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

Prison is, understandably, a very closed environment. Many prisons are also overcrowded. COVID-19 has already entered the prison system and any further spread would be catastrophic for prisoners, staff, their families and the wider community.

The flow of prisoners in and out of custody in Australia is huge. More than 160 people enter our adult prisons every day. Over three-quarters of these people are unsentenced – also known as being “on remand”.

Read more: Explainer: how will the emergency release of NSW prisoners due to coronavirus work?

Indeed, a third of the current Australian prison population is in custody on remand. This means there are over 14,000 people in prison who have not yet been found guilty or, less often, are waiting to be sentenced.

Let’s not forget that about 160 people depart prisons every day too. If COVID-19 finds its way into prison, that means a lot of people could become carriers if they fail to self-isolate when they exit the prison system. Already, three prisoners in the ACT are in isolation due to fears of infection.

Corrective services around the country have suspended all prisoner visits by family members and support workers.

It is not surprising applications have been coming before the courts where barristers have asked judges to grant bail to persons who, in other circumstances, would very likely be denied bail.

Judges and magistrates are required to consider a range of issues in deciding such matters. It is becoming increasingly apparent that this may now include whether the accused is in a high-risk category, such as susceptibility to COVID-19, and will have limited contact with family and friends caused by the new restrictions on visits.

For certain types of offences, courts are required to refuse bail unless they are satisfied the applicant has shown there are “exceptional circumstances” that justify bail. Is COVID-19 an exceptional circumstance? Let’s look at two examples.

On Monday, the ACT Supreme Court granted bail to a woman because her lawyer successfully argued her visiting rights had been restricted by the COVID-19 outbreak. The judge said:

Persons on remand no doubt rely on the limited social contact they are permitted, most of which is achieved through visits. In particular, contact with family is an important element in the life of a person resident at the [ACT prison].

And last week the Supreme Court of Victoria granted another woman bail in circumstances the judge described as “extraordinary”. He was referring to the possibility of significant delays in the justice process as a result of COVID-19,

which would have substantial effects on her and, no doubt, her relationship with her family, [and] which would be a dramatic development for a person who had not previously been in custody.

The judge also noted it was likely the woman would spend more time in custody on remand than she would get as a sentence if found guilty.

Significantly, many courts have postponed new jury trials to reduce the risk of transmission. This may lead to delays of more than a year.

It is also important to understand that prisons operate on the legitimacy of the system. When prisoners feel – rightly or wrongly – they are being treated unfairly, the risk of riots and breakouts increases. Italy has recently had riots in more than 20 prisons. Twelve prisoners have died and 16 escaped as a result. Similar events have been reported in Colombia.

The capacity to manage the system may be affected, too, as community transmission and fear of infection in prisoners increase, and more correctional officers are required to self-isolate for long periods.

Releasing some people from prison is part of the solution to “flattening” the coronavirus curve. New South Wales has already passed legislation to release some low-risk and vulnerable people, although it does not cover unsentenced prisoners.

But this legislation is particularly appropriate for unsentenced prisoners, who are entitled to the presumption of innocence, especially those charged with less serious offences. Bail conditions and electronic monitoring can help ensure community safety, in addition to the increasing restrictions imposed on all Australians to self-isolate.

Read more: How to flatten the curve of coronavirus, a mathematician explains

Releasing some prisoners early will reduce the pressure on the health system in the months ahead. It will also reduce the risk to the broader community if we act now, rather than releasing people once COVID-19 is widespread in prisons.

We recently signed an open letter to governments, urging them to take a range of steps to limit the exposure of prisoners to COVID-19, including early release for some prisoners. We also welcome the decisions of judges and magistrates who are using their discretion to limit the possibility that accused persons, who have yet to be found guilty, will be exposed to the coronavirus, especially in circumstances where they can no longer receive visitors.

As governments keep telling us, perilous times require bold decision-making.

– ref. We need to consider granting bail to unsentenced prisoners to stop the spread of coronavirus – https://theconversation.com/we-need-to-consider-granting-bail-to-unsentenced-prisoners-to-stop-the-spread-of-coronavirus-134526

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sango Mahanty, Associate professor, Australian National University

The global COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the social networks we rely on. Workplaces, pubs, restaurants and gyms have closed and many people are now housebound.

COVID-19 represents a major rupture in the status quo and calls for new forms of response. Perhaps this is why thousands of new “mutual aid” groups have sprung up internationally. Many of these groups have swelled to several thousand members within a few days.

Such community-driven groups use diverse communication platforms such as Facebook, Whatsapp and letterbox leafleting, to provide safe and inclusive ways for people to network during illness and self-isolation. At a neighbourhood or street level they help each other, particularly vulnerable people, with grocery collection, walking pets, emotional support and more.

But the rapid growth of this movement creates a steep learning curve for group organisers. Just as in wider society, mutual aid groups must grapple with political differences and structural inequality. Groups in Australia can look to those overseas to learn how to overcome these challenges.

What do mutual aid groups do?

Co-author of this article, Nisha Phillipps, co-founded the Haringey COVID-19 Mutual Aid group. It is one of many such groups in Britain and has a membership of more than 3,300.

The Facebook group links its members to neighbourhood groups that coordinate volunteers. It also shares topical information, such as detail on London’s lockdown measures, online mental health services and help for tenants facing eviction.

One of the largest similar groups to emerge in Australia is Love Your Neighbour Melbourne which, at the time of writing had more than 9,285 members.

A Canberra mutual aid group is helping do grocery runs, and reportedly even received offers from plumbers to fit bidets for people who couldn’t buy toilet paper.

Lessons to be learnt

In the fast-moving context of the coronavirus, these groups can learn from each other by sharing approaches to their challenges.

Mutual aid – in the sense of voluntary cooperation for a common purpose – has deep historical roots and can mean different things to different people.

In medicine and social work, mutual support groups are set up by professionals to help those living with particular health and social risks. But mutual aid groups initiated by grassroots activists focus on addressing gaps or harm caused by state services through community-building.

Read more: Why are we calling it ‘social distancing’? Right now, we need social connections more than ever

This means members of a new mutual aid group may arrive with differing expectations of the group’s goals and approach, so clarifying this is important.

The Haringey group’s Facebook page states its goal as “supporting members of the community who are immuno-compromised or self-isolating” through an approach that “coordinates but does not dictate” how groups organise themselves at the street and neighbourhood level.

Their decentralised approach allows groups to use diverse communication systems, such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Slack, email or SMS, depending on what best suits a specific neighbourhood or street.

Dealing with difference

Cooperation and community-building are a welcome salve to the individualistic waves of panic-buying and “shopping rage” we’ve seen of late.

But communities are complex, and reflect the diversity and structural inequalities of wider society. Factors such as ethnicity, disability, socio-economic status, gender or access to technology means some people’s voices are excluded, or they are denied opportunities.

Haringey draws on accountability guidelines from the community organisation Incite. These affirm the principles of respect, care and solidarity and lay out how to address discriminatory conduct. This follows a “transformative justice” approach. A facilitator talks to the people involved, to address the harm caused.

Read more: Why housing evictions must be suspended to defend us against coronavirus

The large and decentralised communities that comprise most COVID-19 mutual aid groups encompass diverse political leanings, from which differences of opinion emerge.

In one Canberra group for example, heated online debate broke out over a post proposing a “rent strike” to deal with job and income losses from COVID-19 lock-downs. This rift largely took place along socio-economic lines, between renters and homeowners/landlords.

Many groups, like Haringey, have an explicit community-centred stance, independent of government. For example, Haringey Council asked for volunteer lists but group administrators did not provide them, as they do not maintain a centralised list and preferred to continue a community-centred approach. Many members do not want direct engagement with police and neighbourhood watch groups, as this might disenfranchise homeless people or undocumented residents.

Where there are differences of opinion on these matters, they are discussed openly. Principles of community-building, solidarity and independence are important reference points in these discussions.

In a pandemic, the safety of volunteers and those receiving help is crucial. In Haringey, the organisers limit posts that suggest do-it-yourself actions to manage or treat COVID-19 that could heighten risks to the community, such as homemade masks. Volunteers draw on hygiene protocols from trusted websites run by health services and community groups such as QueerCare, a transfeminist autonomous care organisation.

Building community while we’re apart

As we move further into the COVID-19 lock-downs in Australia and elsewhere, mutual aid will be relied on more than ever.

Issues such as inclusion, accountability and political frictions can challenge community-driven initiatives of all kinds. Reflecting on what we do, and sharing lessons, will help nurture mutual aid in ways that address these challenges.

– ref. The community-led movement creating hope in the time of coronavirus – https://theconversation.com/the-community-led-movement-creating-hope-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-134391

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emmanuel Stamatakis, Professor of Physical Activity, Lifestyle, and Population Health, University of Sydney

The extensive social distancing policies put in place to limit the spread of COVID-19 mean most people will have to spend much, if not all, their time at home.

Self-isolation means far fewer opportunities to be physically active if you are used to walking or cycling for transportation and doing leisure time sports.

But equally worryingly, the home environment also offers abundant opportunity to be sedentary (sitting or reclining).

While self-isolation measures are necessary, our bodies and minds still need exercise to function well, prevent weight gain and keep the spirits up during these challenging times.

Read more: Why are we calling it ‘social distancing’? Right now, we need social connections more than ever

Exercise can help keep our immune system become strong, less susceptible to infections and their most severe consequences, and better able to recover from them.

Even before the restrictive conditions were announced, physical inactivity cost 5.3 million lives a year globally.

So we should consider ways to limit the effects of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, as well as its wider impact of contributing to the long-term chronic disease crisis.

How much physical activity?

Global recommendations are for all adults to accumulate at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity per week, as well as muscle-strengthening activities on two or more days a week.

Any activity is better than none, and more activity provides more physical and mental health benefits.

As several countries are already under lockdown, it is uncertain for how long you can go outside for a walk, run or cycle. The key question is how can people meet these guidelines when restricted to the home environment?

Sitting, standing and movement

Take regular breaks from continuous sitting in front of your computer, tablet, or smartphone every 20 to 30 minutes.

For example, you could take a few minutes break to walk around the house, take some fresh air on the balcony, in the garden or yard, or play with your dog for a few moments.

Alternate periods of standing while working/studying with sitting by creating your own stand-up desk area.

Make stairs your best friend

Using the stairs is an extremely time-efficient way to maintain fitness. As little as three 20-second fast stair climbs a day can improve fitness in only six weeks.

If you live in an apartment, avoid uncomfortable lift encounters with other self-isolating neighbours by using the staircase for any necessary outdoor journeys. Take care to avoid much contact with handrails.

Internal stairs also offer more stairclimbing and strength exercise opportunities.

Use your own bodyweight

A 2017 British study found home based strength exercises that utilise your own bodyweight – such as press-ups, sit-ups and planks – are as important for health as aerobic exercise.

There are many great resources for such indoor bodyweight exercises for people of all ages online.

Aim for at least a couple of own bodyweight sessions per week, with each session involving two to four sets of eight to 15 repetitions of each strength-promoting exercise. Make sure you take a two to three minutes rest between sets.

Dance the COVID-19 blues away!

An increasing number of live concerts are streamed online. Use the stress-releasing magic of music and dance at home like nobody’s watching (which is not unlikely).

Dancing is an excellent way to protect the heart and maintain fitness as it can reach moderate and vigorous intensity and can even imitate high-intensity interval training.

Dancing also has established mental health benefits to help us cope with the coronavirus-imposed solitude.

Whether it’s electronic beats, rock or traditional Irish music that floats your boat, it will not be difficult to turn up the volume of your stereo a little higher and turn your lounge or kitchen into a little dance hall every now and again.

Give them the play time they’ve always wanted

Social-distancing is a good opportunity to bond more with the little two and four legged members of your family through active play. Both children and dogs will love you replacing some of your online media and sitting time with playing in and around the house with them.

Dogs thrive on human attention and, given the opportunity, they would keep you on your feet 24/7. Take advantage of the extra time you will be in and around the house. There are many great indoor games to keep you active and improve your dog’s well-being.

No matter how young or how old your children are, there are many fun activities you can do together indoors and in the garden.

Just do something!

Left unattended, the self-isolation imposed by COVID-19 will likely skyrocket sedentary time and will drastically reduce the physical activity levels for many. Our suggestions are only a few examples of ideas that need no special equipment and can be done within limited space.

Read more: Coronavirus distancing measures are confusing. Here are 3 things to ask yourself before you see someone

For more ideas take a look at the online resources of reputable organisations such as the World Health Organisation, the American College of Sports Medicine, Sport England and the American Heart Association.

The end goal during self-isolation is to prevent long term physical and mental health damage by sitting less, moving as often as possible, and aiming to maintain fitness by huffing and puffing a few times a day.

– ref. How to stay fit and active at home during the coronavirus self-isolation – https://theconversation.com/how-to-stay-fit-and-active-at-home-during-the-coronavirus-self-isolation-134044

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tahj Rosmarin, Research Officer, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne

In modern cities, our public spaces represent our shared values. They are our common assets, owned, maintained and used by all members of our society. The outbreak of coronavirus and its immediate impacts, such as social distancing, have raised many questions about the role of public space in such times.

Since the World Health Organisation declared the COVID-19 pandemic, countries had been forced to adopt social isolation measures very quickly. Australia has progressively increased enforceable social distancing measures. India’s nearly 1.4 billion people have been ordered not to leave their homes. In Europe, first Italy, then Spain, France, Belgium and the UK have entered periods of total lockdown. It’s happening closer to home in New Zealand.

Read more: Coronavirus: locked-down Italy’s changing urban space

While the economic impacts of the pandemic are becoming obvious, the influence upon public space still remains uncertain.

With businesses being forced to close and whole sectors urged to work from home, streetlife is grinding to a halt across the world. As fear of infection has increased, public transport use has plummeted.

Australia is among the increasing numbers of countries to close “non-essential” public space, including restaurants, cafes and cinemas. Around the world, major sporting events, music concerts and comedy festivals have all been cancelled. Any non-essential travel and meetings are being discouraged or banned.

These measures are significant: they could uproot the very foundations of how people interact in public.

While this intense monitoring of public space is a temporary control, it raises questions about the future. Will we return to our normal habits once it’s all over? Will coughing on the subway be forever taboo?

Read more: To limit coronavirus risks on public transport, here’s what we can learn from efforts overseas

Collectivism or individualism?

The coronavirus pandemic has had immediate impacts – both negative and positive – on how people interact with each other in public. Xenophobia and racial stereotyping have led to antisocial public behaviour. And supermarkets have become stages for public fights over toilet paper and hand sanitiser.

In spite of this, we have also seen instances of collectivism and urban resilience. In Italy, the national lockdown has forced people to create a new type of public space. Citizens are taking to their balconies and windows to enjoy music together, sharing songs across buildings and above streets.

It’s a reminder that connection and interaction are integral to our society even in times of crisis. But is this particular type of collectivism a product of urban density? These scenes may not be so easily replicated in Australia’s sprawling suburbs. However, we are seeing other displays of community.

Read more: How a time of panic buying could yet bring us together

What will fill the void?

The practice of self-isolation raises many uncertainties about public space. Daily human contact is ingrained in the ways people interact in public spaces. Will social isolation lead to a more individualistic approach to public spaces?

In 2020, perhaps this type of physical isolation will not feel so foreign as it might once have. Email, social media and the sharing economy already provide the necessary digital infrastructure.

The role of technology will be heightened as digital space becomes even more prominent as a platform for sharing information and enabling human interaction. Events like these also highlight the shortfalls of our digital infrastructure, in particular the need to improve our national broadband network (NBN).

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

Coronavirus will change the ways we work and study. But it won’t remove our desire for human connection.

Our trust in public spaces will need to be rebuilt if we are to rebuild our economy and our society. In the face of generational issues such as climate change and homelessness, there is hope coronavirus might actually offer us an opportunity to radically reassess our communal values.

– ref. Public spaces bind cities together. What happens when coronavirus forces us apart? – https://theconversation.com/public-spaces-bind-cities-together-what-happens-when-coronavirus-forces-us-apart-133763

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Caroline Wilson-Barnao, Lecturer, The University of Queensland

As the coronavirus outbreak forces the closure of museums, art galleries, libraries and theatres around the word, the concept of “on demand culture” is gaining momentum.

Institutions – museums, galleries and concert halls, which by their very nature rely on in-person visits – are seeking out digital solutions in the form of live-streamed performances, virtual tours and searches of online collections. The Sydney Biennale announced a shift to digital display this week and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has streamed a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony to a live audience that peaked at 4500 and gathered thousands of subsequent viewers.

The current pandemic is dragging cultural institutions into the 21st century, forcing them to catch up with technological solutions to replace on-site experiences. But many institutions are already well down this path. They have already found the shift online has benefits and dangers.

Crossing technical boundaries

From as early as the 1920s, museums have been using the technologies of the day. Back then, it was presenting public lectures on broadcast radio.

From the early to mid-1950s, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology collaborated with CBS to produce What in the World, a program that presented storeroom objects to a panel of industry specialists who had to figure out what in the world the objects were and who made them.

A more recent turn is towards cultural institutions partnering with digital media organisations to deliver access to mediated cultural content. Google Arts & Culture, a digital platform, makes the collections of over 12,000 museums available online. Web portal Europeana, created by the European Union, hosts over 3,000 museums and libraries.

Well before the coronavirus closed ticket desks and moved some experiences onto digital media platforms, virtual gateways had become an important means of generating awareness and engagement with culture.

Anne Frank House has illustrated how online visitors can take part in holocaust remembrance without travelling to Amsterdam. Anne Frank House now uses a chatbot to create personalised conversations with users globally via Facebook messenger. Similarly, Eva.Stories is an Instagram page that recounts, via a series of 15 second videos, the diary of a 13-year-old girl killed in a concentration camp.

Doors shut

The forced closures as a result of coronavirus will accelerate and amplify this shift towards digital transformation.

At a time of social distancing, individual artists, small private companies and major public cultural institutions are quickly re-purposing technology in creative ways.

Morning Melodies is an online broadcast of the usually popular live performances offered by the Victoria Arts Centre.

Isol-Aid live streamed a music festival over the weekend, with 72 musicians across Australia each playing a 20-minute set on Instagram.

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image has set up an online weekly film nights, while acknowledging it “can’t replace the joy of being in the cinema”.

What might be lost

Despite the benefits of this mediated content, social media scholars Jose Van Dijck and Thomas Poell point out digital technologies come with a set of core logics or rules that shape users, economic structures and institutions. These underlying rules of online engagement have long-term implications for how we engage with culture. For future generations, it’s conceivable that a visit to the library, museum, theatre or art gallery won’t be something experienced in person but rather through a digital media platform.

With the “on demand culture” comes a dispersal of audiences into online spaces. In those spaces, their private contemplation of art and culture can become fodder for data mining and analysis.

This data then feeds into the repurposing of cultural content according to the priorities of social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. In 2018, Google Culture launched a face match app that matched user selfies to images drawn from cultural collections. It expanded access for new global audiences, but questions remain about the extent to which phone camera images were used to train Google’s facial recognition algorithm. Some users were critical of the collection’s lack of diversity.

The mediation of culture highlights a new set of ethical dilemmas as content goes online.

What we gain

This isn’t to say the availability of “on demand” cultural content isn’t a good thing. At “normal” times it can allow people to virtually visit exhibitions or enjoy performances they can’t access in real life. Online presentations can enhance understanding with “explore more” links or additional information.

During times of crisis, online cultural experiences can be a lifeline for both art audiences and creators. It is vital that we create avenues through which the community can access culture and seek out technological solutions to keep artists and cultural workers employed during what could be a long hiatus.

14 art & culture links

• Australian Book Industry Awards will be awarded online, as will the Stella Prize for female authors.
• Born to Boogie Dance Connection is hosting a much-needed online groove this week.
• Club Quarantine is where DJ D-Nice or Derrick Jones from 90s hip-hop group Boogie Down Productions is spinning tracks for 100,000+ viewers. Guest appearances include Michelle Obama, Naomi Campbell, Chaka Khan, Halle Berry, Rihanna, and Diddy.
• Europeana Collections are celebrating Women’s History Month.
• Google Art and Culture Explore collections from around the world, from the British Museum to Macchu Pichu.
• Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain is the place for Mark Rothco, Jeff Koons and Richard Serra.
• Karaoke Camp uses Zoom to connect singers worldwide.
• Melbourne Museum has virtual tours of the Phar Lap, dinosaur and First Peoples displays.
• National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, South Korea is showing meet the curators chats on YouTube.
• Nowadays live music lounge in New York is streaming DJs online.
• Rijksmuseum is home to Dutch masters: Vermeer’s Milkmaid, Van Gogh’s Self-portrait and Rembrandt’s most well-known painting: the Night Watch.
• Social Distancing Festival is drawing live streaming performances together in one place.
• Zoo Victoria’s Animal House is livesteaming lions, giraffes, snow leopards cubs, penguins and the occasional dancing zoo keeper.

– ref. When one door closes, open a window – 14 sites with great free art – https://theconversation.com/when-one-door-closes-open-a-window-14-sites-with-great-free-art-134153

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Henry Kha, Lecturer in Law, Macquarie University

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced that only five people can attend a wedding as part of the tough new restrictions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

But why this number specifically? According to the Marriage Act 1961, for a marriage to be legally valid in Australia, five is the minimum number of people who need to be present at the ceremony: the couple, two witnesses and a celebrant.

But the need to have at least two witnesses or even a marriage celebrant has not always been a legal requirement.

A brief legal history

The formal requirement that a marriage celebrant officiate a wedding was first introduced in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, a medieval council of senior church officials convened by the pope.

The Roman Catholic Church had sought to discourage irregular or secret marriages by urging people to marry before a priest. As marriage was understood to be a sacrament, a marriage celebrant became a necessary requirement to ensure that couples met the legal and religious criteria.

The 16th century Council of Trent, a series of counter-Reformation meetings, introduced the requirement that a valid church marriage also required two witnesses. The aim was to prevent fraud and promote certainty in the formation of marriage.

Read more: In the age of coronavirus, only tiny weddings are allowed and the extended family BBQ is out

England had undergone the Protestant Reformation by this time and had not adopted all of these rules. According to medieval canon law, English couples could marry without anyone else being present by simply exchanging wedding vows in present tense (for example, “I take you to be my wife from this day forward”).

This caused uncertainty and led to elopements. There were also rogue priests who performed secret marriages for eloping couples known as “fleet marriage” (named after the London chaplaincy in Fleet Prison).

The great English poet John Donne married in this way. He was arrested and only freed after proving that his marriage was legal.

The Church of England consequently wanted to exercise more control over all marriages. Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act 1753 was subsequently introduced, requiring that all recognised marriages be performed by an authorised clergyman of the Church of England.

The presence of a celebrant was thus a legal requirement for all marriages in England. (Jewish and Quaker marriages were exempt from this law.)

The Marriage Act 1836 ended the Church of England’s monopoly over marriages, legalising the civil ceremonies that exist today.

The act also introduced the requirement that two witnesses be present at a wedding. A system of registering births, deaths and marriage was introduced in the UK the same year. This meant that more formal evidence was required in order to register a marriage, hence the witnesses.

The English laws were then brought to Australia, and this is why five people have to be present at a wedding.

Could we legalise proxy marriages?

Given the current rule on social distancing, it might be time to consider whether proxy marriages should be introduced.

A proxy marriage is a wedding performed by a marriage celebrant where one or both of the marrying parties are not present. A proxy, nominated by either marrying party, acts as a surrogate for one or both people who are getting married.

Read more: Should I cancel my wedding? My kid’s birthday party? Why the government has banned indoor gatherings of over 100 people

A proxy marriage is not a legally recognised form of marriage in Australia because a couple must be physically present at a wedding ceremony for the marriage to be valid. Proxy marriages are also outlawed in many other countries due to concerns over sham marriages, particularly for immigration purposes.

However, proxy marriages were historically used to facilitate arranged marriages over long distances, such as Napoleon Bonaparte’s proxy marriage to an Austrian duchess in 1810.

Proxy marriages are notably legal today in a few American states, though it is generally restricted to members of the armed services who are on active duty. Some proxy marriages are also taking place over Skype, a practice increasingly common in immigrant communities.

So long as the true consent of a person to enter into a genuine committed relationship can be established, then there really is no reason to outlaw proxy marriages. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

The Australian government has already limited weddings to five people. If a lockdown is ever called and weddings are banned, life and love still need to go on. Proxy marriages could be a viable solution in a lonely planet.

– ref. ‘With this ring, I thee and (your proxy) wed’: a new form of marriage in the time of coronavirus? – https://theconversation.com/with-this-ring-i-thee-and-your-proxy-wed-a-new-form-of-marriage-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-134659

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

All non-urgent elective surgery is being suspended, to free up resources as hospitals prepare to deal with the full impact of COVID-19.

Announcing the suspension, taking effect from midnight Wednesday, Scott Morrison said only category 1 and some “exceptional” category 2 surgery would be done, “until further notice”.

The measure was agreed to by the national cabinet of federal and state leaders and covers the public and private systems.

Patients awaiting elective surgery are placed by their doctor in one of three categories

• Category 1 – Needing treatment within 30 days. Has the potential to deteriorate quickly to the point where the patient’s situation may become an emergency

• Category 2 – Needing treatment within 90 days. Their condition causes pain, dysfunction or disability. Unlikely to deteriorate quickly and unlikely to become an emergency

• Category 3 – Needing treatment at some point in the next year. Their condition causes pain, dysfunction or disability. Unlikely to deteriorate quickly.

Morrison said cancelling some elective surgery would “preserve resources including protective equipment” to help both public and private health services for COVED-19.

He said this had “already largely been implemented for category 1 and category 2 and what this means is a further scaling back of those elective surgeries in Category 2.”

Australian Medical Association president Tony Bartone said the AMA supported the ban. “Doctors will ensure that patients who have their surgery delayed are looked after and given the best medical advice.”

Earlier Victorian premier Danial Andrews warned there would be a “stage three” of the response to the virus – after the national cabinet on Tuesday agreed to further shut downs – although he said we were not there yet.

Andrews reiterated it was vital people follow the health and social distancing advice. He said the Centrelink queues were heartbreaking but “what we don’t want is queues for people who need a machine to help them breathe.

“We cannot have people queuing for intensive care beds – that will mean they will die,” he said.

“If we have a situation where this virus fundamentally gets away from us, we will have thousands of people who will only survive if they can breathe with the assistance of a machine.

“And we will not have enough machines, nurses and doctors to provide that care. I’m not sure whether I could make it any clearer than that. If you need further evidence, turn on your TV. Have a look what’s going on in Italy.”

Morrison has also formed a COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission to advise on cushioning the virus’s economic impact, bringing together efforts to mitigate the effects.

Morrison said: “This is about working cooperatively across private-to-private and public-to-private networks to unlock resources, break bottlenecks and fix problems so Australian families, businesses and communities are supported through the challenging months ahead.”

It will be headed by Neville Power, former CEO of Fortescue Metals Group, with a board of commissioners with backgrounds in business, government, and the not-for-profit sector.

They include former Labor minister Greg Combet, former secretary of the health department Jane Halton, former managing director of Toll Holdings Paul Little, EnergyAustralia managing director Catherine Tanna and former Telstra CEO David Thodey (deputy chair), who headed the recent inquiry into the federal public service. Representation from the not-for-profit sector is yet to be announced.

The secretaries of the Prime Minister’s department (Phil Gaetjens) and Home Affairs (Mike Pezzullo) are also on the commission.

Morrison said the commission was “about mobilising a whole-of-society and whole-of-economy effort”.

He told a news conference he had rung Power and “I simply said, Nev, I need you to serve your country”.

Morrison admitted what he has been reluctant to say before – that there are differences in the national cabinet. Stressing its fundamental unity, he said, “Sure, there may be the odd time where there might be a bit of difference at the edge. But I can tell you in my entire working life, in public life, I have never seen the states and territories work together like they are working together right now.

“It is all of our preference to keep that consistency and common action together as much as is possible. But we also need to recognise that in some places, states and territories are in different situations to other parts of the country.” He instanced the Northern Territory, with its remote communities.

It has been NSW and Victoria which have been the most forward-leaning on issues, notably schools.

NSW on Wednesday announced tough measures to crack down on “reckless social gatherings”.

Police will be able to issue $1,000 on-the-spot fines for individuals and $5,000 for corporations that do not comply with ministerial directions. For example if a person organised or took part in a bootcamp of more than the permitted ten people they could be fined.

Police will no longer need a warrant to arrest someone breaching a public health order. This follows NSW legislation to increase police powers passed Tuesday.

– ref. Indefinite freeze on non-urgent elective surgery – https://theconversation.com/indefinite-freeze-on-non-urgent-elective-surgery-134684

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bernard Walker, Associate Professor in Organisations and Leadership, University of Canterbury

As New Zealand begins a four-week lockdown to avoid the spread of COVID-19, businesses will have to adapt to radically new settings.

Just hours before the lockdown, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared a state of emergency and issued an epidemic notice to give authorities further enforcement powers to make sure people follow the lockdown rules.

Read more: As NZ goes into lockdown, authorities have new powers to make sure people obey the rules

Competent leadership will be vital during the coronavirus crisis, and businesses and the service sector will play a crucial role. But few people have previous experience of such a complex crisis situation.

Our research into previous disasters has identified leaders who are more effective in crisis situations – and we found they follow five principles which also offer guidance for the weeks ahead.

Read more: Coronavirus: three ways the crisis may permanently change our lives

Principles and priorities

Like other leaders, these people competently perform all the core functional tasks in a crisis, such as ensuring supply chains, securing premises and setting up processes to maintain operations.

The main difference is that these highly effective leaders are using a set of principles. When they are thrown into unfamiliar situations, they use these like a moral compass to guide them. Each crisis is different, and crises evolve rapidly, but these leaders use their principles to craft specific responses for different situations and stages. Using those principles means their functional activities perform better.

The principles themselves aren’t new. The real difference is that these leaders make them a priority. They are intentional and persistent in living them out in practice. The combined effect of having clear principles, prioritising and intentionally implementing them makes these leaders different.

Here are five principles our research identified:

1. Employee-centric approach

Staff are a priority for effective leaders. They tune in to how workers are thinking and feeling in a crisis, they keep watching changes, and they respond to concerns.

In the current situation, employees’ health and job security are obvious anxieties. Workers will need to know their leaders are genuinely concerned for their well-being as they juggle work, childcare and running households during the lockdown.

Social connections, and the support from leaders and coworkers are important, and good leaders will work with staff to find creative ways to have person-to-person and team connections. They’ll also keep checking in to monitor how those are working.

In previous localised crises, leaders have tried to minimise job losses, provided flexible compassionate leave, and found ways to reduce the stress from higher workloads during staff shortages.

Read more: Working from home: what are your employer’s responsibilities, and what are yours?

2. Quality communication

More effective leaders are dedicated to personal communication with their staff. They keep people constantly informed and are transparent, without causing information overload. They are deliberately visible, proactively getting out and seeing staff. They keep the volume of written communications manageable.

But communication is a two-way process. Effective leaders listen to their staff and remain non-judgemental. When workers know they can genuinely raise issues and see a response, they feel valued and engaged.

Read more: Coronavirus weekly: as the virus spreads, economies grind to a halt

3. A common vision

These leaders focus on setting out a clear, shared vision and a sense of purpose, beyond day-to-day routines. They also keep reframing the situation, as the crisis progresses, so that teams can see what is needed in each stage, and move their attention to those issues.

Rather than micromanaging teams, these leaders extend the trust relationship by empowering them. Teams know they can be innovative, but still access the leader for advice and support.

4. Collaboration and networking

More effective leaders deliberately network and collaborate with a range of people. This goes beyond good teamwork, deliberately breaking down barriers across the organisation and reaching out to outside organisations. In a crisis, good leaders use these networks to initiate forums for sharing ideas and accessing resources.

5. Personal and organisational learning

Curiosity and a desire to keep learning are part of good leadership. Crises are changing rapidly and leaders have to make decisions with limited information. Effective leaders act as hosts, so that a wider pool of people can share information to contribute to decisions. Their organisations quickly see new insights and possibilities, and take on board new ways of working.

In this way, the leaders and their teams can be more strategic, anticipating changes, opportunities and threats, and be better in planning for them.

Read more: Coronavirus: three ways the crisis may permanently change our lives

At a personal level, these leaders know the importance of looking after themselves and their family. They learn to plan for their own well-being and act as a role model for their staff. They choose to have down time and use their own supports during the ongoing pressure.

These five principles were crucial in the crises we studied. They are likely to be crucial in the current setting. The coronavirus crisis will have many stages, right through to longer-term economic effects. It will be an incredibly turbulent time, but leaders who work in these ways are likely to ride the storm best.

– ref. Five principles to follow if your job is to lead your staff through the coronavirus crisis – https://theconversation.com/five-principles-to-follow-if-your-job-is-to-lead-your-staff-through-the-coronavirus-crisis-134642

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Olivia Fisher, Research Fellow (Health Services Research) Faculty of Health, School of Public Health and Social Work, Queensland University of Technology

This is a confusing and, frankly, scary time for a lot of us. There’s so much contradictory information, and the “right” thing to do yesterday is now the “wrong” thing to do today.

If you’re feeling edgy, having trouble sitting still or concentrating, finding yourself constantly or obsessively checking for updates, losing sleep, or waking in the early hours of the morning feeling anxious – you’re not alone.

These are completely normal, human reactions to a completely abnormal situation. Worrying about whether you’re doing enough to protect yourself and others, whether you’re going to lose income, and what this will all mean long-term is to be expected.

Read more: Coronavirus is stressful. Here are some ways to cope with the anxiety

You might be wondering whether this worry and other feelings of anxiety might indicate a developing mental health problem.

Feeling this way for a few days, or even weeks, in the context of a major national emergency, does not indicate that you have a mental disorder.

But some people will need to access support or talk to their GP about ongoing concerns.

What’s normal?

Normal fear responses are part of a healthy, adaptive process that allows us to get away from or deal with something we perceive as dangerous.

Normal anxiety:

• is situation specific – related to a particular event of circumstance
• is limited in time
• does not have a long-term impact on your ability to go about your day-to-day life (although there may be short periods where it can feel overwhelming).

However, sometimes our fear can become overwhelming and start to impact on our ability to function in our daily lives.

Some anxiety symptoms to be aware of are excessive worry which is difficult to control, restlessness, feeling easily fatigued, having difficulty concentrating, irritability, muscle tension or sleep disturbance.

Coping mechanisms while social distancing

In times of trouble, Australians usually band together to support each other with hugs, a helping hand and a nice hot cuppa. We raise money, have benefit concerts, and get to work so we can feel we’re doing something. We build belonging in our community, and feel a sense of accomplishment when we pull through together.

This time it’s different, and our normal ways of coping with disasters are not going to work. For many of us, social distancing means we are not able to use most of our day to day coping strategies either, such as going to the gym or hanging out with friends.

Read more: Why are we calling it ‘social distancing’? Right now, we need social connections more than ever

But there are things we can do to buffer against the impact of uncertain and traumatic times.

Having a strong sense of belonging, along with a regular sense of accomplishment, are key to our mental well-being. They’re linked with lower levels of depression and anxiety symptoms, and higher levels of mental well-being.

Belonging

Social distancing does not require social isolation. There are safe ways to connect with people that don’t involve putting yourself at risk of COVID-19 exposure.

Staying connected is not just a nice thing to do – it’s actually important for our health. Some theorists have suggested that belonging is a fundamental human motivation, just as compelling as the need for food.

Don’t wait for people to connect with you – reach out to them. There’s a good chance that they’re feeling isolated and afraid as well.

Read more: Social distancing can make you lonely. Here’s how to stay connected when you’re in lockdown

Accomplishment

It’s important to find ways in your day to day life to feel a regular sense of accomplishment, and it might be a matter of re-framing what you consider to be an accomplishment.

If you have kids in the background, dogs barking to be taken for a walk, and all the other wonderful interruptions that may come with working from home, it’s likely that just reading and responding to emails is an accomplishment in itself.

If you’re not working at the moment and funds are tight think about what else you can accomplish. Spring clean. Plant capsicum, strawberry or tomato seeds saved from your lunch and see if they will grow. Or learn something new, like robotics, knitting or crochet.

Read more: 6 strategies to juggle work and young kids at home: it’s about flexibility and boundaries

When to get help?

Sometimes what you’re experiencing will signal a more serious problem that needs some external support.

It’s time to seek help if:

• symptoms of anxiety are starting to affect your ability to function in your daily life
• the symptoms are getting worse
• the symptoms feel overwhelming, or
• the symptoms persist over time – more days than not.

Supports are available where and when you need them. The Lifeline phone line is open 24 hours on 13 11 14.

Beyondblue has online information and resources such as the beyondblue web chat.

For children, teens and young adults, KidsHelpline has supports available by phone at 1800 55 1800, web chat or email.

Your GP can help you to identify whether your symptoms meet the criteria for an anxiety disorder. They can also write a mental health care plan, if appropriate, and refer you to professional services in your local community.

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

– ref. Can’t sleep and feeling anxious about coronavirus? You’re not alone – https://theconversation.com/cant-sleep-and-feeling-anxious-about-coronavirus-youre-not-alone-134407

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Ekberg, Associate Professor, Menzies Health Institute Queensland, Griffith University

Reports from South Korea, China and Italy say losing the sense of smell and taste may be a symptom of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Specialists in the UK have suggested the loss of smell, also called anosmia, could even be an early indication of infection.

While the exact details of what happens with this coronavirus are unclear, evidence from other infections suggests that while damage to the sense of smell is possible, it’s unlikely to be permanent.

Read more: Curious Kids: How do we smell?

Can viruses get into your nerves?

Viruses and bacteria are constantly bombarding the lining of the nose. Luckily our defence mechanisms prevent most pathogens penetrating into the deeper layers of tissue.

Yet some pathogens can penetrate the nasal lining and are known to enter the olfactory nerve, which is responsible for the sense of smell. Pathogens can also enter the trigeminal nerve, which is responsible for controlling biting and chewing, and for sensation in the face.

If viruses or bacteria do enter the nerves, the consequences can be serious. Perhaps the most striking example is Bell’s palsy, where part of the face is temporarily paralysed, and which may sometimes be caused by viral infection of the facial nerve.

Do other viruses affect the sense of smell?

Other viruses, including influenza and herpes, are known to infect the olfactory nerve. From animal studies using other types of coronaviruses (not SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) we also know that a nasal inoculation with mouse hepatitis virus, which is a type of coronavirus, can rapidly penetrate the olfactory nerve and then continue up into the brain.

In humans, it has been shown that some types of human coronaviruses can enter the brain from the olfactory bulb at the end of the olfactory nerve. To date, it remains unknown whether SARS-CoV-2 can damage the olfactory nerve.

Bacteria also penetrate the olfactory nerve. Our research team has shown that Burkholderia pseudomallei, which causes the tropical disease melioidosis, can kill the olfactory nerve cells and then enter the remnants of the olfactory nerve to move up into the brain.

Once pathogens are inside the olfactory nerve, it is like a highway from the nose to the brain. If the infection kills off nerve cells, it’s even easier for the pathogens to move along the nerve.

How does an infection affect the sense of smell?

This killing of the olfactory nerve cells is likely to be the main reason people lose their sense of smell after an infection. Once 20-30% of the olfactory nerve cells have died, people will report they have lost their sense of smell.

If a person has lost 30% of their olfactory nerve cells, they won’t be able to detect enough odour molecules to activate the threshold level for smelling when they breathe normally. However, if they sniff harder they will probably be able to smell enough to recognise an odour.

Our research with bacteria has shown that olfactory nerve damage can occur within 24 hours of initial exposure, and (unpublished) results with other viruses show they can act even more quickly. In this way, loss of sense of smell can indeed be an early indicator of a potential pathogen onslaught within the nasal system.

Why is taste affected as well?

What we usually think of as “taste” when we enjoy a delicious meal is actually the combination of smell and taste. When people lose their sense of smell, the major contribution to the enjoyment of food is lost.

This is why people may report they have also lost their sense of taste – which strictly speaking depends on the tongue and tastebuds – when they have lost only their sense of smell.

Why do only some people with COVID-19 lose their smell?

Our bodies and immune systems are very diverse, due to genetics and circumstances. Not all people will be susceptible to particular pathogens or affected in the same way.

Our research in mice has clearly demonstrated not only that different strains of mice are susceptible to different bacteria but also that different nerve routes can be affected.

While we do not yet know if SARS-CoV-2 does harm the olfactory nerve, a similar process could explain why some people report a loss of smell and some don’t.

Will it be permanent?

Luckily, the olfactory system is designed to survive the constant bombardment of pathogens so if you do lose your sense of smell it will only be temporary. While the olfactory nerve cells that are present within the nasal lining can be infected and die off, stem cells that lie beneath the nerve cells rapidly generate new nerve cells to replace the lost ones.

The new nerve cells grow their long connections back up into the brain to restore the pathway. Depending on the severity of the initial infection, the sense of smell can return within a few days or weeks.

Read more: An impaired sense of smell can signal cognitive decline, but ‘smell training’ could help

– ref. Coronavirus might cause loss of smell, or anosmia. But it probably won’t be permanent – https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-might-cause-loss-of-smell-or-anosmia-but-it-probably-wont-be-permanent-134548

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Piers Dunstan, Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO

There’s no denying the grandeur and allure of a nature reserve or marine protected area. The concept is easy to understand: limit human activity there and marine ecosystems will thrive.

But while the number of marine protected areas is increasing, so too is the number of threatened species, and the health of marine ecosystems is in decline.

Why? Our research shows it’s because marine protected areas are often placed where there’s already low human activity, rather than in places with high biodiversity that need it most.

Not where they should be

Many parts of the world’s protected areas, in both terrestrial and marine environments, are placed in locations with no form of manageable human activity or development occurring, such as fishing or infrastructure. These places are often remote, such as in the centres of oceans.

Read more: Protected marine areas seem a good idea – but they may have insidious political effects

And where marine protected areas have been increasing, they’re placed where pressures cannot be managed, such as areas where there is increased ocean acidification or dispersed pollution.

But biodiversity is often highest in the places with human activity – we use these locations in the ocean to generate income and livelihoods, from tourism to fishing. This includes coastal areas in the tropics, such as the Coral Triangle (across six countries including Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia), which has almost 2,000 marine protected areas, yet is also home to one of the largest shipping routes in the world and high fishing activity.

Read more: Why seagrass in Indonesia’s marine protected areas is still under threat

What’s more, many marine industries are already regulated through licences and quotas, so it’s hard to establish a new marine protected area that adds a different type of management on top of what already exists.

This leaves us with an important paradox: the places where biodiversity is under the most pressure are also the places humanity is most reluctant to relinquish, due to their social or economic value. Because of those values, people and industry resist changes to behaviour, leaving governments to try to find solutions that avoid conflict.

Lessons from the fishing industry

How can we resolve the paradox of marine protected areas? A strategy used in the fishing industry may show the way.

Fisheries have had experience in going beyond the limits of sustainability and then stepping back, changing their approach to managing species and ecosystems for better sustainability, while still protecting economic, social and environmental values.

Read more: Marine parks and fishery management: what’s the best way to protect fish?

In the past, many of the world’s fisheries regularly exceeded the sustainable limit of catches, and many species such as southern blue fin tuna declined significantly in number. But strong rules around how a fishery should operate mean declines have since been reversed.

So how did they do it? In recent decades, many of the world’s large-scale fisheries implemented formal “harvest strategies”. These strategies can flip downward trends of marine species in places not designated a marine protected area.

Harvest strategies have three steps. First is pre-agreed monitoring of species and ecosystems by fishers, regulators and other stakeholders. Second, regulators and scientists assess their impact on the species and ecosystems. And last, all stakeholders agree to put management measures in place to improve the status of the monitored species and ecosystems.

These measures may include changing how fishing is done or how much is done. It’s a commonsense strategy that’s delivered successful results with many fished species either recovering or recovered.

Read more: Protecting not-so-wild places helps biodiversity

In Australia, the federal government introduced a formal harvest strategy policy to manage fisheries in 2007. It was evaluated in 2014, and the report found many (but not all) fish stocks are no longer overfished. This includes species such as Orange Roughy and Southern Blue Fin Tuna in Australia, which were overfished but are no longer so.

But unfortunately, this positive trend has not been replicated for biodiversity hit by the combinations of other human activities such as coastal development, transport, oil and gas extraction and marine debris.

A consistent strategy

We need to adapt the experience from fisheries and apply a single, formal, transparent and agreed biodiversity strategy that outlines sustainable management objectives for the places we can’t put marine protected areas.

This would look like a harvest strategy, but be applied more broadly to threatened species and ecosystems. What might be sustainable from a single species point of view as used in the fisheries might not sustainable for multiple species.

Read more: Tropical fisheries: does limiting international trade protect local people and marine life?

This would mean for our threatened species, we would be monitoring their status, assessing whether the total population was changing and agreeing on when and how we would change the way that they are impacted.

Such a strategy would also allow monitoring of whole marine ecosystems, even when information is limited. Information on trends in species and ecosystems often exists, but is hidden as commercial-in-confidence or kept privately within government, research or commercial organisations.

Looking ahead

Still, a lack of data shouldn’t limit decision making. Experience in fisheries without much data shows even rules of thumb can be effective management tools. Rules of thumb can include simple measures like gear restrictions or spatial or temporal closures that don’t change through time.

Moving forward, all stakeholders need to agree to implement the key parts of harvest strategies for all marine places with high biodiversity that aren’t protected. This will complement existing marine protected area networks without limiting economic activity, while also delivering social and environmental outcomes that support human well-being.

Our marine ecosystems provide fish, enjoyment, resources and and simple beauty. They must survive for generations to come.

– ref. Why marine protected areas are often not where they should be – https://theconversation.com/why-marine-protected-areas-are-often-not-where-they-should-be-133076

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Whiteford, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

This is longer than the usual Conversation article, so allow some time to take it in.

On Sunday, the government announced a second coronavirus economic package.

In addition to further one-off payments, the package includes some of the most significant changes to social security payments Australia has ever seen, even if only on a temporary basis.

The amendments passed by parliament on Monday night expand them further.

The package effectively doubles rates of JobSeeker Payment for most people without children.

Read more: Scalable without limit: how the government plans to get coronavirus support into our hands quickly

The maximum rate for a single recipient without dependants is currently A$565.70 per fortnight. Lone parents and those over 60 who have been on benefit for nine months or more currently get more, while members of couples each get somewhat less.

For the six months from April 27 the government will boost it by A$550 per fortnight through a special time-limited Coronavirus Supplement.

Importantly, the extra $550 will go to all current recipients, including those who get less than $565.70 because they have assets or are in part-time work.

It will also go to both existing and new recipients of the Youth Allowance JobSeeker Payment, Parenting Payment, Farm Household Allowance and Special Benefit.

Thanks to Monday night’s amendments, it will now also go to full-time students receiving Abstudy, Austudy and Youth Allowance for Students.

There are also reports that special payments (and the Coronavirus Supplement) will be made available to temporary visa holders who lose their jobs or suffer significant financial hardship because of the coronavirus.

In addition, the government will no longer need legislation to make further changes to settings, giving the Social Services minister unprecedented powers.

This will give the government the ability to respond flexibly as circumstances change.

One million now, an extra million soon

Roughly 1.3 million existing recipients will receive the supplement, including the 200,000 or so students added on Monday.

To them will be added as many as one million more, who are not currently receiving the JobSeeker or any other payment.

Among them will be permanent employees who are stood down or lose their jobs, sole traders, the self-employed, casual workers and contract workers who find themselves meeting the benefit income tests as a result of the coronavirus.

Included are people required to care for people who are affected by the coronavirus.

Accelerated processing

The assets test for JobSeeker Payment, Youth Allowance Jobseeker and Parenting Payment will be waived for the duration of the Coronavirus Supplement.

In addition, the normal one week waiting period will be waived, as will the liquid assets test waiting period (which can be up to 13 weeks).

People already in this waiting period will be given immediate access to payments.

It is also important that the Coronavirus Supplement will be paid automatically. Current recipients will receive the full $550 on top of their regular payment without asking for it.

Services Australia is putting on an extra 5,000 staff to deal with the inflow of new claimants and accelerating claim process.

Australia moves up the ranks

These changes will significantly boost the adequacy of working age social security payments in Australia – at least temporarily.

This chart shows where Australia sat in 2019 compared to other members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on replacement rates – the percentage of previous after-tax earnings that an unemployment payment provided to a single unemployed worker who had previously been on two-thirds of the average wage.

Australia is coloured red, and is at the bottom of the pack.

OECD 2019 unemployment income replacement rates

A number of countries have boosted their payments, at least temporarily, in response to the coronavirus.

The chart below shows where Australia and New Zealand and France sit now, compared to the 2019 replacement rates of other countries.

Australia is again coloured red, but has climbed toward the middle of the pack.

OECD unemployment replacement rates and announced increases

The charts show that Australia’ short-term earnings replacement rate climbs from 38% to 68%, because the base rate nearly doubles while rent assistance stays the same.

Replacement rates will be lower for higher income workers who lose their jobs and higher for part-time workers and casuals.

It is worth noting that other countries are adopting approaches that differ in where support is being targeted. Denmark, for example, is providing a direct wage supplement to employers of 75% of wages up to a ceiling, on the condition that they do not lay off workers.

Read more: Coronavirus infecting Australian jobs: vacancy rates down since early February

This is actually less than the current replacement rate of 84% in Denmark, but if it is successful it would effectively mean that Danish workers would continue to receive their normal salary (a 100% “replacement rate”).

It remains to be seen whether that strategy works.

Improvements on delivery

The government has indicated that the stimulus package is “scalable”, meaning that it is possible to increase the amounts even further and to extend their duration.

And the government has already fixed some gaps in its initial plan relating to students and newly arrived residents and temporary visa holders. Permanent residents will be eligible for assistance immediately and not subject to current waiting periods – which can be up to four years.

Without extending benefits to temporary visa holders we would have had what academics Henry Sherrell and Peter Mares warned would be

hundreds of thousands of people who are suddenly unemployed, without access to welfare, and without a method to return to their country of citizenship.

The provisions of the special benefit that will be available to temporary visa holders define severe financial hardship as earning less than the highest special benefit fortnightly payment, being unable to improve that financial position and having limited savings.

There is another group whose status should be clarified urgently – that is people who have applied for permanent residence and are still in that application process. There is a case for treating them as if they had already become permanent residents rather than temporary workers.

The ‘benefit cliff’ remains

A remaining downside with potentially big unintended consequences is the legislated proposal doesn’t yet adjust the spouse income test, excluding many couples where one earner loses their job and leading to a perverse and undesirable “benefit cliff”.

If the recipient’s spouse is working and not receiving a Jobseeker or equivalent payment, then the JobSeeker payment will be reduced by 60 cents for every dollar the partner earns over $994 per fortnight.

Read more: Getting poorer while working harder: The ‘cliff effect’

This means that the recipient can receive some JobSeekers Payment – and hence the full $550 per fortnight Coronavirus supplement – until the working partner’s income reaches $1,844 per fortnight. At that point they face the “benefit cliff”.

If the working partner has an income of $1840 per fortnight, the recipient gets the full supplement of $550 per fortnight, but if the worker has an income of $1850 a fortnight, the recipient gets nothing. The same cliff faces single people, as well.

But this partner income threshold of $1850 per fortnight ($925/week) is right in the middle of the Australian income distribution.

We calculate that, among two-earner couples aged 25-54, of the primary earners who lose their job, about half will get the Coronavirus Supplement, while of the secondary earners, only somewhere between a quarter and a third will get it.

(These are rough estimates based on Bureau of Statistics income survey estimates of the personal income distributions).

Read more: Job guarantees, basic income can save us from COVID-19 depression

Given that in most couples the secondary earner is female, the different treatment has the potential to discriminate against women.

One way to eliminate the cliff would be to integrate the Coronavirus Supplement more properly into the income support system, so that people with spouse income above these cutoffs would continue to receive a reduced payment.

The government has asked for power to fix this issue via regulation, but has not yet announced how it will address it.

The scale of the challenge

An extra one million recipients (the treasurer’s estimate) would mean that the share of the working age population receiving income support climbed from 14.2% to 18.7%, an increase of 4.5 percentage points, which is bigger than the 3.5 and 3.8 percentage point increases during Australia’s two previous post-war recessions in the early 1980s and early 1990s.

In both of these earlier recessions, the unemployment rate shot up from under 7% to near 10% or higher within a year. The current increase will take place in the next six months, rather than over a full year.

Not all the effect will directly be in the unemployment rate. Some will be in the non-participation rate as people decide to neither work nor look for work.

The best measure to watch to track the labour market will be the reduction in hours worked.

Read more: The case for Endgame C: stop almost everything, restart when coronavirus is gone

International experience also suggests that it will be substantial. Service Canada is reported to have received more than 500,000 applications for Employment Insurance in the past week, 20 times the number recorded in the same week a year ago and equivalent to about 2.5% of the labour force. Similar trends have appeared in the United States.

In Australia, we are already seeing the payment system struggling under the load of new applications.

Ultimately, the key goal of our economic response to the coronavirus must be to share the economic costs.

The government has made an excellent start in the package announced on Sunday and extended on Monday.

But we have to be prepared to ramp it up and expand support so that everyone living in Australia is adequately supported and the burden of the crisis is shared fairly.

– ref. Coronavirus supplement: your guide to the Australian payments that will go to the extra million on welfare – https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-supplement-your-guide-to-the-australian-payments-that-will-go-to-the-extra-million-on-welfare-134358

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Whiteford, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

This is longer than the usual Conversation article, so allow some time to take it in.

On Sunday, the government announced a second coronavirus economic package.

In addition to further one-off payments, the package includes some of the most significant changes to social security payments Australia has ever seen, even if only on a temporary basis.

The amendments passed by parliament on Monday night expand them further.

The package effectively doubles rates of JobSeeker Payment for most people without children.

Read more: Scalable without limit: how the government plans to get coronavirus support into our hands quickly

The maximum rate for a single recipient without dependants is currently A$565.70 per fortnight. Lone parents and those over 60 who have been on benefit for nine months or more currently get more, while members of couples each get somewhat less.

For the six months from April 27 the government will boost it by A$550 per fortnight through a special time-limited Coronavirus Supplement.

Importantly, the extra $550 will go to all current recipients, including those who get less than $565.70 because they have assets or are in part-time work.

It will also go to both existing and new recipients of the Youth Allowance JobSeeker Payment, Parenting Payment, Farm Household Allowance and Special Benefit.

Thanks to Monday night’s amendments, it will now also go to full-time students receiving Abstudy, Austudy and Youth Allowance for Students.

There are also reports that special payments (and the Coronavirus Supplement) will be made available to temporary visa holders who lose their jobs or suffer significant financial hardship because of the coronavirus.

In addition, the government will no longer need legislation to make further changes to settings, giving the Social Services minister unprecedented powers.

This will give the government the ability to respond flexibly as circumstances change.

One million now, an extra million soon

Roughly 1.3 million existing recipients will receive the supplement, including the 200,000 or so students added on Monday.

To them will be added as many as one million more, who are not currently receiving the JobSeeker or any other payment.

Among them will be permanent employees who are stood down or lose their jobs, sole traders, the self-employed, casual workers and contract workers who find themselves meeting the benefit income tests as a result of the coronavirus.

Included are people required to care for people who are affected by the coronavirus.

Accelerated processing

The assets test for JobSeeker Payment, Youth Allowance Jobseeker and Parenting Payment will be waived for the duration of the Coronavirus Supplement.

In addition, the normal one week waiting period will be waived, as will the liquid assets test waiting period (which can be up to 13 weeks).

People already in this waiting period will be given immediate access to payments.

It is also important that the Coronavirus Supplement will be paid automatically. Current recipients will receive the full $550 on top of their regular payment without asking for it.

Services Australia is putting on an extra 5,000 staff to deal with the inflow of new claimants and accelerating claim process.

Australia moves up the ranks

These changes will significantly boost the adequacy of working age social security payments in Australia – at least temporarily.

This chart shows where Australia sat in 2019 compared to other members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on replacement rates – the percentage of previous after-tax earnings that an unemployment payment provided to a single unemployed worker who had previously been on two-thirds of the average wage.

Australia is coloured red, and is at the bottom of the pack.

OECD 2019 unemployment income replacement rates

A number of countries have boosted their payments, at least temporarily, in response to the coronavirus.

The chart below shows where Australia and New Zealand and France sit now, compared to the 2019 replacement rates of other countries.

Australia is again coloured red, but has climbed toward the middle of the pack.

OECD unemployment replacement rates and announced increases

The charts show that Australia’ short-term earnings replacement rate climbs from 38% to 68%, because the base rate nearly doubles while rent assistance stays the same.

Replacement rates will be lower for higher income workers who lose their jobs and higher for part-time workers and casuals.

It is worth noting that other countries are adopting approaches that differ in where support is being targeted. Denmark, for example, is providing a direct wage supplement to employers of 75% of wages up to a ceiling, on the condition that they do not lay off workers.

Read more: Coronavirus infecting Australian jobs: vacancy rates down since early February

This is actually less than the current replacement rate of 84% in Denmark, but if it is successful it would effectively mean that Danish workers would continue to receive their normal salary (a 100% “replacement rate”).

It remains to be seen whether that strategy works.

Improvements on delivery

The government has indicated that the stimulus package is “scalable”, meaning that it is possible to increase the amounts even further and to extend their duration.

And the government has already fixed some gaps in its initial plan relating to students and newly arrived residents and temporary visa holders. Permanent residents will be eligible for assistance immediately and not subject to current waiting periods – which can be up to four years.

Without extending benefits to temporary visa holders we would have had what academics Henry Sherrell and Peter Mares warned would be

hundreds of thousands of people who are suddenly unemployed, without access to welfare, and without a method to return to their country of citizenship.

The provisions of the special benefit that will be available to temporary visa holders define severe financial hardship as earning less than the highest special benefit fortnightly payment, being unable to improve that financial position and having limited savings.

There is another group whose status should be clarified urgently – that is people who have applied for permanent residence and are still in that application process. There is a case for treating them as if they had already become permanent residents rather than temporary workers.

The ‘benefit cliff’ remains

A remaining downside with potentially big unintended consequences is the legislated proposal doesn’t yet adjust the spouse income test, excluding many couples where one earner loses their job and leading to a perverse and undesirable “benefit cliff”.

If the recipient’s spouse is working and not receiving a Jobseeker or equivalent payment, then the JobSeeker payment will be reduced by 60 cents for every dollar the partner earns over $994 per fortnight.

Read more: Getting poorer while working harder: The ‘cliff effect’

This means that the recipient can receive some JobSeekers Payment – and hence the full $550 per fortnight Coronavirus supplement – until the working partner’s income reaches $1,844 per fortnight. At that point they face the “benefit cliff”.

If the working partner has an income of $1840 per fortnight, the recipient gets the full supplement of $550 per fortnight, but if the worker has an income of $1850 a fortnight, the recipient gets nothing. The same cliff faces single people, as well.

But this partner income threshold of $1850 per fortnight ($925/week) is right in the middle of the Australian income distribution.

We calculate that, among two-earner couples aged 25-54, of the primary earners who lose their job, about half will get the Coronavirus Supplement, while of the secondary earners, only somewhere between a quarter and a third will get it.

(These are rough estimates based on Bureau of Statistics income survey estimates of the personal income distributions).

Read more: Job guarantees, basic income can save us from COVID-19 depression

Given that in most couples the secondary earner is female, the different treatment has the potential to discriminate against women.

One way to eliminate the cliff would be to integrate the Coronavirus Supplement more properly into the income support system, so that people with spouse income above these cutoffs would continue to receive a reduced payment.

The government has asked for power to fix this issue via regulation, but has not yet announced how it will address it.

The scale of the challenge

An extra one million recipients (the treasurer’s estimate) would mean that the share of the working age population receiving income support climbed from 14.2% to 18.7%, an increase of 4.5 percentage points, which is bigger than the 3.5 and 3.8 percentage point increases during Australia’s two previous post-war recessions in the early 1980s and early 1990s.

In both of these earlier recessions, the unemployment rate shot up from under 7% to near 10% or higher within a year. The current increase will take place in the next six months, rather than over a full year.

Not all the effect will directly be in the unemployment rate. Some will be in the non-participation rate as people decide to neither work nor look for work.

The best measure to watch to track the labour market will be the reduction in hours worked.

Read more: The case for Endgame C: stop almost everything, restart when coronavirus is gone

International experience also suggests that it will be substantial. Service Canada is reported to have received more than 500,000 applications for Employment Insurance in the past week, 20 times the number recorded in the same week a year ago and equivalent to about 2.5% of the labour force. Similar trends have appeared in the United States.

In Australia, we are already seeing the payment system struggling under the load of new applications.

Ultimately, the key goal of our economic response to the coronavirus must be to share the economic costs.

The government has made an excellent start in the package announced on Sunday and extended on Monday.

But we have to be prepared to ramp it up and expand support so that everyone living in Australia is adequately supported and the burden of the crisis is shared fairly.

– ref. From near-worst to middle of the pack: your guide to the Australian payments that will go to the extra million on welfare – https://theconversation.com/from-near-worst-to-middle-of-the-pack-your-guide-to-the-australian-payments-that-will-go-to-the-extra-million-on-welfare-134358

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thalia Anthony, Professor in Law, University of Technology Sydney

The New South Wales government has passed emergency legislation providing the Corrections Commissioner with powers to release some of the state’s 14,034 prisoners.

This legislation was introduced in the wake of the global release of prisoners to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Most recently, the United States has begun to release thousands of prisoners across four states.

Read more: Why releasing some prisoners is essential to stop the spread of coronavirus

Legislation to release prisoners in NSW was drafted amid the growing number of cases of COVID-19 infections in prison populations, including staff. The overcrowding and poor sanitation and health conditions in prisons make them ripe for the rapid spread of disease.

Long Bay jail in Sydney was locked down this week when two prison staff tested positive for COVID-19 and several inmates displayed symptoms. The higher incidence of chronic health conditions among inmates predisposes them to suffer serious and critical outcomes from the virus.

Why is legislation needed?

The NSW government has introduced the COVID-19 Legislation Amendment (Emergency Measures) Act 2020 (NSW) to address the escalation of COVID-19 cases in the state.

NSW has the highest per capita rate in Australia, with more than 1,000 cases as of March 25. The emergency legislation provides for the release of prisoners. The provision will apply for a minimum of six months and may apply for up to 12 months under regulations.

This emergency provision is concerned with protecting vulnerable inmates and releasing prisoners who pose a low risk to the community. Attorney-General Mark Speakman said the legislation was designed to protect the health of inmates and frontline prison workers as well as the “good order and security” of prisons.

Freeing up prison space through the early release of prisoners will enable the remaining prisoners to be isolated, to prevent or control an outbreak. It also allows the health needs of remaining inmates to be better addressed.

We have seen what happens without this action in prisons overseas: infection spreads rapidly and foments unrest among prisoners. In Italy, prisoner fears that they faced a death sentence because of COVID-19 resulted in riots in 23 Italian prisons and the deaths of 12 prisoners.

Who can be released under the legislation?

The COVID-19 legislation allows for the release of prisoners who belong to a prescribed “class of inmates”. They may be defined according to their health, vulnerability, age, offence, period before the end of the prison term and any other matter as set down in regulations.

Serious offenders are excluded. This not only rules out those specifically mentioned, including prisoners convicted of murder, serious sex offences and terrorism, but also high-level drug and property offenders.

The Corrections Commissioner will determine an individual’s release where it is “reasonably necessary” due to “the risk to public health or to the good order and security of correctional premises”. Community safety and the prisoner’s access to suitable accommodation outside prison are necessary aspects of the decision-making. Other consideration are whether the offender has previously committed a domestic violence offence and the impact of the release on the victims.

Prisoners will be released on parole and subject to standard parole conditions. They will, for example, have to be of good behaviour and not reoffend, as well as any additional conditions determined by the commissioner, including home detention and electronic monitoring.

Does this cover all prisoners?

There are some concerning omissions from this legislation if it is to achieve its objectives of protecting inmates, prison staff and the community.

First, it is not clear whether it will apply to youth detention centres. This vulnerable group requires special protection in this period when they are denied visits from their parents, family and lawyers, have fears about COVID-19 infection and most likely are unaware of their rights to health care.

The legislation also does not refer to remand prisoners, who constitute over one-third of prisoners in NSW. The legislation explicitly refers to parole, rather than determinations on bail.

Administrators must set down regulations to include this group in the prescribed “class of inmates” for release. Otherwise, those most entitled to liberty – who have not been convicted or sentenced – will be left in prison to suffer through the pandemic. The suspension of new jury trials will mean they spend further time in prisons until well after the COVID-19 crisis.

Critically, the legislation is silent on people who are facing a prison sentence or remand order, but not yet in prisons. For those people, there is no legislation urging the courts to consider the coronavirus pandemic in promoting non-prison sentences or allowing bail applications.

Read more: Homelessness and overcrowding expose us all to coronavirus. Here’s what we can do to stop the spread

Over the past week, lawyers have rushed to collect evidence on the effect of the pandemic on prisoners to support their clients’ pleas not to be imprisoned. Supreme Courts in Victoria and the ACT have accepted the relevance of COVID-19 in bail applications. But there is a lack of guidance elsewhere on bail and sentencing, increasing the risk of more people being sent into the prison system.

Schedule 1 of the emergency legislation granted controversial powers to the attorney-general to alter the bail laws by regulation during the crisis. The NSW government has indicated it intends to use these powers to deliver changes on bail to prevent more prisoners entering jail on remand. The timing and scope of these changes have not been detailed, but are certainly critical to preventing the pandemic entering our prisons.

Not only would the entry of new inmates add to the burden on prisons, it could also create a devastating situation where unknown carriers of the coronavirus enter the system.

While there are no laws to limit courts ordering imprisonment during the pandemic, Corrections Commissioner Peter Severin could use his discretion to review the release of prisoners at the point of reception. In other words, the process between the court order and physical entry into a prison cell. Regulations should clarify the use of the commissioner’s power at this point to prevent unnecessary entry of new prisoners.

Does it strike the right balance in community protection?

The immediate release of NSW prisoners will protect prisoners from greater exposure to COVID-19, limit the outbreak of the virus in prisons and minimise the spread between prison and the community.

But there is more to be done. The release of less serious offenders should not be based on the pre-pandemic criteria of the risk of the individual. These criteria often discriminate against Indigenous people, those with mental health issues and socio-economically deprived. Rather, it should be based on the health needs of prisoners and the interests of community safety in managing the health risk.

Given that many prisoners have poor health and are serving short prison terms, the broad use of the commissioner’s discretion could result in thousands of prisoners being released from NSW prisons.

Ultimately, the legislation will only work to minimise the worst effects of COVID-19 in prisons if the commissioner exercises his discretion widely to prevent overcrowding and take the load off already scarce health services in prisons.

– ref. Explainer: how will the emergency release of NSW prisoners due to coronavirus work? – https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-will-the-emergency-release-of-nsw-prisoners-due-to-coronavirus-work-134523

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Myfan Jordan, Associate, Health Ageing Research Group (HARG), La Trobe University

Hidden within the coronavirus-devastated tourism market is a related impact: the loss of customers could be financially devastating for small investors who dominate short-term letting platforms such as Airbnb. After a decade of high returns, they may now wonder whether a return to the secure, if slightly less lucrative, long-term residential tenancy market is a safer bet. If investors shift from short-term letting to long-term rentals in search of greater security, this would benefit the growing numbers of Australians in rental housing.

With the coronavirus pandemic there are signs this is already happening. In Dublin, for example, a 64% rise in long-term rental properties has been reported this month. It’s thought landlords are withdrawing from short-term listing sites and offering properties on the rental market.

Until now, rising property prices have forced more Australians into long-term renting even as short-term letting has eaten into the supply of properties. Young adults once dominated the rental market. It’s fast becoming a more permanent solution for families and even for older Australians. One in three households now rent their homes.

So, with almost 350,000 Australian properties having been listed on Airbnb, the impact on local communities can be significant. The increase in short-term lettings has been linked to increasing homelessness.

Read more: Ever wondered how many Airbnbs Australia has and where they all are? We have the answers

Why landlords will look for security

Beyond the immediate impact of coronavirus on tourism in Australia, it’s possible the increased risks in the holiday lettings market may provide the impetus to align the interests of landlords and tenants around longer-term tenure.

Despite Prime Minister Scott Morrison urging vacationers not to ask for refunds from struggling operators, the tourism downturn has introduced a new level of risk for hosts. Airbnb has enacted a policy of full refunds for cancellations, which is reported to be “completely obliterating smaller hosts”.

Other platforms are advising hosts to manage COVID-19 risk themselves. This leaves many investor-landlords navigating a complex, public health crisis largely on their own.

With some of our most popular destinations facing an existential crisis, the impacts on small business, working families and low-income Australians may be both obscured but far-reaching, as the Airbnb example shows. Big players in the tourism industry can lobby federal government for support. Individual agents in the share economy are largely unprotected.

To date, the home-share concept has been a winner for property investors. Holiday letting has largely moved on from the original Airbnb model of sharing one’s primary residence. Letting through digital platforms with access to a global market of tourists has brought high-rent, low-risk dividends for people with investment properties.

The coronavirus pandemic, however, is revealing cracks in the foundations of the holiday-letting model.

Read more: Who wins and who loses when platforms like Airbnb disrupt housing? And how do you regulate it?

What has happened to renters?

Research suggests the digital disruption of the holiday accommodation sector has had significant impacts on local renters. There is little doubt tourist demand through online letting platforms has reduced the supply and increased prices of long-term rental housing in Australia, particularly in parts of our capital cities.

Likewise in Europe, where one in four rental properties in some tourist destinations is now a holiday property. This has led some governments to introduce strict regulation. It includes licensing, fines and limits on the number of days a property can be let each year.

Australia has been slower to respond, despite observations that Airbnb is “impacting the rental market and … bringing the cost of housing up”. Even in Tasmania, which has the strongest market regulation, one in every 27 Hobart homes remains listed for short-term lease. Similarly, in Sydney and Melbourne, growth in the sector has driven up rental housing costs.

Read more: Airbnb: who’s in, who’s out, and what this tells us about rental impacts in Sydney and Melbourne

In New South Wales, fines for unregistered holiday lets have increased by 500%. But councils struggle to enforce laws that landlords are either unaware of or actively avoid complying with.

Home ownership has become a privilege in Australia, one driving disadvantage among those who are locked out. For a single age pensioner, for example less than 1% of rental housing is affordable. And long-term rental housing stock is often of poor quality.

Time for a rethink

Australia’s rental housing system undeniably needs a rethink. The sector presents a growing problem for state and territory governments, in terms of both the supply of affordable rental properties and finding the right balance between landlord and tenant rights.

Read more: Chilly house? Mouldy rooms? Here’s how to improve low-income renters’ access to decent housing

Government measures to increase the availability of rental housing through tax incentives, such as negative gearing, are unfortunately not restricted to landlords who offer longer-term tenure. To date there has been little financial incentive to eschew the higher returns of the Airbnb model for the relative stability of residential tenancies.

In times of crisis, Australians pull together. During the summer bushfires, we saw Airbnb hosts offer emergency housing to displaced families. They recognised the critical importance of a safe and secure home – a sanctuary. We need to recognise this critical function of home beyond times of crisis, to ensure every Australian has a home for good.

Read more: Australia’s housing system needs a big shake-up: here’s how we can crack this

Per Capita’s Centre for Applied Policy in Positive Ageing is launching its Home for Good project in collaboration with The Australian Centre for Social Innovation today. You can read their policy brief on Australia’s private rental housing market here.

– ref. As coronavirus hits holiday lettings, a shift to longer rentals could help many of us – https://theconversation.com/as-coronavirus-hits-holiday-lettings-a-shift-to-longer-rentals-could-help-many-of-us-134036

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Onisha Patel, Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute

In the race to develop a treatment for COVID-19, the disease threatening millions of lives around the world, scientists are studying every aspect of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes it.

One vital step is understanding the precise shape and structure of the virus at the molecular level. Knowing the shape lets scientists identify targets and design drugs to hit them.

This approach was used to create the anti-influenza drugs oseltamivir and zanamivir (Tamiflu and Relenza) among others. It also shows great promise for the new coronavirus.

What is being done for COVID-19 treatment?

At present, scientists and clinicians are investigating the use of existing drugs such as chloroquine, which is used as an antimalarial and to treat autoimmune disorders, and the antiviral remdesvir. (Despite what you may read or hear, none of these are approved treatments for COVID-19 and should not be taken without medical instructions.)

Many pharmaceutical companies are also looking into therapies based on antibodies produced in people who have already been infected by the virus and recovered.

There are also several attempts in progress to create a vaccine which can be given to healthy people to make them immune. There are various approaches in play, including the use of genetic material or synthetic viral proteins to find ones that teach our immune systems to mount an effective defence against the virus.

Human trials are already under way for some of these experimental drugs and vaccines, and time will tell if they work. But almost certainly, an effective long-term strategy will also require significant research investment to allow the design of novel treatments that are specifically targeted for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

How can you design new treatments without knowing what your target looks like?

Why structural biology?

If you want to design a key to a lock, it is much easier if you know what the lock looks like. In the same way, to design targeted treatments it is important to know what the target looks like.

In SARS-CoV-2 virus, the targets are its genetic material and proteins. These molecules let the virus invade humans and make multiple copies of itself.

Structural biology is a field of science that allows us to see beyond what is visible to the naked eye, to see nanoscopic-sized molecules such as DNA, RNA and proteins. Structural biology methods such as X-ray crystallography and cryo-electronmicroscopy are currently being used at a rapid pace to visualise molecular components of the virus.

Within weeks from when the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 was made available, structural biologists have used these techniques to see proteins that make up the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Some of these include the “spike” protein, a protein that helps the virus to gain entry into the host and enzymes that enable virus replication including the main protease, an attractive target for drug development. The inner molecular machinery of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is just beginning to be revealed and there is more to come.

Read more: Revealed: the protein ‘spike’ that lets the 2019-nCoV coronavirus pierce and invade human cells

How is structural biology helping with COVID-19 research?

Scientists are using structural biology data to look for special features within the viral proteins. One such feature is a cavity or space where a small chemical molecule (a potential drug) can fit.

Once identified, researchers work on the molecule to improve the fit and make it work better as a drug. Eventually the chemical molecule might fit tightly enough to stop the viral protein from doing its job, much like a spanner thrown into a set of gears.

This approach to the design of new and targeted drugs is called “structure-based drug design”. It is more efficient, precise and time-saving. It has been used in the past to create anti-viral drugs such as oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and zanamivir (Relenza) that target the flu virus.

Scientists are now using this approach to discover drugs against SARS-CoV-2. For vaccine design and therapeutics development, knowing what the SARS-CoV-2 “spike” protein looks like is a major breakthrough. Scientists are already planning to use a stabilised version of this protein to screen for antibodies from people who have recovered from COVID-19 infection.

Where is structural biology data being shared?

Modern robotics, better instrumentation, faster data collection, better computing and software have revolutionised the speed with which structural biology information is being made available. This would not have been possible even five years ago.

The structural data collected is deposited at the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB), online open access repositories who make this data available worldwide free of charge. This open access policy makes it possible for scientists globally to answer some of the most intriguing questions on SARS-CoV-2 biology and find the best ways to design new treatments.

Whether for new drugs or vaccines, structural biology is at the frontline to understand the molecular machinery from viruses to humans.

– ref. “Like a key to a lock”: how seeing the molecular machinery of the coronavirus will help scientists design a treatment – https://theconversation.com/like-a-key-to-a-lock-how-seeing-the-molecular-machinery-of-the-coronavirus-will-help-scientists-design-a-treatment-134135

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Langley, Senior Research Fellow, Griffith University

With constraints on our movements and general way of life becoming more and more restricted, we are feeling a loss of control not experienced since the second world war.

In being confined to our homes, we are missing our normal social support from friends and family, and our freedom to control our day-to-day lives.

But making music provides a means to regain control.

People in Spain have been filmed acting out with music, creating duos across apartment buildings.

The citizens of Wuhan chanting “Keep it up, Wuhan!” and singing patriotic songs from their windows encouraged themselves and their neighbours in their efforts to save their city.

In Italy, citizens have been playing instruments and singing from their balconies during their lockdown.

Parodies on YouTube are both lifting community spirits and reminding people to look after each other – not just themselves.

For some, this behaviour might have begun with trying to break the tedium of staying confined at home. But others clearly wished to support their community in one of the only ways they had left available to them: by making music.

Why do we sing during times of crisis?

Music creates a sense of belonging and participation.

It is an antidote to the growing sense of alienation and isolation in society in general – even more so now we are being asked to actively practise social distancing and isolation.

Social distancing and geographical isolation do not have to result in social isolation. In the face of uncertainty and panic, music is a social balm for soothing anxiety, enhancing community connections and acting in defiance of a threat to community spirit.

We have seen this before. People sang as flames tore through the roof of the historic Notre Dame Cathedral last April: hymns in the streets when Parisians could do nothing else to save the beloved icon.

This spontaneous reaction seemed to reflect the need of Parisians to reassure each other that, even though the cathedral was being destroyed before their eyes, their community would continue.

The music also seemed to be offered to the cathedral itself – reassurance that she was being supported by her community in her time of need.

During the coronavirus crisis, community support has evolved from a series of spontaneous musical flash mobs to connect with each other to coordinated displays of appreciation – including clapping, shouting and singing – to acknowledge the health workers on the front lines.

Much like singing, this external expression of gratitude is helping people to cope in times of crisis: providing personal and social development, mental health and well-being benefits, and community strength and harmony.

Music in human evolution

We don’t know exactly when we started to make music.

Finding the first evidence for singing – likely our first foray into music – is impossible, though instruments dating back some 40,000 years have been found in Europe. These bone flutes would not be the first instruments to be created, however, as they already show signs of complex design and most musical tools, such as skin drums, couldn’t survive the many thousands of years to discovery by an archaeologist.

Today, music is the most consumed form of culture. People listen to music to regulate their mood, to achieve self-awareness, and as an expression of personal and collective identity and social relatedness.

The ability of music to increase social cohesion and direct human attention was probably a key reason for its development throughout human behavioural evolution, allowing early humans to convey emotions and intentions effectively. This communication could prove decisive in times of stress, and ultimately mean the difference between life and death.

Now, we are seeing this age-old human adaptation once again being mobilised in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to keep communities pulling together.

Music has not yet lost its importance for humanity.

– ref. Singing away the coronavirus blues: making music in a time of crisis reminds us we belong – https://theconversation.com/singing-away-the-coronavirus-blues-making-music-in-a-time-of-crisis-reminds-us-we-belong-133790

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Darren Saunders, Associate professor, UNSW

Watching the world adjust to the horrific new reality of the COVID-19 pandemic, has led me to contemplate a much more important lesson we might be learning together as we face this crisis.

We’ve all been ripped out of our comfort zones, with so much of the familiar rhythm of daily life suddenly replaced by a pervasive, visceral uncertainty.

So many questions without answers. So many experts with differing views. A brutal realisation that things don’t work the way we always thought. Seeing infinite shades of grey instead of that comforting black and white world.

Sound familiar?

Welcome to the mind of a scientist.

Read more: Coronavirus distancing measures are confusing. Here are 3 things to ask yourself before you see someone

Uncertainty is unnerving – but you can learn to live with it

When this feeling dawned on me years ago on one of many early morning drives to Canberra during my PhD, it was almost crippling.

Digging deep into the mysteries of biochemistry and molecular biology – the ghosts in the machine of life itself – can do that. It can be an incredibly challenging, even unnerving experience.

But I learned to let that uncertainty wash over me. Like being caught in a rip in the surf, resistance just tires you out and makes things worse. After swimming around in it for a while I soon learned to float.

I even managed to crack a wave or two.

I wonder if this shows us one potential way through the viral-induced trauma surrounding us? We are all faced with rapidly shifting information and advice. What is true at 8am might not be by 6pm.

A role for scientists

Maybe scientists have a role to play here beyond the hard work going on to understand this new coronavirus, chasing vaccines and new drugs? We are comfortable swimming in the unfamiliar, we know how to float on a sea of uncertainty. We know it’s OK to say “I don’t know” or “good question”.

There’s an opportunity here for scientists to lead by example, both in the way we act and the way we communicate. To show the way in dealing with uncertainty, with changing information, and with appropriate responses.

But we need to start from a place of empathy. People are anxious and scared and we should acknowledge that. They want clear information and advice, based on best available data, not to be lectured or patronised. And scientists should be upfront about the fact that the advice may change – rapidly – or be slightly different to the next person’s.

Uncertainty and public messaging

We need, as a society, to become more comfortable with doubt and uncertainty in public, politics and business.

I’m OK with public messaging reflecting that. We’re so used to politicians holding a particular line on an issue, but the COVID-19 crisis has shown it doesn’t work when the situation is fluid and dynamic.

Maybe I’m just more comfortable with that as a scientist. Politicians absolutely have to be held to account but there should also be space for their positions to evolve – genuinely – with evidence.

We can change

Our sudden interest in disinfectants and hand washing, had me reflecting on my early days in a research lab.

Learning how to grow human cells without contamination by bacteria and yeast, or setting yourself on fire, takes some learning.

“Don’t touch that!”

“No, not that way!”

“What did you do that for?”

“No, hold it like this.”

It’s not intuitive. It takes real concentration – until it doesn’t anymore. Deeply ingrained habits and muscle memories have to be erased and rewritten. It’s hard, frustrating work.

It feels like the whole planet is sharing a similar experience now, but the stakes are much higher.

We can learn and change, until what was once difficult and uncomfortable becomes second nature. We’ve rapidly become much better, as a society, at things like handwashing and cough etiquette. Our relationship with uncertainty will have to change too.

Read more: In the age of coronavirus, only tiny weddings are allowed and the extended family BBQ is out

– ref. Uncertain? Many questions but no clear answers? Welcome to the mind of a scientist – https://theconversation.com/uncertain-many-questions-but-no-clear-answers-welcome-to-the-mind-of-a-scientist-134388

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexey D Muraviev, Associate Professor of National Security and Strategic Studies, Curtin University

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s declaration of “war” against the COVID-19 pandemic requires a mobilisation of all available resources to the front-lines of the response – and this includes a bigger role for our armed forces.

So far, the most visible force on our streets has been the police. In NSW, the police are now patrolling supermarkets to enforce civilised behaviour and order among panic buyers. A special police task force has also been set up in Victoria to enforce social distancing practices in public places.

Read more: In the wake of bushfires and coronavirus, it’s time we talked about human security

The military can also be a highly valuable asset in a national emergency, yet governments usually only deploy armed forces when a situation turns critical, such as this summer’s bushfires.

We have clearly reached such a critical point in the coronavirus crisis. Desperate times call for a more coordinated and strategic response and much greater involvement of the Australian Defence Force.

Responding to unconventional threats

Modern military power is designed to respond to a comprehensive suite of conventional, asymmetric or unconventional threats. The latter includes chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons, often referred to as CBRN.

Defence has a limited, but well-equipped, capability to respond to CBRN threats. The ADF has a specialised counter-CBRN unit, the Special Operations Engineer Regiment (SOER), which has been trained to respond to biological and bacteriological threats and operate in contaminated environments.

Read more: ‘Cyber revolution’ in Australian Defence Force demands rethink of staff, training and policy

The Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group conducts specialised research and development to prevent and defend against CBRN attacks, including disease modelling.

In simple terms, the ADF can offer specialist epidemiological detection and decontamination capabilities. This includes the type of heavy equipment (such as CBRN-proof armoured personnel carriers) and protective gear that could be useful if the pandemic worsens.

This is in addition to a wide range of other functions the ADF can offer, from trained medics to transport logistics to policing functions.

The diggers move in

The ADF has been involved in the nation’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak from the early stages. For instance, the military offered its ground defence facilities, RAAF Base Learmonth and RAAF Base Darwin, to assist with the transfer of Australian nationals to quarantine stations on Christmas Island and Howard Springs.

But it wasn’t until the country moved into lock-down mode that it was asked to contribute much more.

Just this week, ADF personnel have been deployed in contact tracing teams to help NSW health officials track down those who came in contact with passengers on the virus-stricken Ruby Princess cruise ship.

ADF staff are also contributing clinical and epidemiological support to the Department of Health, while engineering maintenance specialists have been called in to assist the Victoria-based Med-Con medical supplier with the production of protective masks, sanitisers and other medical items.

Yet, this is likely to be just the beginning. For example, CBRN specialists could be providing much-needed training to police and other emergency services on how to operate in contaminated environments.

Read more: Why releasing some prisoners is essential to stop the spread of coronavirus

More defence medical staff, including mobile hospital units, decontamination equipment and emergency stocks of supplies, should be on standby to be deployed on short notice to worst-affected areas.

The military can also start assisting in ground logistical operations (for example, setting up quarantine areas and exclusion zones) and targeted emergency airlift (dispatching emergency medical teams to remote areas).

And if police resources become overstretched, military personnel could enforce quarantine orders or area shut-downs, though deploying soldiers on the streets may only be used as a last resort by the government.

If the government declares an even higher state of emergency, the military could also be called on to secure key elements of physical infrastructure (power stations, fuel depots, airports and sea ports, state borders and others), and protect key elements of supply chains.

What foreign militaries are doing

This is the strategy being embraced around the world as the pandemic worsens, with militaries being deployed in increasingly diverse tasks.

In the US, the military and National Guard are now undertaking a range of duties, such as

• assisting civil authorities with enforcing quarantine orders by opening up defence facilities and providing mobile and floating hospitals to treat the infected

• airlifting specialists, equipment and supplies to areas most in need and offering on-site logistical support and delivery of key items (food, medical supplies)

• assisting in COVID-19 testing of civilians and research for a vaccine.

In the UK, up to 20,000 active defence personnel and reservists are in a higher state of readiness to respond to the pandemic, part of Operation Broadshare.

In Germany, about 3,000 military doctors and thousands of military reservists are also on standby, while France has mobilised 100,000 police officers and military personnel to enforce the country’s lock-down orders. A military field hospital also just opened this week in France to take the pressure off intensive care units.

In northern Italy, the military has been enforcing city lockdowns, in addition to transporting bodies of victims to places of cremation.

With limited resources on hand, Australia may even be in need of foreign military medical assistance if the pandemic worsens here, notably from the US. Australia received such assistance during the bushfire crisis, and Italy is currently getting similar aid from Russia.

Protecting the defenders

Of course, even as the Australian military is prepared to counter the pandemic, it’s not immune to the threat.

This week, the ADF announced it is relocating non-essential personnel out of Iraq and Afghanistan out of concern the virus could spread there.

There have also been 11 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the Department of Defence inside Australia.

For a small standing force like the ADF, a pandemic is as much of a challenge as for the rest of the nation. But given the military’s resilience to stressful environments, a bigger role for our soldiers may be what we need right now.

– ref. In the war against coronavirus, we need the military to play a much bigger role – https://theconversation.com/in-the-war-against-coronavirus-we-need-the-military-to-play-a-much-bigger-role-134149

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Langley, Senior Research Fellow, Griffith University

With constraints on our movements and general way of life becoming more and more restricted, we are feeling a loss of control not experienced since the second world war.

In being confined to our homes, we are missing our normal social support from friends and family, and our freedom to control our day-to-day lives.

But making music provides a means to regain control.

People in Spain have been filmed acting out with music, creating duos across apartment buildings.

The citizens of Wuhan chanting “Keep it up, Wuhan!” and singing patriotic songs from their windows encouraged themselves and their neighbours in their efforts to save their city.

In Italy, citizens have been playing instruments and singing from their balconies during their lockdown.

Parodies on YouTube are both lifting community spirits and reminding people to look after each other – not just themselves.

For some, this behaviour might have begun with trying to break the tedium of staying confined at home. But others clearly wished to support their community in one of the only ways they had left available to them: by making music.

Why do we sing during times of crisis?

Music creates a sense of belonging and participation.

It is an antidote to the growing sense of alienation and isolation in society in general – even more so now we are being asked to actively practise social distancing and isolation.

Social distancing and geographical isolation do not have to result in social isolation. In the face of uncertainty and panic, music is a social balm for soothing anxiety, enhancing community connections and acting in defiance of a threat to community spirit.

We have seen this before. People sang as flames tore through the roof of the historic Notre Dame Cathedral last April: hymns in the streets when Parisians could do nothing else to save the beloved icon.

This spontaneous reaction seemed to reflect the need of Parisians to reassure each other that, even though the cathedral was being destroyed before their eyes, their community would continue.

The music also seemed to be offered to the cathedral itself – reassurance that she was being supported by her community in her time of need.

During the coronavirus crisis, community support has evolved from a series of spontaneous musical flash mobs to connect with each other to coordinated displays of appreciation – including clapping, shouting and singing – to acknowledge the health workers on the front lines.

Much like singing, this external expression of gratitude is helping people to cope in times of crisis: providing personal and social development, mental health and well-being benefits, and community strength and harmony.

Music in human evolution

We don’t know exactly when we started to make music.

Finding the first evidence for singing – likely our first foray into music – is impossible, though instruments dating back some 40,000 years have been found in Europe. These bone flutes would not be the first instruments to be created, however, as they already show signs of complex design and most musical tools, such as skin drums, couldn’t survive the many thousands of years to discovery by an archaeologist.

Today, music is the most consumed form of culture. People listen to music to regulate their mood, to achieve self-awareness, and as an expression of personal and collective identity and social relatedness.

The ability of music to increase social cohesion and direct human attention was probably a key reason for its development throughout human behavioural evolution, allowing early humans to convey emotions and intentions effectively. This communication could prove decisive in times of stress, and ultimately mean the difference between life and death.

Now, we are seeing this age-old human adaptation once again being mobilised in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to keep communities pulling together.

Music has not yet lost its importance for humanity.

– ref. Singing away the coronavius blues: making music in a time of crisis reminds us we belong – https://theconversation.com/singing-away-the-coronavius-blues-making-music-in-a-time-of-crisis-reminds-us-we-belong-133790

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pauline Taylor-Guy, Professor, Australian Council for Educational Research

Most Australian universities are moving courses online to prevent the potential spread of COVID-19. This includes lectures and tutorials, which will likely be delivered via the university learning management systems such as Moodle or Blackboard.

Some students believe universities are waiting until the census date (the date students can withdraw from the course without incurring a fee) before the transition, so they are locked into an inferior online experience while paying money for what they believe is a superior mode of teaching.

When done right, online learning can actually be as effective as face-to-face education. But Australian universities haven’t upskilled their staff to deliver this kind of quality online education.

If Australian universities don’t provide intensive upskilling to lecturers to deliver online classes and support effectively, they might see many students disengaging and dropping out early.

Why online learning can fail

Australian universities introduced online degrees more than a decade ago. The hope was, and still is, that online learning would provide access for students who have historically been prevented from completing a higher education because they were unable to attend university in person.

These include students from low socio-economic backgrounds, students with a disability, and regional and remote students.

Completion rates for students studying fully online in many countries are considerably lower than for those studying face-to-face. In Australia, dropout is at least 20% higher for online students compared with on-campus students and degree completions are 2.5 times lower.

Those most likely to drop out are the very groups access to online learning was meant to reach.

A national 2017 study investigated these dropout rates. It found many academic and professional staff at Australian universities perceived online delivery as less important or lower priority than face to face.

The same report also identified a lack of skill and experience among many academic staff when it came to online course design and online teaching which, in turn, impacted negatively on student learning and engagement.

A 2016 study showed a lot of online learning in Australian universities consisted of lecturers simply uploading materials they used in their face-to-face courses to online learning platforms.

Many university teachers have had no experience themselves of online learning and have not been upskilled in online course design and pedagogy.

Read more: Australian unis may need to cut staff and research if government extends coronavirus travel ban

Where online students are out of sight and out of mind and lecturers do not have the skills to teach in an online environment it’s the perfect storm for disengagement and dropout.

When online learning is done right

Learning management systems such as Moodle are designed to support online learning. These systems effectively organise learning resources, including multimedia resources, that students can easily access.

Students can engage in collaborative activities with their peers and lecturers, through tools such as discussion boards and wikis (a website or database developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content).

An analysis of studies conducted between 1995 and 2004 compared achievement for students who had completed online and face-to-face tertiary education courses. It found the results were largely similar.

Read more: The coronavirus outbreak is the biggest crisis ever to hit international education

Students who completed online courses learnt as much as those in face-to-face instruction, achieved as well and were equally satisfied with their overall experience. The key word here is completion. There are higher dropout rates and lower completions across the higher education sector internationally for students who study online.

When online learning is well-designed, conducted in a learning management system and is in the hands of skilled teachers, it offers a comparable learning experience to face-to-face.

What many uni courses may look like online

In the current scenario, a lecturer may deliver the same lecture or tutorial via video that they would deliver face to face. They may use online discussion boards or chat rooms to try and replicate small group work in tutorials.

Students may work through course materials on their own and have little connection with each other or their lecturer beyond the real-time video or chat interactions. They may not get the opportunity for the kinds of peer-to-peer and student-lecturer interaction that support engagement and learning.

Research shows these sorts of practices – which can be more accurately described as “remote learning” rather than “online learning” – promote student disengagement and dropout.

So, what can lecturers do to improve learning?

In the immediate future, university staff moving to online teaching can use some of the following tips to help students stay satisfied and engaged.

1. Communicate with students as much as possible

• get to know your students in the online environment. Ask them to introduce themselves by completing an “about you” page

• students are likely to have many questions. One way to manage this is to set up a Frequently Asked Questions discussion board and ask students to post their question on it. In that way, all students can see the response

• set up a weekly 30 minute live, but also recorded, Q & A session. Students can send in questions for you to respond to or ask you live. This way, students will see you “in person”.

2. Make sure students know where to get support

• make clear to students where they can access support for the different areas that impact them, such as academic advice and finance. You will need to work closely with student support services to do this

• set up a student support services discussion board in your subject, which student support officers could manage.

3. Help build your students’ technology skills

• help students who aren’t so sure about the online platform to learn the technological skills they need. It’s not just you who needs upskilling.

• you can ask your student group to self-nominate as online mentors if they have good online skills. It’s a great way to build connections.

1. Get across the resources

• your students will need to collaborate and share knowledge in new ways now they are not in the same physical space. Use discussion boards and wikis to encourage them to work on collaborative activities. If you don’t know how to do this, ask your learning and teaching specialists at your university. Edinburgh University also has some helpful resources. Stephen Downes’ creating an online community guide is also helpful

• for course design ideas, Professor Gilly Salmon’s carpe diem resources are excellent.

Universities should also move, as quickly as they can, to provide intensive training in online course delivery to their lecturers.

– ref. Universities need to train lecturers in online delivery, or they risk students dropping out – https://theconversation.com/universities-need-to-train-lecturers-in-online-delivery-or-they-risk-students-dropping-out-133921

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Colvin, Lecturer, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Australia has the technology to move from fossil fuels to renewable energy, but the social dynamics remain challenging. The Stop Adani protest convoy during the 2019 federal election campaign brought this difficulty to the fore.

A real sticking point for navigating any social change, including the energy transition, is finding a way through entrenched attitudes in which people see themselves as “us” in conflict with “them”. In these situations, people tend to focus on trying to defeat their opponents rather than finding mutually beneficial solutions to the problem.

In research just released, I examined media coverage of the Stop Adani protest convoy to better understand these social identity divides. In particular, I analysed the factors shaping who was an “us” and who was a “them” in the conflict.

I found that the media, with the help of politicians, crafted a narrative of division between inner-city “greenies” and Queensland mining communities. These divisions foster a social dynamic that ultimately inhibits co-operation and good policy outcomes.

Identity matters

The Stop Adani convoy took place in April and May 2019. It involved hundreds of protesters travelling by road (in a convoy of vehicles) from Tasmania, through eastern Australian cities to Clermont, the regional Queensland town nearest the site of Adani’s proposed Carmichael coal mine.

The identity dimension of this protest is important. Australia’s energy transition is inextricably tied to the often fraught politics of climate and energy more broadly, and our social divisions fall along left-right political lines. This means our views on issues such as climate change and energy policy are wrapped up in, and can often be explained by, the groups with which we identify.

Read more: Coal mines can be closed without destroying livelihoods – here’s how

So, the energy transition is taking place in an already polarised and challenging space plagued time and time again by the same conflict dynamics.

This conflict often gets in the way of identifying and implementing effective policy solutions. It’s a particular problem for the energy transition, which needs people and sectors working together to support the technical changes. And if society is divided, it is far less likely to achieve a “just transition” that limits negative social impacts and promotes social equity.

The role of the media

The media is a space in which diverse groups of people make sense of something happening outside their day-to-day life. That’s why it’s important to examine how the media depicts contentious issues. I studied representation of the convoy in Australia’s six most popular online news websites.

Media representation of the Stop Adani convoy depicted it as a social conflict between two opposing, hostile sides. One side was characterised as activists, Greens (or “greenies”), conservationists and elites; the other characterised as blue-collar workers, regional Queenslanders and proud mining communities.

Read more: Adani is cleared to start digging its coal mine – six key questions answered

These identity-based distinctions were cultivated by political figures who provided media commentary on the convoy. The most prominent were those in favour of the Adani mine, such as Nationals senator Matt Canavan, who criticised the convoy participants as “self-appointed, self-important bureaucrats” who took a “busybody approach”.

Former Greens leader Bob Brown, who led the convoy, said he “respected those who genuinely believed the Adani mine should go ahead” and identified the coal mining industry and governments as the targets of the protest.

My media analysis revealed that to convoy participants, Adani’s proposed mine symbolised the need for climate action and curtailment of Australia’s coal industry. A counter-movement grew stronger in response, comprising community members and supported by the coal industry. To this group, the Adani mine symbolised regional survival and self-determination.

Once a debate becomes a “groupish” conflict like this, predictable dynamics in social interactions emerge. This includes hostility and suspicion towards the other side, and stereotyping which can lead to de-humanisation.

These dynamics emerged during the Stop Adani convoy. There were reports of protesters refused entry to local shops and feeling intimidated by the behaviour of townspeople, including having stones thrown at their cars. Conversely, an anti-Adani protester reportedly likened Adani supporters to Nazis in a Facebook post. (Bob Brown distanced the convoy from the comments, which he said had “no place in civil debate”).

Media reports of these incidents served to fuel a narrative of two opposing groups clashing over a fundamental and unsolvable differences.

Finding unity

There has been much debate about the extent to which the convoy affected the election result in crucial regional Queensland electorates. My study did not address this question.

At its core, my analysis showed that for the “us” that emerged via the convoy, there had to be a “them”. In other words, we form groups based not just on who we are like, but also who we are not like.

Read more: Coal miners and urban greenies have one thing in common, and Labor must use it

But achieving a successful and fair energy transition requires creating a unified “we”, and not leaving any person or community behind. This means looking after regional communities and people who will feel the first-hand impacts of decarbonising our energy supply.

We must better understand the identity dimension of the energy conflict if we’re design and implement creative and effective solutions. This means more listening, more sharing, and finding common ground.

– ref. Our social identity shapes how we feel about the Adani mine – and it makes the energy wars worse – https://theconversation.com/our-social-identity-shapes-how-we-feel-about-the-adani-mine-and-it-makes-the-energy-wars-worse-133686

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Colvin, Lecturer, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Australia has the technology to move from fossil fuels to renewable energy, but the social dynamics remain challenging. The Stop Adani protest convoy during the 2019 federal election campaign brought this difficulty to the fore.

A real sticking point for navigating any social change, including the energy transition, is finding a way through entrenched attitudes in which people see themselves as “us” in conflict with “them”. In these situations, people tend to focus on trying to defeat their opponents rather than finding mutually beneficial solutions to the problem.

In research just released, I examined media coverage of the Stop Adani protest convoy to better understand these social identity divides. In particular, I analysed the factors shaping who was an “us” and who was a “them” in the conflict.

I found that the media, with the help of politicians, crafted a narrative of division between inner-city “greenies” and Queensland mining communities. These divisions foster a social dynamic that ultimately inhibits co-operation and good policy outcomes.

Identity matters

The Stop Adani convoy took place in April and May 2019. It involved hundreds of protesters travelling by road (in a convoy of vehicles) from Tasmania, through eastern Australian cities to Clermont, the regional Queensland town nearest the site of Adani’s proposed Carmichael coal mine.

The identity dimension of this protest is important. Australia’s energy transition is inextricably tied to the often fraught politics of climate and energy more broadly, and our social divisions fall along left-right political lines. This means our views on issues such as climate change and energy policy are wrapped up in, and can often be explained by, the groups with which we identify.

Read more: Coal mines can be closed without destroying livelihoods – here’s how

So, the energy transition is taking place in an already polarised and challenging space plagued time and time again by the same conflict dynamics.

This conflict often gets in the way of identifying and implementing effective policy solutions. It’s a particular problem for the energy transition, which needs people and sectors working together to support the technical changes. And if society is divided, it is far less likely to achieve a “just transition” that limits negative social impacts and promotes social equity.

The role of the media

The media is a space in which diverse groups of people make sense of something happening outside their day-to-day life. That’s why it’s important to examine how the media depicts contentious issues. I studied representation of the convoy in Australia’s six most popular online news websites.

Media representation of the Stop Adani convoy depicted it as a social conflict between two opposing, hostile sides. One side was characterised as activists, Greens (or “greenies”), conservationists and elites; the other characterised as blue-collar workers, regional Queenslanders and proud mining communities.

Read more: Adani is cleared to start digging its coal mine – six key questions answered

These identity-based distinctions were cultivated by political figures who provided media commentary on the convoy. The most prominent were those in favour of the Adani mine, such as Nationals senator Matt Canavan, who criticised the convoy participants as “self-appointed, self-important bureaucrats” who took a “busybody approach”.

Former Greens leader Bob Brown, who led the convoy, said he “respected those who genuinely believed the Adani mine should go ahead” and identified the coal mining industry and governments as the targets of the protest.

My media analysis revealed that to convoy participants, Adani’s proposed mine symbolised the need for climate action and curtailment of Australia’s coal industry. A counter-movement grew stronger in response, comprising community members and supported by the coal industry. To this group, the Adani mine symbolised regional survival and self-determination.

Once a debate becomes a “groupish” conflict like this, predictable dynamics in social interactions emerge. This includes hostility and suspicion towards the other side, and stereotyping which can lead to de-humanisation.

These dynamics emerged during the Stop Adani convoy. There were reports of protesters refused entry to local shops and feeling intimidated by the behaviour of townspeople, including having stones thrown at their cars. Conversely, an anti-Adani protester reportedly likened Adani supporters to Nazis in a Facebook post. (Bob Brown distanced the convoy from the comments, which he said had “no place in civil debate”).

Media reports of these incidents served to fuel a narrative of two opposing groups clashing over a fundamental and unsolvable differences.

Finding unity

There has been much debate about the extent to which the convoy affected the election result in crucial regional Queensland electorates. My study did not address this question.

At its core, my analysis showed that for the “us” that emerged via the convoy, there had to be a “them”. In other words, we form groups based not just on who we are like, but also who we are not like.

Read more: Coal miners and urban greenies have one thing in common, and Labor must use it

But achieving a successful and fair energy transition requires creating a unified “we”, and not leaving any person or community behind. This means looking after regional communities and people who will feel the first-hand impacts of decarbonising our energy supply.

We must better understand the identity dimension of the energy conflict if we’re design and implement creative and effective solutions. This means more listening, more sharing, and finding common ground.

– ref. Our social identity shapes how we feel about the Adani mine – and it’s making the energy wars worse – https://theconversation.com/our-social-identity-shapes-how-we-feel-about-the-adani-mine-and-its-making-the-energy-wars-worse-133686

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jodi McAlister, Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture, Deakin University

Romance fiction has two defining features.

First, it centres on a love story. Secondly, it always ends well.

Our protagonists end up together (if not forever, then at least for the foreseeable future) and this makes the world around them a little bit better, too.

In times of uncertainty, upheaval and chaos, readers often turn to romance fiction: during the second world war, Mills & Boon was able to maintain its paper ration by arguing its books were good for the morale of working women.

The books the company was producing in this period were not about the war. Most never even mentioned it. Instead, they provided an escape for readers to a world where they could be assured everything was going to turn out all right: love would conquer all, villains would be defeated, and lovers would always find their way back to each other.

Read more: How to learn about love from Mills & Boon novels

Today, romance publishing is a billion-dollar industry, with thousands of novels published each year. It covers a wide range of subgenres: from historical to contemporary, paranormal to sci-fi, from novels where the only physical interaction between the protagonists is a kiss, to erotic romance where sex is fundamental to the story.

Rule 34 of the internet states if you can think of something, then there’s porn of it. The same, I would argue, is true for romance fiction.

But where to begin? As both a scholar of romance fiction and an avid reader of it, I’ve put together this list of five great reads for people who might want to start exploring the genre.

If you like Jane Austen, try…

The Austen Playbook by Lucy Parker

The Austen Playbook is the fourth book in Parker’s London Celebrities series (all only loosely connected, so you can jump in anywhere).

Heroine Freddy is an actress from an esteemed West End family, trying to balance her desire to perform in musicals and crowd-pleasers over her family pushing her towards serious drama. Hero Griff is a theatre critic and his family estate is playing host to a wacky live-action Jane Austen murder mystery, in which Freddy is playing Lydia.

Parker is a gifted author, and this book is a light, bright and sparkling delight.

If you like (or hate!) dating apps, try…

The Right Swipe by Alisha Rai

Many people now find partners on dating apps, but these apps are often not exactly friendly for women.

Rai addresses that to great effect in The Right Swipe, where heroine Rhiannon is the designer of a dating app designed specifically for women.

She meets hero Samson the first time as a result of swiping right, and then the second time, months later, when he’s teamed up with one of her primary business rivals…

If you’re fascinated by psychology, try …

The Love Experiment by Ainslie Paton

Paton is one of Australia’s smartest and most underrated romance authors. The Love Experiment draws on the 36 questions developed by psychologist Arthur Aron to explore whether intimacy could be generated or intensified between two people if they exchanged increasingly personal information.

The 36 questions were popularised in Mandy Len Catron’s 2015 New York Times essay To Fall In Love With Anyone, Do This. Here, journalist protagonists Derelie and Jackson undertake the experiment in Paton’s book, only to find love is more complex than 36 questions.

If you think we need to save the oceans, try…

Project Saving Noah by Six de los Reyes

This book emerges from RomanceClass, a fascinating community of English-language romance writers and readers based in the Philippines. One of their distinctive features is their collaboration with local actors in Manila to perform excerpts from the books (including Project Saving Noah) at their regular gatherings. I was privileged enough to attend one of these last year.

Protagonists Noah and Lise are graduate students in oceanography competing for one spot on a research project, while simultaneously being forced to work together. Their romance is conflicted and compelling, but what stands out about this book is the vividness with which their environment – natural and academic – is constructed.

If you like your protagonists to have some maturity, try…

Mrs Martin’s Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan

If Milan’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she was at the centre of the recent scandal engulfing the Romance Writers of America, which penetrated through romance’s usual cultural invisibility.

When she’s not standing up against systemic racism, Milan writes excellent, mostly historical, romance. Mrs Martin is a delightful historical romp, as our two heroines Bertrice (aged 73) and Violetta (aged 69) team up against Violetta’s terrible nephew, and fall in love and eat cheese on toast together.

– ref. Love and a happy ending: romance fiction to help you through a coronavirus lockdown – https://theconversation.com/love-and-a-happy-ending-romance-fiction-to-help-you-through-a-coronavirus-lockdown-133784

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

Only five people will be able to attend a wedding – the couple, the celebrant and two witnesses – and funerals will be restricted to 10 in the latest round of life-changing restrictions to be imposed on Australians to fight the coronavirus’s spread.

Real estate auctions and “open house” inspections will be stopped, and Australians will now be prohibited from leaving the country, rather than just strongly advised not to do so.

Scott Morrison, announcing the new crackdowns, also told people to stay home, except when it was absolutely necessary to go out. But they shouldn’t have the extended family around the dinner table or to a barbecue.

Read more: View from The Hill: A contest of credible views should be seen as useful in a national crisis

However he is still advising people to send their children to school, and on Wednesday will meet teachers’ union representatives to discuss arrangements to protect staff, especially older teachers more vulnerable to the virus. Schools would need to reopen on the other side of the holidays, he said.

Addressing a news conference after Tuesday night’s federal-state national cabinet, Morrison said the widened list of bans would include food courts in shopping centres, except for takeaways. Outdoor and indoor markets – excluding food markets essential to ensure the food supply across the country – will be a decision for each state and territory.

A range of personal services, including beauty therapy, tanning, waxing, nail salons and tattoo parlors, will be shut down, as well as spas and massage parlours. This does not extend to physiotherapists and similar allied health services.

Hairdressers and barbers have escaped closure, but with a social distancing limit to the number of people on their premises, and the stipulation a patron can only be there for 30 minutes.

The banned list also includes amusement parks and arcades, play centres (both indoor and outdoor), community and recreation centres, libraries, health clubs, fitness centres, yoga, barre and spin facilities, saunas, and wellness centres. Social sporting events and swimming pools are on the list, as are galleries, libraries and youth centres.

Boot camps may be held outside with no more than 10 people.

Morrison said people should “stay at home unless it is absolutely necessary you go out.

“Going out for the basics, going out for exercise, perhaps with your partner or family members, provided it’s a small group – that’s fine.” As was going out to work, where it was not possible to work from home – but not “participating more broadly in the community”.

Visits to your house “should be kept to a minimum and with very small numbers of guests.

“So that means barbecues of lots of friends, or even family, extended family, coming together to celebrate one-year-old birthday parties and all those sorts of things, we can’t do those things now.

“These will be a significant sacrifice, I know.

“Gathering together in that way. even around the large family table in the family home when all the siblings get together and bring the kids, these are not things we can do now. All of these things present risks”.

He said states and territories were considering whether they would make it an offence to organise house parties.

Read more: View from The Hill: Entertainment venues closed in draconian measures to fight the virus

“Outdoors, do not congregate together in groups.

“If you’re gathering together in a group, say, 10 people, together outside in a group, that’s not OK. We’ve got to move people on.”

Morrison said the “hopefully” a full shutdown of the retail sector would not be necessary,

“I do note in a lot of the commentary … there seems to be a great wish to go to that point. Well, be careful what you wish for on something like that. … Because that would need to be sustained for a very long time. And that could have a very significant and even more onerous impact on life in Australia.

“We should seek to try to avoid that where it is possible. But if it is necessary for health reasons, ultimately, those decisions will be taken at the time”.

Asked about why an outside boot camp of ten people was allowed, Morrison said “that is a business, that is someone’s livelihood and you are saying that I should turn their livelihood off. I’m not going to do that lightly. If it is not believed to be necessary based on the medical expert advice.

“I am not going to be cavalier about people’s jobs and their businesses. Where possible the national cabinet together is going to try and keep Australia functioning in a way that continues to support jobs and activity in our economy which is not going to compromise the health advice that we’re receiving.

“And so no, I don’t think we should rush to that sort of [shutdown] scenario. I think you could rush to failure in that sort of scenario.

“You could rush to causing great and unnecessary harm because understand this, this country is not dealing with one crisis, we’re dealing with two crises. We are dealing with a health crisis that has caused an economic crisis.

“I am very concerned about the economic crisis that could also take a great toll on people’s lives, not just their livelihoods. The stresses that that will put on families. The things that can happen when families are under stress.

“I am as concerned about those outcomes as I am about the health outcomes of managing the outbreak of the coronavirus and it is a delicate task for the national cabinet to balance those two.

“Lives are at risk in both cases. And so the national cabinet won’t just rush on the sense of an opinion of inevitability. We will calmly consider the medical advice that is put to us and weigh those things up and make sensible decisions as leaders. I will not be cavalier about it and neither will other premiers and chief ministers.”

He apologised for the systems failure that prevented people accessing Centrelink, prompting huge queues with many people who had lost jobs visibly upset.

“We are deeply sorry. We have gone from 6,000 [online traffic], to 50,000 to 150,000, all in the matter of a space of a day.”

He appealed to people “even in these most difficult of circumstances to be patient. Everyone is doing their best. What we are dealing with an unprecedented. No system is built to deal with the circumstance and events we are facing as a nation.”.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: We are now a nation in self-isolation

The Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, said the steep growth in the number of cases – the tally is now passed 2000 – was “very concerning”.

Nine reported a panel of experts from the Group of Eight universities commissioned by the federal government had recommended that “Australia without delay implement stronger national social distancing measures, more extensive banning of mass gatherings, school closure or class dismissal”.

The group, in advice presented on March 22, also urged “much-enhanced” testing without delay.

It said: “Countries with significant COVID-19 infections have eventually been forced into strong public health measures in a reactive manner. It became unavoidable from a public health perspective.

“Proactive measures will result in a smaller epidemic and less stress on the health system. Reactive measures (such as in Italy) may result in a greater burden of morbidity and mortality and delay in reaching the point of recovery.

“The only difference is at what point these measures are implemented, whether proactive or reactive, and how large the resulting epidemic will be.”

The “dominant” position in the group was for “a comprehensive, simultaneous ban across Australia”, but the other view among its participants was for a “more proportionate response”.

With the government going down the latter path, Morrison and Murphy were noticeably uncomfortable when questioned about the advice.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott, who as health minister in 2004 drove preparations for a possible bird flu pandemic, called for a total shutdown.

“We need to have a very, very complete shutdown now to do everything we humanly can to prevent the spread of the disease, he told 2GB.

“You can only put the economy into a coma for so long, it can’t be indefinite,” he said.

“But the more complete it is now the more likely it is to be short-lived.”

– ref. In the age of coronavirus, only tiny weddings are allowed and the extended family BBQ is out – https://theconversation.com/in-the-age-of-coronavirus-only-tiny-weddings-are-allowed-and-the-extended-family-bbq-is-out-134584