the banner of private heritage — is liked more than any other heritage genre, with 57% of the main sample and 46% of our boost samples liking it best, followed by “Australia’s national heritage” and “world heritage”.
Family history is a favourite for Australians who self-identify as working class (38%) and those who claim middle-class status (44%). Only 9% of those who said family history was their most-liked form of heritage identified as upper-middle and upper classes.
Family history is favoured by 61% of 18–24-year-olds, 57% of 25-39-year-olds, 55% of 40-59-year-olds and 57% of those over 60.
This popularity was confirmed in follow-up interviews, with almost half specifically mentioning their efforts to learn about and engage with their family’s heritage.
Many expressed deep pride in particular features of their genealogies, like lineage (number of generations traced), identified individuals (well-known historical figures and those associated with national narratives), and a sense of “pedigree”. As one interview put it:
… every one of our great grandparents were born in Australia. And most of our great, great grandparents … Yeah, no, most people can’t say that.
For another respondent, a source of great pride was traced through connections to Gallipoli:
Me, personally, my grandfather was in the first battalion that landed on Gallipoli … so I’ve grown up with that culture, that heritage.
Our data reveals family history is an area of heritage that appeals to broad swathes of the population (across ages, genders, a range of educational backgrounds and the working and middle classes) — and a few in the “upper classes” too.
It seems lots of Australian families are keen to uncover family stories.
All my life I’ve been involved in music and molecular biology. At the crossroads between science and art, I see great scope for insight.
My latest research, published in the journal BMC Bioinformatics, reveals how music can be used to reveal functional properties of the coronavirus genome.
This project followed earlier work I had done generating audio from human DNA sequences; this time, I wanted to apply those techniques to the virus sweeping the world to see what might be revealed. In other words, this was the difficult second album!
Genes of the coronavirus are like biological book chapters; they hold all the words that describe the virus and how it might function. These “words” are made from strings of chemical letters scientists refer to as G, A, U and C.
This viral “book” is over 30,000 characters long. Some of these characters come together to form what scientists call a codon, which is a sequence of RNA that corresponds to a specific amino acid. But to stick with our analogy, let’s just say they come together to form “words”.
In my work, I assigned notes to these words to generate audio; I had wondered if this might helps us understand what the words mean.
I devised an online tool to hear the sound of coronavirus doing two things that all viruses do: the first is called “translation”, which is where the virus makes new proteins. The second is called “transcription”, which is where the genome of the virus copies itself.
Sounds of the coronavirus genome.
There are several things you can hear: the start and end of genes, the regions between genes and the parts of the genome that control how genes are expressed.
Other researchers have written about this extensively in the coronavirus scientific literature but this is the first time you can distinguish between these regions by listening.
Revealing relationships between structure and function
So, what’s the point of all this?
As a research tool the audio helps supplement some of the many visual displays that exist to represent genomic information. In other words, it helps scientists understand even more about the virus and how it operates. Recently, UK-based composer and researcher Eduardo Mirandaat University of Plymouth used DNA sequence data for music composition and to better understand synthetic biology. Researcher Markus Buehler at MIT has been working with musical representations of proteins to enquire about novel protein structures.
I think an equally valid question is: does the audio sound musical? Now that I have finished the scientific research part of this project, I listen to the coronavirus genome with fresh ears, and from a musician’s perspective I been surprised as to how musical it sounds.
I don’t mean to trivialise the pandemic by thinking about the virus in musical terms.
As a molecular biologist at Western Sydney University, when I think about the virus I see RNA sequences, and it’s my job to see relationships between structure and function. I don’t see patients in the clinic and I’m not researching a cure — these things are not my domain.
Taking the genome to the recording studio
As a musician, I have also taken the audio data into the recording studio, away from the research lab, to reveal other perspectives on the coronavirus.
The coronavirus audio is pulsating and incessant, but, working with other musicians, we have tried to tame the sequence; to make it subservient to our musical knowledge, ideas and human spirit.
I returned to the trusty drum kit that once drove my old band The Hummingbirds and this now beats the viral sequence into submission. With guitar by Mike Anderson, who is in Sydney-based instrumental surf twang band Los Monaros, we have reached an understanding of its jagged rhythms and syncopated pulses to create some music.
Sonification can reveal new perspectives on the function and structure of the coronavirus genome.Author provided, Author provided
We mixed the computer-generated audio from the coronavirus genome with real guitars and drums played by real people. The result sounds more musical than I thought it would and it reminds me of the pulsing music of US composer Steve Reich. I still hear genes and other viral characteristics within the science data but music wins out in the rehearsal studio.
As a musician, this project has been rewarding but as a scientist, I hope sonifying the coronavirus genome helps people think about its function in new and helpful ways.
I was also challenged to create something almost beautiful out of something so awful. Let’s hope we will soon be able to return to work and live music more “normally”, to the parts of life that engage us intellectually and creatively.
Faced with a difficult economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia needs to act quickly with creative solutions to reestablish immigration into the country, even before a potential vaccine is found.
Over the past two decades, population growth has been an important driver of Australia’s economic growth. Immigration is the largest component of this, comprising about 64% of our population growth in 2016-17 (with the rest coming from natural increase).
This year, immigration is down because of COVID-19, but also because of reductions in permanent migration numbers set by the government for 2019-20. Immigration levels will be low well into 2021, with net overseas migration expected to be -72,000 (from previous highs near 300,000).
This is the first time since the second world war it has fallen to negative levels.
According to last week’s budget, Australia’s overall population growth is expected to be just 0.2% in 2020-21 and 0.4% in 2021-22, the slowest growth in over a century.
The university sector faces up to A$19 billion in losses over the next three years due to lost international student revenue.Shutterstock
Why immigration is so vital to the economy
The border closure is devastating for people trying to come to Australia, whether they are migrants wishing to start a new life, refugees or in some cases, even partners of those already living in the country.
However, aside from these important human stories, the immigration downturn will also have considerable economic effects.
First, as mentioned before, immigration growth drives economic growth. And a return to over 3% economic growth without immigration seems unlikely. When we take into consideration lower fertility rates during the pandemic, such growth is even less likely.
Lower immigration has a real effect on GDP. In the June quarter of 2020, GDP contracted by 7%, which is the largest fall on record. At least some of this is due to plummeting immigration.
Second, the continued border closure affects our key exports, in particular international student arrivals. Total exports are predicted to fall 9% in the next year, while net exports are expected to shave 1 percentage point from GDP growth in 2021-22. International student migration and tourism make up a large part of these exports.
For some Australian universities, international students make up around 30-40% of total revenue.Shutterstock
Third, lower immigration rates affect levels of consumption. With one million fewer people entering Australia this year, there will be less demand for services and housing. This is leading to urgent calls for a return to immigration from within the construction sector.
Fourth, lower immigration rates may cause critical problems for the labour market in certain industries. Much of the horticulture and agriculture sector, for instance, was previously supported by working holiday makers. Farmers are now desperate for assistance, with a projected labour shortfall for summer harvests estimated to be 26,000 workers.
Attempts to mobilise Australian workers into these jobs have been largely unsuccessful, in part due to the low wages, but also the regional nature of the work that would demand seasonal relocation.
The demand for seasonal workers to harvest produce will peak in March.Lukas Coch/AAP
Fifth, fewer immigrants results in fewer people of working age contributing to the tax base. Many immigrants are generally under 45 and are here to work — either in skilled jobs or on working holiday visas. Losing large numbers of them means fewer people of working age in the population.
Of course, this assumes these people would be working during COVID-19. Research suggests temporary migrants are experiencing high rates of unemployment and homelessness during the pandemic, meaning they may not be working and contributing taxes as they normally would.
Still, given they are not receiving welfare assistance or Medicare, they are placing less strain on public systems than Australian citizens and permanent residents.
And unemployment is not a long-term problem. As the economy recovers, the hospitality sector is expected to bounce back quickly, with many temporary migrants able to return to work.
How we can restart immigration with user-pay quarantine
Last week’s budget suggested the government will start experimenting with immigration corridors (bringing in small numbers of migrants from selected countries) in late 2020, but it does not anticipate immigration will be back to normal until well into 2021. This would also be dependent on the discovery and development of a vaccine.
The economic challenges we are facing are a strong incentive for the government to find creative solutions to bring immigrants back to Australia quickly at previous levels.
User-pay quarantine with a robust security guard system is a feasible solution that would allow the economy to get back on track and keep Australia safe from COVID-19 spread.
The current hotel quarantine system could be expanded to restart immigration.DAN HIMBRECHTS/AAP
Here is how it would work. Immigrants would be tested three days before leaving their home countries. They would not be allowed to board a flight if they are unwell. On arrival, they will be quarantined.
This could be in the Northern Territory or other remote parts of Australia, which would generate revenue for regional areas. NT already does this for people from Victoria, allowing them to quarantine there for 14 days before flying elsewhere in the country — charging them a pretty penny in the process.
Costs would be shared by workers or firms. This could be left to the market to sort out. Australian companies who really need workers will be willing to shoulder the lion’s share of the costs, while non-sponsored individuals could pay for themselves.
This doesn’t require a travel bubble. It doesn’t require a vaccine. It can be implemented today.
In his budget reply, Anthony Albanese said women have suffered most during the pandemic, but were reduced to a footnote in the budget. He promised a Labor government would undertake a generous reshaping of the childcare subsidy to enable more women to join the workforce or to work more hours.
“We look at those areas that have received direct support – construction… the energy sector, defence, manufacturing, all of those areas where the government has put direct money into a particular sector – they tend to be male dominated sectors.
“And actually often they’re not the ones that have taken the hardest hit in this recession.
“The sectors that have been hit really hard: hospitality, tourism, the arts, recreation, administrative services tend to be actually slightly more female dominated… we really don’t see any direct assistance for those sectors in the budget. ”
When asked about the budget generally Wood, the president of the Economic Society of Australia, is concerned all the eggs have been put into the “private sector basket”.
“If it doesn’t pay off, then we may see unemployment sticking around for a long time to come.”
In the Grattan institute’s report, co-authored by Wood, and titled Cheaper Childcare, Wood endorsed reform in a similar vein to Albanese’s proposal.
“Our numbers suggest that for every dollar that you spend reforming the subsidy…you return more than two dollars in additional GDP,” she says.
“The Labor reforms… you’re probably talking, if its $2 billion a year… something in the vicinity of $5 billion return each year for GDP.”
As always, we are joined by political scientist Paul Buchanan and this week we will discuss:
How the ‘probabilities’ of Presidential incumbent Donald Trump being re-elected, look increasingly unlikely. It’s still possible, but more improbable.
If Democrat candidate Joe Biden wins the presidency, what would this mean for the rest of the world?
What would Joe Biden’s foreign policy look like?
And, who would be the likely contenders to join a Biden Administration?
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New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian has become ensnared this week in the sensational ICAC hearings into alleged corruption by former MP Daryl Maguire — and suddenly finds her future very much in doubt.
In yesterday’s hearing, Maguire admitted to using his parliamentary office and resources to conduct private business dealings, including receiving thousands of dollars in cash as part of a visa scam.
Meanwhile, Berejiklian, who has denied any wrongdoing by maintaining a personal relationship with Maguire even after he was forced to resign as MP, has faced calls from the Opposition for her to resign.
Whether Berejiklian will be forced to step down remains to be seen. But it’s becoming clearer by the day that, at the very least, her reputation will be seriously tarnished by the explosive revelations.
Berejiklian is hardly the first NSW politician to become enmeshed in scandal.
Corruption has been ingrained in the political culture of NSW, from the days of its founding in the 19th century. This is the very reason the Independent Commission Against Corruption was formed in 1988 — and why it remains a vital watchdog over the inner workings of state government.
Maguire told ICAC he accepted ‘thousands of dollars’ as part of a cash-for-visa scheme.ICAC
to conservatives it appeared as if the government had been debased into a giant system of corruption with needy ministers and members bound together by their joint interest in plunder.
Politics then (and now) was a honey pot: needy, greedy ministers and MPs were always looking to benefit from public works, jobs, development and government contracts, as well as through the manipulation of the criminal justice system.
NSW has also always had a sleazy subterranean network of fixers and door-openers who could influence decisions for the right price.
Sydney has traditionally been thought of as a corrupt old town. Whether this was because of its buccaneering origins in the convict era or because it was where all the action took place has long been an open question.
A few of NSW’s not-so-finer moments
The colony’s early days set the stage for a long history of political and public corruption. Among the more notable episodes:
ICAC is formed — and then brings down its founder
In response to the storm of corruption allegations in the Wran years, Liberal Premier Nick Greiner created the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). The new body had wide powers, a broad anti-corruption brief and iron-clad independence.
Ironically, Greiner was an early victim of the new body. In 1992, it found him guilty of corruption for appointing renegade Liberal MP Terry Metherell to a senior public service position to allow the government to regain his safe seat.
The finding was overturned by the courts on appeal and most today would agree that Greiner had acted corruptly in only a technical sense. (He had not benefited personally and in the pre-ICAC era, this would have been seen as an astute bit of politics.)
Greiner’s political career ended in 1992 after ICAC expressed concerns over his integrity.DAN HIMBRECHTS/AAP
Greiner’s downfall was a vivid indication of the seismic shift that had taken place in NSW politics to try and rid the state of corruption.
The previous “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” era of political favours was gone. A problem could no longer be fixed with the right contacts and right sum of money, and turning a blind eye to improper behaviour by “mates” was no longer acceptable.
Everyone in the public sector was on notice that corrupt dealings would be investigated and punished and offenders publicly shamed.
In 2012-13, ICAC investigations exposed former minister and power-broker Eddie Obeid’s extraordinary influence on the Labor governments of Morris Iemma and Kristina Keneally and the insidious tentacles of the Obeid family’s covert business empire.
Then, in 2014, Liberal Premier Barry O’Farrell resigned after falsely denying to ICAC he had received a bottle of expensive wine from an associate of Obeid’s, who was lobbying for a valuable government contract.
Barry O’Farrell resigned over his inability to remember being gifted a $3,000 bottle of wine.DAN HIMBRECHTS/AAP
O’Farrell admitted to a massive failure of memory but was cleared of any wrongdoing by ICAC. Nonetheless, he took the honourable course and resigned.
In recent years, ICAC itself has come under scrutiny. In 2015, it was accused of overreach, particularly in its pursuit of Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen.
David Levine, ICAC’s inspector and a former judge, harshly criticised the commission’s investigation of Cunneen, calling it “unjust, unreasonable and oppressive”.
Levine called the inquiry into Cunneen a ‘low point’ in ICAC’s history.JOEL CARRETT/AAP
Reforms are brought in, but are they enough?
As a result, ICAC was restructured in 2016. The existing single commissioner was replaced by a panel of three — a full-time chief commissioner and two part-time ones.
A decision to proceed to a compulsory examination or public inquiry needed majority approval of the three commissioners. More emphasis was placed on procedural fairness in inquiries.
And the highly respected Supreme Court judge Peter Hall replaced Megan Latham as chief commissioner in August 2017.
Levine had also proposed abolishing public inquiries, which he said had resulted in the undeserved trashing of reputations.
He recommended an exoneration protocol for those who had a finding of corrupt conduct made against them but were acquitted in court, and judicial review of ICAC decisions.
These recommendations were rejected at the time, but they may be worth reconsidering — particularly if the inquiry into Maguire’s actions unfairly jeopardises Berejiklian’s premiership.
The president of New Caledonia’s parliamentary Congress says the Pacific territory could become an independent state associated with France.
The suggestion was made by Roch Wamytan in an interview with the Catholic newspaper La Croix after the October 4 independence referendum in which 53 percent voted for the status quo, a reduced majority from the previous vote in 2018.
Wamytan, who was a signatory to the 1998 Noumea Accord, said if support for independence continued its growth to the third and last referendum in 2022, New Caledonia would become independent.
He said this was inevitable because of the provisions of the French constitution and the UN resolutions which placed New Caledonia on the decolonisation list.
Last week, the pro-independence FLNKS movement said it would invoke the option of a third referendum, which could be requested at the earliest next April.
Opponents of independence are against another such vote and asked Paris to become proactive to stop it.
Wamytan said an independent Kanaky New Caledonia would want to revisit its ties with France and join the ACP group of countries linked to the European Union.
Avoiding African-style model He said he wanted to avoid a replication of the type of post-colonial relations which France built with its African colonies, which he said slowed their development.
Wamytan emphasised a desire to broaden ties within the Asia-Pacific region, including with Australia and New Zealand as well as the Melanesian countries.
With China having New Caledonia’s resources in its sights, he said New Caledonia needed to balance its ties.
Wamytan said France might want to keep a military base in New Caledonia which would be preferred, should China wish to establish itself.
Before the last referendum, he told a campaign rally that France was in no position to protect New Caledonia during the Second World War and the territory was protected by Americans, Australians and New Zealanders.
Wamytan also said France might still be interested in access to New Caledonia’s exclusive economic zone which could be granted at a cost.
Wamytan said the pro-independence side would meet the visiting French Overseas Minister Sebastien Lecornu but ruled out what he called a “consensual solution”.
This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.
The age of the driverless taxi has arrived – at least in parts of Phoenix, Arizona. Self-driving car company Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced its autonomous vehicles are now available to the general public (or at least paying customers).
The service is only available in a limited area for now, both because regulations in Arizona are relatively permissive and because the cars need a detailed three-dimensional map to tell them all about the road environment.
Until earlier this year, the self-driving vehicles were under testing and were used in 5-10% of Waymo’s rides. The service has been shut because of the pandemic, but is now back and Waymo is aiming to increase availability.
Are the cars really ‘self-driving’?
Waymo One currently requires a human driver to be present to supervise the self-driving care and override it when necessary, but the new announcement means fully autonomous, unsupervised vehicles. If successful, passengers will have entirely free time in the back seat.
Safety is still a concern though. Waymo claim trials in excess of 20 million miles of autonomous driving as of January 2020. While this sounds reassuring, with current US death rates at 1 per 100 million miles this is woefully small to demonstrate safety on par with human drivers.
However, some research suggests deploying “good enough” self-driving cars will save lives by getting rid of human errors – and that waiting for the technology to become near-perfect before deploying it would be a mistake.
Much of Waymo’s success is down to rigorous simulation and training. The company has its roots in Google’s self-driving car project, which began in 2009.
Unlike some other companies working on autonomous vehicles, such as Tesla and Volvo, Waymo is not trying to make a vehicle it can sell to consumers. At present, Waymo is only focused on offering a taxi service, though Avis Budget Group will manage the physical fleet of vehicles.
This may be a smart move. From a consumer psychology perspective, buying a Tesla or any other branded autonomous vehicle is expensive, but getting a driverless taxi will feel just as futuristic at a much lower cost.
The road ahead for autonomous vehicles
Even if Waymo’s technology proves safe and effective in practice, commercial success will depend on whether consumers adopt it. We still see customers in banks who prefer to go to a teller instead of making a transaction via a kiosk or ATM, and computer users who are reluctant to upgrade systems and services to newer versions.
There are still drivers resistant to the usage of (any) electronics in cars, so, for some, robot-driven cars will be a hard sell. What’s more, self-driving cars still struggle to manage everyday unexpected obstacles, such as potholes or broken traffic lights. Weather can also take a toll by affecting sensors.
Billions of dollars have been spent on autonomous car research, but they are far from perfect. High-profile deaths) involving autonomous vehicles have also taken some of the shine off the technology.
So, are we ready to embrace the technology and service?
Waymo provided the service before the pandemic; proved the technology works; and, showed there is public demand for such a service. They will now be aiming to convince stakeholders such as governments and business partners that now is the time for autonomous vehicles.
While seeking to address technical reliability issues – such as the requirement for a 5G mobile network – and customer acceptance of their product, Waymo will be hoping they won’t experience any catastrophic accidents as some of their competitors have.
Have you ever been in more than one place at the same time? If you’re much bigger than an atom, the answer will be no.
But atoms and particles are governed by the rules of quantum mechanics, in which several different possible situations can coexist at once.
Quantum systems are ruled by what’s called a “wave function”: a mathematical object that describes the probabilities of these different possible situations.
And these different possibilities can coexist in the wave function as what is called a “superposition” of different states. For example, a particle existing in several different places at once is what we call “spatial superposition”.
It’s only when a measurement is carried out that the wave function “collapses” and the system ends up in one definite state.
Generally, quantum mechanics applies to the tiny world of atoms and particles. The jury is still out on what it means for large-scale objects.
In our research, published today in Optica, we propose an experiment that may resolve this thorny question once and for all.
Erwin Schrödinger’s cat
In the 1930s, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger came up with his famous thought experiment about a cat in a box which, according to quantum mechanics, could be alive and dead at the same time.
In it, a cat is placed in a sealed box in which a random quantum event has a 50–50 chance of killing it. Until the box is opened and the cat is observed, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time.
In other words, the cat exists as a wave function (with multiple possibilities) before it’s observed. When it’s observed, it becomes a definite object.
What is Schrödinger’s Cat?
After much debate, the scientific community at the time reached a consensus with the “Copenhagen interpretation”. This basically says quantum mechanics can only apply to atoms and molecules, but can’t describe much larger objects.
Turns out they were wrong.
In the past two decades or so, physicists have created quantum states in objects made of trillions of atoms — large enough to be seen with the naked eye. Although, this has not yet included spatial superposition.
But how does the wave function become a “real” object?
This is what physicists call the “quantum measurement problem”. It has puzzled scientists and philosophers for about a century.
If there is a mechanism that removes the potential for quantum superposition from large-scale objects, it would require somehow “disturbing” the wave function — and this would create heat.
If such heat is found, this implies large-scale quantum superposition is impossible. If such heat is ruled out, then it’s likely nature doesn’t mind “being quantum” at any size.
If the latter is the case, with advancing technology we could put large objects, maybe even sentient beings, into quantum states.
This is an illustration of a resonator in quantum superposition. The red wave represents the wave function.Christopher Baker, Author provided
Physicists don’t know what a mechanism preventing large-scale quantum superpositions would look like. According to some, it’s an unknown cosmological field. Others suspect gravity could have something to do with it.
This year’s Nobel Prize winner for physics, Roger Penrose, thinks it could be a consequence of living beings’ consciousness.
Over the past decade or so, physicists have been feverishly seeking a trace amount of heat which would indicate a disturbance in the wave function.
To find this out, we’d need a method that can suppress (as perfectly as is possible) all other sources of “excess” heat that may get in the way of an accurate measurement.
We would also need to keep an effect called quantum “backaction” in check, in which the act of observing itself creates heat.
In our research, we’ve formulated such an experiment, which could reveal whether spatial superposition is be possible for large-scale objects. The best experiments thus far have not been able to achieve this.
Finding the answer with tiny beams that vibrate
Our experiment would use resonators at much higher frequencies than have been used. This would remove the issue of any heat from the fridge itself.
As was the case in previous experiments, we would need to use a fridge at 0.01 degrees kelvin above absolute zero. (Absoloute zero is the lowest temperature theoretically possible).
With this combination of very low temperatures and very high frequencies, vibrations in the resonators undergo a process called “Bose condensation”.
You can picture this as the resonator becoming so solidly frozen that heat from the fridge can’t wiggle it, not even a bit.
We would also use a different measurement strategy that doesn’t look at the resonator’s movement at all, but rather the amount of energy it has. This method would strongly suppress backaction heat, too.
Single particles of light would enter the resonator and bounce back and forth a few million times, absorbing any excess energy. They would eventually leave the resonator, carrying the excess energy away.
By measuring the energy of the light particles coming out, we could determine if there was heat in the resonator.
If heat was present, this would indicate an unknown source (which we didn’t control for) had disturbed the wave function. And this would mean it’s impossible for superposition to happen at a large scale.
Is everything quantum?
The experiment we propose is challenging. It’s not the kind of thing you can casually set up on a Sunday afternoon. It may take years of development, millions of dollars and a whole bunch of skilled experimental physicists.
Nonetheless, it could answer one of the most fascinating questions about our reality: is everything quantum? And so, we certainly think it’s worth the effort.
As for putting a human, or cat, into quantum superposition — there’s really no way for us to know how this would effect that being.
Luckily, this is a question we don’t have to think about, for now.
