Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rod Lamberts, Deputy Director, Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University
Good news: COVID-19 is not the only thing going on right now!
Bad news: while we’ve all been deep in the corona-hole, the climate crisis has been ticking along in the background, and there are many things you may have missed.
Fair enough – it’s what people do. When we are faced with immediate, unambiguous threats, we all focus on what’s confronting us right now. The loss of winter snow in five or ten years looks trivial against images of hospitals pushed to breaking point now.
As humans, we also tend to prefer smaller, short-term rewards over larger long-term ones. It’s why some people would risk illness and possible prosecution (or worse, public shaming) to go to the beach with their friends even weeks after social distancing messages have become ubiquitous.
But while we might need to ignore climate change right now if only to save our sanity, it certainly hasn’t been ignoring us.
So here’s what you may have missed while coronavirus dominates the news cycle.
Heatwave in Antarctica
Antarctica is experiencing alarmingly balmy weather.Shutterstock
On February 6 this year, the northernmost part of Antarctica set a new maximum temperature record of 18.4℃. That’s a pleasant temperature for an early autumn day in Canberra, but a record for Antarctica, beating the old record by nearly 1℃.
That’s alarming, but not as alarming as the 20.75℃ reported just three days later to the east of the Antarctic Peninsula at Marambio station on Seymour Island.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned a global average temperature rise of 1.5℃ could wipe out 90% of the world’s coral.
As the world looks less likely to keep temperature rises to 1.5℃, in 2019 the five-year outlook for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was downgraded from “poor” to “very poor”. The downgrading came in the wake of two mass bleaching events, one in 2016 and another in 2017, damaging two-thirds of the reef.
Of course, extreme Antarctic temperatures and reef bleaching are the products of human-induced climate change writ large.
But in the short time since the COVID-19 crisis began, several examples of environmental vandalism have been deliberately and specifically set in motion as well.
The Berejiklian government in New South Wales has just approved the extension of coal mining by Peabody Energy – a significant funder of climate change denial – under one of Greater Sydney’s reservoirs. This is the first time such an approval has been granted in two decades.
The NSW government has approved a coal mining extension for Peabody Energy.AAP Image/Joel Carrett
While environmental groups have pointed to significant local environmental impacts – arguing mining like this can cause subsidence in the reservoir up to 25 years after the mining is finished – the mine also means more fossil carbon will be spewed into our atmosphere.
Peabody Energy argues this coal will be used in steel-making rather than energy production. But it’s still more coal that should be left in the ground. And despite what many argue, you don’t need to use coal to make steel.
In Victoria, the Andrews government has announced it will introduce new laws into Parliament for what it calls the “orderly restart” of onshore gas exploration. In this legislation, conventional gas exploration will be permitted, but an existing temporary ban on fracking and coal seam gas drilling will be made permanent.
The Victorian government has overturned the temporary ban on onshore gas exploration.AAP Image/Michael Dodge
The announcement followed a three-year investigation led by Victoria’s lead scientist, Amanda Caples. It found gas reserves in Victoria “could be extracted without harming the environment”.
Sure, you could probably do that (though the word “could” is working pretty hard there, what with local environmental impacts and the problem of fugitive emissions). But extraction is only a fraction of the problem of natural gas. It’s the subsequent burning that matters.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the Trump administration is taking the axe to some key pieces of environmental legislation.
One is an Obama-era car pollution standard, which required an average 5% reduction in greenhouse emissions annually from cars and light truck fleets. Instead, the Trump administration’s “Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient Vehicles” requires just 1.5%.
Trump’s administration is axing important environment legislation.EPA/Tasos Katopodis
The health impact of this will be stark. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, the shift will mean 18,500 premature deaths, 250,000 more asthma attacks, 350,000 more other respiratory problems, and US$190 billion in additional health costs between now and 2050.
And then there are the climate costs: if manufacturers followed the Trump administration’s new looser guidelines it would add 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the equivalent of 17 additional coal-fired power plants.
The challenges COVID-19 presents right now are huge. But they will pass.
The challenges of climate change are not being met with anything like COVID-19 intensity. For now, that makes perfect sense. COVID-19 is unambiguously today. Against this imperative, climate change is still tomorrow.
But like hangovers after a large celebration, tomorrows come sooner than we expect, and they never forgive us for yesterday’s behaviour.
Local governments are not eligible for the JobKeeper Payment, while major industries like construction are. Although the JobKeeper scheme has been broadly welcomed, it is a mystery to business why Australia’s 537 local councils, which provide vital support for industries like construction, are not eligible. The failure to include local councils (and their wholly owned corporations) will undermine the economic and social impact these policies are meant to have.
This just doesn’t make sense to business or local government. Business and industry are depending on their partnerships with local government to get through the coronavirus crisis. But local councils, which employ almost 200,000 people, are already laying off thousands.
Since construction directly employs about 1.2 million people (9.2% of the workforce) and indirectly many more, construction sites remain “exempt” as the government closes down all non-essential businesses to combat coronavirus. As Urban Taskforce chief executive Tom Forrest said:
The building and construction industry will be a critical player in driving the economy through this crisis.
The federal government’s A$130 billion wage subsidy will cover businesses paying their employees A$1,500 a fortnight each for up to six months. Private businesses (including not-for-profits) will be eligible for the subsidy if they meet the criteria.
Local government misses out. Yet revenues have been hit extremely hard since local government raises only 3.6% of its income from taxation and 90% from its own sources. These include rates and fees for services – many of which have had to close.
As a result, city council revenues have plummeted. For example, Blacktown City Council in Sydney estimates its monthly revenue has fallen by about A$1.7 million. The council employs around 2,300 people who serve a population of 400,000 people.
Like all local governments, it is responsible for a wide range of critical local services that support industries like construction that are exempt from current shutdowns. Councils provide planning and development approvals, childcare centres (26 in Blacktown’s case), waste management, infrastructure (such as roads and footpaths, parks, sporting grounds and swimming pools), housing, community amenities, transport and communications, recreation and culture and general public services.
The majority of freight tasks, which are central to keeping the economy going, start and finish on local government-controlled roads. These roads add up to about 662,000km in length – about 75% of the total national road length. Of 251.2 billion kilometres travelled in 2016, 142.1 billion occurred in capital cities.
Local councils also fund and support major construction projects. To return to the example of Blacktown, the A$76.5 million Warrick Lane development is part of the city centre transformation, which will provide major economic and social benefits for the people of Blacktown.
The Warrick Lane redevelopment is a major construction project that wouldn’t be happening if not for the city council.
Another Blacktown City project is the International Centre of Training Excellence, a multisport high-performance education, sports medicine and accelerated recovery facility. It’s due to open in 2022.
Nationwide, local government owns and manages non-financial assets with an estimated written-down value of A$408 billion in 2015-16. Operational spending by councils totalled about A$35 billion in that year.
Local government spending goes into providing industry support and services across the nation. If you take these services and supports away you undermine government efforts to stimulate industries like construction to get us through this crisis and recover from it.
You also introduce the risk that development approvals are granted without thorough assessments. That’s likely to lead to new problems down the line.
As the federal government says, keeping people in work and businesses open will lay the foundations for a stronger economic recovery once the coronavirus crisis passes. But local government support is key to this strategy. Most people would be concerned to know their local councils are not being supported in the same way as private businesses – some of which have accumulated millions in profits and are incorporated overseas.
The federal government rightly talks about partnership, collaboration and collective responsibility to get through this crisis. Local council activities are critical to the productivity, well-being and liveability of local communities and cumulatively to the nation at this time.
Disaster management experience and guidelines tell us the response to any crisis must be bottom-up as well as top-down. This means local government’s role is crucial. How can this be achieved without a functioning local government supporting industry and communities to get through this pandemic?
If you’re working from home for the first time, you might be asking yourself why you didn’t get to do this years ago.
The benefits of remote work have been discussed for nearly half a century. Many thinkers predicted a near future where work moves to the worker, rather than the worker to the work.
In 1969, Alan Kiron, a staff scientist at the US Patent Office, wrote in The Washington Post about how computers and new communication tools could change life and work. He called this “dominetics” – a combination of domicile, connections and electronics. The term never caught on, but the idea did.
Amid the 1973 OPEC oil crisis and skyrocketing fuel prices, a University of Southern California research group led by Jack Nilles conducted one of the first major studies of what Nilles would call “telecommuting”.
Nilles’s team studied a Los Angeles-based insurance company with more than 2,000 employees. Each worker travelled 34.4 kilometres a day on average, at a total cost (in 1974 prices) of US$2.73 million a year.
Their study, published in 1976, concluded technology would soon make it more economical for organisations to decentralise using telecommuting. But Nilles also came to understand that “technology was not the limiting factor in the acceptance of telecommuting”.
Satellite work
Still, technology was a factor. This was a time when telephones and telefax machines were the only telecommunications equipment most people knew. Very few homes had personal computers, let alone access to the early internet. So the book focused more on redesigning work to let employees commute to local satellite offices.
Nilles illustrated the idea with the diagrams below.
Jack Nilles’s diagrams for teleworking.
The principles were similar to the early architecture of the internet, whose designers were also interested in system resilience (notably a communications network that could survive nuclear attack).
Baran’s 1962 diagrams of the internet as a distributed communications network.A magazine advertisement for the Apple II computer in December 1977.Apple Computer Inc/Wikimedia
Home telecommuting became more viable as the personal computer market exploded in the late 1970s. Apple’s breakthrough Apple II, for example, was released in 1977.
In 1980 futurist Alvin Toffler, author of the 1970 book Future Shock, predicted in his sequel, The Third Wave, that the home would “assume a startling new importance” in the information age, becoming “a central unit in the society of tomorrow – a unit with enhanced rather than diminished economic, medical, educational and social functions”.
Here comes the internet
Toffler accurately saw technology’s potential, but it would be some time before remote working became relatively easy. Consider what sending an email involved in 1984:
How to send an email 1980s style. Electronic message writing down the phone line first shown on Thames TV’s computer program Database in 1984.
But with the growth in the internet, management guru Peter Drucker felt confident enough by 1993 to declare commuting to the office obsolete:
It is now infinitely easier, cheaper and faster to do what the 19th century could not do: move information, and with it office work, to where the people are. The tools to do so are already here: the telephone, two-way video, electronic mail, the fax machine, the personal computer, the modem, and so on.
Vision versus reality
Despite the technology, the growth in working from home has been slow. A large survey of Anglo countries by IBM in 2014 found just 9% of employees teleworked at least some of the time, with about half of those doing it full-time or most of the time. Data from Australia and US suggest the proportion was still less than 20% at the end of 2019.
Australian statistics state almost a third of people do some work from home. But this inflates the number by including all those who work at home to catch up on work from the office.
There are have been two main barriers to greater uptake.
One, as Nilles himself acknowledged, is organisational culture.
How we organise often lags behind what technology permits. Many organisations still cling to traditional ideas about managing people. If managers can’t see their employees working, they assume they won’t be.
The second problem is more intractable.
People actually like to be around each other. We’re social creatures. Indeed, a direct consequence of remote work is the the co-working movement, a response to the psychological and social challenges of working alone from home.
Even the technology companies that make teleworking and electronic cottages possible remain wedded to central offices. In 2013 Yahoo’s new chief executive, Marissa Mayer, discouraged employees from working from home, because “people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together face to face”.
Apple founder Steve Job was also apparently obsessed with having physical office space that encouraged staff mingling. This reportedly including stressing over details like bathroom locations so personal encounters would occur.
What about the future?
These challenges remain.
But circumstances should assist at least with the organisational and cultural barriers. Home working is simply, for now, the new reality. Businesses have no choice but to make it work.
After at least six months, it’s easy to imagine some of this will stick.
The issue of social needs will be thornier. As Toffler himself said, “it would be a mistake to underestimate the need for direct face-to-face contact in business, and all the subliminal and nonverbal communication that accompanies that contact”.
Perhaps the future will look a bit more like Nilles’s idea, with the growth of local co-working spaces, designed not overcome the limits of technology but to meet our needs as social beings.
When a literary luminary such as Thomas Kenneally declares so early in 2020 that he is certain a “more original” novel “will not be published this year”, the reviewer faces a challenge. The book in question is The Dictionary of Lost Words, the debut novel by South Australian writer Pip Williams.
Occasionally, I finish a book that I want to immediately read again, such as Alan Bennett’s delectably quirky book, The Uncommon Reader, which I have re-read several times.
I have now read Williams’s book twice. I raced through it the first time to see how it would turn out and needed to read it a second time to pick up what I had missed the first time round. In its 383 pages it covers a timespan of more than 100 years: 1882–1989.
Truth in fiction
The novel is set mainly in Oxford, but events occur in Bath, Shropshire, and Adelaide, Australia.
It is based on true events, the central one being the compilation of Oxford University Press’s New English Dictionary (now the Oxford English Dictionary) by a team of lexicographers led by Sir James Murray, and helped by all of his 11 children.
Murray began compiling the dictionary in 1879. It was unfinished at his death in 1915 and completed by his fellow editors in 1928. The second edition appeared in 1989; it is currently being completely revised.
Other historical figures who play key roles in the novel are printer Horace Hart and lexicographer Henry Bradley, who succeeded Murray.
Author Pip Williams speaks about her novel.
Women’s words
Williams’s fictional central character, Esme Nicoll, born in 1882, lives with her father Harry, a lexicographer who works on the dictionary in a corrugated iron shed, grandly called the Scriptorium. It sits in the garden of Murray’s house, Sunnyside, at 78 Banbury Road in Oxford. Esme has lost her mother at a very young age.
She spends her days beneath the sorting table in the “scrippy”, where the lexicographers sort and assess the potential contributions sent to Murray by volunteers following his worldwide appeal for words to be included in the new dictionary.
One day, a lexicographer drops off a slip of paper. It falls under the table and Esme rescues it. She places it inside a small wooden suitcase kept under the bed of the Murrays’ housemaid Lizzie. The word is “bondmaid”, which is exactly what Lizzie is. Lizzie supplies her own entry: “Bonded for life by love, devotion or obligation. I’ve been a bondmaid to you since you were small, Essymay, and I’ve been glad for every day of it”. The word is not discovered to be missing until 1901.
Over several years, Esme secretes a trunkful of words:
My case is like the Dictionary, I thought. Except it’s full of words that no one wants or understands, words that would be lost if I hadn’t found them.
Esme and Lizzie also collect words from stallholders in Oxford’s Covered Market, many of them “vulgar”.
Esme‘s gathered words comprise the book published many years later, titled in the novel as Women’s Words and Their Meanings, after Lizzie passes Esme’s collection on to a compositor at the Press. However, when Esme subsequently presents a copy of the volume to an editor who takes over after Murray’s death, he rejects it as unscholarly and not a “topic of importance”, confirming Esme’s experience that “all words are not equal”.
She responds to him: “you are not the arbiter of knowledge, sir. It is not for you to judge the importance of these words, simply allow others to do so”.
Williams grafts an emotional story onto other historical figures and interweaves the themes of women’s equality and the suffrage movement. The suffragist-suffragette divide is layered into the narrative when Esme’s actor friend, Tilda, heeds Emmeline Pankhurst’s “deeds, not words” call to action and ends up committing arson.
A minor character is Esme’s godmother Edith, whose earnest epistles to Esme and her Dad move the plot along, including a painful episode when Esme is treated harshly at a Scottish boarding school. Esme undergoes many changes in fortune, finding some happiness as the story unfolds.
Judge the book
Reviewing this book, I’m reminded of a quote in Putnam’s Monthly magazine of American literature, science and art from April 1855:
I proclaim to all the inhabitants of the land that they cannot trust to what our periodicals say of a new book. Instead of being able by reading the criticism to judge the book, it is now necessary to read the book in order to judge the criticism.
My advice to readers is similar: experience The Dictionary of Lost Words for yourselves rather than getting swept away by the hype. Don’t gobble it, as I did the first time round – savour its heart-wrenching detail.
Unfortunately, a close read does reveal the need for a tighter copy edit. “Radcliffe” is spelt two different ways on opposite pages; “braille” is misspelt; the main street in Oxford is known as “the High” rather than “High Street”. I circled (in pencil) dozens of instances of my pet peeve “different to”.
Regardless, it has had an astonishing pickup by international publishers, who clearly expect it to be a commercial success. It will certainly be a popular book-club choice. Time will tell whether it takes its place beside literary classics.
Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of ESCAP.
Op-Ed by Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana
Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of ESCAP.
The unprecedented public health emergency triggered by the COVID -19 pandemic and its multi-faceted impact on people’s lives around the world is taking a heavy toll on Asia and the Pacific.
Countries in our region are striving to mitigate the massive socioeconomic impact of the pandemic, which is also expected to affect the region’s economic health. In its annual Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific 2020 launched today, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) expects growth in Asia-Pacific developing economies to slow down significantly this year.
Bold investments to sustain the region’s physical and economic well-being are imperative. The Survey advises policymakers to protect the economic health of the region with measures that support affected businesses and households and prevent economic contagion. To tackle COVID-19 in developing Asia-Pacific countries, the Survey also calls for an estimated increase in health emergency spending by $880 million per year through to 2030. Fiscal support will be crucial in enhancing health responders’ ability to monitor the spread of the pandemic and caring for infected people. ESCAP is also calling on Asia-Pacific countries to consider setting up a regional health emergency preparedness fund.
The pandemic is also an opportunity for us to rethink our economic growth path that has come at a heavy cost to people and planet. According to the latest ESCAP assessment on implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Asia and the Pacific is not on track to achieve any of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) by 2030, with regression on several environmental Goals.
This stands in stark contrast with the region’s impressive gains in material prosperity, which have been powered by intensive resource use. We are currently paying the price amid a public health emergency in a region with 97 of the 100 most air-polluted cities in the world and 5 of the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change. Economic policymaking is understandably focused on maximizing growth to reduce poverty and create jobs. Yet, we need to question this when the methods of growth undermine its sustainability over the long term.
The 2020 Survey is proposing a transition towards a growth path that ensures we bequeath a healthy planet to future generations. It is calling for a shift in the paradigm of production and consumption, which is at the core of all economic activities.
To bring about this fundamental shift in the way we produce and consume, we need to adopt the motto of ‘no more business as usual’ for all stakeholders in planetary well-being, namely governments, businesses and consumers. Policymakers should not lose sight of a looming climate crisis, but rather design economic stimulus packages with social inclusion and environmental sustainability built into every decision.
The Survey identifies challenges and constraints to making this switch for each group of stakeholders. The good news is that it is possible to take on these challenges and align the goals of all stakeholders with the 2030 Agenda’s goal of sustainability.
In particular, the Survey urges governments in the region to embed sustainability in policymaking and implementation, transition out of fossil fuel dependency and support the greening of finance. The region continues to provide $240 billion worth of annual subsidies to fossil fuels while investments in renewables remain at $150 billion.
Businesses can integrate sustainability by factoring in environmental, social and governance aspects in investment analysis and decisions. Carbon pricing will be a key tool to reduce emissions and mitigate climate-related risks. The region is already a leader in adopting the emerging sustainable business paradigms of the shared economy and circular economy.
All of us as consumers must understand the importance of switching to sustainable lifestyles. This will begin with increasing awareness of the impact of consumer choices on people and planet. Governments will have to play a significant role in encouraging consumer choices through positive reinforcements, small suggestions and eco-labelling of products.
Integrating sustainability also requires international collaboration, given the interconnected world in which we live. Asia-Pacific governments need to coordinate their climate action, particularly the development of climate-related standards and policies. Having achieved so much, yet also at the risk of losing so much, the Asia-Pacific region stands at a pivotal moment in its development journey. The next phase of its economic transformation should be more sustainable, with cleaner production and less material-intensive lifestyles.
With headwinds to the region’s development journey strengthened by the COVID-19 pandemic, let us heed the United Nations Secretary General’s call to mobilize for a decade of action to build a sustainable and resilient future.
Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of ESCAP
Scott Morrison has made clear his view that any attempt to eliminate COVID-19 entirely in Australia would carry too high an economic cost, while Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy says such an aim would require “very aggressive” long-term border control.
The national cabinet will soon receive advice from its medical experts on various scenarios for the way ahead, but the Prime Minister, speaking at a joint news conference with Murphy on Tuesday, effectively ruled out the most ambitious.
New Zealand is trying for elimination, but has had to go into a stringent lockdown to pursue it. Elimination was the policy adopted in the source of the virus – Wuhan in China.
Morrison has been focused throughout on achieving a balance between health and economic considerations, summed up in his mantra that it is all about “saving lives and saving livelihoods”.
Murphy was asked, in light of Australia so far having a relatively limited number of cases, what would be the advantages of trying to eliminate the virus altogether.
He said that was one of the options available but the issue was “then you don’t have any immunity in the population and you really have to control your borders in a very aggressive way and that might be for a long time.”
“What is clear about the way countries are responding to this virus is that there is no clear right answer. There are lots of potential paths.”
He said national cabinet had asked its advisers, the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, to produce a range of scenarios. “The good thing is that we can do that now in a position of relative calm,” he said.
Currently, the strategy was to identify, control and isolate all cases.
“That may be the long-term strategy. But we have to look at all of those potential options. There is no clear path.
“Unlike pandemic influenza, where the strategy was to control and contain until the vaccine came, because we knew the vaccine would come, we don’t know if and when a vaccine will come with this virus. If it does, that’s a beautiful way out. So, we have to look at a range of different potential scenarios. … But there is no single right answer.”
Morrison added to Murphy’s answer, stressing the national cabinet “has to also consider the ability to actually continue to run the country under such a scenario”.
He said “the economic lifeline” of measures being provided had “a finite life”.
Obviously if a scenario involved a timeline beyond all the governments’ capacity to support it, “that would render such an option not workable”.
Asked what proportion of the population would need to have developed immunity before the situation could start returning to normal, Murphy said there was no benchmark.
“Some people believe you need over 50% immunity, to up to 60%.
“To be clear, we are not pursuing a path of ‘herd immunity’, we are pursuing a path of control and suppression. But if you did want to get that sort of level of immunity to prevent transmission, it’s probably at that level.
“But we don’t know yet, that’s modelled on other viruses, there’s no community in the world that has very high immunity as yet.”
The national cabinet released modelling, done by the Doherty Institute, but it was theoretical and did not include Australian data.
Now that there is a cohort of approaching 6000 Australian cases, modelling on the Australian position will be done in coming weeks and the government says it will be released.
According to the material released: “The initial modelling shows a scenario of an uncontrolled outbreak. In that scenario, peak daily Intensive Care Unit (ICU) bed demand is 35,000, which would greatly exceed Australia’s expanded capacity of 7,000 ICU beds.
“With isolation and quarantine, demand is reduced to 17,000 ICU beds at its peak, still well above expanded capacity. With isolation, quarantine and social isolation daily demand is reduced to below 5,000.”
The government has been much encouraged by the flattening of the curve of new COVID-19 cases but the next few weeks remain critical, and both Morrison and Murphy implored Australians to abide by the distancing and stay-at-home rules over the Easter holidays.
Although the growth in case numbers has been lowered and most cases have come from overseas or are linked to arrivals, Murphy said “the thing that worries us most of all is the more than 500 people who have acquired this virus from someone in the community that doesn’t know they’ve had it.
“That means that there are people walking around in our communities who can be transmitting this virus without knowing they’ve had it. That is why we cannot relax what we’ve been doing” or “”it could all come undone”.
Morrison said that easing of restrictions – when that happened – could be at a different pace in different parts of the country, with some states watching trials in others.
Tuesday’s national cabinet meeting ticked off on a code for commercial tenancies, which will be legislated at the state and territory level. It applies for small and medium sized businesses.
It provides for rent reductions “based on the tenant’s decline in turnover to ensure that the burden is shared between landlords and tenants.
“The code provides a proportionate and measured burden share between the two parties while still allowing tenants and landlords to agree to tailored, bespoke and appropriate temporary arrangements that take account of their particular circumstances.”
The federal government is waiving rents for small and medium enterprises and not-for-profit tenants in its properties.
Morrison said residential tenancies will be dealt with directly by each state and territory.
On Wednesday parliament – with much reduced numbers – meets to pass the government’s $130 billion wage subsidy package. The government has made some minor changes after representations from the ACTU but has not given any substantial ground.
During the one-day sitting, Labor will move to establish a Senate committee to inquire into all aspects of the government’s response to Covid-19 .
Labor senator Katy Gallagher tweeted: “Australians need the committee to provide transparency, scrutiny and accountability over the huge expenditure of public money as well as significant changes to the way that we’re all living as a requirement of this pandemic and the Government’s response to it”.
Meanwhile it has been confirmed Year 12 will go ahead for students.
Education Minister Dan Tehan said after a meeting with state counterparts that “we agreed that Year 12 students will get a leaving certificate for 2020. There will be no Year 13. There will be no mass repeating of Year 12.
“We want Year 12 students to finish their education and next year go to university, undertake vocational training or enter the workforce.” The ministers will discuss more details on Thursday.
A conspiracy theory claiming 5G can spread the coronavirus is making the rounds on social media. The myth supposedly gained traction when a Belgian doctor linked the “dangers” of 5G technology to the virus during an interview in January.
Closer to home, Facebook group Stop5G Australia (with more than 31,700 members) has various posts linking the disease’s spread to 5G technology.
Members of the Stop5G Australia Facebook group share posts and videos claiming 5G helps spread COVID-19.Facebook
Peddling such misinformation is not only wrong, it’s destructive.
The Guardian reported that since Thursday at least 20 mobile phone masts across the UK have been torched or otherwise vandalised. Mobile network representative MobileUK published an open letter stating:
We have experienced cases of vandals setting fire to mobile masts, disrupting critical infrastructure and spreading false information suggesting a connection between 5G and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Celebrities – stick to what you know
Many outlets and people have rushed to debunk this myth, including federal minister for communications, cyber safety and the arts Paul Fletcher. But myriad groups and public figures continue to perpetuate it.
Actor Woody Harrelson and singer Keri Hilson have both shared content with fans suggesting a link between 5G and COVID-19.
Stop5G Australia members have claimed the Ruby Princess cruiseliner’s link to 600 reported infections and 11 deaths is because cruises are “radiation saturated”. That’s wrong.
A screenshot of posts from the Stop5G Australia Facebook group.https://www.facebook.com/groups/Stop5GAustralia/?ref=br_rs
One petition is calling on the Australia government to stop 5G’s rollout because the technology can supposedly “negatively affect your immune system” (a claim for which there is exactly zero evidence). It has received more than 27,000 signatures.
How 5G radio signals (radiation) work
The difference between 5G and previous generations of mobile services (4G, 3G) is that the latter uses lower radio frequencies (in the 6 gigahertz range), whereas 5G uses frequencies in the 30–300 gigahertz range.
In the 30-300 gigahertz range, there’s not enough energy to break chemical bonds or remove electrons when in contact with human tissue. Thus, this range is referred to as “non-ionising” electromagnetic radiation.
It’s approved by the federal government’s Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency as not having the negative health effects of more intense radiation.
Radiation can come into contact with the skin, for example, when we put a 5G mobile to our ear to make a call. This is when we’re most exposed to non-ionising radiation. But this exposure is well below the recommended safety level.
5G radiation can’t penetrate skin, or allow a virus to penetrate skin. There is no evidence 5G radio frequencies cause or exacerbate the spread of the coronavirus.
Also, the protein shell of the virus is incapable of hijacking 5G radio signals. This is because radiation and viruses exist in different forms that do not interact. One is a biological phenomenon and the other exists on the electromagnetic spectrum.
5G radio waves are called millimetre waves, because their wavelength is measured in millimetres. Because these waves are short, 5G cell towers need to be relatively close together – about 250 metres apart. They are organised as a collection of small cells (a cell is an area covered by radio signals).
For 5G to cover a larger geographic area, more base stations are needed in comparison to 4G. This increase in the number of base stations, and their proximity to humans, is one factor that may stir unfounded fears about 5G’s potential health impacts.
Your phone may be dangerous, but its radiation isn’t
COVID-19 spreads through small droplets released from the nose or mouth of an infected person when they cough, spit, sneeze, talk or exhale. Transmission occurs when the droplets come into contact with the nose, eyes or mouth of a healthy person.
So if an infectious person speaks through a phone held near their mouth, enough infectious droplets may land on its surface to make it capable of spreading the virus. This is why it’s not advisable to share mobiles during a pandemic. You should also regularly disinfect your mobile.
Addressing this myth is critical as property is now being damaged, and individuals attacked. Physical and verbal threats to broadband engineers can be added to a long list of assaults on health workers.
At a time when millions are relying on fast internet to work and study from home, vital telecommunications infrastructure is at risk of being destroyed. Conspiracy theories have motivated arson attacks on 5G towers in Belfast, Liverpool and Birmingham.
Youtube has announced it will devote resources to removing content linking 5G technology to COVID-19.
The announcement came after fingers werepointed at one video, published on March 18 (and viewed more than 668,000 times), in which an American doctor claims incorrectly that Africa is less affected by COVID-19 because it’s not a 5G region. The video remained online at the time of publishing this article.
Even regional distribution, though South Island is worse. Chart by Keith Rankin.
Analysis by Keith Rankin.
Even regional distribution, though South Island is worse. Chart by Keith Rankin.
New Zealand now has sufficient case data to get a sense of its regional distribution of Covid19. Surprisingly, Auckland is not dominant, unlike the main business cities in other countries such as London, New York, Milan and Sydney. Certainly, internationally, Covid19 is very much a city disease.
The New Zealand regional chart shows both total cases by region, and cases adjusted for identified clusters. The idea is that clusters could have happened anywhere, and in themselves overstate the community incidences in the regions with clusters.
We see that the regions with the highest incidences of Covid19 are those relatively affluent areas, which are the most Pakeha-dominant. (This is born out by ethnicity estimates, fore which minority ethnic groups are all underrepresented in the present Covid19 data.)
Auckland’s incidence of Covid19 may be surprisingly low in part because of its high ethnic East Asian and Pacific populations.
If we disregard the Ruby Princess cluster in Hawkes Bay, then 8 of the bottom 9 regions are in the North Island; the exception is the West Coast.
When New Zealand moves from Level 4 shutdown to Level 3 or Level 3.5, it looks as though all regions should be treated equally. Even Otago/Southland – the worst affected – is not dramatically worse than the other regions.
Chart Update: New Zealand with Australia, Canada, and United States. We can see that New Zealand and Australian case data have converged. Chart by Keith Rankin.
The second chart is an update of the one that compares New Zealand with Australia, Canada, and United States. We can see that New Zealand and Australian case data have converged, and it is likely to stay that way. Both these countries have very low percentages of positive test results; a ratio of cases to tests of less than 0.02; it is much worse in the USA where the ratio is 0.19. Canada has a case ratio of 0.05. New Zealand has tested 0.8 percent of the population, similar to Canada but less than Australia. The USA, which has tested less than 0.6 percent, clearly has a much higher unknown incidence of Covid19 than Canada, which in turn has a substantially higher unknown incidence than New Zealand and Australia.
It is looking increasingly like New Zealand and Australia will approach the winter in good health.
Is David Clark the best possible Minister of Health to be leading New Zealand through the Coronavirus crisis? Confidence in Clark has plummeted with today’s revelation that the Health minister made another recreational trip during the lockdown that appears to breach the Government’s own rules.
The Prime Minister has decided not to accept his resignation, citing the “massive disruption” this would cause to the Government’s attempts to combat the spread of Covid-19 – see Eleanor Ainge Roy’s report today for the Guardian: New Zealand health minister demoted after beach visit broke lockdown rules.
The PM has been clear she would have liked to have got rid of Clark, saying “Under normal conditions, I would sack the minister of health. What he did was wrong, and there are no excuses.”
For example, Patterson says, he can obviously no longer front health messages about lockdown rules, and she asks whether keeping Clark in place will “prove to be too much of a distraction for Jacinda Ardern at such a crucial time?” She also points out that “Even the fact he’s obviously only still a minister because New Zealand is in the middle of the crisis is hardly confidence-inducing and further undermines his authority and credibility.”
The problem for Ardern is the lack of obvious replacements. Patterson explains: “None of the associate ministers, Jenny Salesa, Peeni Henare or the Greens Julie Anne Genter has the experience or seniority to take over as the lead minister. Bringing in another minister Ardern could trust to do the job would require them getting up to speed very quickly with a complex portfolio at the most extraordinary of times, plus any knock on implications for that minister’s own portfolios.”
According to Herald political editor Audrey Young, Clark’s sacking is now just a matter of time, and it’s “very unlikely” he can stay in his role until the election – in fact he may have to go before the crisis is over. She says “Ardern or Finance Minister Grant Robertson could take over the portfolio themselves as a short-term bridging position” – see: Why Health Minister David Clark can’t last (paywalled).
Young says Ardern will be “incandescent with fury” at the “no-win position” Clark has put her in, forcing her to deal with a political crisis in the middle of a health crisis, which is “unforgiveable”. Ardern knows keeping Clark on could make her look weak, and she could have just gone for the easy option of firing him, but that would not be “in the best interests of resolving the health crisis”.
Stuff political journalist Henry Cooke also suggests the more pragmatic choice would have been to get rid of Clark: “Politically the right option would be to simply accept it and send him to the backbench. That rips the band-aid off. You don’t have to spend the next two days batting off questions about Clark”, but putting in a new minister would be very difficult – see:Jacinda Ardern should fire David Clark as soon as this is over.
And who would replace Clark? Cooke discusses the problem: “There isn’t really an heir apparent to take on the role, as there is absolutely no way that Ardern would hand it to either of the associates: Health is too important of a portfolio to be handed to a Green MP like Julie Anne Genter, or someone with as little clout as Jenny Salesa.”
Cooke says it’s appropriate that Ardern has taken action against her minister, as the issue wasn’t about to blow over: “This is not an apologise and move on sort of sin. This is the Health Minister breaking and undermining an extremely stringent set of rules his own government has put in place for health purposes. It fulfils every stereotype of politicians as people who are happy to write rules but not abide by them.”
What’s more, being Health Minister, Clark should have been entirely on top of the new rules: “He should know these rules inside-out. The Government is currently intervening in the public’s lives to a degree no Government has done in a lifetime, with the full power of the police behind them – they need to be absolutely squeaky clean on this stuff themselves.”
Cooke also raises a question that others have been commenting on – why Clark hasn’t been part of the Government’s crisis response in Wellington: “You’d be forgiven for forgetting that Clark was the health minister still, given he’s fronted a tiny amount of the daily press briefings and has been holed up in Dunedin ever since the lockdown began. Many politicians would see this as the month that would make their career; Clark decided it would be the month for him to ruin his. His own top civil servant is now a national celebrity while he’s an embarrassment to his boss.”
Clark’s decision to depart Wellington is also discussed today by Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva: “From the outset, it seemed odd that Clark had not based himself in Wellington for the duration of the lockdown. For all that technology can offer, there is a reason why Ardern chose not to return to Auckland” and it speaks “volumes of Ardern’s confidence in him that she was happy with that arrangement” in which he worked from his Dunedin home – see: Clark’s career all but over after lockdown breaches.
More generally, Sachdeva argues Clark was never well suited to be Health minister: “He came into the job with no real health experience to speak of; while his mother was a GP, the ‘Dr’ honorific in front of his name comes from a PhD in theology rather than any medical qualifications. Clark has exercised questionable judgment in the past too, most notably a decision to head overseas for a family holiday in the days before a nationwide nurses’ strike in mid-2018. More generally, he has never seemed entirely comfortable fielding difficult questions from opposition MPs or the media, frequently giving the impression of a deer in the headlights.”
Clark’s performance during the Coronavirus crisis had already been questioned much earlier on. A number of bloggers and commentators suggested he wasn’t taking the pandemic seriously enough or communicating it well – see, for instance, Martyn Bradbury’s report on one of his Breakfast TV appearances in early March:David Clark vs John Campbell – worst interview ever.
About the same time, Chris Trotter argued Clark needed to step up and take more control of the crisis and fronting the Government’s response. He implored the PM to work out whether she needed him by her side, or whether she needed a new Minister of Health: “Having an effective and trustworthy Health Minister standing at her side for the duration of the fightback is essential. If that role isn’t one David Clark feels up to playing, then he, or Jacinda, should urgently arrange for it to be given to somebody else” – see: A helluva job: the political machinations of the coronavirus crisis during an election year.
Trotter warned the PM that Clark wasn’t up to the job and might cause problems: “In terms of potential cock-ups, the Prime Minister needs to keep a particularly close watch on her Health Minister, David Clark. A more ‘political’ politician than Clark would already have stepped forward to make the challenge of Covid-19 his own. Unfortunately, Clark has an unfortunate reputation for being ‘guided’ almost entirely by his officials. Certainly, he has displayed a consistent unwillingness to be held to account by the news media.”
Then when the mountain-biking controversy broke, a number of commentators suggested he might need to go, because his slip-ups undermined the Government’s all-important lockdown rules and messages. For instance, Heather du Plessis-Allan argued the PM needed to take action: “If she wants the rest of us to take these rules seriously for the next three weeks, she’s going to have to set an example” – see: David Clark doesn’t deserve it, but he should be fired.
At that stage Du Plessis-Allan also raised the question of whether Clark was actually relevant to the management of the crisis: “The fact that he’s in Dunedin when the country’s response to the biggest health crisis in 102 years is being run out of Wellington tells you everything.”
Criticisms of Clark were dismissed last week by a Press newspaper editorial, which said those calling for him to be sanctioned or sacked were “mischief-making” and seem “petty and contrived” – see: Making mountain bikes out of molehills.
However, the editorial argued that Clark’s bigger mistake was his decision to leave Wellington during the crisis: “There is much more substance to the criticism that at a time when New Zealand is facing its greatest health crisis in a century, the Government’s Minister of Health should have been in Wellington and making himself available to the media alongside Ardern and Finance Minister Grant Robertson. While there is a logic behind limiting the number of messengers, and putting the best communicators and most senior ministers in front of the public, the Health Minister’s absence from the capital during the crisis seems unusual.”
Finally, former Act MP Heather Roy stands up for David Clark and argues that “going to the beach with his family in their bubble on day 3 of lockdown when everyone was settling into a new normal is hardly a cardinal sin”. She says that the controversy is the sorry outcome of the fact that “We’re constantly being told what to do, or what we shouldn’t be doing” – see: New Zealand’s narks, the new normal.
The High Court today quashed the conviction of Cardinal George Pell, who had originally been found guilty on a number of charges by a jury of 12 people.
His defence counsel, Bret Walker SC, had argued before the High Court that the convictions in 2018 were unsound because it was not open to the jury to find Pell guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
He argued to the High Court the “sheer unlikelihood” of events and times aligning in the way that had been put forth by the prosecution to the trial judge and jury. He argued the story of the complainant could not be credible.
The High Court has now agreed.
A jury decides, but then …
Remember that, prior to the verdict, a jury of a dozen men and women had deliberated for almost five days before returning their verdicts of guilty on all five charges.
How is it that a jury’s decision, after hearing all the evidence (with the exception of Pell himself) and deliberating for a considerable period of time, can be subverted by the opinion of an appeal court 16 months later?
To answer this question we need to look briefly at the appeal grounds that apply in the higher criminal courts. There are two broad grounds of appeal against conviction. Each is found in both the common law and legislation that pertains to these matters.
The first, and far more common, is that there has been an error of law (or fact) in the way that the trial has been conducted, the way evidence has been wrongly admitted, or the way the judge has incorrectly summed up to the jury.
The less common basis of appeal is the verdict of the jury is unreasonable, or cannot be supported, given the evidence. The Pell appeal proceeded on this basis, and succeeded.
Reluctance to overturn juries
Appeal judges have traditionally shown a marked reluctance to overturn jury verdicts. The failed High Court appeal by Michael and Lindy Chamberlain in 1984 against their convictions for murdering their daughter comes quickly to mind. (They were later exonerated.)
Judges of the High Court have long wrestled with the difficulty of subverting the important role of the jury. In 1997, then Chief Justice Gerard Brennan put the position thus:
… the courts accept the jury as the possessor of both the skills and the advantages that are required to reach a proper verdict. In my respectful opinion, any contrary approach denies the importance of trial by jury and is inconsistent with the constitutional function which the jury performs.
Nevertheless, there may be exceptional cases where it appears that, despite its skills and advantages and the due observance of all relevant rules of law and procedure, the jury must have fallen into error.
There has long been a tradition of upholding the existence of the jury as the fundamental underpinning of the value, strength and reliability of our system of criminal justice.
I have always thought this a slightly odd observation given that magistrates, not juries, determine the vast majority of criminal cases that arrive for trial in Australia’s courts.
But in the higher courts judgment by one’s peers has always been a bulwark against the idea of a star chamber where decisions about an accused person’s guilt or innocence are made unfairly and capriciously.
A jury of your peers
The stability of the jury as an integral part of the justice system has never been seriously questioned. Advocates for the retention of the jury often recite the well-known case of Bushell in England in 1670 when two Quakers, William Penn and William Mead, were arrested and charged with unlawful assembly.
The jury stood steadfastly against the wishes of the judge who wanted to convict the two preachers. The judge was ultimately rebuffed. The jury was vindicated and its place in the criminal justice process was cemented.
But in cases such as Pell, the High Court has reinforced the notion that, despite the jury having the primary responsibility of determining the guilt or innocence of a person on trial, its responsibility can be subject to a higher order.
This is because, ultimately, the appeal courts have been given an overriding responsibility of determining for themselves whether a jury decision is a safe decision that has not been infected with the hue and cry or matters outside the evidence that was put to them.
Whatever one may think of the Pell decision, it is appropriate there be such a final arbiter in the justice process.
But one victim of this appeal result may be a loss of public confidence in the jury system. At the other end of the spectrum, others may lose confidence in the justice system itself.
I trust that neither is the outcome. But one could be excused for feeling a general uneasiness about the fact that, for all the store we place on juries in determining issues of guilt and innocence, their role can be dispensed with so easily.
Fitbit recently released data showing a global decrease in physical activity levels among users of its activity trackers compared to the same time last year.
As we navigate the coronavirus pandemic, this is not altogether surprising. We’re getting less of the “incidental exercise” we normally get from going about our day-to-day activities, and many of our routine exercise options have been curtailed.
While we don’t know for sure how long our lifestyles will be affected in this way, we do know periods of reduced physical activity can affect our health.
To understand why the consequences of inactivity could be worse for some people, it’s first important to understand the concept of cardiorespiratory fitness.
Cardiorespiratory fitness provides an indication of our overall health. It tells us how effectively different systems in our body are working together, for example how the lungs and heart transport oxygen to the muscles during activity.
The amount of physical activity we do influences our cardiorespiratory fitness, along with our age. Cardiorespiratory fitness generally peaks in our 20s and then steadily declines as we get older. If we’re inactive, our cardiorespiratory fitness will decline more quickly.
As we get older, our cardiorespiratory fitness declines.Shutterstock
One study looked at five young healthy men who were confined to bed rest for three weeks. On average, their cardiorespiratory fitness decreased 27% over this relatively short period.
These same men were tested 30 years later. Notably, three decades of normal ageing had less effect on cardiorespiratory fitness (11% reduction) than three weeks of bed rest.
This study demonstrates even relatively short periods of inactivity can rapidly age the cardiorespiratory system.
But the news isn’t all bad. Resuming physical activity after periods of inactivity can restore cardiorespiratory fitness, while being physically active can slow the decline in cardiorespiratory fitness associated with normal ageing.
Staying active at home
Generally, we know older adults and people with chronic health conditions (such as heart disease or type 2 diabetes) have lower cardiorespiratory fitness compared to younger active adults.
This can heighten the risk of health issues like another heart disease event or stroke, and admission to hospital.
While many older people and those with chronic health conditions have been encouraged to stay home during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s still possible for this group to remain physically active. Here are some tips:
set a regular time to exercise each day, such as when you wake up or before having lunch, so it becomes routine
aim to accumulate 30 minutes of exercise on most if not all days. This doesn’t have to all be done at once but could be spread across the day (for example, in three ten-minute sessions)
use your phone to track your activity. See how many steps you do in a “typical” day during social distancing, then try to increase that number by 100 steps per day. You should aim for at least 5,000 steps a day
take any opportunity to get in some activity throughout the day. Take the stairs if you can, or walk around the house while talking on the phone
try to minimise prolonged periods of sedentary time by getting up and moving at least every 30 minutes, for example during the TV ad breaks
incorporate additional activity into your day through housework and gardening.
First, put on appropriate footwear (runners) to minimise any potential knee, ankle or foot injuries. Also ensure you have a water bottle close by to stay hydrated.
It may be useful to have a chair or bench nearby in case you run into any balance issues during the exercises.
Start with five minutes of gentle warm up such as a leisurely walk around the back garden or walking up and down the hallway or stairs
then pick up the pace a little for another ten minutes of cardio – such as brisk walking, or skipping or marching on the spot if space is limited. You should work at an intensity that makes you huff and puff, but at which you could still hold a short conversation with someone next to you
next, complete a circuit program. This means doing one set of six to eight exercises (such as squats, push ups, step ups, bicep curls or calf raises) and then repeating the circuit three times
these exercises can be done mainly using your own body weight, or for some exercises you can use dumbbells or substitutes such as bottles of water or cans of soup
start with as many repetitions as you can manage and work up to 10-15 repetitions of each exercise
perform each exercise at a controlled tempo (for example, take two seconds to squat down and two seconds to stand up again)
finish with five minutes of gentle cool down similar to your warm up.
If you have diabetes, check your blood sugar levels before, during and after you exercise, and avoid injecting insulin into exercising limbs.
If you have a heart condition, it’s important to warm up and cool down properly and take adequate rests (about 45 seconds) after you complete the total repetitions for each exercise.
For people with cancer, consider your current health status before you start exercising, as cancers and associated treatments may affect your ability to perform some activities.
Museums, galleries and artist collectives around the world are shutting their doors and moving online in response to coronavirus. But engaging with audiences online requires access, skills and investment.
My research with remote Aboriginal art centres in the Northern Territory and community museums in Victoria shows moving to digital can widen the gap between urban and regional organisations.
Local spaces are vital. They ensure our national story is about more than the metropolitan, allowing artists to create – and audiences to engage with – local art and history. These art centres and museums bring communities together.
This cannot be replicated online.
Australia’s digital divide influences the ability of museums and galleries to move online, and the ability of audiences to find them there.
Cultural organisations that cannot produce digital content risk getting left behind. If we don’t support regional and rural organisations in their move online – or relieve them from this pressure entirely – we run the risk of losing them.
More than metropolitan
Community museums are critical in collecting, preserving and enabling access to local history. Across Victoria, these community organisations hold around 10 million items.
Aboriginal art centres produce some of Australia’s best contemporary art, generating A$53 million in sales between 2008 and 2012.
Digital platforms can make these contributions to our cultural life more accessible – particularly in these times of physical distancing. But artists in remote Aboriginal art centres and volunteer retirees running community museums are the most likely to experience digital disadvantage and the most likely to be left behind.
A digital divide
Australians are more likely to be digitally excluded when Indigenous, living in remote areas, or over the age of 65.
Over 30% of Indigenous artists practising out of art centres are over 55, and are most likely to be earning from their art over 65. These remote centres have poor access to web-capable devices and have low-quality internet connections.
The digital divide also exists for local audiences with access issues of their own.
Although most art centres and community museums have active websites and social media accounts, these are unlikely to be truly engaging or interactive.
Art centres tend to focus their digital platforms outside the community on commercial sales. Community museums focus on information about opening hours and events. They rarely have the expertise or capacity to create detailed online catalogues for audiences.
Exclusionary consequences
Cultural participation is fragmented along demographic and geographic lines. Cities house the majority of our major institutions, with city dwellers dominating visitation.
Digital inequality ensures barriers remain even for online collections. Regional and rural organisations are unlikely to have the specific skills, resourcing and devices to move fully online.
Under social distancing, cultural organisations that cannot produce digital content risk being left behind. This will disproportionately impact regional and rural organisations.
These organisations are critical for preserving the diversity of Australian stories. Aboriginal art centres and community museums provide spaces where the local is solidified. Communities are formed, documented, responded to and shared.
If these organisations cannot host the same web presence as major metropolitan institutions, even local audiences could divert their attention to the cities. Our local cultural organisations might go the way of our disappearing regional newspapers.
To survive the coming months, these organisations need targeted support to move online. Or a reprieve from the pressure to be completely digitally accessible: not all cultural consumption can happen online.
These physical community spaces will be more important than ever once social isolation rules are lifted.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steven Hamilton, Visiting Fellow, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
No Australian government has ever spent A$130 billion so quickly.
Last Tuesday, when the Prime Minister announced the government would subsidise six million jobs for six months to the tune of $1,500 a fortnight, the nation’s economists were left speechless.
Today, the government unveiled the legislation to be considered by the parliament tomorrow.
In ordinary times, there wouldn’t be a lot of support for a $130 billion wage subsidy. But these aren’t ordinary times.
Whole sectors of the economy have shut down, either directly as part of the health response to the pandemic, or indirectly as part of a wave of knock-on effects.
The JobKeeper wage subsidies will give direct support to the worst-affected businesses and jobs, helping to keep the economic damage to a minimum. The package isn’t perfect. But it’s a far better response than had been feared.
It will help keep the Australian economy afloat over the next six months, putting it in a position to bounce back when health officials deem it safe to reopen parts of the economy for business.
It has three key features:
businesses get $1,500 per fortnight per worker (only for those workers who were employed on March 1. Short-term casuals with the business and some visa holders are excluded)
the employer has to keep those workers on the books and pay them at least $1,500 per fortnight
it only applies to businesses whose revenue has collapsed by at least 30% (15% for charities and not-for-profits, 50% for the largest businesses, with banks excluded).
To be effective, it has to deliver on three goals:
to support workers’ incomes through the crisis
to keep workers attached to firms, preserving as many job-specific skills and as much know-how as possible
to prevent wide-scale business failures which could turn a short and sharp recession into a long and painful depression.
Importantly, this means if it’s working well, both workers and employers will get something out of the deal.
At firms that would otherwise have shut down, workers will benefit considerably.
Many workers will get paid more
The $1,500 payment will give them much more than the Newstart payment they would have received if laid off, even the doubled Newstart (now called JobSeeker) which for six months has been paired with a Coronavirus supplement lifting it from $565.70 to $1,115.60 per fortnight.
And for the one third of workers otherwise earning less than $1,500 per fortnight, the JobKeeper payment will be a pay rise. If the subsidy keeps their firm afloat, they’ll keep their job and be paid even more than before for the next six months.
It’s possible those earning more than $1,500 per fortnight will earn less than they did before in pay and benefits, depending on what the government does with the Fair Work Act.
Exactly how it works out for workers who get JobKeeper will depend on the labour market. On one hand, they will be more attractive to employers because their employment comes with a big subsidy that new hires don’t bring with them. On the other hand, they might have few alternative employers to turn to. Jobs might be hard to find.
They’ll get to keep their jobs
Regardless, even if their pay is reduced, their situation will be much better than under the renamed Newstart. And to the extent that cutting their pay helps to keep the firm viable, it will secure a job for them on the other side.
Employers will also benefit. If a business stays open, it will get the benefit of its workers’ labour for free or at a big discount. It might look like corporate welfare, but it’s a feature, not a bug.
A key objective of the scheme is to plug the hole in firms’ revenues to prevent them going under. Most would have been viable if it weren’t for the necessary public health measures governments have taken. Allowing them to fail would mean a pointless destruction of valuable resources.
The wage subsidy is somewhat crude and inevitably there will be some waste. Some firms will be given more money than they need, some workers will be given more, some less.
It was never going to be perfect
Given more time, the treasury could have designed something better targeted, less wasteful. It didn’t have it. The economy has never experienced so sudden a collapse.
But there are a few simple things the government could do to make it better.
It could include short-term casuals and visa holders, and it should take care not to weaken the Fair Work Act.
JobKeeper won’t prevent a serious contraction in the Australian economy, but it should give us a very good chance to bounce back on the other side.
We would like to thank Jeff Borland for his comments on a draft version of this article.
While the Vanuatu government is investing its resources in tackling the coronavirus pandemic threat, it is now stretching its resources to tackle other natural disasters posing threats to the lives of the people – Cyclone Harold still moving over the country after lashing Santo and constant ash fall from Mt Yasur on Tanna.
Torba and Sanma Provinces suffered flooding and damage from the cyclone.
A lot of people were evacuated as the cyclone brought strong winds, destructive storm surges and heavy rainfall that resulted in flooding.
It made landfall in the south-western coast of Santo and caused damage to infrastructure that could be costly to recover.
Buildings were damaged, communication networks and electricity have been disrupted since yesterday.
– Partner –
The government lifted its Covid-19 physical distancing restriction to allow mass gathering of people in evacuation centers.
Cyclone Harold was upgraded to category 5 yesterday morning and is expected to gain strength as it continues on its forecasted path towards Fiji.
Store food, water advice People are advised to store enough food and water and those in unsafe shelters and risky areas are advised to move out to safety.
Authorities in the affected provinces have provided evacuation centres to many families. At the Torba Provincial Headquarter in Sola, Vanualava, families have taken shelter in evacuation centres for several days now.
Director of the National Disaster Management Office (NDMO), Abraham Nasak, said: “This is a very challenging time having experience Covid-19 restrictions and Cyclone Harold impacts at the same time”.
Apart from COVID-19 and Cyclone Harold, NDMO is also coordinating response to the Teouma flooding and Tanna ash fall due to the increase in its activity recently.
Secretary-General (SG) of the TAFEA Provincial Government Council (TPGC) Joe Iautim stressed that the ash fall impacts on communities at the Whitesands area in southeast and a few in north Tanna was severe.
“People in these parts of the island are exposed to volcanic ash all year around and often go without food for several months. They rely on the market to buy crops to eat,” he said.
SG Iautim conveyed that a team from NDMO led by the Senior Provincial Liaison Officer of NDMO, Philip Meto, were in Tanna for the rapid assessment, following a request from communities and the TAFEA NDMO Office.
Ash assessment He said assessment covered other areas that usually experience ash fall and volcanic gases following the wind direction.
NDMO’s Senior Provincial Liaison Officer, Meto, said rapid assessment had been completed awaiting decision from the National Disaster Committee (NDC).
NDMO Director Nasak has assured NDC will consider relief response to the affected families once the State of Emergency (SOE) put in place for Covid-19 ends on Thursday this week.
Director of the Public Health Department Len Tarivonda said the Health Cluster partners were ready to support NDMO response plan for Cyclone Harold.
Cyclone Harold was moving in a south-southeast direction towards central Vanuatu as of yesterday. It is expected to leave Vanuatu by mid-week.
The Pacific Media Centre republishes articles by arrangement with the Vanuatu Daily Post.
New Zealand has 54 new confirmed and probable cases of Covid-19, bringing the total number of cases to 1160, the Health Ministry has confirmed.
Today’s new figure is down from the 67 new cases reported yesterday.
With 65 people recovering in the past day, today is also the first day that recoveries have exceeded new cases in New Zealand, meaning the country’s number of current cases has decreased for the first time since the lockdown began.
Speaking at today’s media conference, Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said 241 people had now recovered from the coronavirus.
He said there were 12 people in hospital – four of them are in ICUs in Wellington, Waitematā, Counties and Southern, and one of them was in a critical condition.
– Partner –
Today’s coronavirus NZ government media conference. Video: RNZ News
Dr Bloomfield also said 42,826 tests had been undertaken to date, and 2 percent of cases so far had been linked to community transmission.
He said the World Health Organisation (WHO) had updated its advice on the use of masks, particularly in the general population.
“In summary, the WHO does not recommend the use of medical masks by the general public, except in particular circumstances where someone is sick and wearing a mask to protect others, or someone who is caring for a sick person and the mask can help to protect them.”
New cases expected level Dr Bloomfield said the Ministry of Health was expecting the number of new cases of Covid-19 to stay level.
He said there were now five more people in the Marist cluster, a larger increase in the Bluff cluster and one more in the Matamata cluster. There were no new clusters, he said.
Dr Bloomfield also gave an update on the number of breaches of the lockdown reported by police.
“There have been 291 breaches of the CDEM Act or the Health Act, 16 people have been prosecuted, 263 warnings and 10 youth referrals.”
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern also spoke at today’s media conference and said the case rates had suggested the level four lockdown was working.
“For the moment, we do appear, at this early stage, to be on track.”
Yesterday the prime minister made it clear the alert level four Covid-19 lockdown would go for the full four weeks, and she said today it was more important than ever that people stayed home.
‘Not time to change’ “Now is not the time to change any of our behaviours.”
She also spoke about the actions of Health Minister David Clark and said that while they were wrong, his knowledge and skills were required to take on Covid-19 and this was the only reason he had maintained his Health portfolio.
“He must pay the price.”
Ardern also gave an update on the Wage Subsidy Scheme – saying it had helped more than 1 million New Zealanders, with $6.6 billion paid out – and said she had written to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson after she heard he had developed Covid-19.
This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.
If you havesymptomsof the coronavirus, call the NZ Covid-19 Healthline on 0800 358 5453 (+64 9 358 5453 for international SIMs) or call your GP – don’t show up at a medical centre.
Many newspapers betrayed their readers during the Great Depression and now some are doing so again during the coronavirus pandemic.
During the Depression, Australia’s major daily newspapers loudly resisted calls for economic stimulus to revive the economy. Even the tabloids – whose working class audiences were feeling the full brunt of unemployment – campaigned instead for government spending cuts that hit their readers hard.
Self-interest was behind this. The companies and individuals behind Australia’s most popular daily newspapers in the early 1930s were bondholders who had lent enormous sums of money to Australian governments before the Depression.
So had banks, trustee and life insurance companies that were allied with newspaper owners, and also major newspaper advertisers.
If Australian governments had not made severe cuts to spending and instead injected money into the economy through welfare and job creation projects, they would not have been able to pay back their debts. Domestic bondholders would have lost millions in interest payments.
– Partner –
Now, we see some news outlets again betraying their readers by prioritising business over public health.
In the Murdoch News Corp/Fox Corporation stable in the US, Fox News downplayed the spread of the virus for as long as it could.
Its presenters ridiculed predictions about its impact as coming from “panic pushers” and liberals out to damage Trump, while the Wall Street Journal editorialised that shutdowns might be safeguarding public health but “at the cost of its economic health”.
Trump jumped on cue and began spouting the same shameful rhetoric that the cure might be worse than the disease because of its economic impact. He wanted Americans back to work by Easter.
The Sun newspaper’s ‘House Arrest’ lockdown edition. Image: The Conversation
Murdoch’s Sun in the UK represented shutdowns there with a bleak front page calling them “HOUSE ARREST” and showing a padlock over the Union Jack.
In the Murdoch outlets in Australia, these views are being faithfully reproduced by Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun and Sky News. Bolt’s column on March 30 was headed “Aussies should be back at work in two weeks”.
During the Great Depression, the mainstream press strongly reflected the economic conservatism of bankers, economists and business leaders. The most vehement outlets were the Argus and the Herald in Melbourne, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, the Mercury in Hobart, and the BrisbaneTelegraph and BrisbaneCourier. They attacked the Scullin Labor government’s plan to reflate the economy through government stimulus as “economic insanity”, “a dangerous experiment”, “grotesque and menacing”.
But in a turn of phrase that even those papers might have found too hysterical, Bolt recently described economic stimulus packages during coronavirus as “Marxism”. This is despite the fact that economic stimulus is now so widely accepted as part of a mainstream economic toolkit that conservative politicians are using it in Australia, the UK and the US.
Sky News host Alan Jones has also downplayed the virus, saying “we are living in the age of hysteria” and that he wants to see the emphasis placed on protecting people “in nursing homes and hospitals instead of schools and football stadiums”.
Sky News video: ‘We are living in the age of hysteria.’
Right-wing commentators – presumably working from home themselves – are keen to get everyone back to work in the midst of a pandemic, even though the medical advice says otherwise.
The usual pretence that they are on the side of their audience falls away at a time of crisis. They are representing the interests of business – particularly their own.
Media companies that were already financially fragile are extremely worried about coronavirus. The sudden halt to business has meant the loss of advertising revenue, possibly for a long period, but also the loss of reader income. This means people have less to spend on media and on buying advertisers’ products.
Combined with this is the dramatic loss of sport (of vital importance to the struggling Foxtel, Kayo Sports and tabloid newspapers) and also the end of house auctions when real estate sections and real estate websites were one of the few remaining bright spots for the newspaper groups. The bread-and-butter events that newspapers cover, from entertainment and leisure to restaurant and movies, have stopped, and nobody knows for how long.
These are unprecedented and menacing threats to commercial media groups. At News Corp, there is the added pressure of a transition in leadership from the 89-year-old Rupert Murdoch to his son, Lachlan Murdoch, a less tested – and less trusted – leader who is unlikely to have the business nous of his father or even his grandfather, Keith Murdoch.
As a journalist and editor, Keith Murdoch was one of those who promoted business interests during the Depression. Rupert’s father was also a vehement conscriptionist during the first and second world wars. Although Keith never signed up for military service himself, he propagandised, almost obsessively, for conscription and called on other men to make a sacrifice for a greater cause.
We need to beware the media commentators of today, anti-science and anti-expertise armchair generals, who likewise call on their fellow citizens to do things they won’t do themselves.
The coronavirus might make Easter celebrations a little subdued this year, but that doesn’t mean going without chocolate eggs. In fact, South Australia’s chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier reportedly said people should partake in the Easter treats “to cheer ourselves up … I’ve certainly got a good supply of chocolate eggs already”.
But before you fill your shopping trolley (online or virtual) with chocolate, we urge you to think twice about whether it’s ethically produced.
Most chocolate consumed globally, including in Australia, comes from the Ivory Coast and Ghana in West Africa – which together account for about 60% of global cocoa supply.
More work is needed by big chocolate companies to ensure cocoa is produced sustainably and fairly.CHRISTOF KRACKHARDT
Spotlight on Nestlé
The US Department of Labor has estimated that 2 million children carry out hazardous work on cocoa farms in Ghana and the Ivory Coast.
Our research has examined Nestlé, which claims its chocolate produced for specific markets is sustainably sourced and produced. A number of its chocolate products are certified through the UTZ and Fairtrade schemes.
Nestlé has adopted the Fair Labor Association (FLA) code of conduct that forbids child or forced child labour, and requires certain health and safety standards, reasonable hours of work and fair pay. Nestlé’s Cocoa Plan also outlines the company’s commitment to sustainability in its Ivory Coast cocoa supply chain.
But a 2016 FLA report said 80% of Nestlé’s cocoa procurement took place outside this plan. Of this part of the supply chain, just 30% was monitored by certification systems.
For the 70% of Nestlé cocoa farms outside certification programs, there was no evidence of training on labour standards or monitoring of working conditions. Assessors also found issues such as child labour, and health and safety issues.
More recently, Nestlé has stated its cocoa plan now covers 44% of its global cocoa supply, and the company is committed to sourcing 100% of cocoa under the plan by 2025.
On the issue of child labour, Nestlé last year reported it was “not proud” to have found more than 18,000 children doing hazardous work since a monitoring and remediation system began in 2012.
However the company would continue trying to eradicate the practice, including “helping children to stop doing unacceptable activities and, where needed, helping them to access quality education.”
Cocoa producers in West Africa are often poorly paid and subject to dangerous working conditions.Wikimedia
Sweet sorrow: an industry problem
Other big chocolate players, such as Mars, Cadbury (owned by Mondelēz International), Hershey and Ferrero are also exposed to problems facing cocoa farming.
Many are taking action. Mars recently supported Ghana and the Ivory Coast in setting a floor price for cocoa, to increase the money paid to farmers.
In 2012, Ferrero promised to remove slavery from its cocoa supply by 2020.
Others have made moves towards better certification, including Hershey, which says it pays certification premiums to farmer groups who meet labour standards.
But despite years of pledges, progress across the sector is slow. The Washington Post last year reported major chocolate companies had missed deadlines to remove child labour from their cocoa supply chains in 2005, 2008 and 2010. It said brands such as Hershey, Mars and Nestlé could still not guarantee their chocolates were produced without child labour.
Child labour issues continue to plague the chocolate industry.Public Domain Pictures
Bad for the planet
Cocoa farming is a major driver of deforestation as farmers cut down trees to clear farmland. For example in 2017, the Guardian reported cocoa traders selling to Mars, Nestlé, Mondelez and other big brands had sourced beans grown illegally inside protected rainforest areas in the Ivory Coast.
Rising demand for chocolate – particularly in India and China – also encourages farmers to increase cocoa yield by using fertilisers and pesticides.
A 2018 study found the chocolate industry in the UK produces the equivalent of more than 2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. It took into account chocolate’s ingredients, manufacturing, packaging and waste.
And research last year by the CSIRO showed it takes 21 litres of water to produce a small chocolate bar.
In response to the problem, Mars and Nestlé have pledged to make their cocoa supply chain sustainable by 2025. Ferrero has committed to source 100% sustainable cocoa beans by 2020, and Mondelēz intends to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10% by 2025, based on 2018 levels.
But pledges do not necessarily transform into action. At a United Nations climate change conference in November 2017, big chocolate producers and the governments of Ghana and the Ivory Coast committed to stopping deforestation for cocoa production. A year later, satellite mapping reportedly revealed thousands more hectares of rainforest in West Africa had been razed.
Instead, choose chocolate independently certified by the Rainforest Alliance, UTZ or Fairtrade. This increases the chance that the cocoa was produced with minimal environmental damage, and workers are treated well.
If you can, check if the company has direct connections with producers, which means farmers are more likely to be fairly paid.
The centerpiece of the Commonwealth government’s COVID-19 economic stimulus program is JobKeeper. Priced at A$130 billion, it will pay eligible employers $1,500 per fortnight for each eligible employee for up to six months.
The aim, according to the government fact sheet, is to
support employers to maintain their connection to their employees (as) these connections will enable business to reactivate their operations quickly – without having to rehire staff – when the crisis is over
But excluded from the scheme are workers on temporary visas (except for New Zealand citizens on Special Category Subclass 444 visas – they’re included).
This exclusion is wrong for four reasons.
1. It penalises the businesses that employ temporary workers
The exclusion of temporary visa holders discriminates against the businesses that employ them.
Given there are close to 900,000 temporary visa holders with work rights (excluding New Zealand citizens) the discrimination will have a serious impact.
It will be particularly severe in industries that significantly rely on temporary migrants: among them hospitality (international students), agriculture (working holiday makers), health and aged care (workers on Temporary Skill Shortage visas).
The exclusion of temporary visa holders from JobKeeper will bring about distortions within and between industries. It will likely result in the closure of businesses that rely upon temporary migrants.
2. It breaches fundamental rights
Equal rights at work – regardless of migrant status – is a key principle of
This principle underpins Australia’s Fair Work Act which treats migrant workers as within its scope.
JobKeeper, which provides a workplace benefit through wage subsidies, departs from this principle.
Not only does it set a dangerous precedent, it is a particularly egregious breach.
Denial of the JobKeeper payment will mean the loss of jobs and livelihoods for many or most temporary visa holders.
Some will be forced to attempt to return to their countries of origin, which in some cases are less safe than Australia.
Among them are Italian working holiday visa holders.
3. Many of those affected are members of the community
Temporary visa holders are only temporary in the sense that they have a limited right to stay.
Swinburne University’s Peter Mares has characterised Australia’s shift to temporary migration as “permanent” in two senses: it is an enduring change, and it has resulted in temporary visa holders residing in Australia for extended periods of time.
Philosopher Joseph Carens has rightly argued that such extended periods of residence provide a basis for community membership, given the contributions given and connections made, regardless of migration status.
Asking temporary visa holders to “go home” not only fails to recognise membership of the Australian community but also misses the fundamental point that Australia is home to many of these temporary visa holders.
This ought not be hard to understand: most overseas Australians would consider their country of residence to be their home.
The position of overseas Australians (of which there are hundreds of thousands) suggests another important perspective: the Golden Rule.
How would we view the actions of foreign governments that insisted that overseas Australians “go home” if they had insufficient funds due to COVID-19 restrictions imposed by these very governments?
4. It undermines the fight against COVID-19
The hardship resulting from the temporary visa holder exclusion will undermine public health measures.
Temporary visa holders will increasingly swell the number of homelessness.
It is hard to “stay at home” if you don’t have one. Financial desperation will drive some to continue working even if unwell.
Other adverse consequences are likely. Desperate temporary visa holders will become exposed wage theft of the kind exposed by the 7-Eleven scandal, slowing Australia’s labour market recovery.
The recovery of higher education will be slowed down if international students are impoverished and unable to pay the fees necessary to continue their studies.
Temporary migrant workers ought to be part of JobKeeper, just as are other Australian residents and New Zealanders on temporary visas.
Excluding them breaches their fundamental rights, fails to recognise the community membership of many of them, and it will undermine Australia’s efforts to fight COVID-19.
The High Court today granted Cardinal George Pell special leave to appeal, and unanimously allowed the appeal. In other words, Pell won. His convictions were quashed and he will be released from prison.
Pell’s prosecution has been socially explosive and legally complex. The cardinal’s convictions by unanimous jury verdicts were a landmark event in Australian history. The High Court’s decision will be, too – both for the legal world and for society more broadly.
For many, it will be impossible to understand how the unanimous jury verdicts of guilty, further supported by a Court of Appeal majority of two judges, can now be overturned.
The High Court decision may undermine confidence in the legal system, especially in child sexual abuse prosecutions.
Civil legal actions against Pell are ongoing, so his legal battles aren’t over yet. More civil lawsuits may well follow, especially after the release of the Royal Commission’s findings about his conduct in Ballarat.
This case is exceptionally complex. It is important for the public to understand the legal process and key issues.
This High Court appeal did not ask whether Pell committed the offences. It asked whether the two majority judges in the Victorian Court of Appeal, in dismissing Pell’s earlier appeal, made an error about the nature of the correct legal principles, or their application.
Here is a summary of the key events.
The jury decision
In 2018, a jury unanimously found Pell guilty “beyond reasonable doubt” of five child sexual offences. This standard of proof is high, but does not require absolute proof. The jury believed the complainant, and rejected Pell’s defence.
The Court of Appeal decision
Pell argued the verdicts “could not be supported on the whole of the evidence”. The question for the court was not whether it thought Pell was guilty, but whether (in its opinion after reviewing all the evidence) it was “open to the jury” to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt the accused was guilty.
Jury decisions cannot be undermined without exceptional circumstances. Pell had to show more than the jury “might have” had a reasonable doubt. He had to show the evidence “precluded” a guilty verdict.
When a complainant is credible, and their account is detailed, plausible, and consistent, it is difficult to show a jury must have had a reasonable doubt.
To meet the standard of “beyond reasonable doubt”, evidence is assessed as a whole. Every piece of evidence does not itself have to be proved to that standard. It is “open to the jury” to convict even if aspects of the evidence are “imperfect”.
All three Court of Appeal judges thoroughly and independently considered all the evidence. Two judges thought the verdict was open to the jury, and one did not.
In other words, two judges thought it was open to the jury to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt the accused was guilty – and one did not.
A court sketch of Cardinal George Pell at the Supreme Court of Victoria last year.Jeff Hayes/AAP
The case goes to the High Court
The High Court allowed “special leave to appeal”. This is unusual, as special leave applications arguing an unreasonable verdict are frequently refused, including in child sexual offence cases.
It can only grant leave if the case involves a question of legal principle, or if – as found here – there’s a question of the administration of justice.
Pell claimed the Court of Appeal misapplied the legal test, causing a miscarriage of justice.
The question for the High Court in whether to give special leave was not whether Pell was guilty, or whether the jury was right.
It was whether the case involved an issue engaging the interests of the administration of justice.
The High Court found the interests of the administration of justice required their involvement. This does not itself indicate any view about Pell’s guilt.
What did Pell argue in the High Court?
Pell argued the Victorian majority judgment’s application of the “open to the jury” test was wrong.
He argued they effectively required him to prove it was impossible for the offending to occur, reversing the onus and standard of proof. He argued the majority’s belief in the complainant was not enough to overcome evidence about lack of opportunity to commit the offences.
He also argued there was sufficient doubt about whether the offending was possible, as the complainant’s account required them to be alone in the sacristy for five to six minutes.
There was enough doubt about this, his legal team argued, the majority on the Court of Appeal incorrectly found it was open to the jury to find the offending occurred during this period.
The Crown rejected these claims. They argued there was no reversal of the onus of proof, and the majority judges were justified in concluding the evidence about lack of opportunity was not persuasive enough to create a doubt that “obliged” the jury to find him not guilty.
Supporters of abuse victims outside the Victoria Supreme Court building in August. Today’s decision was handed down in a near-empty High Court building.Julian Smith/AAP
Pell won today on a legal technicality
Based on their summary reasons, the High Court found the Court of Appeal majority judgment did not apply sufficiently cogent reasoning when it assessed the evidence.
In their full reasons, the High Court concluded an independent assessment of the evidence by the Court of Appeal should have concluded there ought to have been sufficient doubt in the jury’s minds to preclude the verdict from being open.
They found the majority’s judgment failed to consider whether there was a reasonable possibility the offending had not taken place, such that there ought to have been a reasonable doubt as to Pell’s guilt.
They also found that despite the complainant’s credibility and reliability, the evidence of the witnesses required the jury, acting rationally, to have entertained a reasonable doubt as to Pell’s guilt.
It is difficult to reconcile this outcome with the fact this is exactly the conclusion the jury did make. The jury’s conclusion was further supported by the Appeal Court majority judgment’s careful and extensive evaluation of that same evidence.
The High Court has given claims about lack of opportunity an elevated technical legal status that outweighs the jury’s belief in Pell’s testimony and their evident discounting of Pell’s claimed lack of opportunity. This appears perilously close to re-trial by the court.
A jury found the cardinal guilty beyond reasonable doubt of five offences.
In doing so, the jury assessed the testimony and credibility of the complainant. They also considered the strength of the claims made by the cardinal about the timing of his whereabouts, who was with him at the relevant times and whether the offences could have happened.
The jury saw and heard all the evidence, in the context of the trial. It was their legal function to make this decision.
Careful analysis of the full reasoning of the High Court is required to fully assess it. But for now, this extraordinary outcome is strange justice indeed.
Pell has won today on a legal technicality, but he will continue to be assailed by multiple lawsuits.
In contrast, the complainant has been believed by a jury, by a majority judgment, and by a substantial body of public opinion.
The unfolding COVID-19 situation has brought many changes to school education. NAPLAN tests have been cancelled for 2020 and most children are learning online.
Education minister Dan Tehan is meeting with the states on what to do with year 12 exams and criteria for university entry. One option flagged is for universities to look at a mixture of students’ year 11 and year 12 assessments to date.
With regards to the end of school qualification in New South Wales, the Higher School Certificate (HSC), the state’s education board has already given
principals or system authorities the power to make decisions about the number and weighting of HSC formal assessment tasks for their school in 2020.
The board went on to say it “affirms its complete trust in principals and teachers”.
This is similar to what was done in the UK. Their GCSE and A-level exams have been cancelled and replaced with teacher assessment, based on low-stakes testing, coursework and class performance.
While Australia should be looking at creative solutions for assessing students’ end of school results and criteria for university entry, a focus on teacher assessments may be problematic.
Teachers can be prone to a phenomenon known as grade inflation. This is essentially where students are awarded higher marks without demonstrating higher levels of mastery.
Our research showed teachers in private schools are more likely to inflate grades due to pressure from students and parents.
Grade inflation is a worldwide problem, both in schools and universities. As the Atlantic reports, a US study of the history of college grading found, in the early 1960s, an A grade was awarded in colleges nationwide 15% of the time. But today, an A is the most common grade given in college – the percentage of A grades has tripled, to 45% nationwide.
In Australia, year 12 exams – which are weighted heavily in the total score for a student’s school certificate – are marked externally. But in the US, all grades are given to students by their teachers. For extra credit, students may take external Advanced Placement (AP) exams.
At the end of their final school year, or year 12 equivalent, US students’ grades are averaged out to provide a Grade Point Average (GPA).
Students who wish to apply to a college or university will most likely have to take an external Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or an American College Test (ACT) – general tests to evaluate their written, verbal and mathematical and/or scientific reasoning skills. While these tests are used as criteria for admission to most US colleges or universities, many institutions are now test-optional, meaning they don’t require such tests at all.
While every institution balances and counts the “absolute merit” of GPA and test scores in its own way, admissions offices seem to question the grading system and search for other metrics. They acknowledge the average US teacher experiences a great deal of pressure from students and parents anxious about college admissions.
Such pressures are more prevalent in wealthier, white and private schools.
Teachers facing pressure
Our research showed how inflated expectations of students and parents led to teachers’ ethical grading dilemmas in one private prestigious school in the US. We found teachers engaged in “grade massaging” due to either an “ethic of care” toward their students (due to concern about their students’ motivation, psychology or life prospects) or due to extensive school or parent pressures.
One science teacher told us parents feel “they are paying and they deserve for their kids to get As”. As a result, she noted, there is substantial
pressure on teachers to inflate grades, to give do-overs and all that kind of thing.
Another math teacher admitted to “overlooking” a struggling student’s missing work and shoddy study habits, giving her a B+ so she “could just finish the year”.
And another English teacher lamented
there is a moral thing that I need to figure out with myself […] We just take part in this thing […] I am a partner in crime […]
These cases are not unique. Another study showed highly-ranked US public schools, which served mainly middle and upper-middle class students, advanced those they initially identified as having the most privileged background by marking others’ work harsher.
The latter students had a disadvantage when trying to enter elite universities, compared to equivalent students in less prestigious schools.
Research shows Australian low socioeconomic schools offer students less access to the core academic curriculum subjects that are important for university entry. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to complete year 12, and are increasingly locked out of competitive education and job markets.
Unethical practices can also be found in our schools. A study that explored Australian private schools’ strategies of self promotion revealed how they have taken certain statistics or results out of a larger context (“partial reporting”) to give themselves a successful image. Another study discussed how schools manipulating NAPLAN data to secure a good image.
A petition to cancel year 12 exams this year has received thousands of signatures. While weighing up the prospects of this, governments must consider the implications to society, and particularly how this might affect more disadvantaged students.
Although pressing times are calling, teachers should not be left to their own devices to deal with parents, community and other school pressures. Social inequality is already here. Do we really want to take the risk of increasing it?
Source: Council on Hemispheric Affairs – Analysis-Reportage
By Danny Shaw From New York
In the midst of the public health emergency ripping through the world, the United Nations and progressive forces throughout the Americas have called for a unified effort, transcending ideological differences, in defense of human life in the face of the COVID-10 pandemic. Russia and China have answered this call by providing logistical and material support to both third world and first world nations, including Europe and the United States. Cuba has continued to deploy its international medical mission in those countries hardest hit by the novel coronavirus.
Yet, Washington not only continues to impose economic sanctions which block urgently needed medical supplies to Venezuela and other nations which resist US domination; the US is now threatening military intervention against Caracas in a bid to overthrow the constitutional government of President Nicolás Maduro.
Venezuela now faces a perfect storm. At this moment thousands of Venezuelans seek repatriation. The US economic war has intensified, with a naval blockade underway to maximize the collective pain. Hostile paramilitary groups are training in camps along the Colombian-Venezuelan border. A dearth of chemical additives has caused a gasoline shortage; and the novel coronavirus has now spread to some of the popular barrios of Caracas. All this is happening at the very time a dialogue between the government and moderate opposition has been making significant progress and legislative elections are being planned for later this year.
President Maduro, facing an increasingly bellicose posture by the United States military, has written to the US American people urging peace and cooperation. It appears that Washington does not want to give mutual respect and co-existence a chance. Given the recent US–Colombian military exercises and the US naval presence off the coast of Venezuela, Caracas is bracing for some sort of provocation or false positive that could ignite an escalating conflict.
Intrigue on the High Seas
According to Venezuelan authorities, on March 29th, at 23:55, close to the Island of La Tortuga, the Coast Guard spotted and established contact with the German-owned Resolute cruise liner.[1] La Tortuga is 85 kilometers from the state of Miranda.[2] Following diplomatic protocols, the Venezuelans inquired as to why the unauthorized ship was in its territorial waters. The responding captain speaking in English reported that there were “thirty two crew” on board, according to audio that has been released. The captain of the Resolute ignored the Coast Guard’s orders “to detain their movement.”[3] According to Venezuelan Navy Commander Giuseppe Alessandrello, the Coast Guard boat, the Naiguatá, then intercepted the cruise liner and sought to lead it to the closest Venezuelan island to inquire about its destiny. The Venezuelan’s followed a gradual escalation protocol which ultimately involved firing warning shots. The cruise ship which flew the flag of Portugal switched course abruptly and intentionally rammed the coast guard ship several times with a force of 8,400 tons. The purpose-built polar expedition vessel with the capacity to break ice in the Arctic intentionally sank the Naiguatá. Amidst the pandemonium, someone fired shots from the foreign vessel. With the sailors jumping from the capsized ship and life jackets scattered in the ocean, the Resolute fled towards Curaçao.[4] They shut off their Automatic System of Investigation until they arrived in that Dutch colony. The Venezuelan sailors survived because of their training and the prompt arrival of their comrades in other boats to save them.[5]
Prevention and containment measures have been intense in Venezuela. So far, the country has 165 people infected by COVID-19 and 7 deaths (Photo Credit: Presidency of Venezuela)
The BBC and CNN ran headlines claiming that the Venezuelan coast guard intentionally rammed into this innocent cruise liner and fired on the tourists. CNN waited several days before even picking up the story.[6] The BBC reported that Columbia Cruise Services-operated Resolute, “was carrying out routine engine maintenance”[7] when the Coast Guard slammed into it. As if the Venezuelan leadership suffered from unfounded paranoia, the BBC wrote “President Nicolás Maduro has previously accused the United States and other countries of plotting to overthrow him.”
More Questions than Answers
The confrontation raises a number of questions. Why was a cruise liner touring the Caribbean during the coronavirus pandemic? With Trump’s highly publicized announcement of encircling Venezuela with the US Navy because of supposed “drug concerns,” what cruise ship would recklessly drift so close to Venezuela?[8] Why didn’t the Resolute heed orders and follow international protocols even after the Coast Guard warned they would escalate and use force if necessary? Were there mercenaries aboard? The Venezuelan leadership has not concluded its investigation. Since this incident occurred in the context of a US naval presence, the Bolivarian militias and the entire civic-military alliance have been placed on high alert. [9]
Prelude to military aggression?
On March 26th, Attorney General William Barr announced the Department of Justice’s indictment of Nicolás Maduro and other Venezuelan leaders for “narco-terrorism, corruption, money laundering, and drug trafficking.”[10] On April 1st, Trump sent the US navy “to crack down on “counter-narcotics operations, [and] also aimed at denying funds to Maduro and his closest allies.”[11]
The mainstream media has echoed the far-right’s preposterous claim that Venezuela has been charged with flooding America’s streets with drugs.[12] Breaking with the official line, a Newsweek article challenged the administration’s argument that the US Navy is taking up these aggressive positions to stop drug smugglers from capitalizing on the coronavirus pandemic to send more drugs to the US. According to Newsweek, the White House shifted its messaging: “Rather than saying the mission was intended to stop traffickers from exploiting the pandemic, an official linked it to stopping the proliferation of the disease.”[13] It is striking that the mainstream media has not made more of the fact that most of the production and export of cocaine come out of Colombia, a close ally of the US. ,[14]
Thousands of Refugees Return Home
As the U.S. intensifies its military and economic threats and attacks on the Bolivarian revolution, Venezuela faces a humanitarian challenge– the return of thousands of its citizens from neighboring neoliberal states. At a time when all nations need maximum solidarity, xenophobia and economic hardship faced by Venezuelan immigrants in Peru, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador, have led to a growing exodus back to Venezuela.
Around 1.8 million Venezuelans now live in Colombia. Since many of these immigrants work in the informal sector, they receive no assistance as these markets are either reduced or closed on account of the coronavirus pandemic. Many Venezuelans have found themselves without a source of income, which on average was a mere $8 a day, and without public assistance.[15] Now that public buses are shut down, if the Venezuelan government cannot offer transportation, many are braving the elements and walking back to their homeland. The Colombian government has not offered any food, water or transportation to families gearing up for the two to three-week journey home. Bloomberg news reported on the arduous trek back but ignored the xenophobia and the role the US-led international blockade had on creating this refugee crisis.”[16]
In response to the flow of returning Venezuelan immigrants in a time of pandemic, the Maduro administration has set up testing sites on the border to determine who may be carrying the virus. [17] Authorities announced “The Bolivarian Shield Safe Health 2020” plan to provide housing and COVID-19 testing for the thousands of Venezuelans crossing the border.[18] Those who test positive will be referred to Centinelas Hospitals and those who are asymptomatic will stay in one of 21 hotels in the state of Táchira. As of right now, Venezuela has a relatively low number of COVID-19 positive citizens at 165, and 7 deaths.[19] Medical officials are taking the utmost care to ensure that the influx of returning refugees does not introduce hundreds of new contagious individuals into the population.
These refugees, of the economic sanctions and depressed oil prices which have stalled Venezuela’s efforts to implement more economic reforms, are returning without any illusions about the inhospitable conditions which they had to endure in their host countries. Maduro sent Conviasa planes[20] to retrieve 100 Venezuelans who voluntarily returned from the Dominican Republic.[21] He offered to do the same for any Venezuelans in the US who wanted to return, stating: “We are keeping track of all of our countrymen and women who are victims of xenophobia and have decided to return to Venezuela, their homeland. We extend our arms to you as we have millions of people who have found in our country peace and hope. Welcome home!”[22] Trump ignored the offer.
The Bolivarian Shield Safe Health effort is consistent with Venezuela’s nationwide effort to contain the spread of COVID-19. Not only is there a national quarantine, the government is being proactive in trying to identify infected persons nationwide by means of a survey, the Patria Poll, which is linked to a national identification card. The Patria poll was lauded by the World Health Organization (WHO) for its ability to detect infections early on.[23] Jorge Rodríguez, Minister of Communication and Information, reported the following: “Of 17,13,4230 people who filled out the surveys, 111,877 showed some type of symptom, allowing for massive early detection intervention. Of those 111,887, we visited 92,237 of them. 8,115 showed some type of symptom: coughing, nasal congestion, headaches and throat pain.” All of these measures demonstrate that despite the sanctions, which make it more difficult for this South American nation to obtain medical supplies, the government has quickly mobilized its limited resources in an effort to curtail the spread of COVID-19.
The Naval Blockade
The Naval blockade further restricts Venezuela’s access to key imports to keep its economy running. The vice president of Economics, Tareck el Aissami, explained how the US naval blockade seeks to undermine the country’s access to fuel supplies: “With this perverse naval blockade and recurring intimidation of potential suppliers, the U.S. is impeding the supply of chemical additives and spare parts necessary for the productive process that distributes fuel throughout our national territory.”[24]
Should a military attack occur, Colombia would likely provide the proxy paramilitaries and eventually be drawn into a larger conflict. This has raised alarm bells in the Colombian legislature.[25] The bellicose posture of the U.S. and its allies in the region has also drawn the condemnation of the Human Rights Network,[26] Russia,[27] Mexico[28] and other state and non-state actors around the world.
Conclusion
With UN Secretary-General António Guterres calling for a global ceasefire in order to unite efforts against COVID-19, a US Panama or Grenada style invasion of Venezuela would involve a high political cost and have an unpredictable outcome. It also appears that a number of Colombian lawmakers have no appetite for a proxy war launched from Colombia. So it is likely, for the moment at least, that the US naval blockade is aimed at increasing the devastating impact of the economic sanctions at the very time Venezuela is battling a pandemic which threatens the entire world. Despite two decades of attacks on the Bolivarian revolution, Washington may once again be underestimating the determination of the Venezuelan civic-military alliance to resist foreign domination and choose its own destiny, even against all odds.
Danny Shaw is an academic at City University of New York and Senior Research Fellow at COHA
[4] Press Conference of Vladimir Padrino López and Nicolás Maduro on March 31st, 2020. “Supuesto barco de pasajeros embiste y hunde a buque de la armada y se refugia en Curazao”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79BImCkclPE
[9] US intelligence has done everything to find a crack in the Bolivarian armed forces. They have been unsuccessful. Despite the crippling effect of hyperinflation and hoarding by anti-Bolivarian actors, Chavismo is still strong at the state level and among different segments of the working class. This is interesting to contrast with the Bolivian armed forces which did not come out in defense of Evo Morales against the coup. Venezuela continues to push forward through its own “special period” but the Bolivarian spirit is strong. The leadership and masses continue to study Hugo Chávez and how he dealt with these very threats. The slogan and hashtag this week throughout Venezuela was #FuriaBolivariana.
[20] Conviasa is the nationalized and sanctioned Venezuelan airline. The Secretary of State of Venezuela stated that some 500 Venezuelans wanted to come home from the United States.
On March 26, a joint statement published by the American Society of Anaesthesiologists advised in regards to COVID-19 patients that:
… sharing mechanical ventilators should not be attempted because it cannot be done safely with current equipment.
Ventilators help a patient breathe by assisting the lungs to inhale and exhale air. These machines are used to treat patients suffering from conditions including pneumonia, brain injury and stroke.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus (which causes the COVID-19 disease) attacks the respiratory system. When infected, a patient’s ability to breathe is compromised. In mild cases, breathing or respiratory support can be provided using noninvasive means, such as delivering oxygen-rich air through a face mask.
In more severe cases, when a patient suffers acute respiratory distress, an invasive form of respiratory support is required. This is provided through an artificial airway. A tube attached to a ventilator is inserted into the patient’s the mouth or nose (and down the windpipe), or via a surgically-made hole in the neck.
The principle function of a ventilator is to pump or blow oxygen-rich air into the lungs; this is referred to as “oxygenation”. Ventilators also assist in the removal of carbon dioxide from the lungs, and this is referred to as “ventilation”.
One basic type of ventilator is the Bag Valve Mask (BVM). The BVM, also known as the Ambu Bag, is operated manually by a person squeezing a self-inflating bladder. This is an essential tool for ambulance crews, first responders and critical care units. It is light, compact and easy to use.
However, in situations where a steady and controlled air exchange (oxygen in, carbon dioxide out) is needed, mechanical ventilators are required. These look like a quintessential medical product.
The Conversation/EPA/AAP
A mechanical ventilator comprises a computerised box that sits on top of a mobile trolley. There is an array of screens, dials, data cables, power cords and gas tubes. Modern mechanical ventilators are highly complex and sophisticated pieces of equipment. Their increased complexity in comparison with the Ambu Bag allows a superior level of care.
The extra features and control measures of mechanical ventilators allow adjustments such as:
how long inhalation for a patient lasts
how much air is received
how often air is received
the concentration of oxygen within the air (air is about 21% oxygen, but in some cases the percentage of oxygen is increased)
how much pressure the patient’s lungs are inflated to
the temperature and humidity of the air.
Ventilators – a DIY project?
Making a mechanical ventilator requires considerable expertise in research, design and manufacturing. To make a commercial mechanical ventilator means ensuring reliability, serviceability and adherence to strict regulatory standards.
All of this is vital, as mechanical ventilators are often used in life and death situations. And this is why, like other specialist medical devices, they are not cheap. One mechanical ventilator can cost up to US$50,000 (about A$82,000).
Responding to a global need in mechanical ventilators, various groups from around the world have emerged with alternative ventilator designs, each claiming their design works and can be manufactured quickly and cheaply.
A number of these DIY mechanical ventilators are based on the Ambu Bag design, including open lung ventilation and proposals from Triple 8 Racing, Richard Branson’s aerospace company Virgin Orbit and British home and garden appliance company Gtech.
However, instead of relying on manual activation like the Ambu Bag bladder, these designs use mechanical automation to press and release the bladder at desired intervals. Some basic controls are available, but the most significant advantage is their inherent simplicity.
Big players join the race
More complex ventilator proposals have also appeared. The Mechanical Ventilator Milano (MVM) was inspired by a 1960s design and uses the pressurised medical oxygen available in hospitals to drive the ventilator. This simplifies the unit considerably, as it doesn’t need a motor.
The MVM was designed by more than one hundred academics and researchers from around the world. It even features a control system enabled through wifi connectivity.
One proposal that more closely mirrors existing ventilators was developed by Dyson, following an urgent request from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was moved to ICU last night as he battles COVID-19. The Dyson ventilator, unsurprisingly, incorporates a motor from one of its iconic vacuum cleaners.
Dyson is an internationally recognised design and manufacturing company. Pivoting its resources to a mechanical ventilator is not as difficult as it would be for other companies. After all, managing the movement of air is a core function of Dyson’s products (mainly vacuum cleaners, fans and hair dryers).
Importantly, Dyson will only release its ventilator once it meets British health authority specifications.
But while the race to design and manufacture much-needed ventilators continues, health workers on the front lines must make do with what they have. Let’s hope these collective efforts can soon alleviate some of their stress.
New Zealand’s Health Minister David Clark has revealed that he took a trip to the beach during the alert level 4 lockdown and has offered to resign.
Dr Clark said he drove his family 20km from his house in Dunedin to Doctor’s Point Beach for a walk during the first weekend of the lockdown in breach of the rules.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said under normal conditions she would sack him but to avoid disruption she would be demoting him instead.
Dr Clark said he provided the Prime Minister last night with a complete picture of his activity outside his home during alert level 4, as part of his preparation for the Epidemic Response Committee.
He said the trip to Doctor’s Point Beach was a clear breach of the lockdown principles of staying local and not driving long distances to reach recreation spots.
– Partner –
“As the Health Minister it’s my responsibly to not only follow the rules but set an example to other New Zealanders.
“At a time when we are asking New Zealanders to make historic sacrifices I’ve let the team down. I’ve been an idiot, and I understand why people will be angry with me.”
Apologised to PM He said he had apologised to the prime minister for his lack of judgement and offered her his resignation.
“In the interest of full disclosure, since the lockdown began I have also driven my family to a walking track approximately two kilometres from our house for a walk and gone for occasional runs, all of which were local and within the rules, and one bike ride which is already in the public domain.”
In a statement, the prime minister said New Zealand expected better.
“Under normal conditions I would sack the Minister of Health. What he did was wrong, and there are no excuses.
“But right now, my priority is our collective fight against Covid-19. We cannot afford massive disruption in the health sector or to our response. For that reason, and that reason alone, Dr Clark will maintain his role.
“But he does need to pay a price. He broke the rules.
“While he maintains his Health portfolio, I am stripping him of his role as Associate Finance Minister and demoting him to the bottom of our Cabinet rankings.
‘I expect better’ “I expect better, and so does New Zealand,” Ardern said.
Dr Clark told RNZ Morning Report he acknowledged that his ministerial judgement was now in question and that he needed to rebuild trust with the public, who were making huge sacrifices during the lockdown.
“Clearly I have a job to rebuild the confidence of New Zealanders,” he said.
“The Prime Minister has made it clear that in ordinary times she would have sacked me but for the fact we are facing a global pandemic. I need to focus on the job at hand and make sure I don’t commit any more errors of judgement.”
The minister suggested he was unaware of rules regarding non-essential travel outside his local area when he took his trip to the beach and it only occurred to him after being pulled up at the weekend about a second breach involving a car trip to a mountain biking track.
“I discovered that when I was going back over things having rightly been chastised for going for a bike ride locally.
“Obviously as Minister of Health I need to not only follow the rules but set an example to others. I’ve let people down.”
Refused to answer He refused to answer when asked whether he would have continued to flout the rules if it had not been for the electoral vehicle he used being spotted when he went mountain biking.
“It’s not even worth speculating on that. I got it wrong, I’m not making any excuses,” he said.
He played down the damage the revelations may have caused to the government’s efforts to maintain the level-4 lockdown rules.
“The government itself has been, in my view, taking good decisions, but I’ve clearly taken the wrong decision here,” he said.
Dr Clark said the prime minister had not told him whether she would have him in the next Cabinet if Labour formed the next government again after the general election.
This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.
Wrapping your head around the scale of a global pandemic is not easy, and the volume of stats and data can be bewildering.
What, for instance, are we to make of the fact Australia recorded just 109 new cases in its daily count for April 6? Given this figure peaked at around 400 new cases per day, does this mean the rate of infection is now tapering off?
Which stats are most useful in making sense of the situation? To help interpret and understand the mountains of COVID-19 data, we’ll look at five commonly used methods, and explain the pros and cons of each.
To illustrate each method, we’ll use Johns Hopkins University data for Italy during the 43 days from February 23 to April 5.
1. Daily increases
Much of the COVID-19 data is presented as a daily count of new confirmed infections for the preceding 24 hours. For example, on April 5, Italy had 4,316 new cases.
Such numbers accurately convey the horrific scale of the pandemic, but are less good at revealing how the situation is evolving. Without knowing the previous daily totals, it is impossible to say whether the trend is up or down. We need a way to put it into context.
2. Bar chart of daily new cases
One way to provide context is with a bar chart, also called a histogram, showing each new daily case count.
The graph below shows the number of new cases in Italy, from February 23 (the first day with over 100 new cases, and which we have labelled day 1), to 4,316 on April 5 (day 43).
This type of graph can reveal meaningful trends at a glance. We can see the number of new cases began to stabilise on about day 26, and may even have begun to trend downwards.
But while large trends are obvious, we need to be careful when it comes to smaller trends – they may merely be random variations in the daily counts.
3. Graph of cumulative cases
Daily counts tell us how fast the epidemic is growing, but they don’t tell us how big it has grown overall. For that, we need a graph of the total number of cases so far.
This is called a cumulative graph, because each day’s data point is the sum total of all the previously confirmed cases.
Increase in the total number of people infected with COVID-19 over time.Johns Hopkins Univ.
This is an excellent tool for visualising the full extent of the outbreak so far. But the danger is that it makes things look much worse than they are, because the total number of confirmed cases since the beginning of the outbreak can only go up, not down.
This method also makes it hard to see when growth rates are slowing, because you have to look for a plateau in the curve, rather than a drop.
4. Cumulative cases (log scale)
To compensate, we can present the same data on a logarithmic (or log) scale. This means the graph’s vertical axis (y-axis) is graduated by orders of magnitude (1, 10, 100, 1,000) rather than in equal increments (10, 20, 30, 40).
This basically “squashes” the y-axis so large numbers do not skew the whole graph. If an epidemic is growing exponentially, it arguably makes more sense to plot it this way because the trend line can “keep up” with the numbers instead of shooting off into the stratosphere.
Increase in the total number of people infected with COVID-19 over time with log scale.Johns Hopkins Univ.
The log scale graph above shows the same data as the previous graph, but now it clearly tells the story of how Italy’s infection rates actually began to slow before day 26.
One downside is that this is clearly a more abstract way of looking at the data, so you need to know how a log scale works before you can make meaningful sense of it.
5. Percentage growth of the total
A less common, although extremely important, way to present the data is to express the daily number of cases as a percentage of the total so far. This is another good way to put the situation in context.
Percentage daily increase in the total number of people infected with COVID-19 over time.Johns Hopkins Univ.
Like the log scale graph, the graph above also shows that the daily rate of increase in total cases has dropped steadily over the 43 days.
This method is perhaps the most useful for demonstrating the effectiveness of social distancing and other public health measures for “flattening the curve”.
However, one drawback of using percentages is that this method does not reveal the actual numbers involved. It also risks lulling people into a false sense of security – the percentage graph can trend downwards even though the virus is still widespread, and the risk of resurgence still exists.
There’s no ‘best’ way to present the data
These five different ways of presenting exactly the same data can give five different impressions of the situation.
There is also the question of the wider population context in which these numbers are presented.
Italy now has more than 128,900 confirmed cases, compared with a reported 82,600 in China. Given the differences in population (Italy: 60.4 million, China: over 1.4 billion), that means 1 person in 468 has been infected in Italy, compared with just 1 in 16,949 in China.
In tiny Luxembourg, infections stand at 1 person in 223 – an even higher per capita infection rate than Italy.
Countries can also have large differences between regions. New South Wales, the hardest-hit state in Australia, accounts for 46.5% of the country’s cases, despite having 32% of the population.
Testing times
Another crucial piece of context is the total number of tests conducted. This varies hugely, both between countries and over time. When interpreting data on case numbers, it is important to know what proportion of the population has been tested.
Number of positive COVID-19 tests per 1,000 people (blue) and overall testing rates (orange) for selected countries.Mark Osborn, Author provided
Widespread testing also helps to improve estimates of the true fatality rate among those infected with the virus.
As we strive as a society to flatten the curve, it will be heartening to know when our efforts are beginning to bear fruit. The better we understand the data, the easier that will be.
Not only is this important as we all try to come to terms with our new normal, but it will no doubt be crucial in convincing people of the necessity for various restrictions and lifestyle changes as the months drag on.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Saeri, Research Fellow, BehaviourWorks Australia, Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Monash University
More Australians are worried about the longer-lasting, societal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic – specifically that the health system could be overburdened and the country could enter a recession – than they are about the more immediate changes to their own lives, our new survey of 1,000 Australians reveals.
In a world where social distancing is becoming the norm and many Australians are working apart from one another, it would be reasonable to expect society to become more selfish.
Surprisingly, people were more worried about this exact thing – society becoming more selfish – than they were about losing their jobs, feeling lonely or catching the virus themselves.
The findings are part of a study developed in collaboration with researchers around the world, gauging people’s behaviours and concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Australian version of the survey, conducted from March 27-30 and including people of all age groups, sought to understand:
what people are thinking, feeling and doing in relation to COVID-19,
drivers of key behaviours,
where people are getting their information from,
who they trust to fix the problem,
beliefs about the virus and
their own wellbeing.
We hope to repeat the survey throughout the pandemic to keep track of Australians’ thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and to support evidence-informed policy responses that help encourage people to take actions to protect each other and themselves.
That said, it is still difficult to know what behaviours Australians are actually committing to, particularly since some are less publicly visible than others.
Our findings show that behaviours related to hygiene and social distancing had largely been adopted in the seven days prior to the survey.
For example, 87% of people said they often or always washed their hands, while 86% reported often or always staying home and 86% often or always staying two metres away from others.
We also found a majority of respondents denying panic buying of any sort. When we asked if people had bought larger than normal amounts of various items, we found 65% said they never did so for medicine, 54% for disinfectants and just under half for everyday items.
Just 37% said they never bought larger than normal amounts of food, and on the flip side, only 14% said this was something they often or always did.
To be sure, there is still some room for improvement. For instance, a significant number of Australians report not consistently performing protective measures like physical distancing. Worryingly, more than 30% of participants also reported they did not consistently cancel gatherings or meetings with vulnerable populations in the last seven days.
But overall, our findings run counter to the images we have seen in the media in recent weeks of Australians flouting social distancing rules and panic buying toilet paper and other supermarket items.
While these stories get attention because the images are so outrageous, our data suggests they are the exception rather than the rule.
Most people are doing what is recommended. They’re worried, they’re taking protective action and they’re listening to the government. This is what people need to hear: that people like them are doing the right thing, so they should, too.
Younger people more worried than older people
Our survey also looked at what people in different age groups were concerned about and how they were behaving.
Younger people have been the target of scorn in the media, with some suggestions they are not taking COVID-19 seriously and are not undertaking the same level of precautions as older Australians.
Data from our survey shows this may not be true. Those aged 18-29 are taking preventative measures, such as social distancing, staying at home and avoiding travellers from overseas, at the same rate as those in older age brackets.
Interestingly, younger people (aged 18-49) were more worried about some impacts of the virus than older people (over 50), such as becoming infected with coronavirus themselves, being lonely, the health system being overloaded and becoming unemployed.
However, we also found young people admitting to buying larger than normal amounts of medication and food than older people. Nearly a quarter of people aged 18-29 said they often or always did this, compared to less than 10% of those over 50.
Younger people were also less likely to respond to the recommendations of health authorities and political leaders. People under 50 were more likely to follow recommendations from social media than people over 50.
Whose advice do Australians follow?
We asked the sample about where they get their COVID-19 information. The most common sources were the media (73% indicated they often or always get information from this source) and health authorities (71%).
However, when we asked whose advice they followed, health authorities (80% of people responded “often” or “always”) were the clear leaders. Despite trust in politicians generally being low, 64% of respondents also indicate they often or always followed their advice.
The least popular sources of information were coworkers (81% of respondents said they never, rarely or only sometimes got information from this source) and social media (70%).
Not surprisingly, advice from these sources was also rarely followed (80% never, rarely or sometimes for social media and 77% for coworkers).
Taken together, these findings emphasise the importance of well-communicated advice from health authorities and political leaders – people are listening and generally following the advice they are getting.
With further analysis of the data, we also hope to uncover what kinds of messages are more or less effective in encouraging Australians to take preventative health measures, including over the next months.
Among other questions, we asked Australians who they had confidence in to minimise the harm caused by COVID-19 on a scale of 1-7, from “very low confidence” to “very high confidence”.
Our data showed health authorities to be the most-trusted to minimise harm, with 64% of respondents indicating scores of 5 (“a lot of confidence”) or higher. In fact, respondents expressed significantly greater confidence in health authorities to fix the problem than either state or Commonwealth leaders.
Interestingly the World Health Organisation ranked second with 59% of Australians indicating “a lot of confidence” or higher, suggesting people understand the global nature of COVID-19 and that flattening the curve in one country will not end the pandemic for everyone.
This is also why we have built an international collaboration to share the study materials and data, and are coordinating with other international efforts (the iCARE study and the International Survey on Coronavirus) to understand the crucial role of behaviour change in reducing the harm from COVID-19.
It might surprise you to learn that nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War are now helping conserve whale sharks, the largest living fish.
Growing up to 18 metres – longer than the average bus – whale sharks live in all tropical oceans. In Australia, they are found off tropical coasts in the north, particularly in Western Australia.
Whale sharks face a number of threats. Globally they are listed as endangered, and their numbers continue to decline.
Until recently, key information about the life history of whale sharks was missing, which prevented informed choices about how they were managed. In particular, scientists were not able to accurately assess their age and growth patterns.
Our research, published today in Frontiers in Marine Science, changes that. We examined the skeleton of whale sharks, using carbon from Cold War atomic bomb testing as a “time stamp” to reveal their true age. The findings will help protect these beautiful animals into the future.
Until now, it’s been difficult to assess the age of whale sharks.Wayne Osborn
Gentle giants
Whale sharks are placid “filter feeders”, which basically means they eat by opening their massive mouths and straining small fish and plankton that pass through the gills.
They are covered in a pattern of stripes and spots that provide camouflage as they bask at the surface. Whale sharks’ gentle nature and striking appearance has made them a drawcard for tourists who pay to snorkel or dive with the animals.
Whale shark ecotourism is big business. At Ningaloo Reef off Western Australia, the industry is worth an estimated A$12.5 million per year.
The industry is also valuable for small island nations such as the Maldives and developing countries including the Philippines and Indonesia. It has lifted thousands of villagers from poverty and provided an impetus for governments to protect whale sharks.
But all is not plain sailing for these animals. In some parts of the world they are hunted for their fins, meat, oil and skin. The flesh resembles tofu when cooked, and is a popular menu item in parts of Asia, particularly China.
When shipping lanes are established near whale shark habitat, the animals are frequently struck by vessels and either die or suffer propeller injuries such as fin amputation. Their habit of basking at the surface of the ocean during the day puts whale sharks at particular risk of ship strike.
This combined with other threats – such as warming sea surface temperatures due to climate change – has created an uncertain future for these charismatic and valuable animals.
A whale shark carcass on the shore of Teluk Betung beach in West Sumatra, Indonesia, last year. The animal is considered endangered.RAJO BATUAH/EPA
The silver lining on the mushroom cloud
Just how vulnerable whale shark populations are to these threats is not clear. Growth rates of fish species – or how many years they take to reach a certain size – determine their resilience, and how fast populations are likely to recover if severely damaged.
But determining the age of whale sharks has, to date, been very difficult. Their vertebrae feature distinct bands, similar to the rings of a tree trunk, which increase in number as the animal grows older. But the bands could not conclusively be used to determine age because some scientists believed a ring formed every year, but others suggested one formed every six months.
Cross section of a whale shark vertebra from Pakistan, showing 50 growth bands.Paul Fanning/ Pakistan node of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation
To settle the debate, we turned to the radioactive legacy of the Cold War’s nuclear arms race – specifically, carbon-14.
Carbon-14 is a naturally occurring radioactive element. But in the 1950s and early 1960s, nuclear weapons tests by the US, Soviet Union, Great Britain, France and China released enormous amounts of carbon-14 into the air.
It travelled into the world’s oceans, and into every living organism on the planet – including the skeletons and shells of animals.
We analysed the vertebrae of two whale sharks collected many years ago in Taiwan and Pakistan. By counting back from the peak carbon-14 level, we concluded the rings were formed once per year. This meant that for the first time, the age and growth rate of a whale shark could accurately be determined; a 10-metre shark was 50 years old.
We know whale sharks can grow to almost twice the length of the animals we analysed, and have been estimated to live as long as 100 years. The results of our study makes that prediction now seem more likely.
Whale sharks can live as long as 100 years.Wayne Osborn
What does this mean for whale sharks?
Slow-growing species with long lifespans are typically very susceptible to threats such as fishing. This is because it takes many years for animals to reach reproduction age, and the rate at which individuals are replaced is very slow.
Our study explains why fisheries targeting whale sharks almost immediately collapse: the species is not built to cope with the added pressures of human harvests.
Whale sharks populations take a very long time to recover from over-harvesting. Governments and management agencies must work together to ensure this iconic animal persists in tropical oceans – for both the future of the species, and the many communities whose livelihoods depend on whale shark ecotourism.
The Australian summer just gone will be remembered as the moment when human-caused climate change struck hard. First came drought, then deadly bushfires, and now a bout of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef – the third in just five years. Tragically, the 2020 bleaching is severe and the most widespread we have ever recorded.
Coral bleaching at regional scales is caused by spikes in sea temperatures during unusually hot summers. The first recorded mass bleaching event along Great Barrier Reef occurred in 1998, then the hottest year on record.
Since then we’ve seen four more mass bleaching events – and more temperature records broken – in 2002, 2016, 2017, and again in 2020.
This year, February had the highest monthly sea surface temperatures ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef since the Bureau of Meteorology’s records began in 1900.
Coral bleaching at Magnetic Island, March 2020. (Video by Victor Huertas)
Not a pretty picture
We surveyed 1,036 reefs from the air during the last two weeks in March, to measure the extent and severity of coral bleaching throughout the Great Barrier Reef region. Two observers, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, scored each reef visually, repeating the same procedures developed during early bleaching events.
The accuracy of the aerial scores is verified by underwater surveys on reefs that are lightly and heavily bleached. While underwater, we also measure how bleaching changes between shallow and deeper reefs.
Of the reefs we surveyed from the air, 39.8% had little or no bleaching (the green reefs in the map). However, 25.1% of reefs were severely affected (red reefs) – that is, on each reef more than 60% of corals were bleached. A further 35% had more modest levels of bleaching.
Bleaching isn’t necessarily fatal for coral, and it affects some species more than others. A pale or lightly bleached coral typically regains its colour within a few weeks or months and survives.
The 2020 coral bleaching event was the second-worst in more than two decades.ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
But when bleaching is severe, many corals die. In 2016, half of the shallow water corals died on the northern region of the Great Barrier Reef between March and November. Later this year, we’ll go underwater to assess the losses of corals during this most recent event.
Compared to the four previous bleaching events, there are fewer unbleached or lightly bleached reefs in 2020 than in 1998, 2002 and 2017, but more than in 2016. Similarly, the proportion of severely bleached reefs in 2020 is exceeded only by 2016. By both of these metrics, 2020 is the second-worst mass bleaching event of the five experienced by the Great Barrier Reef since 1998.
The unbleached and lightly bleached (green) reefs in 2020 are predominantly offshore, mostly close to the edge of the continental shelf in the northern and southern Great Barrier Reef. However, offshore reefs in the central region were severely bleached again. Coastal reefs are also badly bleached at almost all locations, stretching from the Torres Strait in the north to the southern boundary of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
For the first time, severe bleaching has struck all three regions of the Great Barrier Reef – the northern, central and now large parts of the southern sectors. The north was the worst affected region in 2016, followed by the centre in 2017.
In 2020, the cumulative footprint of bleaching has expanded further, to include the south. The distinctive footprint of each bleaching event closely matches the location of hotter and cooler conditions in different years.
Poor prognosis
Of the five mass bleaching events we’ve seen so far, only 1998 and 2016 occurred during an El Niño – a weather pattern that spurs warmer air temperatures in Australia.
But as summers grow hotter under climate change, we no longer need an El Niño to trigger mass bleaching at the scale of the Great Barrier Reef. We’ve already seen the first example of back-to-back bleaching, in the consecutive summers of 2016 and 2017. The gap between recurrent bleaching events is shrinking, hindering a full recovery.
For the first time, severe bleaching has struck all three regions of the Great Barrier Reef.ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
After five bleaching events, the number of reefs that have escaped severe bleaching continues to dwindle. Those reefs are located offshore, in the far north and in remote parts of the south.
The Great Barrier Reef will continue to lose corals from heat stress, until global emissions of greenhouse gasses are reduced to net zero, and sea temperatures stabilise. Without urgent action to achieve this outcome, it’s clear our coral reefs will not survive business-as-usual emissions.
About half of international students in Australia are private renters and more than half of them rely on paid work to pay the rent, but most of the casual jobs they depend on have been lost in the coronavirus pandemic. The results of our recent survey (conducted pre-COVID-19) of international students living in private rental accommodation suggest up to half of them may now be unable to pay their rent. Many also live in quite crowded conditions, so will struggle to self-isolate even if they don’t lose their current housing.
Our survey covered all three post-secondary sectors – universities, vocational education and training, and English language (ELICOS) – and we received over 7,000 valid responses from students in the private rental sector in Melbourne and Sydney. Although the survey closed in mid-December and we have yet to finalise the report, the data suggest the knock-on effects of COVID-19 will have profound impacts on international students. About 565,000 are in Australia now, the government estimates.
Paying the rent was a major worry for many international students even before the pandemic. Just over one in three respondents agreed or strongly agreed they “worry about paying the rent each week”.
A staggering 22% said they “quite often go without necessities like food, so I can pay for my accommodation”. In response to the question, “In the last year, have you ever felt that you could become homeless?”, 17% said, “Yes”.
A critical finding is that just under half (46%) said they had to have a paid job to be able to pay the rent. Of the 43% who had a paid job (which suggests most of those who had to work to pay the rent had found a job), 44% worked in food services or hospitality. It is likely almost all employed international students are in casual jobs and thus have minimal job security.
When we asked students whether losing their job would mean they would not be able to pay the rent, 57% agreed or strongly agreed. Only a quarter disagreed or strongly disagreed. The results suggest 40-50% of the international students renting privately – about 150,000 people – may now be unable to pay their rent.
Although recent measures to prevent landlords evicting tenants who are in financial distress due to COVID-19 will help in some cases, the moratorium does not appear to prevent landlords evicting tenants for other reasons. “No grounds” evictions are seemingly still in place.
A spike in instances of discrimination related to COVID-19 could add to the risk of these students losing their accommodation.
To add to their vulnerability, international students are not eligible for sick leave or any of the recently announced government benefits. They will not be able to apply for the increased unemployment benefit or youth allowance. They are also not eligible for the recently announced wage subsidy.
The lack of any income support could encourage an international student to continue working while ill. They might then infect fellow workers, housemates and the general public.
Living in crowded share housing
The survey indicated half of the international students in the private rental sector had at least three housemates and 19% had five or more. One in four respondents shared their bedroom with someone other than a partner. About one in five shared their bedroom with two or more people.
What the data indicate is that the housing conditions of a large proportion of international students provide fertile ground for the coronavirus to spread. If an international student tests positive for COVID-19, they will probably not have a space where they can self-isolate.
Only one in four students disagreed or strongly disagreed that it was “difficult to find out what my rights are as a renter”. Just over half strongly agreed or agreed they “understand [their] rights as a renter”.
As well as not knowing their rights, another factor that could make students more vulnerable is only 60% said they were renting from a landlord or real estate agent. The rest are renting from a flatmate, families they may or may not know, their educational institutions, or student accommodation (Iglu, Urbanest, etc).
Clearly, the situation of many international students in private rental accommodation is extremely precarious. COVID-19 could be a tipping point for many. Not only will they have no income, but they could find themselves homeless with no possibility of flying home to their families.
They might also not be able to pay their fees – around A$20,000 a semester for university students. This could result in their “confirmation of enrolment” being cancelled and their student visa being withdrawn. Students will then be in Australia illegally and could find themselves in immigration detention.
Many temporary Australian residents will be excluded from the JobSeeker Payment and Coronavirus Supplement to be provided to permanent residents. In this open letter to the prime minister, 40 leading Australian experts on public policy argue this is in no-one’s interests.
Dear Mr Morrison,
The Australian government has achieved a great deal with its far-reaching responses to the risks to the Australian people and the economy as a result of the Covid19 pandemic.
The temporary increases to social security benefits through the introduction of the Coronavirus Supplement and the introduction of the JobKeeper Payment have done much to boost public confidence as Australia along with the rest of the world faces the most challenging economic environment in 100 years.
The combination of these two payments should provide a robust safety net for those who qualify for one or other of the payments.
However, there is a serious gap in the government’s response that needs to be filled as soon as possible. This is the situation facing temporary visa holders in the workforce who are not currently eligible to access the COVID-19 crisis measures.
On April 4, the acting minister for immigration announced announced that most temporary visa holders with work rights will now be able to access their Australian superannuation to help support themselves during the crisis, but that others would be encouraged to return to their home country.
The Minister’s Statement sets out the scale of this issue:
there are 2.17 million people presently in Australia on a temporary visa
of these, there are more than 672,000 New Zealanders in Australia on a subclass 444 visa
there are 565,000 international students in Australia, mainly studying in the higher education or vocational education sector
There are around 139,000 temporary skilled visa holders, on either a 2 year or 4 year visa
There are about 118,000 people in Australia on a Working Holiday visa (or backpacker visa)
There are another 185,000 other temporary visa holders in Australia, about half of them temporary graduate visa holders
The minister has acknowledged the crucial role that these temporary visa holders play in the Australian economy.
For example, his statement points out that international students “are an important contributor to our tertiary sector and economy, supporting 240,000 Australian jobs.”
Permanent Australian residents have been queuing at Centrelink offices.AAP
Many of those on working holiday visas are working in “the critical sectors of heath, aged and disability care, agriculture and food processing, and childcare”.
Temporary skilled visa holders “were provided the visa to fill a skills shortage – a shortage that may still be present when the crisis has passed”.
Also on April 4, a joint statement from the Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister for Agriculture and the Minister for Immigration announced temporary changes to visa arrangements to help farmers access the workforce they need to secure Australia’s food and produce supply during COVID-19.
Pointing out that “these visa holders fill a critical workforce gap in this sector,” the government announced that, before moving to other parts of the country, working holiday makers will need to self-isolate for 14 days.
The JobKeeper and the JobSeeker Payments will cover some temporary visa holders, but not all.
For example, it appears that New Zealanders in Australia will be eligible for the JobKeeper Payment, but only if they have been with the same employer for 12 months or more. They will only be entitled to the JobSeeker Payment and the Coronavirus Supplement if they have been in Australia for 10 years or more.
Non-New Zealanders will have only their super to rely on (which may have plummeted in value), a wholly inadequate solution.
The government has already made the very positive move of extending access to social security benefits to permanent residents who previously were not eligible for many payments for up to four years.
Refusing income support to temporary migrants who lose their jobs poses risks to public health and their own welfare, will create shortages of workers in vital sectors now and when the economy restarts, and breach Australia’s global responsibilities.
These workers have all been making valuable contributions to the Australian economy.
Many will not be able to, and should not have to, return “home”.
If temporary migrants find themselves without income and unlawfully resident here, Australia will face a humanitarian crisis and an even worse health situation for us all.
Such migrants may be made homeless or will be forced to live in crowded situations and may be forced into illegal work.
We believe that as a matter of urgency that entitlement to the JobSeeker Payment and the Coronavirus Supplement should be extended to these workers for the period of the current health emergency.
The minister for families and social services has wide-ranging discretionary powers to make regulations to achieve this, but the sitting of parliament this week provides the opportunity for the government to make a firm commitment to fill this gap in their response to this unprecedented crisis.
This example was disappointing because the invited guest – Max Rashbrooke – is familiar with my work, and made no attempt to discuss anything like what I have been advocating for many years. And the panellist Janet Wilson made a very over‑the‑top and totally ignorant dismissal of the proposal.
My proposal for a Basic Universal Income (BUI) is very straightforward. (I will use this name to distinguish my proposal from the various ‘straw man’ versions of UBI that are in circulation.)
New Zealand should (and can easily) adopt a flat income tax rate of 33% and an annual Basic Universal‑Income of $9,080, which amounts to $175 per week.
Max Rashbrooke was considering a UBI of $13,000 without any changes to income taxes. (I dismissed this idea on 25 March by saying: “It is not possible to offer any kind of Universal Basic Income … at the level of New Zealand Superannuation”.) He also said that a UBI of anything less would be of minimal benefit, so therefore unworthy of consideration.
Max Rashbrooke’s suggestion was that a new unfunded universal benefit payable to working‑age New Zealanders was a very inefficient way to use all that extra money (which I calculate to be about $40 billion). But nobody has ever advocated what Max Rashbrooke was suggesting.
Then Janet Wilson said that it was completely ridiculous to pay a highly paid person such as herself an annual UBI of $11,000. Rather she favoured an extremely targeted (and necessarily bureaucratic) form of helping people affected by the present emergency. She did not realise that a properly-structured UBI would only affect her if her circumstances changed.
Five Examples
So let’s consider five imaginary people:
Janet, who grosses $100,000 a year before tax
Max, who grosses $70,000 a year before tax
Bob, who grosses $40,000 a year before tax
Jill, a student with a student loan; she lives with her parents
Fred, a beneficiary
Janet.
At present she pays $23,920 in income tax, leaving her with $76,080.
Under my proposal she receives $67,000 after tax and receives a Basic Universal Income of $9,080, leaving her with $76,080. If she is content with $76,080 under the old formula, she should be content with $76,080 under the new formula.
Max.
At present he pays $14,020 in income tax, leaving him with $55,980.
Under my proposal he receives $46,900 after tax and receives a Basic Universal Income of $9,080, leaving him with $55,980. If he is content with $55,980 under the old formula, he should be content with $55,980 under the new formula.
Bob.
At present he pays $6,020 in income tax, leaving him with $33,980.
Under my proposal he receives $26,800 after tax and receives a Basic Universal Income of $9,080, leaving him with $35,880. He is better off by $1,900.
Jill.
At present she receives an annual student loan living allowance of about $8,000. This has to be repaid when she is in subsequent employment.
Under my proposal she receives a Basic Universal Income instead. And she pays tax on any parttime work at a rate of 33 percent. If she has no parttime employment, she is better off by $1,000 today, and does not have to repay the money in the future.
Fred.
Fred is a beneficiary, receiving a jobseeker (unemployment) benefit (after tax) of about $13,080 per year.
Under my proposal he receives a BUI of $9,080 plus a Jobseeker Benefit of $4,000.
So his disposable income does not change.
Of these five people, only Bob and Jill would see an immediate rise in the income available for them to spend. However, all five benefit from the Basic Universal Income.
Janet and Max benefit because, if either loses their job (or their business), they would have an immediate tideover weekly income of $175 to call upon, and they may decide not to bother applying for an unemployment benefit (leaving the benefit queue to the needy).
Bob benefits directly, and substantially more if, for example, he is asked to take a 25 percent pay cut. In that event he would be grossing $30,000 a year, instead of $40,000.
Under the present income tax scale, with a $30,000 wage Fred would receive $25,730 after tax.
Under my BUI proposal he would receive $20,100 in after tax wages, plus a BUI $9,080, totalling $29,180. Bob would be $3,450 better off. The BUI is a very real cushion to the blow of having to work shorttime and take a wage cut. And he does not have to apply to MSD to receive that cushion; he has it already.
Jill gains what is effectively a Universal Student Living Allowance. She is no longer treated as if she is a child until she is aged 25. She can of course take out a student loan to pay her course fees, and to pay for other course-related costs. And, by paying tax at 33 percent, she is discouraged from taking on too much paid work at the expense of her studies. She has a better study‑life balance.
Fred gains, because if he accepts a casual, parttime or precarious job, he still gets to keep the first $9,080 of his benefit. And if he loses or otherwise finishes that job, there is no benefit stand‑down. He still gets his BUI, and may decide to wait before applying for the extra $4,000 Jobseeker Benefit; instead he can devote his time and effort into finding further employment.
Looking Ahead
A Basic Universal Income – as outlined – is modest, affordable and technically easy to implement. It is a future‑looking policy that benefits every working‑age adult, and hurts nobody.
It has one other major benefit. Once there is a BUI in place (with the flat tax that underpins it), then, if an emergency (such as the present Covid‑19 emergency) deepens, then it is an easy matter to address the situation by raising the BUI (eg from $175 to $200 per week), allowing everyone to benefit in a very immediate, democratic and straightforward way.
A Basic Universal Income is not a wage. It is much better understood as a basic productivity dividend. High productivity societies cannotafford to not pay productivity dividends. The consequence of failure to pay productivity dividends is unsustainable inequality and social discord.
Criticism?
I have been pushing this proposal for a long time now. And I have yet to hear a single argument against it. With the present public health and economic emergency in place, it is high time that this proposal – not some other straw man proposal – was subject to an informedpublic discussion.
My sense is that, despite the simplicity of the proposal, it is not properly understood. I think that the misunderstanding has something to do with the flat tax rate that is central to the proposal. Possibly many people do not understand the difference between a flat income tax and the prevailing alternative?
Crises should not be wasted. Now is an especially good time to look to the future.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern does not want New Zealand to be at level four for “a minute longer than needed”, but says there is no plan to lift it earlier than the planned four weeks.
As New Zealand approaches the halfway point of the four-week lockdown, Ardern said today the country needed to stay the course.
“We can expect to see cases and contacts of those cases coming through,” she said.
“We also need to better understand the cases of community transmission.”
She said New Zealand needed to be at level four for four weeks because it took time for symptoms to be seen and some people may have passed on Covid-19 before the lockdown and those symptoms will only just be starting to be seen now.
– Partner –
“No matter what technology can offer us for contact tracing, it will still be critical that we have those one-on-one interviews where we interrogate people.
She said the country needed to be absolutely sure it was not missing “silent outbreaks” and this was why surveillance testing was important.
Ardern also spoke about the issue of mental health while addressing media after a meeting of Cabinet on the level 4 national response to the Covid-19 outbreak.
The government is launching a campaign and resources to help New Zealanders cope with stresses created by Covid-19.
She said many people felt distressed, anxious or worried and this was completely understandable.
“No-one should be too hard on themselves at this particular point in time.”
She said the new campaign would focus on providing people with the tools they needed “to be able to manage their worries, look after their mental health and connect with loved ones, despite operating from their own bubbles at this time”.
The Prime Minister has also confirmed that the Covid-19 Wage Subsidy Scheme has paid out $5.3 billion to 876,000 New Zealanders.
“MSD is still working hard through applications … to support those many employees and businesses.”
The Treasury estimates that between $8 billion and $12 billion will eventually be paid out in wage subsidies.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said 13 people were in hospital, and three were in ICU – one in Wellington and two in Auckland. One of the people in ICU is in a critical condition.
There are now 12 significant clusters, with 72 cases linked to Marist College, a Catholic girls’ school in Auckland. The cluster associated with a wedding in Bluff now has 62 cases, and the Matamata cluster has 58.
This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.
If you havesymptomsof the coronavirus, call the NZ Covid-19 Healthline on 0800 358 5453 (+64 9 358 5453 for international SIMs) or call your GP – don’t show up at a medical centre.
Researchers testing the head lice drug Ivermectin as a possible treatment for COVID-19 have seen promising results in lab studies.
But the research is in its early stages and the drug is yet to be tested on people with COVID-19. There’s so much we don’t know, including the right dose and delivery method for people with coronavirus infection.
So if you’re thinking of buying some just in case, think again.
Ivermectin is a second-line treatment for scabies.Shutterstock
The pharmaceutical company that makes Ivermectin, MSD, has also been donating the drug to developing countries to treat the parasitic diseases river blindness and elephantiasis for the past 30 years.
When used at the recommended dose, Ivermectin is generally well tolerated. Some of the common side effects include diarrhoea, nausea, dizziness and drowsiness.
Less common is a lack of energy, abdominal pain, constipation, vomiting, tremors, rashes and itching.
Ivermectin has also been shown to stop other viruses (such as HIV, dengue, influenza and Zika) replicating, at least in the laboratory.
The researchers found Ivermectin had an effect on SARS-CoV-2 after one exposure to the drug. Viral replication was shut down within 24 to 48 hours.
It’s still not clear exactly how Ivermectin works. But it appears to stop the processes that allow proteins to move within the virus. These proteins would normally dampen the body’s antiviral response, allowing the virus to replicate and enhance the infection.
Where is the research on Ivermectin for coronavirus up to?
This research on Ivermectin has been conducted in cell culture (cells grown in a laboratory) and is very preliminary. It provides some promise, but not evidence of an effective treatment in people (yet).
Rigorous clinical trials in people with or exposed to COVID-19 infection are needed to establish the drug works and is safe to use, and in what doses. The laboratory studies of Ivermectin suggest higher concentrations of the drug may be needed beyond a standard dose to have an antiviral impact. So safety monitoring will be important.
Lab studies suggest higher concentrations may be needed for COVID-19.Shutterstock
If Ivermectin is found to work on people with COVID-19, it needs to be studied as a potential treatment. So researchers need to know: does it prevent COVID-19 infection, reduce the severity of the associated illness, or improve the time to recovery? These are important questions to be answered before it becomes a treatment for COVID-19.
On a positive note, re-purposing drugs such as Ivermectin as a potential treatment for COVID-19 is ideal because development can move quickly to clinical trial testing because we already know it’s safe to use in humans at currently recommended doses.
No. It’s too soon to know if the promising laboratory test results will translate into a safe and effective drug for COVID-19 patients. The researchers were very clear Ivermectin should not be used to treat COVID-19 until further testing is complete.
We certainly shouldn’t be stockpiling the drug to use later, especially since we don’t yet know the best way to take Ivermectin, including the right dose. And it could lead to unintended medicine shortages for people who need the drug to treat serious diseases caused by parasites.
This week’s Newspoll, conducted April 1-3 from a sample of 1,508 people, showed a huge boost in Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s approval rating based on his leadership thus far in the coronavirus crisis.
Nearly two-thirds of people (61%) were satisfied with Morrison’s performance (up a massive 20 points) and 35% were dissatisfied (down 18), for a net approval of +26, up 38 points.
Anthony Albanese also improved his net approval by nine points to +9. Morrison led Albanese as better PM by 53-29%, another large improvement from the last Newspoll, which was a closer 42-38%.
Analyst Kevin Bonham says these are the biggest poll-to-poll jumps for a PM in Newspoll history on both net approval and better PM. His tweet shows the largest net approval rises for PMs, and when they occurred.
The Newspoll also gave the Coalition a 51-49% lead over Labor in the two-party preferred question, a two-point gain for the Coalition since the last Newspoll three weeks ago.
Primary votes were 42% Coalition (up two points), 34% Labor (down two), 13% Greens (up one) and 5% One Nation (up one).
Major crises tend to produce a “rally round the flag” effect for incumbents, though it doesn’t always last.
An example of a major crisis that produced an initial rally-round-the-flag effect, but nothing else, is the Queensland floods in December 2010 to January 2011, which affected over three-quarters of the state.
From October to December 2010, the Labor state government was trailing the opposition LNP by a landslide 59-41% margin. Based on Premier Anna Bligh’s handling of the floods, Labor surged ahead by 52-48% in the January to March 2011 polling, but then fell back immediately to a 60-40% deficit in April to June 2011.
Labor never recovered and was reduced to just seven of 89 seats at the March 2012 state election.
There are currently far fewer coronavirus cases and deaths in Australia than in European countries and the US. If the crisis is resolved relatively painlessly in Australia, I believe Morrison’s ratings will stay high during the crisis, but then drop back after it ends.
In other Newspoll questions, 84% of respondents were worried and 14% confident about the economic impact of coronavirus (76-20% previously). On the preparedness of the health system, 57% were worried, compared to 41% confident.
An overwhelming majority (86%) supported the JobKeeper scheme. While 64% thought the $1,500-per-fortnight payment for qualifying workers was about right, 16% thought it was too much and 14% not enough.
Some 67% were worried about catching the virus, 38% about higher government debt, 36% about losing their jobs and 35% about their superannuation balance.
Is Trump’s modest ratings boost sustainable?
In the FiveThirtyEight polling aggregate, US President Donald Trump’s current ratings across all polls are 45.8% approve, 50.0% disapprove (net -4.2%).
In polls of registered or likely voters, Trump’s ratings are 45.6% approve, 50.9% disapprove (net -5.3%). Trump’s net approval has improved five to six points in the last three weeks and is at its highest since early in his term.
Despite the rise in Trump’s approval, the RealClearPolitics average of national polls gave virtually certain Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden a 5.9% lead over Trump in the November 2020 election, down modestly from 8.5% three weeks ago.
A recent Fox News national poll gave Trump a 51-48% disapproval rating. However, 53% thought a quicker response from the federal government could have slowed the spread of coronavirus, while 34% said it was so contagious nothing could stop it spreading.
Despite the higher rating for Trump, the same poll gave Biden a 49-40% lead in the presidential election.
Trump’s gains so far are dwarfed by then US President George W. Bush’s gains in approval of over 30 points after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001.
Other current leaders and governing parties have had far bigger bounces in their ratings than Trump, including Morrison.
In Britain, two recent polls gave the Conservatives 54%, up from the mid-to-high 40s. In Germany, the conservative Union parties are in the mid-30s, up from the mid-20s before the crisis. A recent French poll gave President Emmanuel Macron a -8 net approval, up 26 points.
Even in the US, Trump’s bounce is far less than the bounce for New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo’s net favourable rating improved from -6 to +48 in a New York Siena College poll. New York has the most coronavirus cases in the US so far.
If the coronavirus crisis is resolved relatively quickly, people will likely be more focused on other factors by the November presidential election. In that case, how much damage the economy takes and whether it is clearly recovering are likely to be the most important factors.
The more likely scenario is that coronavirus will damage the US both economically and in health terms for a long time. The US already has far more cases than any other country. I do not believe Trump’s ratings gains will be sustained if the US falls into a massive health and economic crisis.
The crisis has already had an economic impact: in the week ending March 21, almost 3.3 million new jobless claims were submitted, far exceeding the previous record of 695,000. In the week ending March 28, jobless claims jumped massively again to over 6.6 million. Weekly jobless claims are published every Thursday.
In March, the US unemployment rate rose 0.9% to 4.4%. The survey period was in mid-March, before the massive late-March losses.
In the household survey, employment was down almost 3 million people, compared to a mere 701,000 in the headline establishment survey. While average hourly wages rose 11 cents, this probably reflects the shedding of lower-paying jobs. As average weekly working hours fell, average weekly wages dropped almost US$2 from February.
Although recent encouraging news suggests the rate of new coronavirus cases in Australia is slowing, our medical facilities could still be overwhelmed at some point.
One modelling study has suggested that, if public health measures are not observed or do not work, demand for the existing 2,200 intensive care unit (ICU) beds in Australia will be exceeded within a few weeks. More optimistic views of our achievable ICU capacity would merely delay this event for a few weeks.
Critical shortages of ICU beds and other medical resources overseas have resulted in large numbers of deaths. In these countries there have been vigorous debates about which of many eligible patients should be given access to care facilities in short supply.
For many clinicians, the question of who has access to limited ICU beds presents disturbing challenges, especially in view of a widely disseminated proposal that has gained particular supportin Italy. This bases decisions about who is granted access to ICU beds on calculations of the future years of life that could potentially be achieved through treatment (or, in some proposals, “quality adjusted” years of life).
This would deny access to people above a certain age as well as to people with disabilities and certain medical conditions.
It has taken many years for us to move away from judging the value or worth of a person by their age, race, sexual preference, physical ability, religion or other personal characteristics.
Decisions should not be made based on calculations about how many years a person has to live.Shutterstock
There has also never been a public discussion, and certainly there is no agreement, about whether the “ethical value” of a person can be calculated mathematically on the basis of the total number of years he or she might live.
The alternative, which has been developed and routinely employed in hospitals around Australia for years, applies a process of rigorous discussion about the potential benefits and burdens of treatments proposed for every individual patient, taking into account all relevant clinical features and whether acute problems can be overcome.
It entails a detailed analysis of technical issues and results. It involves open discussion with the patient, medical carers, family members, and expert ICU staff, about medical, social, emotional and ethical issues.
It embraces flexibility and a readiness to adapt and change protocols with changing circumstances. It takes into account the specific circumstances of individual patients’ lives, including their personal preferences and religious and cultural beliefs.
It leaves aside personal characteristics not relevant to the medical decision at hand, such as race, gender, sexual preference and ethnicity.
Age can be relevant
This is not to say that age can never be a relevant consideration. Indeed, in some conditions, advanced age is closely linked with the likelihood of a poorer response to a treatment.
Sometimes this is because increasing age is directly linked to age-related diseases that reduce the likelihood of a successful outcome from treatment, such as certain types of cancer.
Sometimes age can be a factor but it’s more of a signifier of other considerations.Shutterstock
At other times, for reasons that are much less clear, age itself appears to predict poor outcomes of treatment, leading to its inclusion in many scoring systems for predicting outcomes of treatment, including in intensive care and cancer care.
In both cases it is valid that age be taken into account in decision-making. It is also possible that age may be relevant to more philosophical considerations, for example, whether older people consider themselves to have already lived a “fair innings” or whether young people should be given the opportunity to live a life and gain their potential.
While these may also be relevant considerations, and be accepted by many, including sometimes by older people themselves, they are much less clear and much more contested, and require ongoing debate.
The key point is that, even in these cases, age is never taken as a defining quality or characteristic of a person but rather as a potential signifier of other relevant characteristics or risk factors. Its relevance is linked to what it implies for the particular person, not to an assumption that old people have diminished value and are less worthy of treatment.
In extreme settings, time and resource constraints may add greatly to pressures on the decision-making process but the same principles still apply. In fact, it is exactly in these contexts that it is most important to resist resorting to criteria that are not founded on evidence or valid ethical arguments.
How do we respond?
The ethical strength of a society is revealed in how it responds to serious challenges. If we have values worth defending, this is the time to fight for them.
Most of us do not want to move to a society based on the arbitrary imposition of measures that discriminate against people on the basis of ethically or medically irrelevant personal characteristics.
Future generations will judge us on how we respond to this crisis and whether we have been able to defend our core values. This is the time, perhaps more than any other, when we have to keep our ethical nerve.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ilan Noy, Professor and Chair in the Economics of Disasters, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
Governments across the world have rolled out extensive financial packages to support individuals, businesses and large corporations affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The US and Australian stimulus packages each represent about 10% of GDP. New Zealand’s program is about 5% of GDP, but each country is experiencing the economic shock differently, has different existing safety nets and priorities, and different mechanisms to deliver this assistance.
These support packages will play a significant role in shaping our world for many years, and we should not allow the clear emergency of the situation to stop us questioning their design.
Our work on economic recovery following natural hazards and disasters defines a set of build-back-better goals, and how they should be assessed.
This kind of thinking applies equally to our current predicament. We argue that globally, the purpose of COVID-19 stimulus packages should be threefold, and we should assess them against these three goals:
make sure people’s basic needs are satisfied
make it possible for the economy to spring back into action once the necessary social distancing measures are relaxed
use these funds to create positive change, and rebuild areas we previously neglected (in many countries, this will mean investing in public health systems).
To achieve the first goal of making sure people can meet their basic needs, many high-income countries – including the US, Greece, the UK and France – are either providing direct payments to all citizens (as in the US) or targeted support to those who lost income or jobs.
These payments are sometimes a fixed proportion of each recipient’s previous income, up to a cap (as in the UK), or are identical for everyone who has lost income (as in New Zealand).
From an economic perspective, it is clearly more efficient to provide support only to the people who really need it – those who have lost income and would not be able to support themselves and their dependants.
But these programs are also shaped by politics and ethics, and different countries chose different ways to distribute this assistance, not always based on need.
Restarting economies
Even better are programs that provide the wage subsidies through existing employers, such as Germany’s famed Kurzarbeit program (which translates to “work with shorter hours”) which was implemented during the 2008 global financial crisis.
New Zealand’s wage subsidy package is a similar program. It supports businesses to continue paying their staff even if they are unable to work.
Details of payments to businesses are posted online, to make sure employers comply and transfer these funds to their employees. This initiative was trialled after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
A similar support was also implemented in Australia.
Generally, wage subsidies allow for continued employment of individuals who would otherwise be let go, and they will also assist in achieving the second goal of resuming economic activity once restrictions are relaxed.
Such programs have been shown to be effective in Germany and New Zealand in ameliorating unexpected shocks.
While employees need support, directly or indirectly, it is also important that small and medium-sized businesses are propped up so they are ready to forge ahead once it is possible to do so. They should receive grants and subsidised loans to pay their costs, other than wages. Otherwise many businesses will fail, and the recovery will be slow and hard.
Global impacts
Whether large corporations need to receive support depends partly on the longer-term importance of their sector. It is easier to justify support for national airlines, which are an important linchpin in many countries’ global ties, than to support fossil fuel producers, for example.
Nor are there many reasons why taxpayers (present and future) should bail out wealthy individual owners of large businesses, when these businesses could be restructured in bankruptcy proceedings that should not lead to their shutdown.
But the COVID-19 pandemic has impacts well beyond individual countries and their economies and may require global support mechanisms.
Most low- and middle-income countries have either not yet announced any assistance or their packages are less than 1% of GDP. They typically cannot afford more with their existing debt levels.
It is therefore incumbent on high-income countries that can afford larger fiscal support packages to help countries that cannot. But so far only a handful of high-income countries, including Finland and Norway, have provided such support.
The international institutions supported by the rich world, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, should pull out all the stops and lend enough, and at concessionary rates, to low-income countries so they can, at the very least, provide for their people’s basic needs.
Without that support, the virus will continue to spread in low-income countries and defeat the draconian social distancing measures that almost every country is implementing now.
Finally, it is important that we scrutinise these programs carefully now, rather than only once the public health emergency has passed and they have been entrenched. The sums involved are incredibly large and we will be remiss if we mis-spend what we are now borrowing from our children and grandchildren.
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From the second week of lockdown in New Zealand, to Covid-19 in the Pacific and an “authoritarianism creep” by governments in the Asia-Pacific region provided a fast-changing landscape on the Pacific Media Centre’s Southern Cross radio programme on 95bFM today.
New Zealand had crossed the 1000-case threshold on Sunday with 89 new cases and one death, reports Sri Krishnamurthi on the programme.
However, the pandemic was starting to affect the Pacific with Guam being the worst-hit with 93 cases and four deaths and there was also the curiosity of an American aircraft carrier docked in Guam with 155 cases on board.
Ironically, captain Brett Crozier, 50, who was “relieved” after he sent a letter which ended up in hands of a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, saying that conditions were dire on board was himself reported now to be suffering from Covid-19
Meanwhile, people in Fiji were still not taking the threat seriously with 134 arrested on Saturday for flouting lockdown rules, with Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama threatening unleash the army if lockdown rules were not obeyed.
If that was not enough, some governments were using Covid-19 to clamp down on people and the media as authoritarianism began to raise its ugly head in the Philippines – where on person was shot on Saturday, Cambodia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu.
– Partner –
There was much angst too, over the way Bauer Media New Zealand toppled costing 237 jobs as the media continues its run of bad news.
And, as fate would have it, category 5 cyclone was bearing down on Vanuatu as well as on-track to hit Fiji, after devastating the Solomon Islands.
Past viral epidemics have influenced the evolution of all life. In fact, about 8% of the humane genome consists of retrovirus fragments. These genetic “fossils” are leftover from viral epidemics our ancestors survived.
COVID-19 reminds us of the devastating impact viruses can have, not only on humans, but also animals and crops. Now for the first time, the disease has been confirmed in a tiger at New York’s Bronx Zoo, believed to have been infected by an employee. Six other tigers and lions were also reported “showing symptoms”.
According to the BBC, conservation experts think COVID-19 could also threaten animals such as wild gorillas, chimps and orangutans.
While virologists are intensely interested in how viruses mutate and transmit between species – and understand this process to an extent – many gaps in knowledge remain.
Skilled in their craft
Most viruses are specialists. They establish long associations with preferred host species. In these relationships, the virus may not induce disease symptoms. In fact, the virus and host may benefit each other in symbiosis.
Occasionally, viruses will “emerge” or “spillover” from their original host to a new host. When this happens, the risk of disease increases. Most infectious diseases that affect humans and our food supply are the result of spillovers from wild organisms.
The new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that emerged from Wuhan in November isn’t actually “new”. The virus evolved over a long period, probably millions of years, in other species where it still exists. We know the virus has close relatives in Chinese rufous horseshoe bats, intermediate horseshoe bats, and pangolins – which are considered a delicacy in China.
Smuggled pangolins are killed for their scales to be used in traditional Chinese medicine. They are suspected to be the world’s most-trafficked mammal, apart from humans.Shutterstock
Past coronaviruses, including the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), have jumped from bats to humans via an intermediary mammal. Some experts propose Malayan pangolins provided SARS-CoV-2 this link.
Although the original host of the SARS-CoV-2 virus hasn’t been identified, we needn’t be surprised if the creature appears perfectly healthy. Many other coronaviruses exist naturally in wild mammal and bird populations around the world.
Where do they keep coming from?
Human activity drives the emergence of new pathogenic (disease-causing) viruses. As we push back the boundaries of the last wild places on Earth – felling the bush for farms and plantations – viruses from wildlife interact with crops, farm animals and people.
Species that evolved separately are now mixing. Global markets allow the free trade of live animals (including their eggs, semen and meat), vegetables, flowers, bulbs and seeds – and viruses come along for the ride.
Humans are also warming the climate. This allows certain species to expand their geographical range into zones that were previously too cold to inhabit. As a result, many viruses are meeting new hosts for the first time.
How do they make the jump?
Virus spillover is a complex process and not fully understood. In nature, most viruses are confined to particular hosts because of specific protein “lock and key” interactions. These are needed for successful replication, movement within the host, and transmission between hosts.
For a virus to infect a new host, some or all protein “keys” may need to be modified. These modifications, called “mutations”, can occur within the old host, the new one, or both.
For instance, a virus can jump from host A to host B, but it won’t replicate well or transmit between individuals unless multiple protein keys mutate either simultaneously, or consecutively. The low probability of this happening makes spillovers uncommon.
To better understand how spillovers occur, imagine a virus is a short story printed on a piece of paper. The story describes:
how to live in a specific cell type, inside a specific host
how to move to the cell next door
how to transmit to a new individual of the same species.
The short story also has instructions on how to make a virus photocopying machine. This machine, an enzyme called a polymerase, is supposed to churn out endless identical copies of the story. However, the polymerase occasionally makes mistakes.
It may miss a word, or add a new word or phrase to the story, subtly changing it. These changed virus stories are called “mutants”. Very occasionally, a mutant story will describe how the virus can live inside a totally new host species. If the mutant and this new host meet, a spillover can happen.
We can’t predict virus spillovers to humans, so developing vaccines preemptively isn’t an option. There has been ongoing discussions of a “universal flu vaccine” which would provide immunity against all influenza virus mutants. But so far this hasn’t been possible.
Let wildlife be wildlife
Despite how many viruses exist, relatively few threaten us, and the plants and animals we rely on.
Given the enormous number of viruses that exist, and our willingness to provide them global transport, future spillovers are inevitable. We can reduce the chances of this by practising better virus surveillance in hospitals and on farms.
We should also recognise wildlife, not only for its intrinsic value, but as a potential source of disease-causing viruses. So let’s maintain a “social distance” and leave wildlife in the wild.
Some weeks ago, I got an email from a student who had returned to Northern Italy over Christmas to see family.
Unable to return to Australia, they were in lockdown. The hospitals were filling up fast, as COVID-19 began to spiral out of control. Sales of Albert Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague (La Peste) were spiking. Everyone was buying it.
Rereading The Plague over these past weeks has been an uncanny experience. Its fictive chronicle of the measures taken in the city of Oran against a death-dealing disease that strikes in 1940 sometimes seemed to blur into the government announcements reshaping our lives.
Oran is a city like anywhere else, Camus’ narrator tells us:
Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, ‘doing business’.
Like people anywhere else, the Oranians are completely unprepared when rats begin emerging from the sewers to die in droves in streets and laneways. Then, men, women and children start to fall ill with high fever, difficulties breathing and fatal buboes.
The people of Oran initially “disbelieved in pestilences”, outside of the pages of history books. So, like many nations in 2020, they are slow to accept the enormity of what is occurring. As our narrator comments drily: “In this respect they were wrong, and their views obviously called for revision.”
The numbers of afflicted rise. First slowly, then exponentially. By the time the plague-bearing spring gives way to a sweltering summer, over 100 deaths daily is the new normal.
Emergency measures are rushed in. The city gates are shut, and martial law declared. Oran’s commercial harbour is closed to sea traffic. Sporting competitions cease. Beach bathing is prohibited.
Soon, food shortages emerge (toilet paper, thankfully, is not mentioned). Some Oranians turn plague-profiteers, preying on the desperation of their fellows. Rationing is brought in for basic necessities, including petrol.
Meanwhile, anyone showing symptoms of the disease is isolated. Houses, then entire suburbs, are locked down. The hospitals become overwhelmed. Schools and public buildings are converted into makeshift plague hospitals.
A convention centre in London has been transformed into a 4,000-bed hospital.
Our key protagonists, Dr Rieux and his friends Tarrou, Grand and Rambert, set up teams of voluntary workers to administer serums and ensure the sick are quickly diagnosed and hospitalised, often amongst harrowing scenes.
In these circumstances, fear and suspicion descend “dewlike, from the greyly shining sky” on the population. Everyone realises that anyone – even those they love – could be a carrier.
Come to think of it, so could each person themselves.
The failure of the governors to consistently impose “social distancing” is shown up spectacularly in the novel’s most picturesque scene. The lead actor in a rendition of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice collapses onstage, “his arms and legs splayed out under his antique robe”.
Terrified patrons flee the darkened underworld of the opera house, “wedged together in the bottlenecks, and pouring out into the street in a confused mass, with shrill cries of dismay”.
Arguably the most telling passages in The Plague today are Camus’ beautifully crafted meditative observations of the social and psychological effects of the epidemic on the townspeople.
Epidemics make exiles of people in their own countries, our narrator stresses. Separation, isolation, loneliness, boredom and repetition become the shared fate of all.
In Oran, as in Australia, places of worship go empty. Funerals are banned for fear of contagion. The living can no longer even farewell the many dead.
A gravedigger in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 1 2020. Around the world, mass graves are being dug and funerals are being banned.Antonio Lacerda/EPA
Camus’ narrator pays especial attention to the damages visited by the plague upon separated lovers. Outsiders like the journalist Rambert who, by chance, are marooned inside Oran when the gates shut are “in the general exile […] the most exiled”.
Today’s world knows many such “travellers caught by the plague and forced to stay where they were, […] cut off both from the person(s) with whom they wanted to be and from their homes as well”.
Multiple allegories
Camus’ prescient account of life under conditions of an epidemic works on different levels. The Plague is a transparent allegory of the Nazi occupation of France beginning in spring 1940. The sanitary teams reflect Camus’ experiences in, and admiration for, the resistance against the “brown plague” of fascism.
Camus’ title also evokes the ways the Nazis characterised those they targeted for extermination as a pestilence. The shadow of the then-still-recent Holocaust darkens The Plague’s pages.
When death rates become so great that individual burials are no longer possible – as in scenes we are already seeing – the Oranaise dig collective graves into which:
the naked, somewhat contorted bodies were slid into a pit almost side by side, then covered with a layer of quicklime and another of earth […] so as to leave space for subsequent consignments.
When this measure fails to keep up with the weight of these “consignments”, as with the genocidal actions of the Einzatsgruppen, “the old crematorium east of the town” is repurposed. Closed streetcars filled with the dead are soon rattling along the old coastal tramline:
Thereafter, […] when a strong wind was blowing […] a faint, sickly odour coming from the east remind[ed] them that they were living under a new order and that the plague fires were taking their nightly toll.
Camus’ plague is also a metaphor for the force of what Dr Rieux calls “abstraction” in our lives: all those impersonal rules and processes which can make human beings statistics to be treated by governments with all the inhumanity characterising epidemics.
For this reason, the enigmatic character Tarrou identifies the plague with people’s propensity to rationalise killing others for philosophical, religious or ideological causes. It is with this sense of plague in mind that the final words of the novel warn:
that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.
Ordinary hope
There is nevertheless truth in the description of Camus’ masterwork as a “sermon of hope”. In the end, the plague dissipates as unaccountably as it had begun. Quarantine is lifted. Oran’s gates are reopened. Families and lovers reunite. The chronicle closes amid scenes of festival and jubilation.
Camus’ narrator concludes that confronting the plague has taught him that, for all of the horrors he has witnessed, “there are more things to admire in men than to despise”.
Unlike some philosophers, Camus became increasingly sceptical about glorious ideals of superhumanity, heroism or sainthood. It is the capacity of ordinary people to do extraordinary things that The Plague lauds. “There’s one thing I must tell you,” Dr Rieux at one point specifies:
there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is common decency.
It is such ordinary virtue, people each doing what they can to serve and look after each other, that Camus’ novel suggests alone preserves peoples from the worst ravages of epidemics, whether visited upon them by natural causes or tyrannical governments.
The heroes of Camus’ The Plague are the health workers.Kelly Barnes/AAP
It is therefore worth underlining that the unheroic heroes of Camus’ novel are people we call healthcare workers. Men and women, in many cases volunteers, who despite great risks step up, simply because “plague is here and we’ve got to make a stand”.
It is also to these people’s examples, The Plague suggests, that we should look when we consider what kind of world we want to rebuild after the gates of our cities are again thrown open and COVID-19 has become a troubled memory.
PACIFIC PANDEMIC DIARY:By Sri Krishnamurthi, self-isolating in Auckland under New Zealand’s Covid-19 lockdown as part of a Pacific Media Watch series.
As New Zealand edges toward the third week of lockdown having passed 1000 cases threshold (1039) with 89 new cases, 12 clusters and one death on day 11 the bigger angst during the week was for the 237 jobs lost with the folding of the magazine giant Bauer New Zealand.
While Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said yesterday the projections were for 4000 cases by now she was relieved it had not come to that.
“Modelling showed we had the potential to face as many as 4000 cases this weekend, we’re instead just over 1000 those 3000 fewer cases shows the difference that cumulative action can make,” she told her televised press conference.
However, the bigger debate during the second weekend of lockdown was whether or not the German magazine corporate had intended to pull out of New Zealand even before the Covid-19 crisis.
Bauer, in a media statement, said the closure was due to the “severe economic impact of Covid-19”.
– Partner –
However, not so said the minister responsible for media Kris Faafoi, who said no one from Bauer ever lobbied his office on that point, and the company had rejected any government assistance through the wage subsidy.
He and the prime minister insist Bauer’s exit is unrelated to the Covid-19 crisis.
Sudden collapse “The government actively sought assist Bauer through this period,” Ardern of the dramatic and sudden collapse of the company on Thursday.
That assertion was backed up by Paul Dykzeul, who was hired to lead the company here when Bauer Media moved into New Zealand in 2012.
“Bauer is involved in much more media than just magazines now. They’ve been looking at publishing business around the world five years ago and exited from some countries because the model is in decline,” Dykzeul said.
“Government support for the media should include community newspapers,” said Journalism Education Association of New Zealand (JEANZ) president Dr Greg Treadwell last week.
“If the government is going to act it is a pretty good place to start.”
The other issue during the Covid-19 pandemic to raise its ugly head was the creeping authoritarianism that was starting to take hold in the Pacific.
‘Responding with paranoia’ “While the Pacific infection rates are still relatively low, many governments have been responding with panic, paranoia and especially in relation to freedom of information, media independence and constructive and accurate communication, so vital in these critical times,” wrote my colleague Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie in Saturday’s Pacific Pandemic Diary.
Such as President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines who has ordered his troops to “shoot dead” anyone caught violating Manila’s three-week lockdown period.
The first death happened on Saturday when a 63-year-old man was shot dead in the Philippines after threatening village officials and police with a scythe at a coronavirus checkpoint.
In Indonesia, President Joko Widodo’s government has pressed ahead with fast track a debate to adopt three controversial laws.
In Papua New Guinea, East Sepik Governor Allan Bird, controversially called for a “shoot to kill” order to frontier troops against border-crossers from Indonesia.
New Caledonia now has 18 cases, while recorded five new cases on the weekend to take its tally to 12 including one who is suspected of contracting the disease at a religious festival in India.
