Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University

Australia’s relationship with China is fractured. Arguably, this is the worst moment in Sino-Australian relations since Gough Whitlam normalised ties on his election in December 1972.

The Chinese saying “kill the chicken to frighten the monkey” would seem applicable in Beijing’s reaction to Australia’s push for an investigation into the operations of the World Health Organisation (WHO) – and, by implication, China’s responsibility for the coronavirus pandemic outbreak.

Read more: Murky origins: why China will never welcome a global inquiry into the source of COVID-19

Other countries have made similar calls without drawing Beijing’s ire to the same extent.

In an interview with The Australian Financial Review, China’s ambassador, Cheng Jingye, lambasted Australian political leaders and warned of economic reprisals. This marks a new and jagged low in relations between the two countries.

By any standards, this was an extraordinary step by a Chinese official. Cheng would not have taken it without Beijing’s go-ahead.

He accused Australia of “teaming up” with anti-Chinese elements in Washington to “launch a kind of political campaign against China”.

In China’s criticism, Australia is the “chicken” and the US the “monkey” as a recipient of Chinese displeasure.

China’s singling out of Australia for harsh criticism and threats of economic reprisals is designed to convey a message to a potentially vulnerable US ally that costs will accrue to countries that, in Beijing’s view, disrespect Chinese sovereignty.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s lobbying for an inquiry into the WHO in phone calls with foreign leaders, including US President Donald Trump, will have struck the Chinese as more forward-leaning for the leader of a middle power than is necessary.

Read more: Coronavirus shines a light on fractured global politics at a time when cohesion and leadership are vital

A less costly move, diplomatically, may have been for Morrison simply to have joined France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel in entirely legitimate calls for an inquiry.

The WHO is far from blameless. Its initial responses were clumsy. But little purpose would be served by diminishing the credibility of the organisation in the middle of a pandemic.

Once the global health emergency is brought under control – whenever that might be – stakeholders will have ample time to review their investments in the WHO.

In his attempts to shift blame for America’s disastrous initial responses to the pandemic, Trump has sought refuge in criticisms of China and the WHO. Washington’s decision to suspend payments to the organisation is both short-sighted and antagonistic towards global attempts to contain a pandemic whose ravages have far from run their course.

This is another example, if example was required, of America failing to exercise global leadership in a time of crisis.

In the nearly half century since the Whitlam government ended the diplomatic fudge that the Nationalists on Taiwan represented the whole of China, relations between Canberra and Beijing have proceeded relatively smoothly.

On occasions there have been bumps, such as when then Prime Minister Bob Hawke denounced Beijing’s 1989 massacre of student protesters in Tiananmen Square.

Or when, in 1996, then Foreign Minister Alexander Downer gave Australia’s support to the deployment of two aircraft carriers adjacent to Taiwan after China fired missiles in its direction.

Beijing asserted America’s actions represented a containment threat. However, pushback then against Australia’s support for the US was relatively mild.

In 1996, it would’ve been unthinkable for the Chinese ambassador in Canberra to summon a journalist to receive the sort of pointed criticism – and threats – that have arisen over the WHO issue and China’s culpability for the pandemic.

Underlying China’s unhappiness with Australia and completely separate from the coronavirus argument is the Huawei issue.

Australia’s clumsy lobbying effort to persuade other members of the so-called “Five Eyes” security and intelligence collective to exclude the Chinese telecommunications giant from a build-out of their 5G networks remains a running sore.

The other “Five Eyes” members are Canada, the UK, US and New Zealand.

It is hard to exaggerate Beijing’s displeasure over an Australian anti-Huawei lobbying campaign. Indeed, the Huawei issue underlies much of China’s angst against Australia in this latest period.

Incidentally, no Australian prime minister has visited Beijing in an official capacity since Malcolm Turnbull’s visit in September 2016.

Morrison’s conspicuous bid to hold China to account over its role in the coronavirus outbreak will be viewed in Beijing as of a piece with the Huawei issue.

None of this is to suggest other than that China’s behaviour was unconscionable, first in concealing the coronavirus outbreak from the world and then persecuting those among its citizens who sought to publicise its deadliness.

Read more: Lack of confidence in US leadership adds to coronavirus panic

Beijing’s early mismanagement of the coronavirus will not be forgotten, nor should it.

However, the question for a middle power like Australia – located in an Indo-Pacific in which China will become more dominant – is how best to manage the dragon in the room.

China’s bullying behaviour, its threatened resort to a form of economic blackmail and its attempts to drive a wedge between Canberra and Washington mark a vexed new frontier for Australian diplomacy.

Morrison and his advisers might reflect on how the world might look, as the prime minister puts, “on the other side” of the pandemic. We don’t know, but what we do know is that things will not be the same.

Whether China continues its rise, or slips, is an open question. However, whatever calculations might be made about the future, it has proved a mistake to bet against the Chinese since their opening to the outside world in 1978 following Mao’s death.

Morrison’s marketing of his phone call with Trump in which he, or his spokespeople, sought to portray a prime minister answering a call to arms against China was a mistake insofar as it enabled Beijing to pounce.

China needs little encouragement to drive a wedge between Canberra and Washington. These are opportunities a more sophisticated – and less eager – approach in Canberra would forestall. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Australia’s China policy is in the hands of amateurs, or ideologues, or both.

This brings us to the vulnerability issue alluded to crudely by Ambassador Cheng in his AFR interview. Chinese, he warned, might have second thoughts about consuming Australian products like wine and beef, or sending their kids to Australian universities, if relations remain strained. He said:

The Chinese public is frustrated, dismayed and disappointed with what Australia is doing now.

He did not provide evidence to support such a proposition.

But it is the case that Australia’s economic dependence on China is such that it affords the Chinese what Australian policymakers should recognise as an unacceptable level of leverage, even a stranglehold, in times of stress.

No other comparable country is as dependent on China. In 2019, China accounted for more than one-third of Australian merchandise exports and one-fifth of services trade.

Returning to the chicken and monkey metaphor, it would be wise for future Australian governments to work hard on giving the chicken a few more options – including steering clear of the Washington coop – to avoid ending up on a Chinese chopping block.

– ref. China-Australia relations hit new low in spat over handling of coronavirus – https://theconversation.com/china-australia-relations-hit-new-low-in-spat-over-handling-of-coronavirus-137377

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aaron Corn, Professor, Elder Conservatorium of Music · Director, Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music (CASM) · Director, National Centre for Aboriginal Language and Music Studies (NCALMS), Faculty of Arts, University of Adelaide

Recent weeks have been a blur of livestreams as politicians and chief medical officers have taken to Facebook and YouTube to announce Australia’s emergency measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

But on Saturday evening, I eagerly logged onto Facebook, along with more than 50,000 others, to enjoy a livestream of an entirely different kind. It was the first in a series of four East Arnhem Live music concerts to be streamed weekly.

It not only offers a welcome respite from the social isolation many Australians are now feeling, but it is also an ingenious way for Arnhem Land’s prolific musicians to share their music with audiences around the world.

On location

The Northern Territory’s Arnhem Land is home to dozens of remote Indigenous communities, including the Yolŋu communities in the far northeast. While there are presently no known cases of COVID-19 in Arnhem Land, the region’s economic stability relies heavily on artists’ income, which is greatly supported by local tourism during the dry season and international touring to festivals all year round.

Streamed on Saturday, April 24 and still available online, the first East Arnhem Live concert featured singer Yirrŋa Yunupiŋu, the current frontman of rock band Yothu Yindi, with Arian Pearson on acoustic guitar. To showcase Arnhem Land’s natural beauty, the concert was filmed on location at Gälaru (East Woody Beach) against the sun setting over the Arafura Sea, and incorporated stunning aerial cinematography of Dhamitjinya (East Woody Island).

At a length of four songs over 14 minutes, it was a tantalisingly brief event that left me wanting more. It stirred deep nostalgia for my own experiences in Arnhem Land over the past 25 years and long collaborations with local musicians there.

Yirrŋa Yunupiŋu’s four-song set exemplified the very best of Yolŋu songwriting, building significantly on the heavy traditional influences of the style developed by Yothu Yindi around 1990. The influence of Manikay, the ancestral song tradition performed by Yolŋu communities in their public ceremonies, is ever-present in Yirrŋa’s own songs. This is evidenced by the bilma (paired sticks) he played throughout the concert.

With no more than a few hundred senior Yolŋu Manikay singers alive today, the present threat of COVID-19 brings into sharp relief the rarity and uniqueness of Manikay as a quintessentially Australian musical tradition. This is indeed a national treasure of global significance that deserves to be better supported and cherished in Australia and globally.

An anthem for our time

The concert’s opening song was Sweet Arnhem Land, a balladic ode to the region’s immense beauty that includes a direct quote from the Manikay repertoire of Yirrŋa’s clan, the Gumatj. This Manikay quotation references the great ancestral hunter, Ganbulapula, and its melody should be instantly recognisable to anyone who has attended the Garma Festival and experienced public ceremonial repertoire being performed there by the Gumatj clan.

The second song was a cover of Kind of Life, which was first released by Yothu Yindi on the 1991 Tribal Voice album. It was a fitting homage to earlier pioneers of popular music from Arnhem Land, such as Witiyana Marika and the late Mandawuy Yunupiŋu AC of Yothu Yindi, who were the first to gain global acclaim.

Read more: My favourite album: Yothu Yindi’s Tribal Voice

The third song, We Rise, is nothing short of an anthemic triumph. Its stirring sentiment of solidarity in the face of great change and adversity will readily resonate with many Australians at this challenging time.

Yirrŋa’s final song, Banumbirr (Morning Star), pays respect to his mother’s clan, the Rirratjiŋu. Once again, it includes a direct quote from traditional Manikay repertoire, which this time comes from the Rirratjiŋu clan’s iconic Morning Star song series.

With more than 53,000 views on Facebook since Saturday night, this first East Arnhem Live concert has been an outstanding success. While I greatly look forward to the day when I can fly to Arnhem Land again to see dear friends and hear music there in person, this concert series is a most welcome substitute that offers an unexpectedly intimate and poignant experience. And it shares the great beauty of Yolŋu song against the backdrop of the natural environment from which it sprung.

Read more: Friday essay: how Indigenous songs recount deep histories of trade between Australia and Southeast Asia

Tradition and innovation

The Yolŋu people have long engaged with new technologies while retaining their own sense of autonomy. This latest innovation in streaming concerts via social media platforms is in keeping with their pre-colonial exchanges with visiting Asian seafarers.

It was this same longitudinal dialogue between tradition and innovation that made the music of bands like Yothu Yindi possible.

Musicians Yirrŋa Yunupiŋu and Arian Pearson are to be congratulated heartily for this first East Arnhem Live concert, as are the series’ presenters at ARDS Aboriginal Corporation and Yolŋu Radio, and sponsors at Rirratjiŋu Aboriginal Corporation and Developing East Arnhem.

The next three Saturday nights promise to be equally special with unmissable concerts by the Andrew Gurruwiwi Band on May 2 and Yirrmal Marika on May 9, and an unprecedented closing stream of traditional ceremony by the Rirratjiŋu clan on May 16.

The next three East Arnhem Live concerts will stream on the East Arnhem Land Facebook page at 6.30 pm ACST on Saturday, May 2, May 9 and May 16.

Charles Darwin University’s Gupapuyŋu App provides a Yolŋu language pronunciation guide that is free to download.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Wright, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science, Western Sydney University

Debate about how Australia will emerge from the coronavirus pandemic is heating up. As part of the economic recovery, business groups have renewed calls to cut “green tape” – environmental regulation that new projects, such as new mines, must follow.

In response, federal environment minister Sussan Ley wants to introduce new legislation to cut green tape and speed up project approvals.

Read more: When it comes to climate change, Australia’s mining giants are an accessory to the crime

However a major ten-yearly review of the federal government’s key environment legislation is not due to be finished until October.

Cutting green tape is a long-held aim of the Morrison government, which claims excessive environmental regulation unfairly stifles businesses.

But this isn’t the case. In my 30 years of experience researching water pollution, “green tape” has not translated into effective environmental regulation of industry. In fact, I’m yet to see a coal mining operation that’s effectively regulated after approved through the NSW and federal environmental assessment processes.

Here are five examples that show how existing environmental regulations have done little to prevent pollution and toxic chemicals from entering the environment.

1. Closed mines pollute for decades

My research on water pollution from coal mines in the Sydney basin routinely reveals inadequate environmental regulation. I’ve repeatedly uncovered long-standing environmental issues the industry doesn’t seem to learn from, such as pollution continually leaching from active and closed mines.

Read more: What should we do with Australia’s 50,000 abandoned mines?

As part of my PhD research in 2002/3, I studied Canyon Colliery – a coal mine deep in the Blue Mountains that closed in 1997. The mine constantly releases large volumes of toxic zinc and nickel contaminated water from the flooded underground workings into an otherwise pristine mountain stream.

This caused ecological damage in the Grose River, including a steep reduction in species and numbers of river invertebrates below the entry of the mine wastes into the river.

It’s now 23 years since the mining stopped, but the pollution continues – testimony of weak and ineffective environmental regulation. And it will probably last for centuries.

The Canyon Mine is just one of thousands of contaminated, derelict mining and industrial sites dotted around Australia lacking environmental controls.

2. Wollangambe River

Environmental regulation has become more stringent in the last 25 years thanks to legislation introduced by the Howard government in 1999, and NSW’s Protection of the Environment Operations Act introduced in 1997.

But despite this legislation, many new and active mines that lead to environmental damage have been assessed and approved.

Research by my team at Western Sydney University has documented pollution from an active Blue Mountains coal mine, Clarence Colliery.

The mine caused severe metal contamination and ecological damage to the Wollangambe, a World Heritage River. Our research led to the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) in 2017 imposing more effective restrictions on the release of toxic pollutants from the mine.

Despite approvals from both the NSW and federal governments, it seemed no one had noticed the magnitude of pollution from poorly treated mine wastes until our research was conducted. This caused ecological degradation to more than 20 kilometres of the highly “protected” Wollangambe River.

The Conversation contacted Centennial Coal, which owns Clarence Colliery, for comment. They directed us to their statements in 2017, when the EPA finished a five-year review of Clarence’s Environmental Protection Licence (EPL). Then, the company said:

As a result of this review Clarence will operate under a new EPL which will include agreed reductions in metal concentration limits for all water discharged to the Wollangambe. Salinity targets will also be set at 100 EC (electrical conductivity).

Clarence will also be required to comply with a Pollution Reduction Programme (PRP), also issued by the EPA, which will result in Centennial formalising options to address all water quality issues and to meet specific water quality milestones.

3. Georges River

In 2010 I made a submission as part of the environmental assessment for an extension of BHP Billiton’s Bulli Seam coal mining operations (now owned by South 32).

This involved reading thousands of pages of consultant reports explaining how the expanded operation would attempt to avoid or minimise impacts to the environment.

The mine extension was approved. Despite the many “green tape” hurdles, the approved mine was allowed to discharge wastes which our research discovered contained pollutants that were hazardous to river life in the Georges River. These included salt, nickel, zinc, aluminium and arsenic polluting the upper Georges River.

Environmental groups took the coal mine owner to court in 2012, and I provided my evidence for the court case to the NSW EPA.

The EPA has since worked with the coal miner to reduce pollution from the mine.

4. Coal mining under Sydney’s water supply

Many were stunned on March 16 this year, when the NSW government signed off on new coal mine “longwalls” directly under Woronora Reservoir, part of Sydney’s drinking water supply.

Longwall mining is the continuous mechanical removal of coal in underground mines that allows the roof of the mine to cave in after the coal is removed.

So what can they do to a river? Redbank Creek near Picton – 65 kilometres southwest of Sydney – provides a sad testimony.

For nearly a decade, I documented damage where falling ground levels (subsidence) caused by longwalls led to extensive damage to the creek channel.

The land surface fell more than one meter. This caused cracking, warping and buckling of the creek channel. It now rarely holds water in many stretches. Isolated stagnant pools in the creek now accumulate saline and metal-contaminated water containing little aquatic life except for mosquitoes.

The mine responsible for this damage, Tahmoor Colliery, is seeking to extend its operations and the NSW government is currently considering the development.

This mine also disposes of about four to eight megalitres of poorly treated wastes each day to the Bargo River, a popular freshwater swimming river for south-western Sydney.

5. PFAS contamination

Despite the existence of “green tape”, unforeseen problems have left Australia with many contaminated sites that may never be fully cleaned up.

We’ve seen this in the dozens of locations across Australia where toxic PFAS chemicals have contaminated land, water, ecosystems and people.

Read more: A blanket ban on toxic ‘forever chemicals’ is good for people and animals

These were previously regarded as safe chemical additives, for example in fire fighting foam, particularly at military bases.

Such contamination is very expensive to remediate and in February this year landholders near three defence bases reached a financial settlement for the PFAS damage to their property.

“Green tape” is an emotive word implying unnecessary and slow environmental regulation that delays major projects.

Given my own direct experience involved poorly regulated coal mines, I shudder to imagine the environmental degradation “fast-tracked” environmental regulation will lead to.

The Conversation also contacted SIMEC, which owns Tahmoor Colliery. A spokesperson said:

Mining in NSW is governed by stringent state and federal laws enforced by a number of government departments and regulators. SIMEC Mining acquired the Tahmoor Coking Coal Mine two years ago and takes its environmental, compliance and social responsibilities seriously.

Tahmoor Mine has been operating for well over 40 years. We acknowledge that historical mine activity did impact Redbank Creek and that this was self-reported to the regulator. Since then, SIMEC has worked closely with the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE) to enact a comprehensive plan to rehabilitate the creek. Recent rainfall has demonstrated the success of this work and we are confident that the rehabilitation works will restore the creek.

While our operations do produce water as part of the mining process, this is treated and monitored in accordance with our licence conditions. The quality of this water is mandated by our environment protection licence issued and monitored by the NSW Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). Typically, the water monitoring results are well below those limits allowed by the licence. To further improve water quality, SIMEC Mining has committed to the installation of a new water treatment plant.

Water management has been a key focus for SIMEC in the planning of the proposed Tahmoor South extension. We have commissioned extensive specialist assessments to understand any potential impact on ground and surface water. If our extension is approved, these water assets will be carefully monitored throughout the life of the mine to ensure that should any issue occur, it is detected early and resolved efficiently.

– ref. Cutting ‘green tape’ may be good politicking, but it’s bad policy. Here are 5 examples of regulation failure – https://theconversation.com/cutting-green-tape-may-be-good-politicking-but-its-bad-policy-here-are-5-examples-of-regulation-failure-137164

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daiane Scaraboto, Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Melbourne

In eight years, US environmentalist and social media star Lauren Singer had never sent an item of rubbish to landfill. But last month, in an impassioned post to her 383,000 Instagram followers, she admitted the reality of COVID-19 has changed that.

I sacrificed my values and bought items in plastic. Lots of it, and plastic that I know isn’t recyclable in NYC (New York City) recycling or maybe even anywhere … why would I go against something that I have actively prioritised and promoted?

Singer wrote that as the seriousness of COVID-19 dawned, she stocked up on items she’d need if confined to her home for a long period – much of it packaged in plastic.

Her confession encapsulates how the pandemic has challenged those of us who are trying to reduce our waste. Many sustainability-conscious people may now find themselves with cupboards stocked with plastic bottles of hand sanitiser, disposable wipes and takeaway food containers.

So let’s look at why this is happening, and what to do about it.

Sustainability out the window

We research how consumers respond to change, such as why consumers largely resisted single-use plastic bag bans. Recently we’ve explored how the coronavirus has changed the use of plastic bags, containers and other disposable products.

Amid understandable concern over health and hygiene during the pandemic, the problem of disposable plastics has taken a back seat.

For example, Coles’ home delivery service is delivering items in plastic bags (albeit reusable ones) and many coffee shops have banned reusable mugs, including global Starbucks branches.

Read more: For decades, scientists puzzled over the plastic ‘missing’ from our oceans – but now it’s been found

Restaurants and other food businesses can now only offer home delivery or takeaway options. Many won’t allow customers to bring their own containers, defaulting to disposables which generate plastic waste. This means many consumers can’t reduce their plastic waste, even if they wanted to.

Demand for products such as disposable wipes, cleaning agents, hand sanitiser, disposable gloves and masks is at a record high. Unfortunately, they’re also being thrown out in unprecedented volumes.

And the imperative to prevent the spread of coronavirus means tonnes of medical waste is being generated. For example, hospitals and aged care facilities have been advised to double-bag clinical waste from COVID-19 patients. While this is a necessary measure, it adds to the plastic waste problem.

Cause for hope

Sustainability and recycling efforts are continuing. Soft plastics recycler Red Cycle is still operating. However many dropoff points for soft plastics, such as schools and council buildings, are closed, and some supermarkets have removed their dropoff bins.

Boomerang Alliance’s Plastic Free Places program has launched a guide for cafes and restaurants during COVID-19. It shows how to avoid single-use plastics, and what compostable packaging alternatives are available.

As the guide notes, “next year the coronavirus will hopefully be a thing of the past but plastic pollution won’t be. It’s important that we don’t increase plastic waste and litter in the meantime.”

Old habits die hard

In the US, lobbyists for the plastic industry have taken advantage of health fears by arguing single-use plastic bags are a more hygienic option than reusable ones. Plastic bag bans have since been rolled back in the US and elsewhere.

However, there is little evidence to show plastic bags are a safer option, and at least reusable cloth bags can be washed.

A relaxation on plastic bag bans – even if temporary – is likely to have long-term consequences for consumer behaviour. Research shows one of the biggest challenges in promoting sustainable behaviours is to break old habits and adopt new ones. Once people return to using plastic bags, the practice becomes normalised again.

In Europe, the plastic industry is using the threat of coronavirus contamination to push back against a ban on single-use plastics such as food containers and cutlery.

Such reframing of plastic as a “protective” health material can divert attention from its dangers to the environment. Prior research, as well as our preliminary findings, suggest these meanings matter when it comes to encouraging environmentally friendly behaviours.

Read more: Stop shaming and start empowering: advertisers must rethink their plastic waste message

Many people are using their time at home to clear out items they no longer need. However, most second-hand and charity shops are closed, so items that might have had a second life end up in landfill.

Similarly, many tool, book and toy libraries are closed, meaning some people will be buying items they might otherwise have borrowed.

What to do

We can expect the environmental cause will return to the foreground when the COVID-19 crisis has passed. In the meantime, reuse what you have, and try to store rather than throw out items for donation or recycling.

Talk to takeaway food outlets about options for using your own containers, and refuse disposable cutlery or napkins with deliveries. Use the time to upskill your coffee-making at home rather than buying it in a takeaway cup. And look for grocery suppliers offering more sustainable delivery packaging, such as cardboard boxes or biodegradable bags.

Above all, be vigilant about ways environmental protections such as plastic bag bans might be undermined during the pandemic, and voice your concerns to politicians.

Read more: We organised a conference for 570 people without using plastic. Here’s how it went

– ref. Using lots of plastic packaging during the coronavirus crisis? You’re not alone – https://theconversation.com/using-lots-of-plastic-packaging-during-the-coronavirus-crisis-youre-not-alone-135553

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marion Terrill, Transport and Cities Program Director, Grattan Institute

Amidst a global pandemic, some people are starting to dream big about infrastructure projects to help get Australia moving again. The decades-old dream of an Australian fast train is back in the headlines. But, as alluring as it sounds, the federal opposition’s idea for a bullet train from Melbourne to Brisbane is not a good use of a generation’s worth of infrastructure spending.

After the coronavirus crisis, there may be good reasons to fast-track infrastructure to create jobs and stimulate the economy. But it remains as important as ever that funding go only to worthy projects. A bullet train does not fit the bill.

Read more: Why the focus of stimulus plans has to be construction that puts social housing first

No silver bullet

Federal Labor claims the train would be an “economic game-changer” for the regions in its path. But a study into the train, commissioned by Labor itself in government in 2010, found no evidence for this.

Any regional development was too uncertain, the authors concluded, to be considered in their cost-benefit analysis. In fact, they found the project could damage towns along the route:

The history of the impact of transport improvement in Australian towns is that they concentrate activity in the larger centres and create commuter towns lacking in higher level services. Without concerted efforts to the contrary, this is also a likely outcome of the introduction of HSR [high-speed rail].

Read more: Regional cities beware – fast rail might lead to disadvantaged dormitories, not booming economies

Of course, as advocates will be quick to point out, the study did conclude total benefits would outweigh costs by a considerable margin: $2.30 in benefit for every $1 of cost. But this rosy calculation was based on a series of assumptions that are either outdated or inappropriate. As our upcoming report on fast rail will explain in more detail, it’s unlikely the train’s benefits would exceed its costs if a rigorous independent assessment were carried out today.

The benefits are also narrowly concentrated. The biggest winners would be business travellers between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Wider benefits to society accounted for only 3% of the total, and the effect on economic growth was expected to be minimal.

That’s because the train would take a very long time to build. According to the study, the project would only be “shovel ready” 15 years after funding was committed. This makes it completely ineffective as a timely stimulus during a downturn.

Read more: We can halve train travel times between our cities by moving to faster rail

Advocates also argue the train would reduce emissions by taking high-emitting planes out of the sky. But a net reduction won’t be achieved for many years – maybe decades – because constructing the line would create so many emissions.

If built, this train would be the most expensive infrastructure project in Australian history. The study estimated the price tag at A$114 billion – A$130 billion in today’s dollars. As our chart shows, this is enough to pay for an entire generation’s worth of infrastructure.

So what should be done?

It is true current low interest rates would make borrowing to pay for such a large project cheaper than ever before, and fast-tracking infrastructure may be justified to aid economic recovery. But that doesn’t give governments a blank cheque to spend on whatever they like. The crisis does not absolve government of its responsibility to scrutinise projects to decide whether they are worthwhile.

A good place to start is by identifying the problem you want to solve.

If regional development is the goal, other options are available to governments that are more likely to be effective than a bullet train. Infrastructure Victoria and Infrastructure NSW both identify better digital connectivity as a pressing need for regional and rural areas. The current strain on the national broadband network as many of us try to work from home is a good reminder of the link between connectivity and productivity.

If governments do want to focus on transport, “smaller picture” projects, though not as glamorous, tend to deliver more bang for buck, as previous Grattan work has argued.

Read more: Our fast-growing cities and their people are proving to be remarkably adaptable

Projects that can be fast-tracked to start construction soon are also more likely to support economic recovery. Infrastructure Australia’s priority list suggests a range of transport projects and initiatives that are much further developed, including improving the Sydney-Canberra rail link. And the priority list includes projects that benefit all states and territories, not just the big three on the east coast.

The coronavirus crisis has upended many of our assumptions about “normal operating procedure” for governments. But it doesn’t mean we throw the old rule book out the window. Governments should only spend public money on projects that have clear and tangible benefits to society – not on grand “nation-building” projects that are big on style but low on substance.

– ref. Look beyond a silver bullet train for stimulus – https://theconversation.com/look-beyond-a-silver-bullet-train-for-stimulus-136834

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Monash University

Over the past few weeks, there has been increasing awareness of the heightened risk of family violence during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, there has been a silence around perpetrators – in terms of the justice system’s ability to hold them to account during the crisis and the wider family violence system’s need to keep them “in view”.

Both are critical to manage and monitor the heightened risk and danger to women and children during this period of uncertainty and isolation.

Keeping perpetrators ‘in view’

In 2016, a government advisory panel report on reducing violence against women recommended numerous steps to hold perpetrators to account and more support to change their behaviours.

Since then, all Australian states and territories have implemented family violence reforms to ensure numerous “check points” are embedded in their systems to keep perpetrators “in view” at all times.

Keeping perpetrators “in view” refers to the process of identifying, assessing, monitoring and managing their risk over time.

Read more: Coronavirus and ‘domestic terrorism’: how to stop family violence under lockdown

This notion of increased perpetrator visibility relies on coordination and information sharing between a range of men’s services, criminal justice agencies, family violence specialists and other support services, such as those dealing with mental health, alcohol and drugs.

But these responses have been significantly hampered by the COVID-19 restrictions, which limit the ability of victims to seek help and highlight the need for others to step in and report suspected abuse.

This raises the very real risk that new perpetrators will remain invisible for longer. Patterns of escalation among known perpetrators may also go “unchecked” unless they are monitored during this time of heightened risk.

Fewer men’s services during lockdown

One of the key ways known family violence perpetrators are held to account and kept in view is through men’s behaviour change programs (MBCPs).

These programs require men to attend weekly, group-based sessions, as well as engage in short or long-term case management programs.

An immediate impact of the coronavirus restrictions has been the suspension of some face-to-face men’s services and many MBCPs. While this has not stopped family violence interventions altogether, it does make known abusers less visible and may prevent them from getting the support they need.

Read more: ‘Cabin fever’: Australia must prepare for the social and psychological impacts of a coronavirus lockdown

Some men’s services are seeing a surge in demand for telephone services. Coinciding with the beginning of the lockdown last month, the Men’s Referral Service, a national telephone counselling service operated by No To Violence, has seen an alarming increase in calls from perpetrators of family violence.

This included a 94% increase in phone traffic and an average 20% increase in time spent with callers.

Despite the increased need, resources are still lacking. The federal government has announced a $1.1 billion boost in funding for mental health services, Medicare assistance and domestic violence support.

But this package does not specify additional funding to the Men’s Referral Service. Instead, the service makes do with funding from three states (Victoria, NSW and Tasmania).

In the absence of increased funding and availability of men’s services, proactive policing and random household checks of known, high-risk perpetrators will be critical during the lockdown.

Police resources have also been strained by the coronavirus crisis, but these spot checks should be seen as a priority. Victoria Police has recently committed to doing this.

Similarly, the Family Law Court has taken urgent action after reporting a 39% increase in applications relating to parenting orders over the past month.

Both the Family Law Court and Federal Circuit Court will fast-track cases in which there is an increased risk of family violence as a result of COVID-19 social restrictions. This may not guarantee long-term protection to women and children, but it brings perpetrators into view quicker when they are subject to urgent parenting orders during the crisis.

How the family violence system is innovating and adapting

Despite the current challenges, there has been a prompt response from the family violence service sector to the changing environment. For instance, some men’s intervention programs are adapting their strategies to reach known perpetrators who otherwise would be unsupported.

The Men’s Family Violence Intervention Centre in Victoria, for instance, has moved all 200 men in its program to online or telephone services.

To replace MBCP group sessions, facilitators contact each man and conduct a 30-minute phone call to discuss topics usually covered in group, as well as other sources of stress (job loss, financial pressure, isolation at home).

Read more: What governments can do about the increase in family violence due to coronavirus

A pilot MBCP for perpetrators with problematic alcohol or other drug use, developed by TaskForce Community Agency, has taken similar actions.

With a new, in-person group meeting unable to start at the moment, men who had been referred to the service are now receiving a combination of phone support and educational materials via group emails. This allows the agency to “check in” with known perpetrators and keep them “in view” until the next face-to-face group can start again.

There are likely many other examples of adapted and innovative practices in Australia, which has been a leading nation in family violence reform over the last five years.

It is essential the momentum of the work advanced nationally to keep perpetrators in view is not lost during the crisis.

There is no road map to achieve this. But it is clear we must prioritise and provide resources for the monitoring, assessment and management of family violence perpetrators during this time to keep women and children safe.

The National Sexual Assault, Family & Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.

– ref. How do we keep family violence perpetrators ‘in view’ during the COVID-19 lockdown? – https://theconversation.com/how-do-we-keep-family-violence-perpetrators-in-view-during-the-covid-19-lockdown-135942

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Collie, Professor, Monash University

More than 31% of people who have lost work during COVID-19 are recording high levels of psychological distress — a rate four times more than employed Australian adults. Many lost work without notice and are facing high levels of financial stress.

These findings are part of our national study of people who have lost their jobs or have had their work hours reduced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read more: How will the coronavirus recession compare with the worst in Australia’s history?

Since late March nearly 800,000 Australians have lost their jobs. Millions more have had their work hours reduced or are working differently.

Unemployment is predicted to rise to between 10% and 15%.

Centrelink has been overwhelmed with people applying for the JobSeeker payment.

The negative impacts of prolonged unemployment on mental and physical health has been long recognised, and unemployment could emerge as the major public health crisis from COVID-19.

Read more: More Australians are worried about a recession and an increasingly selfish society than about coronavirus itself

The early findings from 611 people enrolled in the study are outlined below. The charts show the acute impacts affecting people in the first few weeks after social distancing measures and travel restrictions were introduced and many businesses closed.

Job loss happened very quickly

Almost 36% of our survey respondents lost their jobs, and about 64% are no longer working, though they remain employed.

Two-thirds of people in the study reported losing work, or losing their jobs, with zero or one day’s notice. About 90% lost work with less than one week’s notice.

Incomes have dropped sharply

Before COVID-19 81% of people in the study reported an average weekly income of A$500 or more. The same people reported large drops in their income, with just under 29% reporting more than A$500 of income in the most recent week.

Most of the study data was collected after people lost jobs but before government stimulus payments such as JobSeeker, the coronavirus supplement and JobKeeper reached people’s bank accounts. Accordingly, almost 52% of people reported having no income in the most recent week.

People are under severe financial stress

Not surprisingly given the situation outlined above, many people are already experiencing considerable financial stress. People who have lost their jobs reported significantly higher levels of financial stress than survey respondents who have lost work but have remained employed.

Many also indicated they would find is difficult to raise A$2,000 within a week.

Psychological distress is very high

Rates of psychological distress are much higher in people losing work during COVID-19 than we typically see in working age Australians. More than 30% of people are recording high levels of distress, a rate almost four times that usually observed in employed Australian adults. Another third of study participants have moderate distress, again much higher than we normally observe.

Read more: What if I can’t pay my rent? These are the options for rent relief in Australia

A larger proportion of people who had lost their job reported high levels of distress compared to those who had lost work but were still employed.

Most people are seeking government support

About 66% of study participants had already applied for Centrelink payments, intended to apply or had registered their intent to apply. Once again, more people who have lost their jobs were in this category (77%) than those who had lost work but were still employed (59%).

Read more: JobKeeper payment: how will it work, who will miss out and how to get it?

More than 28% of participants reported that they were not eligible for any Centrelink benefits.

Looking forward to working again

As well as understanding people’s current financial and health status, the study asked people their thoughts about the future. About 71% said they were not confident of being back in paid work in one month’s time.

People were much more positive about their job prospects in three and six months, with almost 68% of people saying they were somewhat confident or very confident they would be back in paid work in six months’ time.

What next?

The high rates of psychological distress show that unemployment is much more than an economic problem. It is also a serious public health dilemma.

The study will track people’s engagement in work and their health over the rest of 2020 to understand who is most affected and how health and work change over time as restrictions ease, businesses reopen and the economy recovers.

If you have lost work or lost your job during COVID-19, and you are aged 18 or over, you can participate in the study by visiting www.covidstudy.net.

Read more: Despite huge coronavirus stimulus package, the government might still need to pay more

– ref. 90% out of work with one week’s notice. These 8 charts show the unemployment impacts of coronavirus in Australia – https://theconversation.com/90-out-of-work-with-one-weeks-notice-these-8-charts-show-the-unemployment-impacts-of-coronavirus-in-australia-136946

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Keith Rathbone, Lecturer, Modern European History and Sports History, Macquarie University

Last week, the NRL announced league play would resume in late May, following the introduction of strict biosecurity rules.

But even with new restrictions in place, the league should not resume until it can guarantee the safety of their players and employees.

The league also needs to ask serious questions about the social role of New South Wales’ biggest sport. Rugby’s return can signal a return to normalcy, but is the NRL sending the right message at the right time?

Read more: Stadiums are emptying out globally. So why have Australian sports been so slow to act?

Setting a bad example

Many clubs are anxious about the short timeframe for restating play. They need enough time to resume operations, rehire personnel, stake out lodging and restart training. They also need time to put in place the proper health precautions.

Although the league claims its rules will be more “stringent than government restrictions”, it is unclear whether the biosecurity measures will be approved at the state or federal level. The league released a 47-page memorandum to clubs on Sunday evening, including additional measures such as:

• increased player testing

• playing in empty stadiums

• a restricted schedule that limits travel

• a mandatory COVID-19 training module

• the social isolation of players inside their homes, except for essential business and travel

• tough sanctions for rule violations.

The premiers of Victoria and Queensland have already voiced concerns about the NRL’s plans. While Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the federal government have no official position on the move, delegating responsibility for oversight of the NRL’s plans to the states, critics say the resumption of play sets a bad example at a time when Australia is on the cusp of eliminating domestic coronavirus transmissions.

Global health expert Adam Kamradt-Scott has said the restart date was “arbitrary” and warned

“if [the NRL] jump the gun and restart things too early we will confront the situation where we will see cases rise again and us having to go back into stronger restrictions.

Do they have a choice?

The NRL’s weakened financial position has played an important role in its decision to resume play. By mid-April, the league only had about $70 million in cash and was losing $13 million per unplayed round.

The league asked the government for a bailout and was denied. Despite having its largest-ever television contracts, the league had not invested in any collateral, such as a stadium or even the land under its own headquarters, and over the past few years, had spent down its rainy-day fund.

Having also not invested in pandemic insurance, it was looking at a certain financial catastrophe.

Read more: A world without sports

The league’s financial woes worsened after a fortnight of sparring with its biggest television partner, Nine, which led pundits to wonder whether the NRL might still have a television home when its current contract ends in 2022.

Both Nine and Foxtel threatened to withhold quarterly payments to the league and until Friday, were cautious about a restart that might fail and leave them searching for content to replace matches.

At the end of the week, the NRL seemed to reach an agreement with Nine. Their rapprochement comes with additional confidence of a forthcoming three-year extension of their television deal, but likely worth less than the last agreement.

By contrast, the NRL’s chief rival, the AFL, had put itself in a position to weather the virus for longer – a fact many rugby fans likely found galling. The AFL also cancelled play and stood down up to 80% of its staff, but it received loans from ANZ and NAB, thanks to the AFL’s ownership of the Docklands Stadium.

The recent departure of NRL Chief Executive Todd Greenberg and the resignation of Rugby Australia Chief Executive Raelene Castle further illustrate how difficult a time it can be for rugby administrators.

Can the NRL police itself?

Of course, there is danger with restarting too soon, as sporting clubs are particularly vulnerable to the spread of diseases.

Before the NBA season was shut down last month, a number of players tested positive for coronavirus, including four members of the Brooklyn Nets. Only one of the Nets was symptomatic, which raises the question: how long might the asymptomatic players continued to play had league officials not postponed the season?

Asymptomatic carriers could be the biggest problem for the NRL, too. A study in the British Medical Journal and a World Health Organisation report suggested that four-fifths of infected people may be asymptomatic.

As such, the NRL’s proposal to use apps to check temperatures and overall player health might miss those who are infected but not showing symptoms.

The NRL has also had significant issues with health technology in the past, such as when its “sideline injury surveillance” technology failed to properly assess head trauma to Matt Moylan after a shocking collision last year. Moylan played for another 10 minutes before being pulled off the field.

Read more: Is the National Rugby League legally liable for the long-term impacts of concussions?

There is also growing scepticism about the NRL’s ability to police itself.

Peter V’landys, the chairman of the Australian Rugby League Commission, promises there will be sanctions for those who violate the biosecurity measures.

We’ve got no option, there must be a deterrent because one reckless act will bring down an entire competition and the livelihoods that come with that.

But has the league developed enough trust? It resisted calls for independent doctors to assess concussions for years and, since agreeing to the checks, has only done them inconsistently. It is not certain that league-affiliated doctors would be any more responsible in their approach to coronavirus.

The league is also relying heavily on buy-in from players, many of whom are known more for their recklessness than responsibility. Just this week, several players were forced to apologise after breaching social-distancing rules on a camping trip.

Nor is it clear that fans will support these changes. How will supporters respond, for instance, if a star player is sanctioned for an unessential trip out of his home?

Another logistical question: does the league plan to keep players and other employees separate from their families for the whole season? In other sports, similar models have proven difficult. Teams on the Tour de France have traditionally tried to keep riders separate from their families, with mixed success.

It has been a month without rugby and the NRL’s decision to resume play promises an end to every sports fan’s purgatory. Even so, the league should strongly reconsider. A longer delay, or even a cancelled season, is better than risking the lives of players, league employees and other Australians if the coronavirus were to spread further.

– ref. The NRL should reconsider its comeback: it’s too soon – https://theconversation.com/the-nrl-should-reconsider-its-comeback-its-too-soon-137079

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arosha Weerakoon, Lecturer, General Dentist & PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland

As a dentist, my patients often ask whether they still need to floss even though they brush their teeth. The answer is – that depends.

A review of the research on this topic found flossing, combined with regular brushing, reduced the chance of bleeding gums. But the review could not provide evidence flossing prevented holes (tooth cavities) from forming.

This is likely because all of the included studies were conducted within one to three month periods. A few months is long enough to detect bleeding gums, but not for cavities to grow substantially.

So studies in the review looked at the effectiveness of flossing on preventing gum disease rather than cavities.

Read more: How often should I get my teeth cleaned?

But at the very least, we know regular flossing protects our gum health, which in turn protects our teeth. So it’s definitely worth doing.

The advice may be different if you have certain dental conditions – but we’ll get to that later.

Why should I floss?

Cavities and gum disease are mainly caused by plaque that accumulates on our teeth and gums. Dental plaque is part of a complex ecosystem that includes 800 different types of bacteria found in our mouth.

Our plaque’s unique ecosystem is a like a major city, and brushing is like Godzilla destroying the infrastructure. But plaque bacteria can rebuild infrastructure fairly quickly, which is why we brush frequently.

Brushing, however, isn’t very effective at cleaning in between your teeth. And it’s the plaque that remains in these areas that leads to most cavities and gum disease. So that’s where flossing comes in – to clean between the teeth.

Read more: Curious Kids: why do we make saliva?

If plaque on our teeth and gums are left long enough, the mineral in our saliva hardens it to form a white chalky substance called calculus. The calculus acts as a home to many different types of bacteria that can advance gum disease.

Once formed, calculus is impossible to remove by brushing or flossing alone. It needs to be removed using special tools at the dentist.

What’s the big deal about bleeding gums?

Similar to the way doctors measure health by checking your blood pressure, dentists and hygienists gently poke your gums to see if they bleed.

Bleeding gums often signal the presence of uncleaned plaque and/or calculus in the area. You may even notice bleeding after you brush your teeth or eat certain foods.

To a dental practitioner, bleeding gums indicate you’re at risk of developing advanced gum issues, called periodontal disease. This condition sees the foundations that hold your teeth in your jaw bone deteriorate, eventually causing your teeth to loosen and fall out.

Socially embarrassing by-products of advanced gum disease include:

• loose teeth
• a yellow/brown smile
• large black gaps appearing between your teeth where the gums have shrunk away
• bad breath.

So the act of flossing can serve to safeguard your smile.

Current evidence also suggests periodontal disease is associated with an increased risk of heart disease and diabetes, among other health issues.

Read more: Health Check: why do my gums bleed and should I be worried?

OK, so I should definitely floss then?

This depends on your current situation. Just like you wouldn’t mop your rug or vacuum the shower recess, we have specific tools to suit every cleaning situation. Flossing (effectively) is great if:

• you still have most of your teeth
• your teeth are tightly jammed together
• your gums haven’t receded to leave triangular gaps between your teeth.

While for a lot of us this may be the case, for some of us, simply flossing our teeth and gums will be ineffective. Particularly if you have:

• gaps between your teeth that are too large for floss to clean
• complex dental work such as crowns, bridges and implants
• partial dentures (dentures that replace some missing teeth)
• orthodontic appliances such as braces.

In these instances, we have to start thinking about interdental cleaning, or using other tools to clean between your teeth such as special Christmas tree-shaped brushes or sticks.

Read more: The flossing flap: Mind your dentist, and floss every night

If you don’t think flossing is right for you, ask about interdental (between teeth) cleaning during your next visit to the dentist. Your dentist or hygienist will be able to recommend products and a cleaning routine to suit your needs.

Tips for good flossing

To floss effectively, keep in mind:

• floss at least once a day
• floss before brushing so it becomes part of your routine
• cut 30-40cm of regular floss for each use
• wrap most of it around the finger of one hand and 2-3cm around the finger of another
• slowly move the floss towards the gums to ensure you clean both teeth.

Flossing can cause some bleeding, but this will resolve over time.

Flossing can take some time to master. But the more often you floss, the faster and better you’ll become. And what better time to practise than when you’re stuck at home during a pandemic?

Read more: Can I still go to the dentist? How coronavirus is changing the way we look after our teeth

– ref. Do I need to floss my teeth? – https://theconversation.com/do-i-need-to-floss-my-teeth-133245

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sky Croeser, Lecturer, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University

After the horrors of the last bushfire season, climate action in Australia seemed to have new momentum. But then coronavirus struck. All of a sudden, the public was preoccupied by a different catastrophe.

But one positive has emerged from the devastation wrought by coronavirus: our ability to radically shift social and economic systems when needed. It shows real action on climate change is possible, and should encourage us to work towards that even as we stay at home.

Read more: From the bushfires to coronavirus, our old ‘normal’ is gone forever. So what’s next?

I must note here that for some people right now, the focus is on simply surviving. Increased domestic violence risk, housing insecurity, unemployment, mental health issues and other forms of marginalisation means many have little energy for activism.

But for those of us with time and resources to spare, there’s plenty to do now to support climate action. My research focuses on how people around the world use digital technologies to create change. So here are five ways to make a difference without necessarily leaving the house.

1. Create or join local coronavirus support networks

A huge number of community mutual aid groups have recently formed – try joining one.

Mutual aid is about helping each other and realising that we all have something to offer. Participating can do more than help us get through the pandemic – it can also strengthen the community ties we need to cooperate on climate action.

Read more: The community-led movement creating hope in the time of coronavirus

The lack of effective climate leadership by many governments – including the Australian government – means working for change at the local level is vital. The Transition Towns movement, which began in 2006, is built on the idea that community resilience can create new possibilities in times of crisis.

Recently, Extinction Rebellion UK released the Alone Together resource pack, to help people meet the challenges of coronavirus through compassion, creativity and mutual aid.

Working together can shift our ideas about what is possible, so keep talking to your neighbours once the pandemic has passed.

2. Put pressure on government and industry to take action

Climate change advocacy campaigns are achieving significant successes in Australia and there are plenty of ways you can contribute from home.

For example, the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act is currently under review, and public input is being sought. This legislation has not done a great job of protecting the environment since it was enacted 20 years ago, and the effects of climate change mean strong environment laws have never been more needed.

If you want to make a submission and need ideas, Friends of the Earth have outlined how the laws needs to change. Or just write about what matters to you when it comes to protecting the environment.

Now might be also a good time to check whether any of your money is invested in fossil fuels, and move it if it is: Market Forces will walk you through the process.

You could also give time or money to support organisations working for climate justice, such as Seed Mob or the Climate Justice Union.

3. Keep learning

The pandemic has highlighted problems with our political and economic systems. The crisis has affected everyone, but in different ways. Racial disparities put some groups at increased risk and there are claims that policing of the lockdown is harsher in some areas than others.

Also, people in low-paid work such as childcare and retail are at additional risk of exposure to the virus, while many in better-paid professions can work from home.

Learning from the disparities we see during this crisis can help us build a broader and more inclusive environmental movement. If you have time to read, consider books about Indigenous connection to land, such as Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, Victor Steffensen’s Fire Country, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

4. Use time at home to reconsider your lifestyle

Making changes as individuals will not in itself solve climate change. The impact of driving less and skipping an international trip pales in comparison to the effect of, say, Adani’s proposed Carmichael coal mine.

But you can link the changes you make at home to broader structural change.

For example, if you’re using time at home to evaluate your water use, find out which industries near you use the most water – and whether there’s a fair distribution. How much are households paying compared to mines, for example, and do any restrictions that your household faces also apply to industries that use a lot of water?

If you’ve shifted to getting groceries delivered, learn more about how to support regenerative agriculture in your area. Can you buy fruit and vegetables from farms that are improving soil health, supporting biodiversity, and paying workers fairly?

5. Reconnect with nature

Connection with nature can be soothing. It can also help to spark and sustain environmental action. Connecting to nature might mean growing your own food, paying attention to city plants and wildlife on your walk to the grocery store, or simply letting the breeze blow through your apartment.

Together while we’re apart

Finding ways to participate in climate action from home can connect us to our communities, and help us find meaning and agency during a difficult time.

One day this crisis will pass, and we might find we’ve laid the groundwork to come out of it stronger, and with more hope than before.

Read more: Here’s what the coronavirus pandemic can teach us about tackling climate change

– ref. Here are 5 ways to flatten the climate change curve while stuck at home – https://theconversation.com/here-are-5-ways-to-flatten-the-climate-change-curve-while-stuck-at-home-134995

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

We have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of people working from home as directed by governments and employers around the world to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

If, as some expect, people are likely to work from home more often after the pandemic, what will this mean for infrastructure planning? Will cities still need all the multibillion-dollar road, public transport, telecommunications and energy projects, including some already in the pipeline?

Read more: Flexible working, the neglected congestion-busting solution for our cities

World’s largest work-from-home experiment

Remote working was steadily on the rise well before COVID-19. But the pandemic suddenly escalated the trend into the “world’s largest work-from-home experiment”. Many people who have had to embrace remote working during the pandemic might not want to return to the office every day once restrictions are lifted.

They might have found some work tasks are actually easier to do at home. Or they (and their employers) might have discovered things that weren’t thought possible to do from home are possible. They might then question why they had to go into the workplace so often in the first place.

But what impact will this have on our cities? After all, many aspects of our cities were designed with commuting, not working from home, in mind.

Read more: Coronavirus could spark a revolution in working from home. Are we ready?

Stress test for NBN and energy networks

From a telecommunications perspective, the huge increase in people working from home challenges the ways in which our existing networks were designed.

Data from Aussie Broadband show evening peak broadband use has increased 25% during the shutdown. Additional daytime increases are expected due to home schooling with term 2 starting.

Research by the then federal Department of Communications in 2018 estimated the average Australian household would need a maximum download speed of 49Mbps during peak-use times by 2026. If more people work from home after COVID-19, the size and times of peak use might need to be recalculated.

Another factor not modelled by the government research was the potential impact of an increase in uploads. This is a typical requirement for people working from home, as they now send large files via their suburban home networks, rather than their office networks in the city.

Read more: Coronavirus: telcos are picking up where the NBN is failing. Here’s what it means for you

Recent research by Octopus Energy in the UK has found domestic energy use patterns have also changed since COVID-19. With more people working from home, domestic energy use in the middle of the day is noticeably higher. Some 30% of customers use an average of 1.5kWh more electricity between 9am and 5pm.

Conversely, data from the US show electricity use in city centres and industrial areas has declined over the same period.

Less commuting means less congestion

Closer to home, new data from HERE Technologies illustrate just how much traffic congestion has eased.

Thursday afternoons from 5-5.15pm are normally the worst time of the week for traffic congestion in Melbourne. Last week the city’s roads recorded the sort of free-flowing traffic usually seen at 9.30am on a Sunday. Just 1.8% of Melbourne’s major roads were congested, a fraction of the usual 19.8% at that time.

All of Australia’s major cities are experiencing similar reductions. Transurban has reported traffic is down 43% on the Melbourne airport toll road, 29% on its Sydney roads and 27% in Queensland.

Passengers are also staying away from public transport in droves. For example, South Australian government statistics for Adelaide show passenger numbers have slumped by 69% for buses, by 74% for trains and by 77% for trams, compared with this time last year.

Read more: For public transport to keep running, operators must find ways to outlast coronavirus

What does this mean for infrastructure planning?

With these trends in mind, future investment in roads, public transport, energy and telecommunications will need to consider the likelihood of more people working from home.

Prior to COVID-19, Melbourne research found 64% of city workers regularly worked from home, but usually only one day a week, even though 50% of their work could be done anywhere. While the changes we are now seeing are a result of extreme circumstances, it is not inconceivable that, on average, everybody could continue to work from home one extra day per week after the pandemic. Even this would have significant implications for long-term urban planning.

The most recent Australian Census data show 9.2 million people typically commute to work each day. If people worked from home an average of one extra day per week, this would take 1.8 million commuters off the roads and public transport each day.

Many road and public transport projects will be based on forecasts of continuing increases in commuter numbers. If, instead, people work from home more often, this could call into question the need for those projects.

Areas outside city centres would also require more attention, as working from home creates a need for more evenly distributed networks of services for the likes of energy and telecommunications. Interestingly, such a trend could support long-term decentralisation plans, like those outlined in Melbourne’s Metropolitan Planning Strategy. And if such change encourages more people to live away from the big cities, it also could help to make housing more affordable.

Read more: Fancy an e-change? How people are escaping city congestion and living costs by working remotely

– ref. If more of us work from home after coronavirus we’ll need to rethink city planning – https://theconversation.com/if-more-of-us-work-from-home-after-coronavirus-well-need-to-rethink-city-planning-136261

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

Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese could be set for a face-off at a by-election in the marginal NSW seat of Eden-Monaro.

Labor MP Mike Kelly is expected to announce this week whether he will quit parliament. He has suffered continuing serious health problems.

Kelly, formerly a lawyer in the military who served in Iraq and on other overseas deployments, won the seat in 2007, lost it in 2013, and won it back in 2016. He is considered to have a strong personal vote.

Eden-Monaro is on a margin of about 1%. It has a large rural and coastal hinterland and contains the major town of Queanbeyan, which abuts Canberra. The seat has a high proportion of public servants.

Parts of the electorate were hit by the recent bush fires.

On the Coalition side, NSW deputy premier John Barilaro, the Nationals leader whose state seat is in the electorate, has left open the option of running, saying he is “not ruling anything out”.

If he won the seat, this would carry the risk of fresh instability in the federal Nationals. Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack could find himself under pressure from the ambitious Barilaro.

The Nationals polled only 7% in the seat at the last federal election but Barilaro is popular and has high recognition. He has good support in Queanbeyan.

Liberal senator Jim Molan, who lives in the electorate, might have a tilt at Liberal preselection.

He said he was keeping “all my options open”, although he also said, “I have important causes to continue to fight for as a Senator”. When he won Senate preselection for a casual vacancy, it was on the basis he would only serve the remainder of this term.

In a series of tweets, Molan predicted both the Liberals and the Nationals would run if there were a byelection.

Molan also noted, “We all know that by-elections are notoriously difficult to win, especially for governments. No incumbent government has won a seat from an opposition in the last 100 years.”

NSW transport minister Andrew Constance, a Liberal who holds the state seat of Bega and had a high profile during the bushfires, has also been mentioned as a possible contender for Liberal preselection.

Campaigning in a by-election this year would be constrained by the coronavirus, which will affect interactions even after most restrictions are rolled back.

His handling of the virus crisis has seen a big rise in Scott Morrison’s personal ratings, with this week’s Newspoll showing his approval at plus 40. Anthony Albanese is on plus 11. Morrison leads Albanese as better PM 56-28%.

But on the two-party vote the Coalition and Labor are on 50-50%, compared with the Coalition’s 51-49% in the previous poll.

A snapshot of how seriously the Australian economy is suffering from the coronavirus crisis will be given by treasurer Josh Frydenberg when parliament resumes on Tuesday May 12 for three days of sitting.

Frydenberg’s statement will come a day after the scheduled review of various restrictions, expected to see the nation starting to reopen a range of activities.

Frydenberg says the government will also provide an update on the economic and fiscal outlook in June, after the March quarter national accounts.

The virus crisis has meant the budget has been pushed back to October, with Morrison signalling last week he wants it to contain significant reform measures.

Last week Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe said Australian output was likely to fall by 10% in the first half of 2020 and unemployment was likely to reach 10% by June.

On the health side, the government is delighted with the initial public response to its tracing app which had more than two million downloads by late Monday.

The Victorian government has announced a testing blitz to set the state up for the potential easing of restrictions. Up to 100,000 people across the state are to be tested over the next fortnight.

Premier Daniel Andrews and state health minister Jenny Mikakos said this would “help inform decisions about slowly lifting restrictions, ahead of the State of Emergency being reviewed on 11 May”.

– ref. Possible byelection looms in marginal seat of Eden-Monaro – https://theconversation.com/possible-byelection-looms-in-marginal-seat-of-eden-monaro-137300

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mahmoud Elkhodr, Lecturer in Information and Communication Technologies, CQUniversity Australia

About 1.13 million people had downloaded the federal government’s COVIDSafe app by 6am today, just 12 hours after it’s release last night, said Health Minister Greg Hunt. The government is hoping at least 40% of the population will make use of the app, designed to help reduce the spread of the coronavirus disease.

Previously dubbed TraceTogether – in line with a similar app rolled out in Singapore – the coronavirus contact tracing app has been an ongoing cause of contention among the public. Many people have voiced concerns of an erosion of privacy, and potential misuse of citizen data by the government.

But how does COVIDSafe work? And to what extent has the app addressed our privacy concerns?

Read more: Coronavirus contact-tracing apps: most of us won’t cooperate unless everyone does

Getting started

The app’s landing page outlines its purpose: to help Australian health authorities trace and prevent COVID-19’s spread by contacting people who may have been in proximity (to a distance of about 1.5 metres) with a confirmed case, for 15 minutes or more.

The second screen explains how Bluetooth technology is used to record users’ contact with other app users. This screen says collected data is encrypted and can’t be accessed by other apps or users without a decryption mechanism. It also says the data is stored locally on users’ phones and isn’t sent to the government (remote server storage).

In subsequent screens, the app links to its privacy policy, seeks user consent to retrieve registration details, and lets users register by entering their name, age range, postcode and mobile number.

This is followed by a declaration page where the user must give consent to enable Bluetooth, “location permissions” and “battery optimiser”.

In regards to enabling location permissions, it’s important to note this isn’t the same as turning on location services. Location permissions must be enabled for COVIDSafe to access Bluetooth on Android and Apple devices. And access to your phone’s battery optimiser is required keep the app running in the background.

Once the user is registered, a notification should confirm the app is up and running.

Importantly, COVIDSafe doesn’t have an option for users to exit or “log-off”.

Currently, the only way to stop the app is to uninstall it, or turn off Bluetooth. The app’s reliance on prolonged Bluetooth usage also has users worried it might quickly drain their phone batteries.

Preliminary tests

Upon preliminary testing of the app, it seems the federal government has delivered on its promises surrounding data security.

Tests run for one hour showed the app didn’t transmit data to any external or remote server, and the only external communication made was a “handshake” to a remote server. This is simply a way of establishing a secure communication.

Additional tests should be carried out on this front.

Issues for iPhone users

According to reports, if COVIDsafe is being used on an iPhone in low-power mode, this may impact the app’s ability to track contacts.

Also, iPhone users must have the app open (in the foreground) for Bluetooth functionality to work. The federal government plans to fix this hitch “in a few weeks”, according to The Guardian.

Read more: The coronavirus contact tracing app won’t log your location, but it will reveal who you hang out with

This complication may be because Apple’s operating system generally doesn’t allow apps to run Bluetooth-related tasks, or perform Bluetooth-related events unless running in the foreground.

Source code

“Source code” is the term used to describe the set of instructions written during the development of a program that’s understandable to other programmers.

In a privacy impact assessment response from the Department of Health, the federal government said it would make COVIDSafe’s source code publicly available, “subject to consultation with” the Australian Cyber Security Centre. It’s unclear exactly when or how much of the source code will be released.

Making the app’s source code publicly available, or making it “open source”, would allow experts to examine the code to evaluate security risks (and potentially help fix them). For example, experts could determine whether the app collects any personal user information without consent. This would ensure COVIDSafe’s transparency and enable auditing of the app.

Releasing the source code isn’t only important for transparency, but also for understanding the app’s functionality. Some COVIDSafe users have reported the app wouldn’t accept their mobile number until they turned off wi-fi and used their mobile network (4G) instead. Until the app is made open source, it’s difficult to say exactly why this is.

Read more: Explainer: what is contact tracing and how does it help limit the coronavirus spread?

Civic duty

Overall, it seems COVIDSafe is a promising start to the national effort to ease lockdown restrictions, a luxury already afforded to some states including Queensland.

Questions have been raised around whether the app will later be made compulsory to download to reach the 40% uptake target, but current growth in download numbers suggests such enforcement may not be necessary as more people rise up to their “civic duty”.

That said, only time will reveal the extent to which Australians embrace this new contact tracing technology.

– ref. COVIDSafe tracking app reviewed: the government delivers on data security, but other hitches remain – https://theconversation.com/covidsafe-tracking-app-reviewed-the-government-delivers-on-data-security-but-other-hitches-remain-137249

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Glenn Albrecht, Honorary Associate, School of Geosciences, University of Sydney

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains references to deceased people.

I am a child of the Anthropocene, born in 1953. I have lived in a period of history also known as the “Great Acceleration” as huge negative change unfolded.

While contemplating these changes, I have sensed, within humanity, a profound sense of emotional isolation. To help overcome the solitude, I have created the idea of sumbiotude, thinking and working in companionship with others, to reconnect to life.

Being alive in this particular era, I have had the privilege of living through the rapid transition from a focus on that which is “obvious to the senses” to our new ways of rendering the invisible, visible.

Read more: From the bushfires to coronavirus, our old ‘normal’ is gone forever. So what’s next?

I also accept that reality is complex and independent of us and that new insights into nature can come via acts of scientific and conceptual discovery. However, I am always aware that I am walking in the footsteps of the late Big Bill Neidjie of Arnhem Land when in Gagudju Man he suggests:

We walk on earth,

We look after,

like rainbow sitting on top.

But something underneath,

under the ground.

We don’t know.

You don’t know.

At a time of massive biophysical change (heatwaves, wildfire, floods, pandemics), we need to expand our language to understand these changes and to be able to share the emotional upheavals they engender.

I’ve created a “sumbiography” (from the Greek, sumbios, which means living together) to investigate the union of elements in nature and culture that have symbiotically cohered into a view about life – a philosophy of my own.

For others, undertaking a sumbiography has the potential to help them find their own particular view of their emotional connection – or the lack of it – to the Earth.

A sumbiography can reveal just what kind of emotional compass we have with respect to our personal relationship to this living planet.

A new vocabulary

As a philosopher, my response to the encounter with the open cut coal mines of the desolated Upper Hunter region of NSW was to rethink the emotions of attachment to and abandonment of a place that is loved, and to find the right way to express my feelings.

As there was nothing in the English language to help me, I decided to create my own concept – a neologism – to adequately describe the emotional distress at the loss of one’s endemic sense of place.

It took the combination of a lifetime of teaching, thinking and a creative effort shared with my wife, Jillian, before the concept of “solastalgia” entered the world in 2003.

Read more: The age of solastalgia

Solastalgia, the distressing lived experience of negative environmental change, arose from understanding that the positive side of the lived experience of Earth emotions had to have negative equivalents. Solastalgia marked the beginning of my journey of mental-landscape discovery.

That such a concept did not already exist in the English language was, to me, a sign of just how deeply alienated from our home we – as an Earth-destroying, or “terraphthoric”, culture – had become.

Co-existence with non-human life

My mother played a huge part in my rediscovery and naming of different, more positive, psychoterratic emotions.

In her late seventies, she was struggling: the legacy of tuberculosis had left her breathless and she was having trouble both retaining her independence and continuing as a volunteer guide at Kings Park in Perth. I shopped for her and we ate together most nights.

After a year where I lived close by, she suffered a big, bloody and lonely fall. Following her hospitalisation and recovery, I took her to live with me in the village of Jarrahdale in the Perth Hills.

Our house and block, “Birdland”, had jarrah trees on it and ground orchids; it was visited by kangaroos, possums, quenda (southern brown bandicoot) and many different kinds of birds.

My mother and I thrived there. She reconnected with her own endemic sense of place, and I thinking about the concepts and the associated words needed to account for that sense of reconnection and good Earth emotions.

If the mine-scape of the Upper Hunter and the homogeneity of the city of Perth represented the solastalgic Anthropocene to me, Jarrahdale had offered a lifeline to a different lifestyle and worldview – one where co-existence with non-human life went beyond companion and domesticated animals and a limited number of edible plants.

Adding richness to sumbiography

In loving each other as kin, my mother and I also shared a love of the endemic (endemophilia). This was made manifest in the moments when spider, donkey, enamel or bee orchids were found with almost the same excitement as very first encounters.

These five years with my mother added richness to my sumbiography.

As an adult, I could reunite with my past and feel, beyond solastalgia, positive emotional states residing in me that were also without the corresponding concepts, words and ideas in my language.

Read more: Caring for community to beat coronavirus echoes Indigenous ideas of a good life

While based at Murdoch University, I began a systematic quest to negate solastalgia and all the other negative Earth emotions to add something new, something “terranascient” or Earth-creating that could join the dialectic of the psychoterratic.

Symbiosis

In 2011, I created the meme of the Symbiocene, which I defined as the next era in human and Earth history where reintegration of the Anthropos (humans) with the Sumbios (symbiotic life) was completed.

In 2013, aged 84, my mother died. Half her ashes were scattered carefully into the Kings Park bush around a huge old gnarly log from a long-dead jarrah tree.

Ground orchids abounded in this place, so too the red and green kangaroo paws. She deserved a presence in that park, as her spirit had graced it for more than 20 years. I imagine she became a copse of pink enamel orchids, glistening in the Perth spring sun.

If humans are kind to the Earth, some of her will also become a new jarrah tree, auburn hair all fiery in its wood grain.

For the great bulk of human existence, symbiosis was typical of our relationship to the rest of nature, and I wanted to regain the property of what the Greeks called sumbiosis or “companionship”.

Living together

If I live to be 100 years of age, it is my hope that my life will come to exemplify a neologism that is sumbiotude, or the state of living together.

Sumbiotude is the exact opposite of solitude: instead of contemplating life in isolation, sumbiotude involves contemplation and completion of a lifespan with the loving companionship of humans and non-humans.

I will also be happy if my creative, conceptual work can help Generation Symbiocene – which includes my own children, my step-grandchildren and my five-year-old granddaughter – live in a world where positive Earth emotions prevail.

This is an edited extract republished with permission from GriffithReview68: Getting On (Text), ed Ashley Hay griffithreview.com

– ref. ‘Sumbiotude’: a new word in the tiny (but growing) vocabulary for our emotional connection to the environment – https://theconversation.com/sumbiotude-a-new-word-in-the-tiny-but-growing-vocabulary-for-our-emotional-connection-to-the-environment-136616

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steven Howard, Associate Professor, Child Development, University of Wollongong

With governments around the world asking their citizens to avoid places, activities and gatherings to save lives, this just might be the largest ever international effort to self-regulate our actions against competing desires and impulses.

To achieve this, we must overcome our desire to enjoy the sun and sand, go shopping or to the pub, and even embrace family and friends.

Of course, it’s not so easy for young children, who must forego activities they previously enjoyed and may be confused by contradictions – like being able to see friends at, but not after, school.

But there are ways parents can help children learn to regulate their emotions and behaviours, and to practise these skills.

Read more: 8 tips on what to tell your kids about coronavirus

Why do kids need to learn to self-regulate?

Self-regulation has always played an important role in our lives. It’s what underpins our ability to control our behaviours, emotions and interactions, while at the same time avoiding distractions and enticing alternatives.

With lower levels of self-regulation, our decisions and behaviours would more frequently be poorly conceived, unnecessarily risky or inappropriate to the situation – often with undesirable results.

Even in the early years of life, the ability to self-regulate is important. Pre-school-aged children who have better self-regulation are often better prepared for school and life.

They then tend to:

• have higher levels of academic success
• make fewer risky decisions as adolescents
• and have better health, wealth and productivity as adults.

So, what can we do to support children’s self-regulation, especially during this pandemic, when their capacity for self-control already appears to be under strain?

Self-regulation requires at least three things: selecting a goal, problem-solving and working on motivation, and overcoming distraction and impulses.

1. Selecting a goal

Self-regulatory behaviour is goal-directed. That means children must first decide to behave in a particular way.

If a child is unaware of (or forgets) a family convention to wait for everyone to be seated before starting to eat, a child starting to eat before others may appear like a consequence of poor self-regulation. Yet the child never decided to pursue that goal in the first place.

Read more: A parent’s guide to why teens make bad decisions

We need to support children’s thinking and decision-making around goals, while acknowledging that plans can change and often need to be adjusted.

Adults can support children to be more goal-oriented by giving them opportunities to lead and make decisions, as well as encouraging them to devise simple plans, strategies and procedures to achieve goals.

This may be as simple as asking children to decide what they would like to play (building a cubby house), and plan where they would play it (bedroom), with whom (mum, dad, sibling), and what resources they will need (cardboard box, cushions).

2. Problem-solving and motivation

Even when a goal has been decided, the path to its achievement is often not immediate. Children will encounter numerous distractions and competing opportunities along the way. So they need effective problem-solving and motivation strategies.

To be an effective problem-solver, children must understand there is more than one way to achieve something. This requires creative and critical-thinking, flexibility and persistence.

As adults we can encourage these by:

• engaging children in brainstorming activities, like finding an alternate ending to a familiar story, such as Peter Pan losing his shadow

• using open-ended questioning and posing small problems – as in “How might we capture our shadow? What will we need?”

• encouraging reflective thinking, such as “I wonder, why don’t we see shadows on the ground at night?”

Supporting young children to persist in the face of challenge means taking cues from your child, validating their efforts, reinforcing their solutions and encouraging creative alternatives.

3. Overcome distractions and impulses

Children need to be able to overcome distractions and impulses that are contrary to their goals.

As with most things, this self-regulatory capacity can benefit from practice. This can be achieved in simple, playful ways.

One game, played all around the world, is musical statues. Children dance while the music plays and freeze when the music stops.

What often happens in this game, though, is children who can’t or don’t freeze are either left to continue dancing or they are “out”. Those who perhaps could benefit most from the practise get the least opportunity to practise.

Instead, if a child doesn’t freeze in time, have them try the next round sitting on their bottom, removing their legs from the equation. As they succeed, they can return to standing.

Where children can already do this well, why not reverse things so you dance when the music is off and remain still while the music plays?

This gives children practice controlling impulses – in this case, to keep dancing when the rule requires them to stop – at an achievable level of challenge.

For parents, it gives them unique insight into children’s capacities to control their behaviours, and where they may require additional support.

Read more: ‘Stupid coronavirus!’ In uncertain times, we can help children through mindfulness and play

What else do you need to take into account?

Things like stress, tiredness, hunger, fear, sadness and loneliness can deplete children’s limited self-regulation resources. Parents should seek to minimise these factors before trying to extend children’s self-regulation further.

In the current climate, we can ensure children are operating at their self-regulatory best when we reduce unnecessary demands, ensure routines are not overloaded, are patient and realistic when setting responsibilities.

Lastly, whether we are aware of it or not, children often model themselves on the ways we act and respond. As adults, it’s important to reflect on our own behaviours too: do we give up when challenged, yell when frustrated, fight for resources, or preference others in need over our own wants?

How we respond to this “new normal” will set an example for our youngest generation – and they will undoubtedly learn from our responses.

Read more: Coronavirus: 5 tips for navigating children’s screen time during social distancing

– ref. How to help young children regulate their emotions and behaviours during the pandemic – https://theconversation.com/how-to-help-young-children-regulate-their-emotions-and-behaviours-during-the-pandemic-137245

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melanie Walters, PhD candidate in music, University of Adelaide

There are very few silver linings that have developed from the current catastrophic health crisis, but the wider accessibility of world class performances is one positive outcome to have emerged in recent weeks.

Breaking Glass – a quadruple bill of single-act operas composed by four Australian women – is an example of these. Originally programmed for late March at Carriageworks, it instead premiered on Facebook Live on Saturday.

Breaking Glass is a collaboration between Sydney Conservatorium’s Composing Women professional development program and the Sydney Chamber Opera (SCO). While gender inequality is an issue across most art forms, the inequality in operatic programming is especially stark. Projects such as this are essential to bringing new perspectives and diverse artistic voices to audiences within an otherwise conservative art form.

Read more: In a notoriously sexist art form, Australian women composers are making their voices heard

SCO was the ideal partner for Composing Women in this project. Established in 2010 to present operas of the 20th and 21st century, SCO has shown a commitment to works by Australian composers, with previous productions including Mary Finsterer’s Biographica in 2017 and Elliott Gyger’s Oscar and Lucinda in 2019.

While the name suggests a reference to breaking through the glass ceiling in the opera world, the violent imagery of breaking glass is also fitting in the context of the contemporary themes of ecological disaster, inequality, mental illness, and dystopia explored in these four works.

Four works

Her Dark Marauder, composed by Georgia Scott with the libretto by Pierce Wilcox, is a reworking of concepts drawn from the works of Sylvia Plath. There was an almost expressionist aesthetic to both the staging and the music.

Opening with the three singers separated on the stage surrounded by haze, Scott’s use of insistent repeated-note instrumental motifs, tremolo strings and flutter tonguing immediately evoked a disturbing, oppressive atmosphere. The vocalists – Jane Sheldon, Simon Lobelson, and Jessica O’Donoghue in this work – showed exceptional range, with virtuosic execution of techniques such as vocal fry, portamenti and fricative sounds along with beautifully phrased melodic material.

In Commute, composer Peggy Polias depicts a woman’s daily commute through the lens of ancient Greek mythology and Homer’s Odyssey, with two “suitors” representing mythical monsters. The staging of this work, which was directed by Clemence Williams, was particularly effective, with O’Donoghue hesitantly walking across stage while in front of menacing, oversized projections of hands, and later a single eye representing the cyclops.

This short 20-minute work has a satisfying five-part structure full of contrasting musical textures. From the pulsating white noise and fragmented plosive vocalisations from the two suitors (played by Lobelson and Mitchell Riley) in the opening Amen I through to the entreating modal melody from O’Donoghue in Episode II: The Eye, Polias employed a vast range of compositional techniques to great effect. Commute ended on a note of refreshing optimism, with the final Dawn section featuring interwoven pentatonic melodic lines against the visual effects of a sunrise.

Josephine Macken’s The Tent diverged the most from typical operatic conventions. The title refers to a short story of the same name by Margaret Atwood, which is used as a conceptual framework rather than narrative structure. This abstract, almost wordless work explores the idea of researchers feeding knowledge into an intelligent machine in the wake of an ecological disaster. Macken has created a desolate soundscape using howling winds, drones, microtonality, with the vocal text mostly comprising disjointed phonemes, sustained vowel sounds and fricatives.

Bree van Reyk’s The Invisible Bird draws a connection between invisible and forgotten women in history and extinct or endangered birds. Its minimalist libretto consists of names of vulnerable, endangered and extinct bird species. Despite the seriousness of its subject manner, there was humour and absurdity in the staging. With three performers dressed in formal wear, it opened with cabaret-like choreography complete with jazz hands accompanying birdcalls from both singers and instrumentalists.

The music was palindromic in structure, starting and ending with energetic polyphony. The middle section was particularly poignant, with Sheldon portraying a night parrot shedding its feathers while mournfully singing the names of extinct species.

Virtuosity under pressure

Despite the difficult circumstances, all aspects of this production were outstanding.

The singers showed impressive virtuosity throughout, as did the instrumentalists in the small ensemble, which included some of Australia’s most experienced and committed new music practitioners.

Breaking Glass is a testament to the importance of professional development programs like Composing Women. It is vital new, ambitious artistic work has the opportunity to be presented. In this case, the result was spectacular. While the four operas were very different from each other, they were equally engaging, relevant and thought-provoking.

Getting this production ready to premiere in a different format in such a short time shows adaptability and hard work from all involved. Hopefully this is a sign that large scale, innovative art forms will be able to weather the current crisis, despite unprecedented challenges to the sector.

Breaking Glass can be viewed online. In lieu of ticket purchases, tax deductible donations can be made to SCO.

– ref. Breaking Glass review: Sydney Chamber Opera livestreams premiere – https://theconversation.com/breaking-glass-review-sydney-chamber-opera-livestreams-premiere-136947

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melanie Walters, PhD candidate in music, University of Adelaide

There are very few silver linings that have developed from the current catastrophic health crisis, but the wider accessibility of world class performances is one positive outcome to have emerged in recent weeks.

Breaking Glass – a quadruple bill of single-act operas composed by four Australian women – is an example of these. Originally programmed for late March at Carriageworks, it instead premiered on Facebook Live on Saturday.

Breaking Glass is a collaboration between Sydney Conservatorium’s Composing Women professional development program and the Sydney Chamber Opera (SCO). While gender inequality is an issue across most art forms, the inequality in operatic programming is especially stark. Projects such as this are essential to bringing new perspectives and diverse artistic voices to audiences within an otherwise conservative art form.

Read more: In a notoriously sexist art form, Australian women composers are making their voices heard

SCO was the ideal partner for Composing Women in this project. Established in 2010 to present operas of the 20th and 21st century, SCO has shown a commitment to works by Australian composers, with previous productions including Mary Finsterer’s Biographica in 2017 and Elliott Gyger’s Oscar and Lucinda in 2019.

While the name suggests a reference to breaking through the glass ceiling in the opera world, the violent imagery of breaking glass is also fitting in the context of the contemporary themes of ecological disaster, inequality, mental illness, and dystopia explored in these four works.

Four works

Her Dark Marauder, composed by Georgia Scott with the libretto by Pierce Wilcox, is a reworking of concepts drawn from the works of Sylvia Plath. There was an almost expressionist aesthetic to both the staging and the music.

Opening with the three singers separated on the stage surrounded by haze, Scott’s use of insistent repeated-note instrumental motifs, tremolo strings and flutter tonguing immediately evoked a disturbing, oppressive atmosphere. The vocalists – Jane Sheldon, Simon Lobelson, and Jessica O’Donoghue in this work – showed exceptional range, with virtuosic execution of techniques such as vocal fry, portamenti and fricative sounds along with beautifully phrased melodic material.

In Commute, composer Peggy Polias depicts a woman’s daily commute through the lens of ancient Greek mythology and Homer’s Odyssey, with two “suitors” representing mythical monsters. The staging of this work, which was directed by Clemence Williams, was particularly effective, with O’Donoghue hesitantly walking across stage while in front of menacing, oversized projections of hands, and later a single eye representing the cyclops.

This short 20-minute work has a satisfying five-part structure full of contrasting musical textures. From the pulsating white noise and fragmented plosive vocalisations from the two suitors (played by Lobelson and Mitchell Riley) in the opening Amen I through to the entreating modal melody from O’Donoghue in Episode II: The Eye, Polias employed a vast range of compositional techniques to great effect. Commute ended on a note of refreshing optimism, with the final Dawn section featuring interwoven pentatonic melodic lines against the visual effects of a sunrise.

Josephine Macken’s The Tent diverged the most from typical operatic conventions. The title refers to a short story of the same name by Margaret Atwood, which is used as a conceptual framework rather than narrative structure. This abstract, almost wordless work explores the idea of researchers feeding knowledge into an intelligent machine in the wake of an ecological disaster. Macken has created a desolate soundscape using howling winds, drones, microtonality, with the vocal text mostly comprising disjointed phonemes, sustained vowel sounds and fricatives.

Bree van Reyk’s The Invisible Bird draws a connection between invisible and forgotten women in history and extinct or endangered birds. Its minimalist libretto consists of names of vulnerable, endangered and extinct bird species. Despite the seriousness of its subject manner, there was humour and absurdity in the staging. With three performers dressed in formal wear, it opened with cabaret-like choreography complete with jazz hands accompanying birdcalls from both singers and instrumentalists.

The music was palindromic in structure, starting and ending with energetic polyphony. The middle section was particularly poignant, with Sheldon portraying a night parrot shedding its feathers while mournfully singing the names of extinct species.

Virtuosity under pressure

Despite the difficult circumstances, all aspects of this production were outstanding.

The singers showed impressive virtuosity throughout, as did the instrumentalists in the small ensemble, which included some of Australia’s most experienced and committed new music practitioners.

Breaking Glass is a testament to the importance of professional development programs like Composing Women. It is vital new, ambitious artistic work has the opportunity to be presented. In this case, the result was spectacular. While the four operas were very different from each other, they were equally engaging, relevant and thought-provoking.

Getting this production ready to premiere in a different format in such a short time shows adaptability and hard work from all involved. Hopefully this is a sign that large scale, innovative art forms will be able to weather the current crisis, despite unprecedented challenges to the sector.

Breaking Glass can be viewed online. In lieu of ticket purchases, tax deductible donations can be made to SCO.

– ref. Breaking Glass review: Sydney Chamber Opera livestreams premiere to showcase composing women – https://theconversation.com/breaking-glass-review-sydney-chamber-opera-livestreams-premiere-to-showcase-composing-women-136947

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne

This week’s Newspoll, conducted April 22-25 from a sample of 1,519, had a 50-50 tie between the major parties, a one-point gain for Labor since the last Newspoll, three weeks ago. Primary votes were 41% Coalition (down one), 36% Labor (up two), 12% Greens (down one) and 4% One Nation (down one). Figures are from The Poll Bludger.

Despite Labor’s voting intentions gain, Scott Morrison’s ratings jumped again, following a record 38-point gain in net approval last time. 68% (up seven) were satisfied with his performance and 28% (down seven) were dissatisfied. That’s a net approval of +40, up 14 points. Morrison’s net approval is the best for a PM since Kevin Rudd in October 2009.

Read more: Morrison sees massive ratings surge in Newspoll over coronavirus crisis; Trump also improves

Anthony Albanese also improved his ratings, with his net approval up two points to +11 after a nine-point gain last time. Morrison led as better PM by 56-28 (53-29 three weeks ago).

Ratings for the PM are correlated strongly with voting intentions, so having the PM’s net approval at +40 while voting intentions are tied is abnormal. Analyst Kevin Bonham tweeted this chart showing that this Newspoll is a major outlier.

The most likely explanation for the discrepancy between voting intentions and the PM’s ratings is that Labor and Greens voters approve of Morrison’s performance on the coronavirus crisis, but they distrust the Coalition in general.

Australia’s performance on coronavirus has been strong by international standards. I expect Morrison’s ratings to stay high if Australia continues to perform well, as long as the public thinks there is a crisis. Once the crisis is perceived to be over, Morrison’s ratings are likely to drop over normal partisan conflict.

South Korea is another country that has performed well on coronavirus. The left-wing Democratic party of the incumbent president was rewarded for this performance at April 15 parliamentary elections. They won 180 of the 300 seats (up 57 since 2016), to 103 for conservative parties (down 19).

In an additional Newspoll question, 54% said they would be prepared to install the government’s voluntary coronavirus tracking app, while 39% said they would not install it.

Trump’s ratings slide and Biden leads in key states

This section is an updated version of an article I wrote for The Poll Bludger, published on Friday.

In the FiveThirtyEight poll aggregate, Donald Trump’s ratings with all polls are 43.4% approve, 52.4% disapprove (net -9.0%). With polls of registered or likely voters, Trump’s ratings are 43.8% approve, 52.5% disapprove (net -8.7%). Since my article three weeks ago, Trump has lost five points on net approval, returning his ratings to about their early March levels, before the coronavirus crisis began.

As the US coronavirus death toll increases to over 50,000, there has been far more criticism of Trump’s early response, and this appears to have punctured the “rally round the flag” effect.

Furthermore, there has been a massive economic impact from the virus and related shutdowns: in the past five weeks, over 26 million filed for unemployment benefits. In the latest week, over 4.4 million filed. While this is a slowdown, it is far ahead of the previous record of 695,000 weekly jobless claims. The April jobs report, to be released in early May, will be grim.

The RealClearPolitics average of national polls gives Joe Biden a 5.9% lead over Trump, little changed from 6.1% three weeks ago. However, most of the polls in the average were taken in early April, when Trump’s ratings were better.

As we know from 2016, the US does not use the popular vote to elect presidents; instead, each state is allocated Electoral Votes (EVs). A state’s EVs are the sum of its House seats (population dependent) and senators (always two). There are 538 total EVs, so it takes 270 to win. With two minor exceptions, states award their EVs winner-takes-all.

In 2016, Trump won 306 EVs to Hillary Clinton’s 232, ignoring “faithless” electors, despite losing the popular vote by 2.1%. Trump won Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan by 1.2% or less.

The three most recent Florida polls give Biden an average two-point lead. In Michigan, he has an eight-point lead in the only April poll. In Pennsylvania, Biden averages a seven-point lead in two April polls. In Arizona, which has trended Democratic at recent elections, Biden leads Trump by 9% in an April poll.

Despite noisy protests in Michigan and other states advocating an end to social distancing, polls show the vast majority of Americans want social distancing to continue. In an AP-NORC poll, just 12% thought distancing measures went too far, 26% said they didn’t go far enough and 61% said they are about right.

To have a realistic chance of winning the next election, Trump needs the US economy to be perceived as improving by November. While his base is loyal, lower-educated voters in general want a good economy, and Trump needs their support to offset losses among higher educated voters owing to his behaviour.

Despite the continued economic and coronavirus woe, the Dow Jones has rebounded from a low below 18,600 on March 23 to be currently above 23,700. Stock traders anticipate a V-shaped recovery, which would assist Trump. But since March 31, there have been 25,000 to 39,000 new US coronavirus cases every day. I am sceptical that the US can reduce the caseload to a point where economic activity can safely resume anytime soon.

– ref. Labor gains in Newspoll despite Morrison’s continued approval surge; Trump’s ratings slide – https://theconversation.com/labor-gains-in-newspoll-despite-morrisons-continued-approval-surge-trumps-ratings-slide-137246

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tom Spurling, Professor of Innovation Studies, Swinburne University of Technology

In the wake of COVID-19, we’re seeing intense international competition for urgently-needed supplies including personal protection equipment and ventilators. In Australia, this could extend to other critical imports such as pharmaceuticals and medicines. And when our manufacturing sector can’t fill unexpected breaks in supply chains, we all face risk.

However, Australians have lived through crises of comparable magnitude before. During and after the two world wars, scientific innovation played a crucial role in reform. It led to the creation of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and an array of subsequent discoveries.

Some may assume life will go back to normal once COVID-19 withdraws. But if the past is to be learnt from, Australia should prepare for a greatly different future – hopefully one in which science and innovation once more take centre stage.

Read more: How Australia played the world’s first music on a computer

The birth of the CSIR

It was WWI that heightened awareness of the role of science in defence and economic growth. In December 1915, Prime Minister William (Billy) Hughes announced he would set up a national laboratory “which would allow men of all branches of science to use their capabilities in application to industry”.

This led to the formation of the CSIR in 1926, and its rebirth as the CSIRO in 1949. In the years after WW1, the CSIR contributed greatly to improvements in primary production, including through animal nutrition, disease prevention, and the control of weeds and pests in crops. It also advanced primary product processing and overseas product transport.

In 1937, the CSIR’s mandate was expanded to include secondary industry research, including a national Aircraft and Engine Testing and Research Laboratory. This was motivated by the government’s concern to increase Australia’s manufacturing capabilities and reduce its dependence on technology imports.

War efforts in the spotlight

The CSIR’s research focus shifted in 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbour. Australian war historian Boris Schedvin has written about the hectic scramble to increase the nation’s defence capacities and expand essential production following the attack, including expansion of the scientific workforce.

The John Curtin government was commissioned in October, 1941. Curtin appointed John Dedman as the Minister for War Organisation and Industry, as well as the minister in charge of the CSIR. Dedman’s department was concerned with producing military supplies and equipment, and other items to support society in wartime.

Dedman instructed the council to concentrate on “problems connected with the war effort”. The CSIR responded robustly. By 1942, the divisions of food preservation and transport, forest products, aeronautics, industrial chemistry, the national standards laboratory and the lubricants and bearings section were practically focused on war work full-time.

Scaling up production

The Division of Industrial Chemistry was the division most closely involved in actual production. It was formed in 1940 with Ian Wark as chief, who’d previously worked at the Electrolytic Zinc Company.

Wark was familiar with the chemical industry, and quickly devoted resources to developing processes (using Australian materials) to produce essential chemicals to the pilot plant stage. They were soon producing chemicals for drugs at the Fishermans Bend site, including the starting material for the synthesis of the anaesthetic drug novocaine (procaine).

The researchers developed a method to separate the drug ergot, which is now essential in gynaecology, from rye. They also contributed directly to the war effort by manufacturing the plasticiser used in the nose caps of bullets and shells.

CSIRO today

In response to the current pandemic, CSIRO at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness in Geelong, Victoria, is working with the international Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness to improve understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They are currently testing two vaccine candidates for efficacy, and evaluating the best way to administer the vaccine.

Australian scientists have made monumental contributions on this front in the past. In the 1980s, CSIRO and its university collaborators began efforts that led to the creation of anti-flu drug Relenza, the first drug to successfully treat the flu. Relenza was then commercialised by Australian biotech company Biota, which licensed the drug to British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline.

The CSIRO also invented the Hendra virus vaccine for horses, launched in 2012.

Prior to that, Ian Frazer at the University of Queensland developed the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine which was launched in 2006.

Read more: How we developed the Hendra virus vaccine for horses

What can we take away?

COVID-19 is one of many viral diseases that need either a vaccine or a drug (or both). Others are hepatitis B, dengue fever, HIV and the viruses that cause the common cold. Now may be Australia’s chance to use our world class medical research and medicinal chemistry capabilities to become a dominant world supplier of anti-viral medications.

As was the case during WWI and WWII, this pandemic drives home the need to retain our capabilities at a time of supply chain disruption. While it’s impossible for a medium-sized economy like Australia’s to be entirely self-sufficient, it’s important we lean on our strengths to not only respond, but thrive during these complicated times.

In 2020, Australia has a much greater and broader research and production capacity than it did in 1940. And as we march through this pandemic, we can learn from the past and forge new paths to enhance our position as pioneers in sciencific innovation.

– ref. Coronavirus lessons from past crises: how WWI and WWII spurred scientific innovation in Australia – https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-lessons-from-past-crises-how-wwi-and-wwii-spurred-scientific-innovation-in-australia-136859

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Craig Mark, Professor, Faculty of International Studies, Kyoritsu Women’s University

As countries around the world debate when and how to ease pandemic restrictions, coronavirus infections continue their steady rise in Japan.

On April 16, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was forced to declare a national state of emergency until at least May 6, covering all 47 prefectures. This extended an initial state of emergency declaration on April 7 for seven prefectures, including the cities of Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka.

Two medical groups have also warned that a “collapse in emergency medicine” has already happened as hospitals are being forced to turn away patients, presaging a possible collapse of the overall health care system.

How did Japan get to this point? The country had initially been held up as having one of the more effective responses to the coronavirus in the early days of the pandemic. Yet, its curve has not even started to flatten like those of its neighbours, South Korea, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The relatively low rate of infections from January to March was credited by some to Japanese societal norms: bowing instead of handshakes and hugs, the use of masks in flu season and generally high standards of personal hygiene.

Japan has long had a reputation for conformity and adherence to rules, so a high level of compliance with public safety directions was expected.

Read more: Japan’s capricious response to coronavirus could dent its international reputation

However, overconfidence in these practices, and the ongoing lack of firm direction from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government, may have lulled many Japanese into a false sense of security. This has been starkly demonstrated in recent weeks as crowds have flocked to parks to view the cherry blossoms, ignoring requests from local authorities to stay home.

Opinion polls now show at least half of Japanese disapprove of the government’s handling of the crisis and believe Abe’s national emergency declaration came too late.

Erratic decision-making from the start

From the start of the pandemic, Abe’s government has been criticised for being too offhand in its response and erratic in its decision-making.

Japan’s first major misstep occurred in early February, when the Diamond Princess cruise ship was quarantined in Yokohama. At least 23 passengers were allowed to disembark and go home without being tested, and around 90 government employees returned directly to their Tokyo offices after visiting the stricken vessel.

More than 700 cases were eventually linked to the cruise ship, in total.

Weeks later, Abe then ordered schools to remain closed until the end of the spring break in April, a sudden decision that caught both teachers and parents by surprise, leaving them little time to plan and prepare.

Read more: Coronavirus in Japan: why is the infection rate relatively low?

Then came the lack of decisiveness on the Tokyo Olympics. Abe reluctantly announced in late March that the games would be postponed in 2020, but only after countries began to pull out and the government was accused of dragging its feet.

Read more: Why haven’t the Olympics been cancelled from coronavirus? That’s the A$20bn question

Abe’s government has also faced criticism over relatively low levels of testing. Over 112,000 tests have been conducted, at a rate of around 7,800 per day in April. But the government’s decision to restrict most tests to highly symptomatic patients means actual cases are likely being under-counted.

At a press conference in mid-April, Abe pledged to rectify shortages of personal protective equipment for medical workers and ramp up testing. As an interim measure, two cloth masks are being mailed to every household, an unpopular gesture widely lampooned on social media as “Abenomasks”.

Even when Abe has tried to send the right message, the tone has been off. This was perhaps best symbolised by the mocking reaction to his well-intentioned “stay home” Twitter post, which portrayed him drinking tea and patting his dog.

Critics said it showed just how out of touch he was with the lives of ordinary Japanese.

Tokyo’s governor outshines Abe

As cases began to spike in late March, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike held an emergency press conference to urge residents refrain from nonessential outings, such as visits to parks to view cherry blossoms.

But despite rising concerns from medical authorities, as late as March 31, Abe’s government still denied there was a need for a national state of emergency.

When the state of emergency was finally declared in mid-April, many feared it still wasn’t enough. Under the law, governors can requisition property and medical supplies to use to treat COVID-19 patients, but crucially, police have no enforcement powers to close businesses or restrict the movements of individuals. People and companies can only be asked to voluntarily comply.

The Japanese government could interpret two articles in the constitution to impose a stricter lockdown, as long as appropriate legislation is passed in the Diet, Japan’s parliament.

However, Abe has thus far avoided doing so. He seems to be bowing to pressure from the Keidanren, a major corporate lobby group and donor to his party, out of fear the economy could descend into an even deeper recession than the -5.2% reduction in economic growth projected by the IMF.

Demands have been increasing from health authorities, prefectural governments and opposition parties for Abe to take more forceful action. Revealing his diminishing political authority, he is even being pressed by both senior figures and rank-and-file members within his own Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

The LDP’s junior coalition partner, the Komeito party, also threatened to break from the ruling coalition. The move forced Abe to extend a planned income support scheme for low-income households into a universal payment of 100,000 yen (nearly A$1,500) to all citizens, as part of the government’s record 117 trillion yen (A$1.7 billion) emergency stimulus spending.

And while Abe has floundered, Koike, his longtime rival, has emerged as a strong leader during the crisis, praised for her clear public communication and decisive action.

Abe’s third consecutive term as LDP president expires in September 2021, around the time national elections are due. Even if Japan recovers by then, his legacy as Japan’s longest-serving prime minister is now surely being tarnished.

– ref. How Shinzo Abe has fumbled Japan’s coronavirus response – https://theconversation.com/how-shinzo-abe-has-fumbled-japans-coronavirus-response-136860

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elisa Palazzo, Urbanist and landscape planner – Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Built Environment, UNSW

First the drought, then bushfires and then flash floods: a chain of extreme events hit Australia hard in recent months. The coronavirus pandemic has only temporarily shifted our attention towards a new emergency, adding yet another risk.

We knew from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the risk of extreme events was rising. What we perhaps didn’t realise was the high probability of different extreme events hitting one after the other in the same regions. Especially in the fringes of Australian cities, residents are facing new levels of environmental risk, especially from bushfires and floods.

Read more: Some say we’ve seen bushfires worse than this before. But they’re ignoring a few key facts

But this cycle of devastation is not inevitable if we understand the connections between events and do something about them.

Measures to slow climate change are in the hands of policymakers. But, at the adaptation level, we can still do many things to reduce the impacts of extreme events on our cities.

We can start by increasing our capacity to see these phenomena as one problem to be tackled locally, rather than distinct problems to be addressed centrally. Solutions should be holistic, community-centred and focused on people’s practices and shared responsibilities.

Respond to emergency

We can draw lessons from humanitarian responses to large disasters, including both national and international cases. A recent review of disaster responses in urban areas found several factors are critical for more successful recovery.

One is to prioritise the needs of people themselves. This requires genuine, collaborative engagement. People who have been through a bushfire or flood are not “helpless victims”. They are survivors who need to be supported and listened to, not dictated to, in terms of what they may or may not need.

Another lesson is to link recovery efforts, rather than have individual agencies provide services separately. For instance, an organisation focusing on housing recovery needs to work closely with organisations that are providing water or sanitation. A coordinated approach is more efficient, less wearying on those needing help, and better reflects the interconnected reality of everyday life.

In the aid world this is known as an “area-based” approach. It prioritises efforts that are driven by people demand rather than by the supply available.

A third lesson is give people money, not goods. Money allows people to decide what they really need, rather than rely on the assumptions of others.

As the bushfires have shown, donations of secondhand goods and clothes often turn into piles of unwanted goods. Disposal then becomes a problem in its own right.

Read more: How to donate to Australian bushfire relief: give money, watch for scams and think long term

Combining local knowledge and engagement

Planning approaches in outer urban areas should be realigned with our current understanding of bushfire and flood risk. This situation is challenging planners to engage with residents in new ways to ensure local needs are met, especially in relation to disaster resilience.

In areas of high bushfire risk, planning needs to connect equally with the full range of locals. Landscape and biodiversity experts, including Indigenous land managers, and emergency managers should work in association with planning processes that welcome input from residents. This approach is highly likely to reduce risks.

Planners have a vital job to create platforms that enable the interplay of ideas, local values and traditional knowledge. Authentic engagement can increase residents’ awareness of environmental hazards. It can also pave the way for specific actions by authorities to reduce risks, such as those undertaken by Country Fire Service community engagement units in South Australia.

Read more: Rebuilding from the ashes of disaster: this is what Australia can learn from India

Managing water to build bushfire resilience

Regenerating ecosystems by responding to flood risk can be crucial to increase urban and peri-urban resilience while reducing future drought and bushfire impacts.

Research on flood management suggests rainwater must be always seen as a resource, even in the case of extreme events. Sustainable water management through harvesting, retention and reuse can have long-term positive effects in regenerating micro-climates. It is at the base of any action aimed at comprehensively increasing resilience.

Read more: Design for flooding: how cities can make room for water

In this sense, approaches based on decentralised systems are more effective at countering the risks of drought, fire and flood locally. They consist of small-scale nature-based solutions able to absorb and retain water to reduce flooding. Distributed off-grid systems support water harvesting in rainy seasons and prevent fires during drought by maintaining soil moisture.

Decentralisation also creates opportunities for innovation in the management of urban ecosystems, with responsibility shared among many. Mobile technologies can help communities play an active role in minimising flood impacts at the small scale. Information platforms can also help raise awareness of the links between risks and actions and lead to practical solutions that are within everybody’s reach.

Tailor responses to people and ecosystems

Disrupted ecosystems can make the local impacts of drought, fire and flood worse, but can also play a role in global failures, such as the recent pandemic. It is urgent to define and implement mechanisms to reverse this trend.

Lessons from disaster responses point towards the need to tailor solutions to community needs and local environmental conditions. A few key strategies are emerging:

• foster networks and coordinated approaches that operate across silos

• support local and traditional landscape knowledge

• use information platforms to help people work together to manage risks

• manage water locally with the support of populations to prevent drought and bushfire.

Recent environmental crises are showing us the way to finally change direction. Safe cities and landscapes can be achieved only by regenerating urban ecosystems while responding to increasing environmental risks through integrated, people-centred actions.

– ref. Drought, fire and flood: how outer urban areas can manage the emergency while reducing future risks – https://theconversation.com/drought-fire-and-flood-how-outer-urban-areas-can-manage-the-emergency-while-reducing-future-risks-131560

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tess Newton Cain, Adjunct Associate Professor, Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

Across the globe, the coronavirus pandemic has prompted countries and governments to become increasingly inward-looking. Australia is not immune to this. One of the effects of this situation has been that the “Pacific Step-up” appears to have dropped entirely off the political radar.

The step-up is – or was – the signature foreign policy of the Morrison government. Although it predates Scott Morrison becoming prime minister, under his leadership it had really come to the fore. We saw an increase in ministerial visits to the region, a ramping up of labour mobility opportunities for Pacific islanders, and the establishment of a A$2 billion infrastructure financing facility.

So, how does the Pacific Step-up need to evolve to help respond to the challenges posed by coronavirus?

It’s important to acknowledge that Australia and the island members of the “Pacific family” share more than just an ocean. They have many common challenges. Addressing them requires sharing resources. The coronavirus response presents an opportunity to move the Pacific Step-Up from something that is done “to” or “for” the Pacific to something that Australia does “with” the Pacific.

Read more: Despite its Pacific ‘step-up’, Australia is still not listening to the region, new research shows

It is too easy for the Australian media (and indeed the Australian public) to perpetuate the trope that Pacific people are helpless – chronic victims who need to be rescued from whatever calamity has most recently befallen them. Now is the time for Australian policymakers to step up and demonstrate real respect for their Pacific counterparts.

On top of the increasingly devastating effects of climate change, Pacific island countries are now managing the twin challenges of a potential public health emergency and its severe economic ramifications.

When it comes to the former, the focus has been on prevention. Many countries took swift and significant steps to minimise the risk of the virus entering their communities. Borders have been closed, restrictions on movements enforced and health and medical systems enhanced.

Pacific island countries are also already feeling the economic impacts of the global shutdown. This is particularly evident in those countries that rely on tourism and remittances for revenue, livelihoods and employment.

Several countries have moved quickly and decisively to introduce economic support and stimulus packages to meet some of the most pressing needs of their populations. Maintaining these into the medium and longer term will be a challenge.

In Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga, the impacts of the recent Tropical Cyclone Harold are presenting additional challenges. Reaching Category 5 strength, it caused more than 30 deaths and left large amounts of damage and destruction in its wake. Australia and other partners (particularly France and New Zealand) have provided assistance to government agencies in the region that are charged with responding to disasters of this type.

In the Pacific, and among many Australian commentators, it is widely acknowledged that the step-up is driven largely by geo-strategic anxiety about the growing influence of China in the Pacific islands region. Coronavirus has done little to dilute this angst. In some instances, it appears to have accentuated it. Certainly, China has made it abundantly clear it is ready, willing and able to be a friend in need for Pacific island countries.

A more sophisticated and nuanced Pacific Step-up that addresses the challenges posed by coronavirus provides Australia with an opportunity to demonstrate to Pacific counterparts its ability and willingness to offer something that is different and more valuable than is available elsewhere.

This can take one or more of several forms. First of all, Australia should continue to advocate to the global community the need to provide tailored financial support to Pacific island countries. This must include lobbying for meaningful debt relief to underpin economic recovery.

The IMF has already made some moves in this regard. Australia has also moved quickly in relation to its most recent loan to PNG. When the Pacific Islands Forum’s finance and economic ministers meet online in the near future, this will likely be on the agenda. Australia should look to have something concrete to put forward in support of this, including offers to lobby the G7 and G20.

Read more: Can Scott Morrison deliver on climate change in Tuvalu – or is his Pacific ‘step up’ doomed?

Recently, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters raised the possibility of a New Zealand-Australia “bubble” based on low numbers of infections in both countries. He saw this as a basis for reopening the borders to allow for freer movement of people and goods.

Pacific island countries that have no COVID-19 cases – there are several – should look to be part of a “Pacific bubble” if this conversation goes forward. This would maintain Pacific islanders’ participation in labour mobility schemes.

Australia and New Zealand are also the key markets for Pacific tourism. The sooner tourists can be welcomed back to the resorts and beaches, the sooner island livelihoods can be restored.

The rhetoric of the Pacific Step-Up has been couched in terms such as “Pacific family”. We now need to know what this means for how Australia can and will support Pacific states and communities in the face of coronavirus.

– ref. How might coronavirus change Australia’s ‘Pacific Step-up’? – https://theconversation.com/how-might-coronavirus-change-australias-pacific-step-up-136517

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Harris, Adjunct Associate Professor, Centre for Ecosystem Science, UNSW

The federal government’s Snowy 2.0 energy venture is controversial for many reasons, but one has largely escaped public attention. The project threatens to devastate aquatic life by introducing predators and polluting important rivers. It may even push one fish species to extinction.

The environmental impact statement for the taxpayer-funded project is almost 10,000 pages long. Yet it fails to resolve critical problems, and in one case seeks legal exemptions to enable Snowy 2.0 to wreak environmental damage.

The New South Wales government is soon expected to grant the project environmental approval. This process should be suspended, and independent experts should urgently review the project’s environmental credentials.

Native fish extinctions

Snowy Hydro Limited, a Commonwealth-owned corporation, is behind the Snowy 2.0 project in the Kosciuszko National Park in southern NSW. It involves building a giant tunnel to connect two water storages – the Tantangara and Talbingo reservoirs. By extension, the project will also connect the rivers and creeks connected to these reservoirs.

A small, critically endangered native fish, the stocky galaxias, lives in a creek upstream of Tantangara. This is the last known population of the species.

Read more: Snowy 2.0 is a wolf in sheep’s clothing – it will push carbon emissions up, not down

An invasive native fish, the climbing galaxias, lives in the Talbingo reservoir (it was introduced from coastal streams when the original Snowy project was built). Water pumped from Tantangara will likely transfer this fish to Talbingo.

From here, the climbing galaxias’ capacity to climb wet vertical surfaces would enable it to reach upstream creeks and compete for food with, and prey on, stocky galaxias – probably pushing it into extinction.

Snowy Hydro has applied for an exemption under NSW biosecurity legislation to permit the transfer of the climbing galaxias and two other fish species: the alien, noxious redfin perch and eastern gambusia.

Redfin perch compete for food with other species and produce many offspring. They are voracious, carnivorous predators, known to prey on smaller fish.

Redfin perch also allow the establishment of a fatal fish disease – epizootic haematopoietic necrosis virus – or EHN. This disease kills the endangered native Macquarie perch, the population of which below Tantangara is one of very few remaining.

If Snowy 2.0 is granted approval, it is likely to spread these problematic species through the headwaters of the Murrumbidgee, Snowy and Murray rivers.

Acid and asbestos pollution

Four million tonnes of rock excavated to build Snowy 2.0 would be dumped into the two reservoirs. Snowy Hydro has not assessed the pollution risks this creates. The rock will contain potential acid-forming minerals and a form of asbestos, which threaten to pollute water storages and rivers downstream.

When the first stage of the Snowy Hydro project was built, comparable rocks were dumped in the Tooma River catchment. Research in 2006 suggested the dump was associated with eradication of almost all fish from the Tooma River downstream after rainfall.

Read more: Snowy 2.0 will not produce nearly as much electricity as claimed. We must hit the pause button

Addressing the problems

The environmental impact statement either ignores, or pays inadequate attention to, these environmental problems.

For example, installing large-scale screens at water inlets would be the best way to prevent fish transfer from Talbingo Dam, but Snowy Hydro has dismissed it as too costly.

Snowy Hydro instead proposes a dubious second-rate measure: screens to filter pumped flows leaving Tantangara reservoir, and building a barrier in the stream below the stocky galaxias habitat.

The best and cheapest way to prevent damage from alien species is stopping the populations from establishing. Trying to control or eradicate pest species once they’re established is far more difficult and costly.

We believe the measures proposed by Snowy Hydro are impractical. It would be very difficult to maintain a screen fine and large enough to prevent fish eggs and larvae moving out of Tantangara reservoir and such screens would be totally ineffective at preventing the spread of EHN virus.

A six metre-high waterfall downstream of the stocky galaxias habitat currently protects the critically endangered species from other invasive species threats. But climbing galaxias have an extraordinary ability to ascend wet surfaces. They would easily climb the waterfall, and possibly the proposed creek barrier as well.

Such an engineered barrier has never been constructed in Australia. We are informed that in New Zealand, the barriers have not been fully effective and often require design adjustments.

Read more: The government’s electricity shortlist rightly features pumped hydro (and wrongly includes coal)

Even if the barrier protected the stocky galaxias at this location, efforts to establish populations in other unprotected regional streams would be severely hampered by the spread of climbing galaxias.

Preventing redfin and EHN from entering the Murrumbidgee River downstream of Tantangara depends on the reservoir never spilling. The reservoir has spilled twice since construction in the 1960s, and would operate at much higher water levels when Snowy 2.0 was operating. Despite this, Snowy Hydro says it has “high confidence in being able to avoid spill”.

If dumped spoil pollutes the two reservoirs and Murrumbidgee and Tumut rivers, this would also have potentially profound ecological impacts. These have not been critically assessed, nor effective prevention methods identified.

Looking to the future

Snowy 2.0 will likely make one critically endangered species extinct and threaten an important remaining population of another, as well as pollute freshwater habitats. As others have noted, the project is also questionable on other environmental and economic grounds.

These potential failures underscore the need to immediately halt Snowy 2.0, and subject it to independent expert scrutiny.

In response to the issues raised in this article, a spokesperson for Snowy Hydro said:

“Snowy Hydro’s EIS, supported by numerous reports from independent scientific experts, extensively address potential water quality and fish transfer impacts and the risk mitigation measures to be put in place. As the EIS is currently being assessed by the NSW Government we have no further comment.”

– ref. Snowy 2.0 threatens to pollute our rivers and wipe out native fish – https://theconversation.com/snowy-2-0-threatens-to-pollute-our-rivers-and-wipe-out-native-fish-135194

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Danielle Wood, Program Director, Budget Policy and Institutional Reform, Grattan Institute

The Australian government’s COVID-19 rescue package for the child-care sector provides a lifeline for centres and parents alike.

Child-care centres now have a guaranteed stream of income and support for wage costs, helping them to stay in business through the crisis. For working parents, there’s the relief child care will be available through the crisis and beyond. Better yet, the care is free.

Read more: Morrison has rescued childcare from COVID-19 collapse – but the details are still murky

But what happens after the shutdown is over?

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has emphasised this is a temporary measure, set to run for six months. But parents, having tasted life free of child-care costs, won’t resume paying without a fight.

There is also an economic case for the government to invest more in child care to help rebuild the economy after the health crisis is over.

Australian child-care costs are high

Out-of-pocket child-care costs in Australia have been relatively high by international standards.

The standing Commonwealth Child Care Subsidy is means-tested. Even for a family getting the maximum subsidy (85% of costs for households with income less than A$68,000) it costs about A$9,000 a year to have two children in full-time care. For a family where each parent earns A$80,000, the cost is about A$26,000 a year.

Full-time net child-care costs absorb about a quarter of household income for an average-earning couple with two young children in Australia. The OECD average is 11%. Almost half of Australian parents with children under five say they struggle with the cost.

Deterring workforce participation

The high cost of child care doesn’t just drain family incomes. It has a big impact on workforce participation, particularly for women.

Women are more likely to be a family’s “second earner”, reducing their paid work hours to accommodate caring responsibilities. For many, child-care costs interact with other elements of Australia’s tax and benefit system to make extra hours of paid work financially unattractive.

The chart below shows the “workforce disincentive rate” – the proportion of income from an extra day’s work lost through higher taxes, reduced family payments and child-care costs – for second earners. The disincentive rates are high across the board, but particularly punishing for second earners thinking of taking on a fourth or fifth day of paid work.

For example, consider a household with two young children where both parents would earn A$60,000 a year if they worked full-time. Dad works full-time and mum three days a week.

If mum decided to take on an extra day, she would lose more than 90% of the income for that fourth day in child-care costs, tax and reduced family payments. For comparison, someone earning more than A$180,000 and paying the top marginal tax rate (shown by the black line in the graph) only loses about 47% of additional income.

That leaves mum working for about A$2 an hour on her fourth day; and for nothing on her fifth day.

Is it any wonder the “1.5 earner model” – where dad works full-time and mum part-time – has become the norm in Australia?

The following graph shows the cost of child care is the biggest contributor to these high workforce disincentive rates. Reducing that cost would do more than any other policy change to boost workforce participation for mothers of young children.

But ‘free’ child care doesn’t come cheap

The Child Care Subsidy cost the federal government A$8 billion last financial year. Making child care free would almost triple that cost. In fact, it could be higher, since free child care would trigger a jump in demand, including by those not in the paid workforce.

There is an attractive simplicity to universal child care, and it would likely lead to a big economic payoff in workforce participation, at least over the medium term (5-10 years).

But scrapping means-testing completely would be a radical change to the system and potentially raise concerns about fairness. Under a universal scheme, all parents of young children would be able to access more than $25,000 in subsidies for each child. This would be true even for high-income parents who currently receive no Child Care Subsidy.

Read more: HILDA findings on Australian families’ experience of childcare should be a call-to-arms for government

A cheaper and less radical alternative would be raising and simplifying the Child Care Subsidy to reduce the disincentives to work.

Our modelling suggests a subsidy of 95% of child-care costs for low-income families, tapering down slowly to zero as family income increases, would cost taxpayers an additional A$5 billion a year, compared with at least A$14 billion more for a universal scheme.

It would enable many women who want to increase their paid work to do so, support the post-crisis recovery and boost GDP by about $A11 billion a year in the medium term through higher workforce participation.

For policymakers seeking high-return government initiatives to boost the economy, this is an opportunity too good to miss.

– ref. Permanently raising the Child Care Subsidy is an economic opportunity too good to miss – https://theconversation.com/permanently-raising-the-child-care-subsidy-is-an-economic-opportunity-too-good-to-miss-136856

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lyndal Collins, Research dietitian, Department of Gastroenterology, Monash University

In the midst of this global pandemic, a sourdough revolution has been born.

More time at home combined with supermarket shortages of essentials, has fostered the creativity of a whole new generation of home bakers.

If your Instagram feed is filled with everyone’s favourite new housemate, the sourdough starter, you may be wondering what is so special about these strange, bubbly jars of flour and water and the tasty bread they create.

A happy accident

Sourdough is a leavening (rising) method for baked products that dates back to at least ancient Egypt.

Historians believe that this technique was likely discovered by accident by a baker leaving dough unattended for much longer than usual. By sitting for longer, the wild yeast and bacteria living in the flour, water and air had sprung to life, transforming the dough into what would become the first form of leavened bread. It tasted better and lasted longer, so it stuck.

The sourdough process starts with a starter (sometimes called a “sponge”) – a simple mixture of flour and water. When left for a day or so, a vibrant community of wild yeast and bacteria start to bloom. These microscopic organisms work in harmony to transform the sugars and starches in the flour, producing the gas bubbles that help bread rise and natural acids that give sourdough its characteristic taste, aroma and texture.

Up until fairly recently, the sourdough tradition (including the starter) was passed down through the generations and considered the norm for bread making. However, in the dawn of the industrial revolution, baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) was discovered and began to be mass produced.

Baker’s yeast is now the preferred leavening agent for commercial bread making due to its aggressive nature, resulting in dough that rises quickly and bread that is ready in just a few hours. Sourdough, on the other hand, relies on much gentler yeast and bacteria, that ideally need a longer proving time to work their magic.

Good bread, better for you

Sourdough bread has many nutritional and health benefits over its modern commercial yeast bread counterparts.

Throughout the long rising process, the bacteria present in the starter (typically lactobacillus species) feed on carbohydrates in the dough, producing both lactic and acetic acids as biproducts. This acidity results in a bread with a lower glycaemic index (and a longer shelf life). This makes sourdough a great option for diabetics as it is digested more slowly, resulting in a lower and slower rise in blood sugar levels after eating. Because it is more slowly digested, sourdough bread will even keep you feeling fuller for longer.

The sourdough process also helps to break down common culprits (like FODMAPs and gluten) that may cause bloating and digestive upset in people with food intolerances and irritable bowel syndrome.

Sourdough making also reduces the phytate content of bread, meaning important minerals like zinc and magnesium are more easily absorbed.

Read more: The psychology of comfort food – why we look to carbs for solace

Getting started with your starter

Ready to give your own sourdough a try? You can either make your own starter, get one from a friend or buy one online.

No matter the source, each starter will contain its own unique community of yeast and bacteria. It will change over time depending on how you feed it. Wait, feed it? Yes, your starter is very much alive and like any pet, plant or housemate, needs to be tended to regularly to keep it flourishing.

Feeding your starter is simple and your feeding schedule will depend on how you plan on storing it: in the fridge for less frequent use or on the bench if you bake bread every day or second day. Try to find a storage and feeding regime that fits your lifestyle. This will prevent your starter becoming too “needy”.

Tip top baking pointers

It typically takes a week or so to create a starter with enough umph to make a reasonable loaf of bread. You will know it is ready to go when it can double in size in under eight hours after feeding.

There are many sourdough recipes online to help get you started, but here are some key tips for success.

• Try a variety of recipes using a range of different flours (common ones include wheat, rye and spelt). You will eventually find something that best suits your taste buds!

• Prove your dough overnight in the fridge. The result will be a more flavoursome loaf. Just remember to bring your dough to room temperature and ensure it has doubled in size before baking.

• Need a gluten-free sourdough? This is possible using a gluten-free starter and ingredients for those with coeliac disease.

Though the process can seem complicated at first, the long rising process makes sourdough quite a forgiving artform. If it doesn’t work out first go, try something different next time. You could even consider joining an online sourdough class to perfect your skills.

So why not experiment with making your own sourdough starter this week – it may just become the most fun and rewarding housemate of them all!

– ref. Great time to try: baking sourdough bread – https://theconversation.com/great-time-to-try-baking-sourdough-bread-136493

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

Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy has predicted a more than 50% take up of the new “COVIDSafe” app, as the government mobilises a broad range of health professionals to convince people to download the tracing device.

The app, launched by Health Minister Greg Hunt on Sunday, will broaden and speed up the tracing of contacts a person testing positive for COVID-19 has had.

Fearing many people will shy away from the app because of privacy concerns, the government has surrounded it with what it describes as the “strongest ever” security provisions. Hunt has made a determination under the biosecurity legislation enshrining protections. There will also be legislation for the app when parliament meets in May.

Data must be held in Australia, and not used for any purpose other than tracing contacts of a COVID case.

Read more: View from The Hill: Government needs credible pitch and strong guarantees to get app take-up

Once a person who has downloaded the app has tested positive they must give permission before the data on it can be retrieved. Only state health officials will then be able to access the data.

There are prohibitions on coercing or requiring anyone to install or use the app, whether by positive obligation, or adverse consequences of refusing to do so.

For example, there is a prohibition on an employer refusing to enter into or continue a contract or arrangement on this basis, or a person refusing to allow someone to enter premises.

Experts disagree about the needed take up for the app to be effective. In Singapore the take up rate was only 20%.

The Australian government has spoken of a take up rate of 40%.

Murphy said on Sunday that a “good uptake, in my mind, would be well over half the people. And I reckon we’ll get it, because I think Australians will rise to the challenge, because they have risen to the challenge of distancing, they’ve risen to the challenge of testing.”

Hunt was flanked by health experts at his news conference, including the secretary for the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, Annie Butler, and the president of the Australian Medical Association, Tony Bartone.

Backed by opinion testing about the most effective way to convince the public, Hunt is the ministerial face of the app, after earlier appearances by the Minister for Government Services, Stuart Robert, were counter-productive.

The app on Sunday was endorsed by more than a dozen health sector organisations.

Hunt said Australia had seen a “sustained and consolidated and now extended flattening of the curve”.

There had now been 6711 cases all up, with 83 deaths.

In the last seven days there had been 117 new cases; this compared with 297 in the previous seven days. “We have now had an average increase in case numbers of less than 1% for 15 consecutive days and an average increase in case numbers of less than half a percent for seven consecutive days,” Hunt said.

“All these things mean we are doing well as a nation, but we have not won yet.”

A poll from the Australia Institute, a progressive think tank, released at the weekend found 45% said they would use the app, 28% said they would not, and 27% said they didn’t know or weren’t sure. Men were more likely than women to say they would use it, and people aged 18-39 were more likely than those 60 and over.

Murphy made it clear the enhanced ability to trace fast was particularly important in relation to younger adults.

The government is arguing the app will be a factor in helping decisions on when and what restrictions can be eased.

Australian Banking Association CEO Anna Bligh said the banks’ CEOs would download the app “and, to protect staff and customers, encourage their staff to do the same”.

Read more: Is the government’s coronavirus app a risk to privacy?

Opposition health spokesman Chris Bowen said the app could play a constructive role if handled correctly. The opposition would look at the legislation very constructively and was pleased the government had agreed to refer it to the Senate committee that is examining COVID-19 matters.

But the Law Council of Australia expressed some concerns. “Most important is the concern that the Determination instrument underpinning the legality of the app makes no provision for oversight and reporting on its use,” it said.

Meanwhile, as the debate continued about when children should return to schools, a NSW study by the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance (NCIRS) found very limited transmission in schools.

The study, commissioned by the state government and released Sunday, found:

• In NSW from March to mid-April. 18 individuals (nine students and nine staff) from 15 schools were confirmed as having coronavirus; all had an opportunity to transmit the virus to others in their schools

• 735 students and 128 staff were close contacts of these 18 cases.

• One primary school child and one high school child may have contracted the virus from the initial cases at their schools

• No teacher or staff member contracted the virus from any of the initial school cases.

NCIRS is a research organisation that provides independent expert advice on all aspects of vaccine preventable diseases and social and other issues related to immunisation.

The situation on schools is a patchwork across the country. Scott Morrison has been strongly in favour of children being at school. In NSW they will reopen for all students from May 11 but only for a day a week.

But the Andrews government in Victoria is keeping schools closed for the bulk of children, relying on the advice of its own chief health officer Brett Sutton, who has taken a tougher line than his fellow medical officers. The Victorian opposition at the weekend called for schools to be open.

Federal education minister Dan Tehan said on Sky on Sunday the government’s hope was to see all schools teaching all children in the classroom by the end of May.

– ref. Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy predicts more than 50% take-up of COVID tracing app – https://theconversation.com/chief-medical-officer-brendan-murphy-predicts-more-than-50-take-up-of-covid-tracing-app-137238

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Asha Bowen, Head, Skin Health, Telethon Kids Institute

In mid March, cases of COVID-19 – the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 – dramatically increased in Australia and the government responded with an effective public health strategy. People who could, shifted to working from home, social distancing measures were applied and Australians experienced life in isolation.

Somewhere in the mix, kids stopped attending school. While the federal government has consistently maintained it is safe for schools to remain open, other states like Victoria and NSW told parents to keep their children at home if they could.

We are now in a different phase of the pandemic in Australia. With cases dropping, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has announced students would be making a staggered approach back to classrooms from the third week of the first term – initially for one day a week, then for more time on campus as the term progresses. Schools in Western Australia reopen on Wednesday April, 29.

On Friday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the same social distancing rules as in the community did not apply in the classroom. He said:

The 1.5m in classrooms and the four square metre rule is not a requirement of the expert medical advice for students in classrooms.

Closure of schools has meant kids not seeing their friends and a disruption to their usual education routine.

For some children fears of violence, hunger and lack of safety, that are usually modified through school attendance, have become more real. Inequality and mental health needs have likely become more apparent for some children.

Read more: Schools provide food for many hungry children. This needs to continue when classes go online

The federal and state governments who say it is safe for children to return to school are working off the latest evidence. Here are five reasons we know it’s safe.

1. Kids get infected with coronavirus at much lower rates than adults

This is the case in Australia and throughout the world. There are no clear explanations for this yet, but it is a consistent finding across the pandemic.

Although SARS-CoV-2 can cause COVID-19 in school-aged children, it rarely does and children with the disease have mild symptoms.

Fewer than 150 children below 15 years have been infected with SARS-COV-2 in Australia since the pandemic began. This is compared to the 6,695 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Australia at 25 April, 2020.

2. Children rarely get severely ill from COVID-19

Data from around the world and Australia have confirmed children very rarely require hospitalisation, and generally only experience mild symptoms, when infected with SARS-CoV-2.

Deaths in children due to COVID-19 are incredibly rare. Very few children globally have been confirmed to have died from the virus (around 20 by our calculations), in comparison to more than 200,000 overall deaths.

Many parents have worried their kids’ friends could be infected with the virus without showing symptoms. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. A study in Iceland showed children without symptoms were not detected to have COVID-19. No child below ten years of age without symptoms was found to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 in this study.

this tweet is saying the opposite of the piece?

3. Children don’t spread COVID-19 disease like adults

During the yearly flu season, children spread the flu to friends and grandparents alike. But COVID-19 behaves differently. In household clusters in China, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Iran, fewer than 10% of children were the primary spreader – meaning the virus goes from adult to adult much more effectively than from children to other children, or even children to adults. The same has been found in new studies in The Netherlands.

We still don’t know why this is. It takes us all by surprise as kids with snotty noses are always blamed (and probably responsible) for driving the annual round of winter coughs and colds.

4. School children in Australia with COVID-19 haven’t spread it to others

Schools where cases have been diagnosed in Australia have not seen any evidence of secondary spread.

This means even with kids sitting right next to each other in the classroom, they are very unlikely to infect their friends.

5. There is no evidence closing schools will control transmission

Modelling shows only a small incremental public health benefit to closing schools in the case of usual respiratory viruses such as influenza. But COVID-19 is quite different to flu, so any of the benefits seen for influenza are likely to be even less in the case of COVID-19.

During the 2003 SARS outbreak, school transmission was not found to be a significant contributor to the outbreak and school closures did not influence the control of transmission.

Back to school doesn’t mean back to normal

Schools reopening does not mean a return to education as it was before. Other measures may also be put in place, like staggering lunch breaks, limiting face to face contact between staff and parents and regular hand-washing breaks.

Kids with a cold or other symptoms must stay home from school. And older teachers or those with underlying health conditions that put them at greater risk of complications if infected with SARS-CoV-2 will have altered responsibilities.

It is important parents and the public differentiate between schools reopening from all the other important strategies used to reduce transmission still in place. These include social distancing, travel restrictions, case isolation and quarantine, and banning of large gatherings.

Read more: Other countries are shutting schools – why does the Australian government say it’s safe to keep them open?

But returning to schools is safe. Our leaders are advised on this issue by some of the best infectious diseases, public health and microbiology physicians in Australia, who have repeatedly said that schools can safely remain open.

The Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC) has provided sensible advice for schools to reopen. It makes sense to get our kids back to doing what they do best.

– ref. 5 reasons it’s safe for kids to go back to school – https://theconversation.com/5-reasons-its-safe-for-kids-to-go-back-to-school-137064

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maria Nugent, Co-Director, Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Australian National University

Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. We will be publishing more stories in this series in the coming week.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images and names of deceased people.

In the early Sydney colony, newcomers commonly quizzed Indigenous locals about their memories of Captain Cook and the Endeavour.

They believed the arrival of a shipload of British men who stayed for a week was an incredibly memorable event; and assumed that details of it would have been preserved — even treasured — over time.

The accounts given are hardly ever a straightforward recounting of what Cook did. And they rarely tally with what is recorded in the voyage accounts.

Rather, they carry those common qualities of remembering: telescoping, conflating, rearranging time, stripping back detail, and upping symbolism and metaphor. Unpicking the threads of these memories is vital for historians wanting to find agreement on details and interpretations, and provenance of items that changed hands during early encounters.

Recollecting memories

Some oral accounts were written down – either at the time they were heard or later. Records reveal accounts extracted out of curiosity, to assist with commemorations, or simply to pass the time.

One account comes from the early 1830s. Two priests stationed at St Mary’s Cathedral near Sydney’s Domain met an Aboriginal man from Botany Bay. They asked him “if he had any recollections of the landing of Captain Cook”? He was born too late to have witnessed it himself, but he shared a reasonably long story he had inherited from his father, the recollection of which one of the priests later published.

Similarly, in a recent prize-winning essay, historian Grace Karskens reconstructs a tantalising conversation between Aboriginal woman Nah Doongh and her settler friend Sarah Shand.

“Shand was intensely curious about Nah Doongh’s memory of her first contact with white people”, Karsken explains, but was frustratingly incapable of seeing she was implicated in the dispossession of Aboriginal people, including Nah Doongh.

Nah Doongh offered her a story about Cook, whom she presented as big and evil, violent and greedy, in a way that anticipates late 20th-century Aboriginal oral narratives.

Cook emerged as an erstwhile topic in cross-cultural conversations across colonial Sydney, but the substance of what was said and why was less dependent on the details of what Cook and his crew had done in 1770 than on the conditions, contexts and purposes of the chats.

As many have noted, discourses about Cook in Australia are neverending; but their contours and emphases change in relation to – and contribute to change in — broader Australian culture and politics.

Who is speaking?

Sometimes it is not the account given of Cook that is of primary interest, but the identity of the narrator.

Dharawal woman Biddy Giles lived around the Botany Bay area for much of the 19th century. An account she gave of Cook’s landing was written down after her death by a white settler.

He recalled she’d said: “They all run away; two fellows stand; Cook shot them in the legs; and they run away too!”.

This economical account is faithful to longer Endeavour voyage renditions. But researchers are more exercised by biographical information showing Giles was briefly married to a much older man, Cooman. Speculation swirls that Cooman’s grandfather, also called Cooman, was one of the two fellows shot.

When historian Heather Goodall in her book Rivers and Resilience returned to Giles’ life, she made it clear she thought historians who relied on documentary sources should not attempt such jumps.

Repatriation requests

Not all researchers have been so circumspect. In 2016, speculations about the identity of one of the two men shot contributed to formal requests to museums in Britain for the return of artefacts either known to have been collected at Botany Bay during the Endeavour voyage (four spears at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge) or believed to have been (a shield at the British Museum in London).

The repatriation claim repeated historian Keith Vincent Smith’s assertion one of the two men was Cooman.

When asked for advice on this repatriation request, I (Nugent) concluded there was no consensus about that assertion, noting it was unfortunate that:

historical claims which derive from inconclusive evidence, are based on questionable interpretative leaps, and are not presented in ways that recognise and respect the complexities of writing “early contact” history from fragmentary sources […] were being relied upon.

Other arguments would serve applications for return far better.

The request was unsuccessful, but the process was productive and generally positive. More work has taken place since, both further historical research and object analysis, and importantly, renewed and enriched relationship-building.

Building a material history

Retracing the speculative leaps made between the historical encounters, collected objects, and related written, oral and visual sources reinforces the urgent need for well-resourced, critically reflexive, and multimodal methods of interpretation. This is particularly true when the return of an object and the knowledge it embodies is strongly desired.

This year we will commence a new ARC-funded project, Mobilising Objects to draw together objects in international collections, images, written records, oral accounts, and contemporary expertise to generate a material history of early colonial Sydney.

The project aims to build knowledge about exceptional, but poorly-documented, Aboriginal objects from Sydney and the NSW coast (circa 1770-1920s) in British and European museums. We hope to build strong relations between Aboriginal communities and overseas museums and lay robust foundations for future projects seeking the return of Indigenous cultural heritage.

Gathering together records of oral accounts given by Aboriginal people about Cook and other seaborne interlopers, and grappling with the interpretive challenges they present, will be a vital aspect of this work.

– ref. Tall ship tales: oral accounts illuminate past encounters and objects, but we need to get our story straight – https://theconversation.com/tall-ship-tales-oral-accounts-illuminate-past-encounters-and-objects-but-we-need-to-get-our-story-straight-129978