Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joseph Crawford, Senior Lecturer, Management, University of Tasmania

Imagine you have years-worth of research and it is dismissed by a 15-word rejection letter from a journal editor. That has happened to us.

Or peer reviewers write demeaning, anonymous commentary about your work. That has also happened to us.

Or student evaluations critique your appearance or the way you speak. Yes, that’s also happened to us.

Read more:
The peer review system is broken. We asked academics how to fix it

Academics also get negative feedback on research grants and funding applications, conference submissions and mainstream writing outlets, like The Conversation. And, yes, we’ve experienced all this, too. And we are not alone.

We are experts in management and psychology. The good news is, there are strategies available to help you overcome and even use negative feedback to your advantage.

Feedback is unavoidable

Feedback is a key component for any academic career. It is part of how the profession maintains rigour and quality in what it does.

While it can of course be positive, research shows, it tends to be negative. And this comes at a cost to individuals, their sense of self worth and their mental health.

Academia is not alone here. Managers across all industries use feedback to enhance workplace performance and online reviews are a fact of life for businesses. Yet, despite this, not many people know how to do it well. And, the receivers are not always able to use the feedback in the way it was intended.

On top of calls to improve training for academics, managers and leaders on how to provide helpful feedback (we do this here and here), being able to use the feedback we get is also important for our wellbeing.

Tough feedback can hurt and shake our confidence. Yet it may be necessary to process this feedback to grow and develop as professionals. And this is where positive psychology can help.

Positive psychology is the study of strengths and virtues over human deficiencies and diagnoses. It focuses on promoting strengths – like courage, optimism, and hope – as a buffer against mental ill-health.

6 things to do when you get negative feedback

1. Empathise with the person giving feedback

Do you remember receiving formal training for providing feedback? Probably not. It is likely the reviewer or person giving you feedback did not either.

And humans have a bias towards negative information too. Perhaps this is an evolutionary challenge, with early humanity needing to fixate on dangerous and threatening matters to survive.

A reviewer or manager’s potential lack of training and natural bias does not excuse their harmful comments, but it might help us to empathise with their circumstances.

Academics have complex, very busy careers. When anonymous reviews are negative, it might have more to do with their (lack of) experience and heavy workloads, rather than our work.

2. Pause

When dealing with negative feedback, it can help to pause, take a walk around the block or grab a cup of tea. One of the authors of this piece has the practice of reading a review and then putting it in a draw for a week before she begins to address the feedback.

Distance allows us to gain perspective and think through the parts of the feedback that are valuable and worth addressing. This puts us into a positive state of mind and prompts us to considers solutions as a way of coping.

3. Talk about what happened

Vent to some friends or your colleagues.

Affective labelling theory says when people talk about their feelings, they feel better about them. A Geneva Emotion Wheel might help label more complex emotions.

You can also try self-affirmations, or the practice of recognising the value of one’s self. Affirmations may not suit everyone’s style but if you think they will work for you, useful self-affirmations may include: “I am getting better as a researcher” or “this obstacle will help me grow”. (You can look at some more examples here).

Positive affirmations give rise to more positive emotions and this is useful because positive emotions boost our problem-solving skills.

4. Address your inner critic

Our inner critic is often an ally who motivates us to achieve. It can sometimes be toxic though, especially when receiving unwanted feedback. The inner critic prompts cognitive distortions, such as catastrophising (“I’ll never be published”) or assigning self-blame (“I’m not smart enough”).

As we know, distortions are not true and they stop us seeing the situation clearly. When these voices are left unchecked, it can lead to mental health problems.

Read more:
We have developed a way to screen student feedback to ensure it’s useful, not abusive (and academics don’t have to burn it)

Instead, we need to practice self-compassion. This could include, visualising positive and non-judgmental images. Perhaps visualising a walk on your favourite beach, without a care or concern.

Talking back to our inner critic (verbally or non-verbally) also helps. Cognitive reappraisal is the practice of identifying a negative thought pattern and changing the perspective. In response to “I’m not smart enough” try “This time, this work was not valued, but it is valuable, and I can grow from the feedback”.

5. Reframe what happened

Our brains almost prime us to take negative feedback personally at first.

When receiving negative feedback, the primal (“fight or flight”) and emotional (“do they hate me?”) parts of our brain often jump to respond first.

But we can deliberately look for benefits, upsides and lessons if something bad happens. This is what psychologists call “positive reframing”.

For example, if you get unhelpful personal feedback on anonymous student feedback forms, it might prompt you to talk with your next group of students about the purpose of this feedback and about the importance of them being professional and constructive.

6. Look for opportunities

Each strategy above is designed to help you cope with and accept feedback. The final strategy is to focus on the opportunity.

Despite the negativity or the difficult conversation, someone took time to give this feedback. What is it that can be learned? Or done better next time?

All of this is of course assuming the feedback was constructive. Sometimes negative feedback is just toxic. In these cases, submit your work somewhere else!

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Dr Crawford is the Editor in Chief, Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice.

Kelly-Ann Allen is the Editor-in-Chief of the Educational and Developmental Psychologist and the Journal of Belonging and Human Connection.

Lea Waters does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Negative feedback is part of academia (and life) – these 6 strategies can help you cope – https://theconversation.com/negative-feedback-is-part-of-academia-and-life-these-6-strategies-can-help-you-cope-190069

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charles Livingstone, Associate Professor, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University

Sydney now has two casinos run by companies deemed unfit to hold a gaming licence.

The independent inquiry into Star Entertainment Group, operator of The Star casino, has found it “not suitable” to hold a New South Wales casino licence.

This follows a similar finding against Crown Resorts in NSW in 2021 (and in Victoria and Western Australia since).

Read more:
Crown Sydney casino opens – another beacon for criminals looking to launder dirty money

Star is also facing an inquiry in Queensland, where it operates two casinos, with a third – at Queen’s Wharf Brisbane – on the way.

The litany of malfeasance at its Sydney casino is on par with (and perhaps even greater than) Crown’s, with the inquiry overseen by Adam Bell SC finding it threw its doors open to irresponsible gamblers and criminal infiltrators for years.

The chief of NSW’s new casino regulator, Philip Crawford, said Star’s “institutional arrogance” was “breathtaking”. It had knowingly facilitated money laundering, and made no effort to work out what it needed to fix about its organisational culture.

Whether Star can now satisfy him it can learn now may determine if it gets to keep its licence.

But just as important as it fixing its culture is the wider issue of fixing the failed regulatory and political culture that has allowed institutional corruption to flourish.

Obscuring gambling transactions

The report cites a litany of failures by the company to adhere to anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism regulations.

One was allowing A$908 million over seven years to pass through the casino in contravention of anti-money-laundering rules, fabricating receipts to hide the truth.

This involved allowing guests at the complex’s hotel to buy casino chips using China UnionPay credit cards and recording the transactions as hotel-related expenses. This breached China UnionPay’s ban on its cards being used for gambling.

The Star also appeared to deliberately mislead its banker, NAB. When the bank queried such transactions, including at the request of China Pay, Star executives made “false, misleading and unethical communications”.

Another breach of anti-money-laundering rules was to allow a junket operator, SunCity, to run a private gaming room (known as Salon 95) with its own “cage” (where cash is exchanged for casino chips).

The cage operated from 2018 until 2021 – ending only after the arrest in China of SunCity’s principal, Alvin Chau, in December 2021. The report says Star knew enough to close Salon 95 and end its relationship with SunCity at least three years earlier.

Casino’s culture needs fixing

The report concludes Star’s risk-management processes were deficient, and the overall culture poor.

Executives failed to take issues seriously and communicate them promptly and accurately to the board of directors. The board in turn failed to properly address issues of which directors were aware.

Among the report’s recommendations is introducing a gaming smart card that will enable the casino (and authorities) to track all gambling activity.

Crawford said all options were on the table, and that the Independent Casino Commission would not hesitate to close The Star down if it does not show cause for keeping its licence.

Time will tell.

The commission replaced the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority as casino requlator only last month. The regulatory overhaul also includes higher penalties for breaches (to a maximum of $100 million) and clarifies the regulator’s powers to suspend or cancel a casino licence.

Victoria introduced similar legislation, and a new gambling regulator, in the wake of its royal commission.

But is this enough?

What about the regulatory culture?

This inquiry, as with the others, further exposes a culture of gambling regulation bent to the influence of gambling operators.

The activities of Star (and of Crown) took place over many years, under the nose of regulators. None of revelations triggering these inquiries came from regulators. They came from whistleblowers and investigative journalists, with the assistance of concerned politicians such as Andrew Wilkie.

Regulators have been nobbled by limited resources, lack of political support and even bullying by gambling operators.

Read more:
Responsible gambling – a bright shining lie Crown Resorts and others can no longer hide behind

Donations, revolving door appointments, relationship-building (with promises of significant state revenue) and, in some cases, outright political campaigning has beaten politicians into submission.

From cosy lunches with a power media figure and a NSW premier, to opaque preferential deals for prime real estate, and repeated “memoranda of understanding” between NSW’s pokie clubs and the state government, Australian political culture needs major reform

Charles Livingstone has received funding from the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation, the (former) Victorian Gambling Research Panel, and the South Australian Independent Gambling Authority (the funds for which were derived from hypothecation of gambling tax revenue to research purposes), from the Australian and New Zealand School of Government and the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, and from non-government organisations for research into multiple aspects of poker machine gambling, including regulatory reform, existing harm minimisation practices, and technical characteristics of gambling forms. He has received travel and co-operation grants from the Alberta Problem Gambling Research Institute, the Finnish Institute for Public Health, the Finnish Alcohol Research Foundation, the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Committee, the Turkish Red Crescent Society, and the Problem Gambling Foundation of New Zealand. He was a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council funded project researching mechanisms of influence on government by the tobacco, alcohol and gambling industries. He has undertaken consultancy research for local governments and non-government organisations in Australia and the UK seeking to restrict or reduce the concentration of poker machines and gambling impacts, and was a member of the Australian government’s Ministerial Expert Advisory Group on Gambling in 2010-11. He is a member of the Lancet Public Health Commission into gambling, and of the World Health Organisation expert group on gambling and gambling harm.

– ref. Now Sydney has two casinos run by companies unfit to hold a gaming licence – https://theconversation.com/now-sydney-has-two-casinos-run-by-companies-unfit-to-hold-a-gaming-licence-190540

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan Broomhall, Director, Gender and Women’s History Research Centre, Australian Catholic University

In the last week, I’ve been contacted by several friends and colleagues telling me if you type #catherinedemedici in Twitter, a snake emoji automatically appears. Designed to sync with The Serpent Queen, the serpent now appears even with hashtags made in tweets years ago.

This new Catherine is now the old Catherine.

In a life lived across most of the 16th century, Catherine de’ Medici was Queen of France, the mother of three kings and two queens, and the mother-in-law of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Anyone with that degree and longevity of access to influence across Europe was bound to attract attention.

In The Serpent Queen, we get a clever and powerful Catherine (played by Liv Hill as a teenager and Samantha Morton as the woman in her 40s), beguiling and dangerous, forged in the violence of her childhood and as an emotional response to the rejection of her love by her husband Henri (Alex Heath as the young Henri and Lee Ingleby in adulthood).

This Catherine decides to govern aided by the dark arts, determined to teach her enemies a lesson. She is also playful, musing “it feels good to be bad,” to a backing track of rock guitar.

But do we actually have a new interpretation? Here, a familiar story of one of history’s favourite bad girls strikes again. And in the process, Catherine de’ Medici is again diminished.

It seems the well-crafted propaganda of her own century – and additions of those since – remain as compelling as ever.

A woman of power

Catherine was never the ruler of France, but she was intimately acquainted with politics at the highest level.

She was an assiduous networker. Her remaining letters (some 6,000 survive) give us just a sense of the enormous reach of the relationships she maintained over a long and well watched life.

Hers was a remarkable trajectory. The Medici were not a dynasty of royal blood, but she nonetheless became queen of France, served as regent for her husband and was governess and advisor to her sons.

Her access to influence as a wife and mother, while conventional, was perceived by political men and commentators beyond the court as dangerous because it sat outside formal mechanisms for regulating power.

Multiple versions of Catherine

Catherine was at the height of power when the French kingdom was at war with itself. The French Wars of Religion, lasting from 1562 to 1598, pitted Catholics and Huguenots against each other, fighting for the soul of France.

Widowed in 1559, Catherine remained close to the throne as the advisor to her three sons who became king.

Although Catholic, Catherine’s recommendations for her sons generally favoured a middle course that aimed to maintain the integrity of the realm, and the reputation of the dynasty she had married into.

This pleased few among the ardent on either side, who turned to the pen to respond, creating multiple versions of Catherine as suited their cause.

Sexualised tropes presented Catherine as a danger to men of either side in this conflict. A pamphlet of 1575 versified:

She unmans cocks, tearing off their crests and testicles, a virago holds sway over the French. An unbridled woman dines on the testicles of cocks, and as she devours this food, she smacks her lips and says: ‘Thus, I castrate Gallic courage, thus I unman the French, thus I subdue them!’

This version of Catherine was catchy.

There were many versions of Catherine. Some were the versions she made with her allies for public consumption: versions made in art, ceremony, palaces and acts.

Others had their own ideas about who Catherine was, or what version of Catherine best suited their objectives. Not all had the same reach and not all have been reproduced through to the present day.

Catherine knew the high stakes for women. She had a fraught and complex relationship with Mary, Queen of Scots, but she defended her to Elizabeth I’s courtier Francis Walsingham, telling Walshingham she “knew very well how often people said things of a poor afflicted princess that did not always turn out to be true.”

After her death, dozens of Catherines took free flight in novels. Alexandre Dumas’ Queen Margot (1845) has Catherine dissecting the brains of a chicken whose head she has severed with a single blow, for prophetic analysis. She conducts herself with a “malignant smile”.

She fared little better among 19th century scholars. The influential historian Jules Michelet, a Huguenot, famously termed Catherine “the maggot from Italy’s tomb”.

This version of Catherine was also catchy.

Read more:
Mary, Queen of Scots was a poet – and you should know it

Women in the public eye

Catherine’s treatment throughout history reflects our problematic relationship with women’s roles in public life. There has been a long history of hostility to women of power and women in power.

The Serpent Queen traces Catherine’s life from the trials of her childhood to the beginning of what would become almost 30 years as a central figure in the reigns of her sons. Here we have an engaging Catherine with agency, narrated by Catherine herself. Her lines even echo speeches recorded by contemporary ambassadors.

Does Catherine at last have the final word?

This Catherine seems to seek our sympathy. She looks and speaks directly to us, seemingly eliciting our understanding of her decisions. “Tell me what you would have done differently?” she asks us.

But it is perhaps our collusion in the making of a familiar version of Catherine the series seeks to elicit.

Is this a new Catherine for new times, complex, contextualised, freed from the “bad girl” reputation that has followed her through time? Or a dangerously attractive, lavish rehash of Catherine as “bad girl” all over again?

The Serpent Queen is now airing on Stan.

Susan Broomhall receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is the author of the book, The Identities of Catherine de’ Medici, published by Brill in 2021.

– ref. Who was Catherine de’ Medici? The Serpent Queen gives us a clever, powerful and dangerous woman – https://theconversation.com/who-was-catherine-de-medici-the-serpent-queen-gives-us-a-clever-powerful-and-dangerous-woman-189541

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Crystal Abidin, Associate Professor & ARC DECRA Fellow, Internet Studies, Curtin University

An American seven-year-old named Tariq went viral on the internet last month after appearing in an 85-second Instagram clip professing his love for corn. His quirky quips, including the catchphrase “Have a cornstastic day!” quickly found favour with internet audiences, who turned him into the meme affectionately known as “Corn Kid”.

At the time of writing, the original Instagram clip has been viewed over 26 million times and has been widely reposted by several other accounts across Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok.

On the strength of accidental viral popularity, Corn Kid is now well on his way to becoming a child celebrity. His time in the limelight has followed a predictable path carved out over the past decade as the era of “cute videos of kids” has given way to a full-blown child influencer industry.

Turning accidental virality into commercial opportunities

Corn Kid’s humorous interview was auto-tuned into a catchy song “It’s corn!” by comedy music YouTubers The Gregory Brothers. He began featuring in a string of content collaborations with notable influencers. He was even recently named “Corn-bassador” – an ambassador of corn – for South Dakota in the US.

But Corn Kid’s serendipitous fame has also brought tangible commercial opportunities.

He starred in a social media ad for Chipotle that went viral, and also registered an account on Cameo – a video-sharing platform where users can pay for personalised video messages.

And it is here where what seems like fun on the internet can begin to have real-world consequences.

Accelerated pathways into ‘child celebrity’

If Corn Kid’s story sounds familiar, it is because this rapid pathway from “accidental virality” to “meme celebrity” to “influencer” has been a tried-and-tested recipe for more than a decade.

In 2011, British cousins Sophia Grace and Rosie (then aged 8 and 5, respectively) went viral with a short dance clip. It led to regular appearances on The Ellen Show, followed by music and film opportunities, and careers as YouTube influencers.

In 2014, five-year-old Noah Ritter’s viral street interview eventually led to regular fixtures on talkshows and appearances at cons, after similarly being picked up by The Ellen Show.

But there are also less wholesome examples, such as when 14-year-old Danielle Bregoli went viral for her appearance on the Dr. Phil Show in 2016, after he had called out her bad behaviour and publicly shamed her. She went on to establish herself as a rapper and as a NSFW influencer who reportedly earned US$50 million in her first year.

As I note in my book Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online, young children who go viral on social media are quickly perceived by industry stakeholders as commercial investments to be “spotted and groomed”. And this initial period of instant fame is a critical moment for important decisions.

Some pitfalls of the influencer industry

Parents of children who go viral online often suddenly find themselves in a world of opportunity. Paid cameos, corporate partnerships, offers of talent brokerage and child influencer contracts can line up swiftly. In the growing market, even micro- and mid-tier influencers can demand thousands of dollars for a single post.

As parents are quickly pushed into the glitzy world of child celebrity, there is usually little time to make concerted and informed decisions. Tantalising offers may be short-lived and contingent upon wavering public interest.

Yet, it is important to consider the pitfalls and longer-term consequences in the child influencer industry.

Earlier this year, a TikTok-famous child was sexualised by fan accounts, leading to a public conversation about the safety and privacy of similar child influencers. In another instance, an influencer in my research reported she and her child were involved in a car chase by over-enthusiastic fans.

Read more:
When exploiting kids for cash goes wrong on YouTube: the lessons of DaddyOFive

As advertising opportunities expand in range, parents may also find themselves on a slippery slope as they move from child-centred products to less child-relevant recommendations like car decals and fast food.

Parents must also recognise when their children may no longer enjoy creating content, such as when they need to be “enticed by rewards for compliance to stay in the frame and continue filming”.

In some cases, parents have also been found to exploit and abuse their children when creating sensational content to attract viewers.

In Australia, the industry is growing rapidly.

Navigating unregulated terrain

The child influencer industry is still largely unregulated terrain. One exception is in France, where the government passed a law in 2020 to regulate workable hours, safeguard the income of under-16s, and ensure that companies apply for permission to work with child influencers.

In the UK, a House of Commons committee conducted an inquiry into the child influencer industry in 2021. The UK parliament is presently working on a response to calls for more regulation.

Formal regulations are beginning to catch up with the industry.

In the meantime parents of aspiring child influencers are also doing more to protect their children.

Established “family influencers” on YouTube have role-modelled how to negotiate children’s involvement in content creation – treating it as a reward rather than an obligation, and allowing them to opt out when they want.

Lessons from Asia

I am conducting a five-year ethnography of the influencer industry in Australia and East Asia, during which I have found many more examples of parents doing more to stand up for the interests of their children.

Parents in South Korea are requesting specific clauses in their child influencer contracts with sponsors to give their children more agency. These may accommodate “no shows” if a child refuses to participate in a client event at late notice, or flexibility to renegotiate advertising briefs if a child does not want to engage with the sponsored product or service.

In China, talent managers are trained professionals who act as mediators and brokers for child influencer services. They safeguard access to prominent child influencers, ensure client contracts are fair, educate parents by advising them on legal and contractual matters, and provide quality control for the content that child influencers deliver to clients.

Further, influencer agencies are contractually responsible for any faux pas. Thus, they work quickly to resolve issues that impinge on the welfare of the child.

Even the most loving and well-meaning parents may not have the capacity and skills to protect the interests of their children in the volatile influencer industry. And while change is coming, we can draw on lessons from the past.

Crystal Abidin receives funding from the Australian Research Council (DE190100789). She has previously consulted for Facebook, Google, and Instagram as an independent researcher on policies regarding the safety of minors and child influencers, but is not otherwise affiliated with the platforms.

– ref. It’s corn! How the online viral ‘Corn Kid’ is on a well-worn path to fame in the child influencer industry – https://theconversation.com/its-corn-how-the-online-viral-corn-kid-is-on-a-well-worn-path-to-fame-in-the-child-influencer-industry-189974

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Rickards, Professor, RMIT University

“Work” – broadly defined – is what allows society to function. Like other old certainties, it is under threat from climate change.

A key reason climate-related stresses and disruptions can have such a big impact is precisely because of their effect on the work we do and on the wider system of work we rely on. But little attention has been given to the urgent need to adapt work to climate change.

Our new report on climate impacts at work, released today, documents emerging serious risks.

A female professional told us: “there were days where I simply had to use up sick leave because it was too hot to get safely to work”.

One male sales worker told us about working during the Black Summer of 2019/2020:

Smoke from bushfires two years ago was intolerable. The heat also was horrific at times. During the smokiest days temperatures often shot up to over 40 degrees. It was like the planet Venus. My employer … provided no masks at all at that time, despite numerous requests, even pleadings.

Australia is already 1.4℃ warmer than it was in 1910. Climatic extremes and events like the 2022 floods and Black Summer – as well as many less visible disruptions –  are already undermining our capacity to work across different organisations, industries and sectors.

We will have to get better at adapting to our changed climate – and quickly.

What did we find?

We found the effects of climate change on workers reach more widely than than previously thought.

In short, no one is immune to climate harms, whether indoor or outdoor, junior or senior. Given we rely on each others’ work, that means climate change impacts are likely to increasingly “cascade” through society, as the 2022 IPCC report on Australasia details.

Our research comes from a survey of 1,165 workers across ten industries undertaken in the first half of 2022, assisted by six unions. The sample is not representative of the workforce as a whole and is skewed towards types of workers not typically considered on harms from climate change, such as professionals and community and personal service workers.

Read more:
Unions can – and will – play a leading role in tackling the climate crisis

Previous research has documented the serious ways heat affects workers, especially those outdoors or in poorly cooled spaces. Other studies have found outdoor council workers and delivery cyclists in Sydney are already having to use coping mechanisms such as extra breaks, lighter duties and temporarily stopping work to try to avoid heat stress.

Our data similarly points to heat’s health impacts. Outdoor workers were especially likely to report being tired and fatigued, dehydrated and less productive. They were also more likely to sweat excessively and be sunburnt.

Less recognised is that indoor workers are also being affected by heat and smoke.

These health impacts are serious. Close to 450 people died from the effects of smoke inhalation over the Black Summer. These issues were compounded by the COVID pandemic, notably for those workers who have to had to wear personal protective equipment or work from poorly cooled houses during heatwave conditions.

Climate change can undermine people’s capacity to work in other ways. Some workers reported impacts on the amount and focus of their work. For example, some had to take on new tasks to cover for colleagues who were overwhelmed or furloughed due to the Black Summer fires. A quarter reported having to work additional hours due to emergency situations such as the floods, while others reported they had lost hours, had to take personal leave or even lost their job as a result of climatic events.

There are even impacts from climatic effects on the wider public. Half of the survey respondents reported having to manage angrier customers, while 60% said climatic events had led to staffing disruptions. Some reported extreme weather was causing supply chain disruption.

One male professional said:

The frequency of storm events has noticeably increased, and these storms are often more severe with higher wind speeds and rates of precipitation than in the past. […] Our workload has increased accordingly and risk to people and property has also increased.

Management are struggling to come to terms with the frequency and severity of storm events and this is leading to anxiety and conflict with management in relation to the perceived need to close the site, or part of it, during severe weather events. Site closure protects individuals from harm […] but is bad for revenue raising for the many businesses that operate on our site.

Our capacity to work often relies on intricate systems of settlements, infrastructure and services that consist of workplaces and support others. When any of these workplaces are affected, there are flow-on effects.

Our survey found more than a third of workers had not been able to travel to work due to climatic factors. If trains don’t run or roads are blocked, it can bring many workplaces to a halt.

We are now enmeshed in a different climate to the one we grew up in – and it will change more.

To make our societies and systems resilient to climate change, we will have to adapt how, where, when we work, who “we” is, what we work on, and why. This adaptation work is urgent. No one is immune.

Read more:
As heatwaves become more extreme, which jobs are riskiest?

Lauren Rickards received funding from the Victorian Government for the Climate Resilience Living Lab. She is a member of the Victorian Agriculture and Climate Change Council and the Regen Melbourne Research Council. She was a Lead Author on the Australasia chapter for the IPCC 2022 Sixth Assessment Report by Working Group Two on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.

Todd Denham receives funding from the Victorian Government for the Climate Resilience Living Lab.

– ref. ‘Too hard to get to work’: climate change is making workers’ lives more difficult – https://theconversation.com/too-hard-to-get-to-work-climate-change-is-making-workers-lives-more-difficult-190442

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carl Mika, Professor of Māori and Indigenous Studies, University of Canterbury

In 2017, the Whanganui River was made a person in the eyes of the law. The Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act acknowledged, in its own way, that the human world includes other, more-than-human entities.

It was perceived at the time as quite a radical step for the law, and it is undoubtedly legally significant. But this profound interconnection that underpins all things has been self-evident for Māori and other Indigenous peoples for millennia.

With all things in the world possessing one fundamental essence, any single object owes its existence to everything else. Within one object, everything else resides. The Te Awa Tupua Act took a conceptual step towards recognising this in law.

Depending on who one is talking to, these metaphysical concepts may be called spiritual or holistic, or they may have no label. But it is clearly important that we employ a language that accommodates this thinking, and that its terms are treated with the integrity they’re due, even in the political sphere.

Te Reo Māori is often invoked as one such language – a spiritual taonga, gifted by human and non-human ancestors, and imbued with their presence. It registers the more-than-human realm – Te Po (night), Te Kore (nothingness), and so on – while talking about a single thing.

These more abstract dimensions of te reo Māori, however, can clash with the generally more instrumentalist use of language in policy and law.

Deeper meanings

So it was that earlier this year Justice Minister Kiritapu Allan objected to the tokenistic use of te reo Māori in government departments. Other Māori have objected to this too, and the issue also arises in the debates around science and mātauranga Māori, and tikanga and law.

The problem, one suspects, relates to the overuse and inappropriate use of te reo Māori. Indeed, there may be times when the taonga status of the language can only be honoured when we decide not to use te reo in certain circumstances.

With these political and philosophical concerns at the forefront, one arm of my research has been to examine – from a Māori vantage point, where all things are interconnected or “one” – how a Māori text does not essentially connect with its English translation.

Read more:
Three rivers are now legally people – but that’s just the start of looking after them

With Kiritapu Allan’s challenge in mind, and in light of this year’s 50th anniversary of the Māori language petition itself, consider the position of te reo Māori in policy and legal texts. From a Māori perspective of the interconnectedness of things, there is a particularly isolating, divisive tendency in English, which diminishes full Māori meanings.

Words such as “whakapapa” and “whanau”, for example, often lack their more holistic dimensions in these contexts. Ironically, they have no whakapapa or whanaungatanga with the text. The surrounding English text in law and policy will emphasise measurable, tangible things, whereas te reo terms always refer to intangible worlds as well.

The problem for te reo Māori in these situations is that a term’s “essence” – some might call this its “wairua” – has been modified to refer and equate to an English language term, and also to conform to a colonising worldview in the background.

The Māori worldview

As I said earlier, this worldview is isolating. It separates out things in the world, it actively rejects their togetherness and their relationship with the more-than-human, and it inhibits te reo Māori’s ability to transcend human existence.

We see a warping of te reo Maori in these circumstances – a negating of its spiritual character in order to refer to more tangible things. “Whakapapa” in those instances merely refers to genealogy, “whanau” to human family.

Read more:
Linguistics locates the beginnings of the Austronesian expansion – with Indigenous seafaring people in eastern Taiwan

Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori offers a chance to recall and honour the work of those who have fought to increase the number of Māori speakers. Through their efforts we’ve seen the language flourish in areas we would never have dreamed of only a decade ago.

But with the language now being so widely deployed in previously unforeseen ways and contexts, it’s also timely to think about how the spiritual reality of te reo should be preserved against these colonising backdrops.

When English will do

This is just as important as the effort to have te reo widely used. Sometimes the two camps may not agree with each other, either. It might involve, for instance, not being scared to reject an offer to use te reo Māori in certain forums.

Wherever we see the naturally expansive nature of te reo Māori being “disciplined” by other registers of language, we need to consider withdrawing it. We would simply advise policymakers and legislators to use English terms if they are referring to a non-Māori worldview.

This might seem unthinkable for many, given the apparent push to use te reo Māori at every opportunity to ensure its survival. But it would also be the face of a deeper mission to ensure te reo Māori accords with a Māori worldview.

Instead of being forced to act as a receptacle for a colonising worldview, te reo Māori could “take a breather” to allow Māori to discuss the issue in more depth. After that, it might be that our precious terms are returned to the text with special provisos – or maybe not at all.

Carl Mika does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Tokenism and te reo Māori: why some things just shouldn’t be translated – https://theconversation.com/tokenism-and-te-reo-maori-why-some-things-just-shouldnt-be-translated-190140

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew King, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The University of Melbourne

After weeks of anticipation, it’s finally official: the Bureau of Meteorology has declared another La Niña is underway. This means Australia’s east coast will likely endure yet another wet, and relatively cool, spring and summer.

It’s the third La Niña event in a row. This is rare, but not unheard of. Triple La Niñas have also occurred in, for example, 1973–1976 and 1998–2001.

The past two La Niñas mean water catchments are already full, and soils are sodden from Noosa in the north through to Lismore and the Hunter Valley in the south. It means more flood events are likely in the coming months.

The bureau’s declaration will be unwelcome news to many people – especially those in parts of New South Wales and Queensland still recovering from recent floods. So what else can flood-weary Australians expect in the coming months? And is a fourth La Niña on the cards?

A potentially mild La Niña

La Niña is part of a natural climate cycle over the tropical Pacific Ocean. Sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific vary between being warmer than average (El Niño) and cooler than average (La Niña).

This variability has worldwide effects as it shifts weather patterns – bringing droughts to some regions and floods to others.

For most of Australia, La Niña raises the chance of rain. It has contributed to some of Australia’s wettest ever conditions, and some of the driest in the southern United States across the Pacific Ocean.

The Bureau of Meteorology says this La Niña may peak during spring, and return to neutral conditions early in 2023. Most seasonal prediction models are suggesting this La Niña event will be weaker and shorter-lived than the last two.

Typically, stronger La Niña seasons are associated with more extreme rainfall in eastern Australia. So hopefully a mild La Niña comes to pass and flood-hit regions avoid the worst of the summertime rain, at least.

La Niña is a part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a natural phenomenon. We know these events have occurred in the past – before large-scale greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.

We don’t yet know how La Niña may change as the planet continues to warm, but evidence suggests climate change may make La Niña (and its counterpart El Niño) events more frequent and intense.

And research from earlier this year suggests relationships between La Niña and regional climate may become stronger over many parts of the world, including much of Australia. This could mean Australia feels the force of La Niña and El Niño events more in future as the planet continues to heat.

Three climate forces at work

It’s not just La Niña affecting Australia’s climate at the moment. Two other natural climate forces are also in play: the Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode.

The Indian Ocean Dipole is characterised by variable sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean, and the Southern Annular Mode by the positioning of winds and weather systems to Australia’s south.

We’re currently in a “negative” Indian Ocean Dipole and a “positive” phase of the Southern Annular Mode.

These all have different effects on the Australian climate. In springtime, these conditions – in combination with La Niña – are conducive to more rain in eastern Australia.

We saw all three of these phenomena occur simultaneously in the spring of 2010, when eastern Australia experienced record high rainfall.

It’s too early to say where exactly in Australia is most likely to experience flooding this spring. While La Niña, the negative Indian Ocean Dipole and positive Southern Annular Mode raise the chances of rainfall, individual weather systems and their trajectories will determine where the worst is located.

Read more:
A wet spring: what is a ‘negative Indian Ocean Dipole’ and why does it mean more rain for Australia’s east?

What does La Niña mean for drought and bushfire?

One positive aspect of La Niña is it keeps drought out of the picture for the time being. Some of Australia’s worst droughts are characterised by a lack of La Niña or negative Indian Ocean Dipole conditions over several years. Eastern Australia is unlikely to experience severe drought in the near future.

The La Niña conditions also reduce the likelihood that we’ll see a bad bushfire season in eastern Australia this coming summer.

But it isn’t all good news. La Niña and the other climate influences raise the chances of plant growth and greening in eastern Australia. And this could provide fuel for future fires once conditions dry out again.

Historically, major bushfire seasons in eastern Australia have often followed La Niña events. In 2011, after a La Niña and very wet conditions, we saw some of the biggest fires on record.

A background trend towards hotter, drier weather due to climate change could spell trouble down the track.

Another effect of the triple La Niña is that we haven’t seen record high global-average temperatures since 2016 (noting that 2020 and 2016 are almost tied). This is despite our continued very high greenhouse gas emissions, which have rebounded since the pandemic-associated dip.

La Niña typically reduces global-mean temperatures slightly by cooling a large area of the Pacific Ocean – but this is a temporary effect. Record high global-average temperatures will come again soon, and are more likely when the next El Niño occurs.

Read more:
2021 was one of the hottest years on record – and it could also be the coldest we’ll ever see again

Could we have a fourth La Niña?

Many Australians hoping La Niña was behind us for a few years now have to contend with a third in a row.

While we’ve seen triple La Niña events before, we have never seen quadruple La Niña in the historical record. This doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. In fact, the 2001-2002 season that followed the 1998-2001 triple La Niña wasn’t a long way off from being yet another La Niña.

For now, we must prepare for a wet spring and possibly another wet summer to come.

Severe flooding is more likely than usual in already flood-hit zones, so lessons learnt from the devastation caused by the recent floods should be put in place.

Read more:
No, not again! A third straight La Niña is likely – here’s how you and your family can prepare

Andrew King receives funding from the National Environmental Science Program.

– ref. La Niña, 3 years in a row: a climate scientist on what flood-weary Australians can expect this summer – https://theconversation.com/la-nina-3-years-in-a-row-a-climate-scientist-on-what-flood-weary-australians-can-expect-this-summer-190542

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

As well as her interviews with politicians and experts, Politics with Michelle Grattan includes “Word from The Hill”, where she discusses the news with members of The Conversation politics team.

In this podcast Michelle and Amanda Dunn, the Conversation’s politics editor, canvass Anthony Albanese’s announcement of ten “everyday” Australians who will travel with him to the United Kingdom on Thursday for the Queen’s funeral, which will be held on Monday. They include Dylan Alcott, 2022 Australian of the Year.

Amanda and Michelle also discuss the (slightly delayed) introduction of the legislation for a national integrity body, the future of the republic issue, and Albanese’s determination to follow proper processes.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Word from The Hill: Will Queen Elizabeth’s death affect Australian politics? – https://theconversation.com/word-from-the-hill-will-queen-elizabeths-death-affect-australian-politics-190558

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachael Sharman, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of the Sunshine Coast

The numbers of climate sceptics are dwindling. But they remain a noisy and at times powerful minority that continues to have political influence. This group is unmoved by the near-universal agreement among scientists on the reality and impact of climate change.

Past research into climate change scepticism has focused on sociodemographics. It has found people are more likely to express scepticism if they are older, male, highly value individualistic beliefs and don’t value the environment.

These characteristics are generally entrenched. It means this information, while interesting, may be of little use when trying to increase public support for climate action.

Our latest study of Australian sceptics focused on potentially more malleable factors – including the thought processes of people who reject climate science messaging. Our findings suggest some people reject consensus science and generate other explanations due to mistrust in climate science and uncritical faith in “alternative science”.

We hope these findings help researchers, scientists and those responsible for public messaging to understand and overcome sceptics’ concerns.

Read more:
Almost 90% of us now believe climate change is a problem – across all political persuasions

What factors did the study consider?

For our research, we surveyed 390 Australian climate change sceptics. They were recruited via social media, including from sceptic interest groups and websites. We explored whether the following variables predicted climate change scepticism above and beyond sociodemographic factors:

• the extent to which you feel your life’s outcomes are within your personal control, or are mostly influenced by external factors

• information-processing style

• trust in those who defend the industrial capitalist system against accusations that its activities are causing harm.

We broke scepticism down into four types based on rejection of, or uncertainty about:

1. the reality of climate change

2. its causes

3. its impacts

4. the need to follow scientific advice.

Read more:
Why old-school climate denial has had its day

Similar to previous research, our study found:

• older people were more likely to be sceptical of the reality of climate change

• conservatives were more likely to be sceptical of the reality, causes and impacts of climate change

• lower environmental values were strongly linked to all types of scepticism.

Unlike in the United States, we found religious beliefs had little influence on climate change sceptics in the largely secular Australian population. Instead, they had faith in “alternative” or pseudo-science explanations.

Those who favoured explanations of chance, believing that luck determines outcomes, were also more likely to believe there was no need to act on climate change.

This suggests those who believe outcomes in life are beyond their control are more likely to think individual action on climate change is of little use. Hence, we suggest increased efforts to emphasise the difference individual efforts can make.

Those with stronger individualistic worldviews – their priority is individual autonomy as opposed to a more collectivist worldview – were more sceptical about humans causing climate change.

Contrary to our predictions, people with high analytical abilities were even more likely to be sceptical about this. Our further analyses suggested that mistrust in climate science and uncritical faith in “alternative science” prompted them to reject consensus science and generate other explanations.

Read more:
Climate explained: why some people still think climate change isn’t real

How people explain their scepticism

We asked participants to explain their scepticism. From their responses, we identified five overarching themes:

1. faith in alternative science – they offered answers such as “real science concerning solar activity and other factors such as planetary tides” to explain their rejection of climate science

2. belief that climate changes naturally and cyclically – expressions such as “the climate has always changed quite naturally and always will. Nothing we can do about it” defend against the overwhelming evidence of human-enhanced climate change for five decades or more

3. mistrust in climate science – questions such as “how can anyone support a premise supported by consensus science based on adjusted temps?” invoke claims of data manipulation to support the supposedly nefarious aims of climate scientists

4. predictions not becoming reality – explanations such as “seeing climate change alarmists’ predictions being completely false” result from a basic misunderstanding of model-based climate projections (“prediction” is rarely used any more) and probabilities

5. ulterior motives of interested parties – claims such as “the Man-Made climate change HOAX is pushed by the UN to transfer wealth to poorer nations and make wealthier nations poorer” are contradicted by recent studies that suggest soaring adaptation costs in developed countries like Australia will limit their future generosity to poorer neighbours.

Read more:
Pacific Islands must stop relying on foreign aid to adapt to climate change, because the money won’t last

So how do we begin to change minds?

In all, our results suggest climate change scepticism may be influenced by:

• favoured explanations of pseudoscience and/or belief that events happen by chance
• a belief that the problem is too large, complex and costly for individuals to deal with alone.

Unlike sociodemographic characteristics, these thought processes may more open to targeted public messaging.

In the end, reality bites. Multi-year droughts and successive never-before-seen floods will struggle to fit a sceptic narrative of yet another “one-in-100-year event”. Even the attitudes of Australian farmers, including some of the most entrenched sceptics, are shifting.

Climate change is upon us, and scepticism is rapidly becoming a topic for historians, not futurists.

Patrick D. Nunn receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Natural Environment Research Council (UK) and the British Academy (UK)

Rachael Sharman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Inside the mind of a sceptic: the ‘mental gymnastics’ of climate change denial – https://theconversation.com/inside-the-mind-of-a-sceptic-the-mental-gymnastics-of-climate-change-denial-189645

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

Much has been written about how, with the passing of the Queen, we have lost one of our last continuing links to the second world war.

We have, but we have also lost something even more profound – the link she gave us back to when the kind of world we know began.

On Tuesday last week Queen Elizabeth appointed a new prime minister of Britain, Liz Truss, who was born in 1975.

Seven decades earlier, Elizabeth II ascended to the role alongside Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was born in 1874.

That her first and last prime ministers were born a century apart is remarkable enough. But it is particularly significant that the thread of her reign extended all the way back, through Churchill, to the 1870s. That’s when, according to a new economic book, the expectations we all grew up first began.

As the new UK Prime Minister was sworn in last week, University of California, Berkeley economist Bradford DeLong published his long-awaited Slouching Towards Utopia. It’s an economic history of what he calls “the long 20th century”, a century he says began in 1870.

Why 1870, and not 1901, or even a century earlier at the start of the industrial revolution?

Because, DeLong says, right up until the 1870s living standards hadn’t changed much.

More importantly, living standards hadn’t changed much since the dawn of recorded time.

Until 1870, we weren’t much better off

In the millennia leading up to the birth of agriculture, what humans were able to produce barely increased at all.

In the 10,000-odd years between the year minus-8000 and the industrial revolution in 1500, our ability to produce food and other things increased tenfold, still not enough to be noticed over our (short) lifetimes.

Our ability to produce more than doubled again between 1500 and the 1870. But so did population, which kept most people desperately short of calories – and in near continual childbirth in an attempt to produce surviving sons – while necessitating smaller farm sizes that blunted the benefits of mechanisation.

From the 1870s, life got a lot better – fast

Then, from the decade of Churchill’s birth, things went spectacularly right.

Delong writes that in 1870 the daily wages of an unskilled male worker in London, the city then at the forefront of economic growth, would buy him and his family about 5,000 calories worth of bread. In 1600 it had been 3,000 calories.

He says today the daily wages of such an unskilled worker would buy 2,400,000 calories worth of bread: nearly 500 times as much.

The population grew, but our ability to produce things grew far faster. It grew to the point where, even in our lifetimes, we could see things getting better.

In the words of Billy Joel, every child had “a pretty good shot to get at least as far as their old man got”.

Unimaginable change in one lifetime

From the 1870s on, continual improvements in living standards became a birthright – not for everyone, but for humanity as a whole.

As did the development of once unimaginable products. The motor car, the radio, the television and the computer became ubiquitous during Queen Elizabeth’s life.

With more to go around, it became easier to share rather than take things. Democracies grew to the point where they became natural.

Economically, DeLong credits the development of research labs, modern corporations and cheap ocean transport that “destroyed distance as a cost factor”.

From the 1870s onwards, people were able to get what they wanted from where it was made, and were able to seek better lives by travelling to where they were needed.

Most economists didn’t see it coming

The market economy was necessary for this explosion in living standards, but not sufficient. People had bought and sold things for prices for millennia, but the prices had little to work with.

Almost no one saw such an extraordinary change coming.

The leading economist of the 1870s, John Stuart Mill, wrote it was “questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being”. They had merely “enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment”.

Mill wanted population control. He wanted the expanding “pie” to be split among the people we had, rather than the hordes that would grow to cut each slice back to size.

Read more:
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The fathers of communism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, saw things more clearly.
They expected technology and the taming of nature to produce so much wealth that there would one day be more than enough to go around, making the problem one of how to make sure it went around.

DeLong sees the long 20th century that began in 1870 as an ever-shifting battle between those who wanted the market to determine the distribution of wealth (believing it was the best way to grow the pie), against those who believed such unfairness wasn’t what they signed up for.

The end of certainty

How long did that “long 20th century” last? DeLong thinks it ended in 2010, making it a long century of 140 years. Since the global financial crisis, we have been unable to return economic growth to anything like the pace of those 140 glorious years.

Today, DeLong says material wealth remains “criminally” unevenly distributed. And even for those who have enough, it doesn’t seem to make us happy – at least “not in a world where politicians and others prosper mightily from finding new ways to make and keep people unhappy”.

DeLong sees “large system-destabilizing waves of political and cultural anger from masses of citizens, all upset in different ways at the failure of the system of the twentieth century to work for them as they thought that it should.”

Read more:
Beyond GDP: changing how we measure progress is key to tackling a world in crisis – three leading experts

Not only are we not near the end of the Utopian rainbow, Delong says the end of the rainbow is “no longer visible, even if we had previously thought that it was”.

King Charles III inherits a future with no guarantee of ever-increasing living standards, no guarantee human ingenuity will prevail over global warming, and no guarantee democracy will prevail.

It’s almost impossible to predict what the rest of this century has in store. But that’s how it was in the 1870s too – when even the brightest minds of the time couldn’t imagine what was to come.

Peter Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The certainty of ever-growing living standards we grew up with under Queen Elizabeth is at an end – https://theconversation.com/the-certainty-of-ever-growing-living-standards-we-grew-up-with-under-queen-elizabeth-is-at-an-end-190425

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julie Andrews, Professor Indigenous Research & Convenor of Aboriginal Studies, La Trobe University

The family of Uncle Jack Charles have given permission for his name and images to be used.

Once again, Aboriginal Melbourne is mourning the loss of another iconic member of its community – Uncle Jack Charles.

Uncle Jack Charles was born on the Cummeragunja Aboriginal Reserve in 1943 and was descended from the Victorian peoples of the Boon Wurrung, Dja Dja Wurrung, Woiwurrung and the Yorta Yorta. He spent his life retracing his ancestral heritage after being forcibly removed from his family.

His search brought about happy and sad stories that he documented for us all across his autobiography, screen and theatre. He took us on his journey and cemented this as proof for generations to come. His search for his family even led him to the shores of Tasmania where he was also descended from.

At this year’s NAIDOC week, Uncle Jack was awarded the 2022 Male Elder of the Year. In his acceptance speech, he drew attention to the prisoners he visited. He was always dedicated to acknowledging those who looked on from the sidelines, and to fight for change.

It was fitting he received that award. Thank you, Uncle Jack, for bringing to people’s minds and homes to not fear the other. No doubt there is mourning across all Aboriginal communities, prisoners and street people across Australia.

Read more:
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Truth telling

Uncle Jack Charles was a valued member of our Aboriginal community. His commitment to advocating on behalf of incarcerated Aboriginal people knew no bounds.

Despite the hardships he faced of abuse as a child and incarceration as a young adult, his life made a difference to many others to hold their head up and not be ashamed. We are not invisible, and for this we thank you Uncle Jack.

His truth telling of his personal experiences as a member of the Stolen Generation opened the minds and understanding of many Australians, making it easier for his people to find a voice.

He spoke for all Aboriginal people who struggle with everyday life. He helped people believe in the future. He showed no matter what wrong they might have done in the eyes of the law, or in the eyes of other people, there is a way to come to your own understanding and gain control of the situation.

Uncle Jack would have said this much better than I can. That is what was so inspiring about him: the way he spoke about his life experiences as a child, a youth, a young man and an adult.

To us, he was a well travelled Elder that brought so much teaching and knowledge to those who struggled or were forced to live in alternative ways. He never judged others – except to call out where there was injustice for those who did not have a voice.

He gave us his life teachings and, in return, there was human understanding and support for those he advocated for.

Read more:
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An amazing artist

Uncle Jack’s work towards understanding and comprehending the impact of government policies upon Aboriginal children and the trauma they carry with them as a result of being institutionalised became just one of the many roles he created.

His training as an actor instilled within him the most eloquent speech.

There will never be another Jack Charles – his ability to educate and tell a narrative on stage, in a television commercial and his pure acting talent in a film.

As an actor, performer and author he documented his life. He controlled his own narrative.

In 2008, his documentary Bastardy told of his life as a street person and heroin addict. It was a groundbreaking teaching to those who did not know about living with addiction. By placing his own heroin use in the spotlight, he created an awareness of the perils of addiction and incarceration.

He toured the world with his brilliant 2010 stage play, Jack Charles vs the Crown. Through storytelling and song, he converted government assimilation policy into an artform and a teaching tool.

Telling stories of the plight of Aboriginal homelessness, mental health and incarcerated men and women, he could reach an audience of all ages and make a connection to them.

Across Melbourne, he was easily recognised in streets, cafes and continued to be a valued member of the Aboriginal community.

Most of all, the younger generations recognised him. He had the ability to speak to them and they listened.

The young ones across Australia are feeling shock and disbelief today. My son asked “Why?”; my nephew texted me today and said “Aunt, I met him a few times, he was deadly, a deadly man”.

Yes, he was.

Julie Andrews receives funding from Australian Research Council.

– ref. ‘He was deadly, a deadly man’: remembering the incredible life and work of Uncle Jack Charles – https://theconversation.com/he-was-deadly-a-deadly-man-remembering-the-incredible-life-and-work-of-uncle-jack-charles-190533

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joyce Siette, Research Fellow, Western Sydney University

What’s the daily routine like for older people in residential aged care facilities?

To find out, we spent 312 hours observing 39 residents at six Australian aged care facilities to find out how and where they spend their time across the day. We wanted to know how socially engaged residents actually were and how this could affect their wellbeing.

Our study, published in the journal PLOS One, highlights some long-standing issues in aged care but also provides promise.

Residents were largely active, both in terms of communicating with other people in the centre and in terms of doing activities. But there’s more we can do to create opportunities for socialising.

Read more:
Overseas recruitment won’t solve Australia’s aged care worker crisis

Humans are a social species

Transitioning from life at home to life in aged care can be challenging, often linked with loss of independence, loss of identity, and loss of control.

Many also associate moving into aged care with a decline in their social lives and overall physical health.

So it’s no surprise people living in aged care homes suffer from generally low levels of wellbeing.

Previous research has found residents hardly attend activities in their facility. The conversations they do have are often with care staff – these are very rare, short, and mainly about their physical care.

However, previous studies often fail to capture critical aspects of how and where socialisation occurs in aged care.

We know humans are a social creatures and that we’re wired to connect, with more social connections boosting our overall wellbeing.

That’s why we decided to take a closer look at how aged care residents spend their time.

What we found

During the 312 hours we spent observing 39 residents, we found a day in the life of a resident looks something like this:

• waking up in the morning and getting ready for the day (with the help of personal care staff if necessary)

• attending the dining room for breakfast and spending most of the morning in the common area or lounge room – perhaps participating in an activity run by the lifestyle staff at the facility – before returning to the dining room for lunch

• after that, depending on whether there is an activity being organised, most will go back to their own rooms to recuperate before coming back to the dining room for dinner in the early evening.

We found social interactions peak at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Across the day, residents

• spent the greatest proportion of time (45%) in their own room

• were alone 47.9% of the time

• were inactive 25.6% of the time

• were most likely to chat with other residents, followed by staff, then family

• outside of meal times, residents had conversations in the common area or in their own rooms.

Overall, residents spent more than half their time being socially and physically active.

Over a third of their time was spent with another resident. Spending time with other residents was most likely to be associated with a higher quality of life.

We also found spending time with staff or too much time alone was linked to poorer quality of life.

Creating opportunities for socially active lives

Based on our research, here are three ways aged care providers and governments can do to improve older Australians’ wellbeing:

1. Improve staffing

Staff shortages and time pressures are key reasons why residents spend little time with staff.

Including more activities chosen and assisted by residents in aged care facilities could help create new social opportunities between residents and strengthen existing ones.

2. Tailor Montessori programs to the aged care environment

Montessori programs create a collaborative approach filled with self-directed activities with hands-on learning and play. Activities include things like sorting and recognising objects, completing puzzles, and practising opening locks.

Montessori programs in small groups or led by family members would suit the smaller staff to resident ratios in many aged care centres. They would also help residents (including those with dementia) regain some independence, feel less bored or isolated and have a sense of purpose.

3. Change the physical environment and offer more afternoon activities

Changing the physical environment to accommodate for more social spaces would go a long way to help.

Increasing the number of activities in the afternoon would mean residents have more opportunities to socialise with each other, especially those who are busy with personal care routines in the mornings.

Doing residential aged care differently

After media reports and a royal commission highlighted the failings of Australia’s aged care system, it’s time to think differently about aged care.

Our study reveals residents can and do socialise, and that it can significantly improve people’s quality of life.

We must now find ways to change aged care environments and practices to create more social opportunities.

Read more:
Complaints, missing persons, assaults – contracting outside workers in aged care increases problems

Joyce Siette is affiliated with the Australian Association of Gerontology.

Laura Dodds receives funding from Macquarie University.

– ref. What do aged care residents do all day? We tracked their time use to find out – https://theconversation.com/what-do-aged-care-residents-do-all-day-we-tracked-their-time-use-to-find-out-190147

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rodolfo Ocampo, PhD student, Human–AI Creative Collaboration, UNSW Sydney

An art prize at the Colorado State Fair was awarded last month to a work that – unbeknown to the judges – was generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) system.

Social media have also seen an explosion of weird images generated by AI from text descriptions, such as “the face of a shiba inu blended into the side of a loaf of bread on a kitchen bench, digital art”.

Or perhaps “A sea otter in the style of ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ by Johannes Vermeer”:

You may be wondering what’s going on here. As somebody who researches creative collaborations between humans and AI, I can tell you that behind the headlines and memes a fundamental revolution is under way – with profound social, artistic, economic and technological implications.

How we got here

You could say this revolution began in June 2020, when a company called OpenAI achieved a big breakthrough in AI with the creation of GPT-3, a system that can process and generate language in much more complex ways than earlier efforts. You can have conversations with it about any topic, ask it to write a research article or a story, summarise text, write a joke, and do almost any imaginable language task.

Read more:
Robots are creating images and telling jokes. 5 things to know about foundation models and the next generation of AI

In 2021, some of GPT-3’s developers turned their hand to images. They trained a model on billions of pairs of images and text descriptions, then used it to generate new images from new descriptions. They called this system DALL-E, and in July 2022 they released a much-improved new version, DALL-E 2.

Like GPT-3, DALL-E 2 was a major breakthrough. It can generate highly detailed images from free-form text inputs, including information about style and other abstract concepts.

For example, here I asked it to illustrate the phrase “Mind in Bloom” combining the styles of Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse and Brett Whiteley.

Competitors enter the scene

Since the launch of DALL-E 2, a few competitors have emerged. One is the free-to-use but lower-quality DALL-E Mini (developed independently and now renamed Craiyon), which was a popular source of meme content.

Around the same time, a smaller company called Midjourney released a model that more closely matched DALL-E 2’s capabilities. Though still a little less capable than DALL-E 2, Midjourney has lent itself to interesting artistic explorations. It was with Midjourney that Jason Allen generated the artwork that won the Colorado State Art Fair competition.

Google too has a text-to-image model, called Imagen, which supposedly produces much better results than DALL-E and others. However, Imagen has not yet been released for wider use so it is difficult to evaluate Google’s claims.

In July 2022, OpenAI began to capitalise on the interest in DALL-E, announcing that 1 million users would be given access on a pay-to-use basis.

However, in August 2022 a new contender arrived: Stable Diffusion.

Stable Diffusion not only rivals DALL-E 2 in its capabilities, but more importantly it is open source. Anyone can use, adapt and tweak the code as they like.

Already, in the weeks since Stable Diffusion’s release, people have been pushing the code to the limits of what it can do.

To take one example: people quickly realised that, because a video is a sequence of images, they could tweak Stable Diffusion’s code to generate video from text.

Another fascinating tool built with Stable Diffusion’s code is Diffuse the Rest, which lets you draw a simple sketch, provide a text prompt, and generate an image from it. In the video below, I generated a detailed photo of a flower from a very rough sketch.

In a more complicated example below, I am starting to build software that lets you draw with your body, then use Stable Diffusion to turn it into a painting or photo.

The end of creativity?

What does it mean that you can generate any sort of visual content, image or video, with a few lines of text and a click of a button? What about when you can generate a movie script with GPT-3 and a movie animation with DALL-E 2?

And looking further forward, what will it mean when social media algorithms not only curate content for your feed, but generate it? What about when this trend meets the metaverse in a few years, and virtual reality worlds are generated in real time, just for you?

These are all important questions to consider.

Some speculate that, in the short term, this means human creativity and art are deeply threatened.

Perhaps in a world where anyone can generate any images, graphic designers as we know them today will be redundant. However, history shows human creativity finds a way. The electronic synthesiser did not kill music, and photography did not kill painting. Instead, they catalysed new art forms.

I believe something similar will happen with AI generation. People are experimenting with including models like Stable Diffusion as a part of their creative process.

Or using DALL-E 2 to generate fashion-design prototypes:

A new type of artist is even emerging in what some call “promptology”, or “prompt engineering”. The art is not in crafting pixels by hand, but in crafting the words that prompt the computer to generate the image: a kind of AI whispering.

Collaborating with AI

The impacts of AI technologies will be multidimensional: we cannot reduce them to good or bad on a single axis.

New artforms will arise, as will new avenues for creative expression. However, I believe there are risks as well.

Read more:
So this is how it feels when the robots come for your job: what GitHub’s Copilot ‘AI assistant’ means for coders

We live in an attention economy that thrives on extracting screen time from users; in an economy where automation drives corporate profit but not necessarily higher wages, and where art is commodified as content; in a social context where it is increasingly hard to distinguish real from fake; in sociotechnical structures that too easily encode biases in the AI models we train. In these circumstances, AI can easily do harm.

How can we steer these new AI technologies in a direction that benefits people? I believe one way to do this is to design AI that collaborates with, rather than replaces, humans.

Rodolfo Ocampo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. AI art is everywhere right now. Even experts don’t know what it will mean – https://theconversation.com/ai-art-is-everywhere-right-now-even-experts-dont-know-what-it-will-mean-189800

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patricia A. O’Brien, Faculty Member, Asian Studies Program, Georgetown University; Visiting Fellow, Department of Pacific Affairs, Australian National University; Adjunct Fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC., Georgetown University

If you are trying to find traces of the United States’ long and layered ties with the Pacific Islands in Washington D.C., you need to look hard. Apart from the names of iconic battles chiselled into the Washington Mall’s second world war memorial, evidence of America’s complex Pacific history stretching back to the beginning of the Republic is not there.

Until very recently, this absence was replicated throughout Washington’s institutions, where the Pacific Islands have been at the back of mind since those epic battles were fought 80 years ago.

But over the past few months, things have changed.

The reason for this dramatic shift is plain for all to see: China. Washington is now undergoing a Pacific re-discovery that goes all the way to the top.

At the end of September, US President Joe Biden will host Pacific leaders at the White House for the first US-Pacific Island Country Summit. This will be in the style of the ASEAN meeting held in May.

After the second world war, the US was largely absent in the Pacific. There were notable exceptions, not least the shameful Marshall Islands atomic testing programme that continues to deeply affect the present.

Now the US is striving to be seen and viewed as a force for good in a part of the world where China has been making deep, transformative and worrying inroads for over 15 years.

Read more:
75 years after nuclear testing in the Pacific began, the fallout continues to wreak havoc

This isn’t the first time US postwar hegemony has been challenged in the Pacific. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was disrupting the Pacific Islands power balance and the US responded with a series of treaties and agreements. One was the 1987 South Pacific Tuna Treaty, signed with 16 Pacific Islands. The treaty’s ongoing importance was underscored in recent weeks as part of the renewed US diplomatic drive.

The US also brokered three Compacts of Free Association (COFA) with its former United Nations Trust Territories that became the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of Palau in the mid-1980s. (Rather than becoming independent at this time, the Northern Marianas Islands opted to join American Samoa and Guam as US territories).

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, so too did US interest in the Pacific. But the compacts spurred the formation of numerous Micronesian diaspora communities across the US. Meanwhile, in exchange for certain rights, the COFA states gave the US exclusive control over their oceanic territories and a vital military base on Kwajalein Atoll.

In the current geopolitical context, these 20-year agreements were expiring and languishing, much to the frustration of several congressional representatives from both political sides. Fears of Chinese encroachments spurred the White House into action in March.

Since then, the visibility of the US’s Pacific outreach has risen. Congress took the lead in upping the US game in the Pacific, with numerous bills such as the 2021 Blue Pacific Act. Its budget lines were also designed to address both the immense needs of the region and shore-up the geopolitical interests of the US and its friends and allies, not least Australia.

In August, the urgency of US outreach has been on display in the Solomon Islands, the nation most precariously situated in the unfolding geopolitical contest thanks to the security deal signed in April with China.

At the beginning of August, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy led poignant and very personal commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the commencement of the Battle of Guadalcanal in August 1942.

At the month’s end, the US hospital ship Mercy docked in Honiara, where it was welcomed by Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare. Only days before, he had prevented US coastguard cutter, Oliver Henry, from doing likewise.

Along with urgently needed medical, dental and veterinary aid, the Mercy brought music and a sense of celebration, with the US navy band even singing Solomon Islands tunes, in a demonstration of distinctive tone the US now seeks to set.

Also in August, USAID released its five-year Strategic Framework. This detailed how the US is going to rapidly restore itself in the region as it challenges “authoritarian actors” who “challenge the region’s stability and democratic systems”. The three development objectives are:

• strengthening community resilience particularly in the face of acute climate challenges
• bolstering Pacific economies
• strengthening democratic governance.

The framework cites the regional objectives laid out by the Pacific Islands Forum over the past eight years as the framework’s guide in 12 Pacific Island nations. It has a particular agenda to drastically improve the lives and status of women and girls across the region. The USAID plan is ambitious in its hope to transform conservative Pacific societies, while at the same time offer opportunities more attractive than those of China, thereby limiting its power projection throughout the region.

It is the 12 Pacific nations where USAID seeks to expand operations that have been invited to the White House in late September. The withholding of invitations to the remaining members of the Pacific Islands Forum – the Cook Islands, Niue, French Polynesia and New Caledonia – has been duly noted.

It is a puzzling move, but one that indicates the agenda for the summit: for Biden’s administration to specifically develop its US programmes. The recent revelation that the five foreign ministers heading the Partners in the Blue Pacific Initiative (US, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Britain) will meet before the summit also suggests multilateral proposals will be tabled too.

Given how little the region has been seen and heard in Washington, the summit offers a rare opportunity for the administration to listen to what Pacific leaders have to say and reshape their approach accordingly.

Patricia A. O’Brien received funding from the Australian Research Council as a Future Fellow, the Jay I. Kislak Fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. and New Zealand’s JD Stout Trust.

– ref. US takes a renewed interest in the Pacific – and China’s role in it – https://theconversation.com/us-takes-a-renewed-interest-in-the-pacific-and-chinas-role-in-it-190053

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ralph Cooney, Professor Emeritus in Advanced Materials, University of Auckland

More than half of the thousands of satellites in orbit are now defunct, and this accumulation of floating space debris has been described as a “fatal problem” for current and future space missions and human space travel.

An estimated 130 million objects smaller than 1cm and 34,000 larger than 10cm are travelling in orbit at speeds of thousands of kilometres per hour, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). A report presented at this year’s European conference on space debris suggests the amount of space junk could increase fifty-fold by 2100.

While many fragments of space junk are small, they travel so fast their impact has enough energy to disable a satellite or cause significant damage to space stations.

Both the Hubble Telescope and the Solar Maximum Mission (SMM) satellites had coin-sized holes punched into them by flying debris and a mirror on Nasa’s James Webb space telescope was damaged by micrometeoroids.

Most satellites were not designed with the end of their usefulness in mind. About 60% of the 6,000 satellites in orbit are now out of order. Along with the smaller objects these defunct satellites constitute a major problem both for existing and future satellites and space stations.

Mega constellations of satellites currently being sent into space by corporations such as SpaceX and Amazon are expected to transform access to the internet for all countries. But these private telecommunications ventures will also contribute 50,000 more satellites to already dangerously populated orbits.

Scientists have warned the rapid development of mega constellations risks several “tragedies of the commons”, including to ground-based astronomy, Earth’s orbit and Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Read more:
Soon, 1 out of every 15 points of light in the sky will be a satellite

Methods to remove space debris

There is a growing concern, described as the Kessler Syndrome, that we may be creating an envelope of space debris which could prevent human space travel, space exploration and the use of satellites in some parts of Earth’s orbit. This scenario, perpetuated by collisions between space objects creating ever more debris, could also damage our global communications and navigation systems.

This is why the development of practical debris removal technologies is important and urgent. So far, various strategies have been conceptualised to solve the space debris problem and some have been recently prioritised.

To date, not a single orbiting object has been recovered from space successfully.

One of the main problems in designing space debris removal strategies is how to transfer the energy between the debris (target) and the chaser during the first contact. There are two prioritised approaches and a third in development:

• Impact energy dissipation methods seek to decrease the impact energy of the debris. In one approach, the chaser satellite deploys a harpoon to penetrate the space debris. After the successful shot, the chaser satellite, harpoon and target would become connected by an elastic tether and the chaser would pull the debris to re-enter the atmosphere and burn up together.

• Neutral energy balance includes a magnetic capture method which uses magnetic coils to achieve perfect energy balance between chaser and target. This is a soft docking method which is a preliminary step to some subsequent method of debris disposal.

• Destructive energy absorption aims to destroy small debris targets using a high-powered laser. But the challenge is to develop a laser and battery combination that is powerful but lightweight enough. A laboratory in China has been developing a space-based laser system to be installed on a chaser satellite capable of targeting debris of up to 20cm in size. The Nasa Orion project uses ground-based lasers to destroy small debris.

Read more:
A chunk of Chinese satellite almost hit the International Space Station. They dodged it – but the space junk problem is getting worse

The first space removal project is scheduled for 2025 and will be led by the ESA. It involves a consortium approach based on a Swiss spinoff company, ClearSpace.

The ClearSpace chaser will rendezvous with the target and capture it using four robotic arms. The chaser and captured launcher will then be de-orbited and burn up in the atmosphere.

High cost and more pollution

A key challenge is the substantial cost associated with these proposed solutions, given the immense scale of the space debris problem. Another important aspect is the potential impact of space-clearing efforts on our planet’s atmosphere.

The idea that a growing number of satellites and other objects would be incinerated in the atmosphere as they are removed from space concerns climate scientists. Space debris is pulled downward naturally and burns up in the lower atmosphere, but increasing levels of carbon dioxide are reducing the density of the upper atmosphere, which could diminish its capacity to pull debris back towards Earth.

The combustion of more and more satellites and other space debris (80 tonnes per year at present) falling either naturally or via the new removal methods will also release decomposition products into the atmosphere.

These will certainly contribute more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The decomposition of certain materials in satellites is also likely to release chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases, which could damage the ozone shield.

One cannot miss the parallels between the space junk problem and waste recycling. Clearly, we need to devise a circular economy strategy for our space waste.

At present the legal responsibility for space debris lies with the country of origin. This seems to militate against future international cooperative programmes of space junk removal.

Ralph Cooney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Harpoons, robots and lasers: how to capture defunct satellites and other space junk and bring it back to Earth – https://theconversation.com/harpoons-robots-and-lasers-how-to-capture-defunct-satellites-and-other-space-junk-and-bring-it-back-to-earth-189698

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Tomkins, Geologist, Monash University

A “folded diamond” doesn’t sound entirely plausible. But that’s exactly what we’ve found inside a rare group of meteorites known as ureilites, which likely came from the mantle of a dwarf planet or very large asteroid that was destroyed 4.56 billion years ago in a giant collision.

Within these space rocks, we found layered diamonds with distinctive fold patterns. Our discovery is published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Now of course, everyone knows diamond is the hardest naturally occurring material, so the obvious question was – how on Earth (or in space!) could a folded diamond possibly form?!

This was exactly the sort of curiosity-piquing observation that sends scientists diving down rabbit holes for months on end.

A new analysis technique

Carbon, one of the most abundant elements in the universe, can form all kinds of structures. Among the more familiar ones are graphite and, of course, diamond. But there’s also an unusual hexagonal form of diamond known as lonsdaleite, which has been suggested to be even harder than standard cubic diamonds.

Our team includes a bunch of people who drive development of advanced analysis techniques. At CSIRO, Nick Wilson, Colin MacRae and Aaron Torpy developed a new approach in electron microscopy to map the distribution of diamond, graphite and lonsdaleite in the meteorites.

When our mapping suggested the folded diamond might actually be lonsdaleite, we – Dougal McCulloch, Alan Salek and Matthew Field at RMIT – performed a more detailed investigation via a method called high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (TEM).

The results were exciting: we had found some of the largest lonsdaleite crystallites (microscopic crystals) ever discovered, about 1 micrometre across. So, those intriguing fold shapes were composed of polycrystalline lonsdaleite, meaning they were made from numerous tiny crystals.

Reconstructing the cataclysm

And there was even more. We found the lonsdaleite had been partially converted to diamond and graphite, giving us clues to the sequence of events that had happened in the meteorites. Follow-up work at the Australian Synchrotron by Helen Brand confirmed this result.

By comparing the diamond, graphite and lonsdaleite across 18 different ureilite meteorites, we started to form a picture of what probably happened to produce the folded structures we found. At the first stage, graphite crystals folded deep inside the mantle of the asteroid thanks to high temperatures causing the other surrounding minerals to grow, pushing aside the graphite crystals. (You can see this in the schematic below.)

The second stage happened in the aftermath of the gigantic collision that catastrophically disrupted the ureilite parent asteroid. Evidence in the meteorites suggested the disruption event produced a rich mix of fluids and gases as it progressed.

This mix then caused lonsdaleite to form by replacement of the folded graphite crystals, almost perfectly preserving the intricate textures of the graphite. Of course, it’s not actually possible to fold lonsdaleite or diamond – it formed by replacement of pre-existing shapes.

We think this was driven by the hot fluid mix as pressure and temperature dropped immediately after the cataclysm. Then, shortly after, diamond and graphite partially replaced the lonsdaleite as the fluid further decompressed and cooled to form a gas mixture.

Read more:
How rare minerals form when meteorites slam into Earth

Manufacturing clues from nature

The process is quite similar to a process used to manufacture diamonds known as chemical vapour deposition. These manufactured diamonds are widely used in industry today, particularly for cutting and grinding because diamond is so hard. The difference is that we think the lonsdaleite replaced the shaped graphite at moderately higher pressures than those normally used to grow diamonds, from a supercritical fluid rather than a gas.

So, nature appears to have given us clues on how to make shaped ultra-hard micro machine parts! If we can find a way to replicate the process preserved in the meteorites, we can make these machine parts by replacement of pre-shaped graphite with lonsdaleite.

Being able to study these weird folded diamonds was possible because lead author Andrew Tomkins had time to follow his nose – we call this type of research “curiosity-driven science”. However, although curiosity-driven science produces important breakthroughs, it isn’t normally funded by major funding agencies. They like to see well thought-out details for grand projects that already have a solid foundation of prior research.

We think a good way to boost Australia’s innovation would be to provide recognised science innovators a small grant annually to spend on research as they see fit; no questions asked, no justification or follow-up required.

For curiosity-driven research like our project, scientists need a small amount of time (and money) that can be spent with complete freedom; this produces the creativity that drives innovation. You never know what else we might find out there.

Read more:
We created diamonds in mere minutes, without heat — by mimicking the force of an asteroid collision

Andrew Tomkins receives funding from the Australia Research Council.

Alan Salek receives a RSS Scholarship.

Dougal McCulloch receives funding from Australian Research Council.

– ref. Folded diamond has been discovered in a rare type of meteorite. How is this possible? – https://theconversation.com/folded-diamond-has-been-discovered-in-a-rare-type-of-meteorite-how-is-this-possible-190134

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Sussex, Fellow, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

Vladmir Putin has a new problem. His invasion of Ukraine is not just bogged down. It’s going rapidly backwards.

Ukraine’s armed forces have launched two stunningly successful counteroffensives around Kharkov in the nation’s east, and in the south near the Russian-occupied city of Kherson. Kyiv is now claiming to have recaptured some 2,000 square kilometres of its territory, with the potential to cut off and trap a sizeable portion of the Russian invasion force.

By the Kremlin’s own standards, this is hardly winning. Realising Russia’s war aims – including regime change and the establishment of a “Crimean corridor” that denies Ukraine access to the Black Sea – would require nothing short of a dramatic reversal of its fortunes.

Putin now essentially has three options.

First, he can seek a political solution, hoping to hold onto the territory Kremlin proxies captured in the eight years prior to his 2022 invasion. That’s an unattractive choice, especially since a bullish Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is hardly in the mood to negotiate favourable terms for Moscow. Internationally, it would be a humiliating blow to Russian prestige: a smaller state defeating a top-tier nuclear power in a major land war.

Domestically, and more worrying for Putin, it would sharply call his leadership into question. Mounting signs of domestic discontent now even include St Petersburg regional deputies publicly calling for Putin to be tried for treason, another group from Moscow calling for him to step down, and even state media questioning the conflict.

Option two for Putin is to try to reimpose a long and grinding campaign. But even if his forces can blunt the Ukrainian advance, Russia can achieve only a stalemate if the war returns to static artillery duels. That would buy time. It would wear down Ukrainian forces and allow him to test whether using energy as a weapon fragments the European Union’s resolve over the winter.

However, at Russia’s current rate of losses its conventional forces will be exhausted beyond about 12 months. Both NATO and Ukraine would be well aware of that.

Putin’s third option is to escalate: to send a message to both the West and Ukraine that he means business. Given the dubious nature of his other choices, that may be increasingly likely. But where? And, of equal importance, how?

Invade Moldova

Numerous experts have claimed Moscow might seek to annexe Moldova’s breakaway region of Transdniestria, plus further chunks of Moldovan territory. And in early September, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov warned of armed conflict if Moldova threatened the 2,000 Russian troops guarding Transdniestria’s large ammunition dump at Cobasna.

An actual invasion would be difficult, because it would require Russian control over the Ukrainian city of Odesa for land access. But an airborne reinforcement of its Transdniestrian garrison might be tempting, or launching a hybrid warfare campaign to justify doing so.

In April 2022, there were several “terrorist incidents”, including the bombing of Transdniestria’s Ministry of State Security, as potential pretexts for such a move.

That said, invading would arguably be counterproductive, not least because it may prompt Moldova’s close partner Romania – a member of NATO – to become involved.

Send a ‘stabilisation force’ to Kazakhstan

Although unlikely, a Russian incursion into Northern Kazakhstan to “protect ethnic Russians” was commonly nominated by Russia-watchers playing grim games of “where does Putin invade next?”. Or, at least, they did before Ukraine.

Russian forces under the banner of the “Collective Security Treaty Organization” (CSTO), comprising some of the former Soviet states, actually intervened as recently as January 2022 at the request of Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

However, that was soon exposed as a ploy to help Tokayev defeat his enemies. Since then, he has drifted towards neutrality on the war in Ukraine.

A new Russian intervention would certainly reinforce to restive Central Asian states that the Kremlin sees the region as its privileged sphere of influence. Indeed, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recently hinted that northern Kazakhstan was next on Russia’s invasion list. Yet, with many of its forces already tied up in Ukraine, it’s questionable whether doing so would really be worth the effort.

Full mobilisation

The significant losses suffered by Russian forces might be covered by putting the nation on a war footing. A general mobilisation would direct the economy towards military production, and provide an unending stream of personnel.

Putin has avoided this so far, choosing a shadow approach instead, which has called up an extra 137,000 Russians.

It does remain a live option, although it would mean admitting the conflict is a war (not a “Special Military Operation”), which would be domestically unpopular and result in untrained and ill-equipped conscripts flooding the front line.

Draw NATO in

Apart from the Moldovan scenario, Putin might elect to stage a “provocation” against a NATO state like Estonia. That would be a risky gambit indeed: given what we have seen of the performance of Russia’s conventional forces, even a limited war with NATO would hasten Russia’s defeat, and thus far Putin has assiduously avoided such provocations, apart from bluster and rhetoric.

Perversely, that might allow Putin to salvage some domestic pride by claiming he lost to NATO rather than Ukraine.

Yet his propaganda machine has already been falsely claiming NATO is directly involved in the fight against Russian forces.

And if Putin isn’t prepared to initiate a peace process, then really only one escalation pathway remains.

Read more:
Russia is fighting three undeclared wars. Its fourth – an internal struggle for Russia itself – might be looming

Arrange a radiological ‘accident’

The Kremlin has obliquely hinted at this for a while.

Russian forces have controlled the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant near the city of Kherson since March, turning it into a military base. Rocket and artillery fire is actually not a huge concern, since the plant is heavily hardened.

But if the plant loses connection to the Ukrainian grid – which has already happened several times – the reactors are only controlled by their own power generation, with no fail safe.

Arranging a false flag “accident” blamed on Ukraine is certainly possible, raising the nightmare prospect of a new Chernobyl.

Use tactical nuclear weapons

Look, it’s unlikely. But it can’t be ruled out.

Realistically, using tactical nuclear weapons would be of dubious military value. There would be no guarantee NATO would back down, or that Ukraine would capitulate. It would be very difficult for Russia’s few remaining partners to continue supporting Putin, either tacitly (like China) or indirectly (like India).

Indeed, while much has been made of Russia’s supposed “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine, involving using nuclear weapons to force others to blink, there’s plenty of evidence it’s a myth designed to increase fear of nuclear war among Moscow’s adversaries.

In summary, Putin’s choices remain poor, both domestically and internationally. He may soon feel forced to pick between those that are unpalatable, and those that are risky.

Unfortunately, identifying what he will choose is guesswork: we simply don’t know enough about how Putin’s mind works, or how he prioritises information to make decisions.

But perhaps there’s one hint. Throughout his tenure, Putin has consistently invited NATO and its allies to blink. At this crucial time, the West owes it to Ukraine, and for the sake of its own credibility, to ensure it does not give the Russian president what he wants.

Matthew Sussex has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Lowy Institute, the Carnegie Foundation, and various Australian government agencies.

– ref. With his army on the back foot, is escalation over Ukraine Vladimir Putin’s only real option? – https://theconversation.com/with-his-army-on-the-back-foot-is-escalation-over-ukraine-vladimir-putins-only-real-option-190046

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Dearnaley, Associate Professor, University of Southern Queensland

Hay fever is a downside of springtime around the world. As temperatures increase, plant growth resumes and flowers start appearing.

But while native flowering plants such as wattle often get the blame when the seasonal sneezes strike, hay fever in Australia is typically caused by introduced plant species often pollinated by the wind.

A closer look at pollen

Pollen grains are the tiny reproductive structures that move genetic material between flower parts, individual flowers on the same plant or a nearby member of the same species. They are typically lightweight structures easily carried on wind currents or are sticky and picked up in clumps on the feathers of a honeyeater or the fur of a fruit bat or possum.

Hay fever is when the human immune system overreacts to allergens in the air. It is not only caused by pollen grains but fungal spores, non-flowering plant spores, mites and even pet hair.

The classic symptoms of hay fever are sneezing, runny noses, red, itchy, and watery eyes, swelling around the eyes and scratchy ears and throat.

The problem with pollen grains is when they land on the skin around our eyes, in our nose and mouth, the proteins found in the wall of these tiny structures leak out and are recognised as foreign by the body and trigger a reaction from the immune system.

Read more:
Do I have COVID or hay fever? Here’s how to tell

So what plants are the worst culprits for causing hay fever?

Grasses, trees, and herbaceous weeds such as plantain are the main problem species as their pollen is usually scattered by wind. In Australia, the main grass offenders are exotic species including rye grass and couch grass (a commonly used lawn species).

Weed species that cause hay fever problems include introduced ragweed, Paterson’s curse, parthenium weed and plantain. The problematic tree species are also exotic in origin and include liquid amber, Chinese elm, maple, cypress, ash, birch, poplar, and plane trees.

Although there are some native plants that have wind-spread pollen such as she-oaks and white cypress pine, and which can induce hay fever, these species are exceptional in the Australian flora. Many Australian plants are not wind pollinated and use animals to move their clumped pollen around.

For example, yellow-coloured flowers such as wattles and peas are pollinated by insect such as bees. Red- and orange-coloured flowers are usually visited by birds such as honeyeaters. Large, dull-coloured flowers with copious nectar (the reward for pollination) are visited by nocturnal mammals including bats and possums. Obviously Australian plant pollen can still potentially cause the immune system to overreact, but these structures are less likely to reach the mucous membranes of humans.

Read more:
Got allergies? You could be at lower risk of catching COVID

What can we do to prevent hay fever attacks at this time of the year?

With all of this in mind, here are some strategies to prevent the affects of hay fever:

1. stay inside and keep the house closed up on warm, windy days when more pollen is in the air
2. if you must go outside, wear sunglasses and a face mask
3. when you return indoors gently rinse (and don’t rub) your eyes with running water, change your clothes and shower to remove pollen grains from hair and skin
4. try to avoid mowing the lawn in spring particularly when grasses are in flower (the multi-pronged spiked flowers of couch grass are distinctive)
5. when working in the garden, wear gloves and facial coverings particularly when handling flowers
6. consider converting your garden to a native one. Grevilleas are a great alternative to rose bushes. Coastal rosemary are a fabulous native replacement for lavender. Why not replace your liquid amber tree with a fast growing, evergreen and low-allergenic lilly pilly tree?

If you do suffer a hay fever attack

Sometimes even with our best efforts, or if it’s not always possible to stay at home, hay fever can still creep up on us. If this happens:

• antihistamines will reduce sneezing and itching symptoms
• corticosteroid nasal sprays are very effective at reducing inflammation and clearing blocked noses
• decongestants provide quick and temporary relief by drying runny noses but should not be used by those with high blood pressure
• salt water is a good way to remove excessive mucous from the nasal passages.

Behavioural changes on warm, windy spring days are a good way of avoiding a hay fever attack.

An awareness of the plants around us and their basic reproductive biology is also useful in preventing our immune systems from overreacting to pollen proteins that they are not used to encountering.

John Dearnaley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Sneezing with hay fever? Native plants aren’t usually the culprit – https://theconversation.com/sneezing-with-hay-fever-native-plants-arent-usually-the-culprit-190336

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wesley Morgan, Research Fellow, Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

Australia last week moved to tackle the climate crisis when federal parliament passed Labor’s climate bill. But the new law is just the first step. Over the next eight years to 2030, we must get on a steep trajectory of emissions reductions.

The law set a national target to cut emissions by 43% this decade, based on 2005 levels. While this brings Australia closer to the international consensus, we should be aiming to go much further, much faster.

When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese informed the United Nations of Australia’s new target, he wrote of his government’s aspiration for “even greater emission reductions in the coming decade”. But how will Australia go beyond a 43% cut to emissions? And what policies should the government implement and fund first?

A roadmap released today by the Climate Council charts the way forward. It sets out key goals Australia should be chasing this decade, and ten climate policy “game-changers” to help get us there.

100% renewables by 2030

Australia’s energy grid is responsible for 33% of our national emissions. Today, 59% of our electricity comes from coal-fired power plants.

Renewables are not just a clean form of energy – they are also the cheapest form of new energy. Our analysis suggests Australia should aim to achieve 100% renewables by 2030.

We must also increase overall power generation by around 40% this decade to make steep inroads into electrifying other sectors of the economy.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Enable transmission infrastructure: the federal government has promised A$20 billion for transmission infrastructure. This is crucial. To connect renewables to the grid, we need new transmission lines, and lots of them. The total length of transmission will need to be about 24 times what it is now.

2. Boost storage: to support grid security, we’ll need lots of electricity storage – think grid-scale batteries and pumped-hydro. To encourage greater investment the federal government should set a mandatory Renewable Energy Storage target, with specific goals for additional storage each year to 2030.

3. Upskill Australians: a new energy system will need skilled workers. The federal government must help workers upskill for clean trades through new investment in TAFE courses and electrical apprenticeships.

4. Establish a National Energy Transition Authority: this new organisation should set closure dates and develop transition plans for all coal-fired power stations by 2024, and support communities through the process.

Read more:
Labor’s 2030 climate target betters the Morrison government, but Australia must go much further, much faster

Clean up transport

Australia’s transport sector is responsible for 19% of national greenhouse gas emissions. By the end of this decade, transport emissions should be halved. Almost all new cars in Australia will need to be zero-emissions vehicles, and we’ll need major improvements in public and active transport infrastructure and use.

How do we get there?

5. Fuel efficiency: the federal government should implement mandatory fuel efficiency standards. Already common across the developed world, these standards encourage auto companies to supply more low and zero-emissions vehicles to the market.

The standards can be made more stringent over time, ensuring an orderly shift to zero-emissions vehicles. Without them, Australia risks becoming a dumping ground for polluting older-model cars – while the rest of the world charges ahead.

6. Ditch dirty diesel: Governments – both state and federal – need to invest in cleaner and more convenient public transport. A key first step is replacing diesel buses with a renewable electric fleet.

Read more:
Australia is failing on electric vehicles. California shows it’s possible to pick up the pace

Net-zero buildings

Some 20% of Australia’s emissions are created by the building sector. (It should be noted, this figure includes electricity consumed in buildings, which is also counted as emissions from the energy sector). To reach our climate goals we’ll need to change the way our homes, businesses and other buildings are constructed and run.

This should be done by:

7. Tightening building rules: The National Construction Code must be tightened so all new homes are net-zero emissions – through energy efficient design, rooftop solar and all-electric appliances.

By 2025 gas connections should be banned for new homes, and new gas appliances should be banned for established homes. This would ensure the move to cheaper and cleaner forms of heating and cooking.

Households will also need government support to refit their homes with electric appliances, through incentive programs and concessional finance. As Australians switch energy-efficient renewables-powered homes, they’ll save on bills.

Read more:
Will 7-star housing really cost more? It depends, but you can keep costs down in a few simple ways

Overhaul industry

Australia’s industrial sector creates 34% of our national emissions – and that’s excluding electricity use. These emissions must be halved, by increasing energy efficiency, electrifying processes where possible, switching fuels and phasing out fossil fuel extraction.

At the same time, we must seize new economic opportunities for industry in a future low-carbon world.

Reaching this goal will require:

8. Proper rules for big polluters: The federal government must reform what’s known as the “safeguard mechanism” to ensure big polluters do their fair share to cut emissions. This includes government incentives to drive the steepest emissions reduction possible.

Redirect public spending

Public spending must be aligned with the net-zero goal. That means:

9. No more handouts: federal and state governments spent an estimated $11.6 billion on subsidies for the fossil fuel industry last financial year, up $1.3 billion on the previous year. These handouts, such as fuel tax credits, must stop.

10. Create a climate and energy investment plan: the federal government should introduce climate budget statements outlining how taxpayer investment is aligned with the goal of rapidly reducing emissions.

Time to get started

Australia has already warmed by around 1.4℃ since pre-industrial times. We’re suffering significant losses from accelerating climate change, and worse is on the way.

The passing of the climate bill into law has set the floor for action. Now, we must immediately build our cleaner future – because waiting until the 2030s will be much too late.

Read more:
We pay billions to subsidise Australia’s fossil fuel industry. This makes absolutely no economic sense

Wesley Morgan is a Senior Researcher with the Climate Council

– ref. Now, we begin: 10 simple ways to make Australia’s climate game truly next-level – https://theconversation.com/now-we-begin-10-simple-ways-to-make-australias-climate-game-truly-next-level-190427

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Martin, Animal Ecology Lab, Western Sydney University

Bloody hell! That cockatoo just opened my bin, and it’s eating my leftover pizza. We can’t have that, I’ll put a rock on the lid to stop it opening the bin. Problem solved…?

And so began an arms race in the suburbs of southern Sydney: humans trying to deter sulphur-crested cockatoos from opening kerb-side bins, and cockatoos overcoming their deterrents to feast on our food waste.

The ability to open kerb-side bins is unique to cockatoos of southern Sydney, but this behaviour appears to be spreading. Last year, we published research revealing that this behaviour is a stunning display of “social learning”, as birds learn the bin-opening technique by observing its neighbour.

This had global significance – it meant we can add parrots to the list of animals capable of foraging culture, which also includes chimpanzees, humpback whales and New Caledonian crows.

Our new research, published today, documents 50 bin-protection methods. It provides another example of a global issue of human-wildlife conflict – indeed, it is rare to document a behavioural change of a species in response to the actions of another.

Cockatoos make a mess

While cockatoos opening bins is fascinating, it can also create a mess. The birds search through the rubbish to find food, occasionally throwing out items in the way. Needless to say, coming home to find your rubbish spread on the ground in front of your house is not appreciated.

Some people are also concerned that the food being eaten isn’t healthy for the cockies, such as pizza, bread or chicken.

This arms race is a unique story, as we show it not only involves social learning by cockatoos, but also by humans in response.

Read more:
Clever cockatoos in southern Sydney have learned to open kerb-side bins — and it has global significance

Through our community survey, participants reported how and when they protected their bins from cockatoos, that they changed their bin protection in response to the cockies solving a method, and that they learnt new protection methods from their neighbours.

Our research shows people have escalated their methods to deter cockatoos from opening bins over time, as cockies overcame their efforts. These appear to prevent or hamper cockatoos from opening the bin lid (at least for now), while allowing it to be emptied when the bin is inverted by the garbage truck.

From rubber snakes to custom locks

Our research made observations about the many innovative ways to stop cockatoos opening bins, but we plan to assess the success of different methods in more detail in the future.

We’ll start with the quick and easy method of placing a brick, wood, metal or bottle filled with water on top of the bin lid, making it too heavy for a cockatoo to lift. If the object is heavy enough, then it should work.

If it isn’t, a cockatoo can push it off, open the lid and have a feed, as the video below shows.

A more sophisticated solution is to bolt wood, metal or brick to the lid, or strapping the bottles to the top or underside of the lid. This method permanently makes the lid too heavy and appears to be an effective deterrent.

Another popular method is preventing the bin lid from flipping open via rope, bungee cord, metal spring, or a stick placed through the handle or hinge. These methods had only varying success.

Attaching a custom designed lock was also popular and, if working properly, appears to deter cockies. These locks allow the bin to open when tipped upside down by the garbage truck.

Some people placed metal or plastic spikes around the rim to prevent the birds landing, or they installed barriers to stop a bird getting their beak under the bin lid. These methods appeared to work.

Methods with poor outcomes include modifying the bin lid to deter the birds from landing or walking by making them uncomfortable, such as with netting. And aiming to scare the birds away by attaching a rubber snake is an interesting method but not a popular one, so perhaps it isn’t effective.

Still, the race continues, both in the suburbs where we’ve studied this novel behaviour and in new suburbs as this fast-food foraging behaviour spreads to neighbouring suburbs and, with time, beyond.

An example of human-wildlife conflict

We categorise cockatoo bin-opening as a “human-wildlife conflict”. Such conflicts are common, from possums in a household roof, to the official bin-chicken (the Australian white ibis) scavenging a free feed, to flying-foxes roosting in urban areas or foraging in orchards.

Conflicts can result from noise, smell, poo, damage to crops, gardens, or buildings, or threatening people, stock or pets.

Globally, human-wildlife conflict is common and diverse – think lions eating cattle, monkeys stealing tourists’ cameras, pigeons pooing and nesting in cities, seals sleeping on boats, sharks biting people, ducks eating crops, and snakes sharing homes.

Our attempts to deal with such conflicts can have tragic results for wildlife. One extreme example is shark nets, which kills sharks yet don’t prevent them from accessing the beach. They also kill or entangle non-target – and sometimes threatened – species, such as turtles, dolphins, grey-nurse sharks and whales.

We should learn to live alongside wildlife instead, especially as “conflict species” may be under threat, such as the grey-headed flying-foxes (an important pollinator) or great white sharks (an important predator).

In many instances of human-wildlife conflict, public education goes a long way to reducing conflict. Understanding wildlife behaviour and appreciating the fascinating features of native species often favourably shifts community attitudes – we can grow to love them, not fight them.

So whether it’s finding new and harmless ways to protect your bin from hungry cockatoos, or having shark-smart behaviour, there are positive actions we can take if we are informed.

To help our ongoing research, please take the 2022 Bin-Opening Survey and report if you “have” or “have not” seen cockatoos opening bins.

The authors gratefully thank the contributions of the survey participants and research volunteers; we acknowledge our co-authors of this research: Barbara, Lucy, Damien, and Richard.

John Martin receives funding from the ARC.

– ref. An arms race over food waste: Sydney cockatoos are still opening kerb-side bins, despite our best efforts to stop them – https://theconversation.com/an-arms-race-over-food-waste-sydney-cockatoos-are-still-opening-kerb-side-bins-despite-our-best-efforts-to-stop-them-189969

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Scully, Associate Professor of Modern European History, University of New England

It sounds very familiar – a well-respected monarch dies, and a radical, left-leaning, Antipodean cartoonist struggles to find the right tone to commemorate the event.

He is torn between his distaste for what he sees as the archaic, pre-modern institution of monarchy, and the undoubted personal quality of the late incumbent.

More used to poking fun at the great and good, or attacking governments for their weak-willed or wrong-headed policies, changing tone to reverence and respect is difficult.

But in the end, he manages to strike a very good balance and produce a memorable cartoon.

The well-respected monarch was George VI; the radical, left-leaning, Antipodean cartoonist was David Low; and the year was 1952. With From One Man to Another, Low not only conveyed his own respects, man-to-man, but imagined also the British workman, his hat in his hand and sleeves rolled-up, casting a humble bunch of flowers towards a mighty tombstone labelled “The Gentlest of the Georges”.

This was an expression of democratic – even socialist – sensibility, in an age when monarchy seemed, to many, to be increasingly out-of-step with the advance of modernity and the inexorable march of post-war history.

Low was compelled to look back, not forward, conscious he had an historic role to fulfil in commemorating the passing of the king who had embodied so much of the stolid, British pluck and humility during the second world war.

He reflected in his 1956 autobiography that he hated the old-fashioned, “The Nation Mourns”-style of Victorian cartoon, but it was to that set of images and traditions that he turned.

Read more:
16 visits over 57 years: reflecting on Queen Elizabeth II’s long relationship with Australia

A long lineage

Cartoonists have had to do something similar in 2022, with the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

In the United Kingdom, the likes of Peter Brookes, Ben Jennings and Christian Adams have all been conscious of the need for solemnity, as well as celebration.

Across the world, cartoonists have had to struggle with much the same thing, and some favoured themes are already apparent: Elizabeth reunited with her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, or troops of sad corgis; the Union Flag with an Elizabeth II-shaped hole at the centre; or a tube train with a sole occupant heading into a blaze of light at the end of the tunnel.

All of these images speak to the style and the visual language of today, but also share a lineage several centuries old.

Read more:
The New York Times ends daily political cartoons, but it’s not the death of the art form

A bereaved widow, again

Nobody would have thought to depict Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 with her travelling to heaven by tube, although the Underground seems emblematic of her age (London’s first underground railway was opened in January 1863, 26 years into Victoria’s reign).

There were no sad corgis (that breed only became associated with the Royal Family from the 1930s), but a downcast British Lion was imagined by Francis Carruthers Gould in Fun.

The theme of a bereaved widow finally reunited with her spouse is clearly a parallel (Albert, the Prince Consort had died in 1861). So too is the very idea that a cartoonist should commemorate the event – something unthinkable when William IV died in 1837, or so much so when George IV died in 1830 that a well-known cartoonist never published his draft sketch.

The sheer immensity of the loss of Victoria called for some pretty special treatment, at a time when cartooning was a lot more formal and respectable than it is today.

It preoccupied several days’ work for Linley Sambourne, chief cartoonist of London’s Punch (for a while, a magazine that was almost as much a British institution as the monarchy).

Requiescat was huge: a double-page spread in sombre black-and-white, depicting a gaggle of goddesses in mourning for their lost monarch.

Allegorical female figures representing countries were all the rage in Victorian and Edwardian cartooning (something David Low also hated and thought was “moth-eaten” by the time he was at his peak).

England, Scotland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and India were all included by Sambourne.

Just one goddess was enough for his junior colleague, Bernard Partridge, who imagined Clio – History herself – adding the name of Victoria to the roll of great monarchs.

It was the same when Victoria’s son and heir, Edward VII, died in May, 1910.

Bernard Partridge went with just two figures, rather than a whole host, imagining a weeping Britannia seated before the empty Coronation Chair, an angel of peace reaching out to touch her shoulder.

This was designed to express “an empire’s grief” in terms even more explicit than Sambourne had done with Victoria, but the imagery was very British; even domestic.

Minus the caption, it could almost be recycled in 2022 – crucially, the monarch does not actually appear. So too, Partridge’s offering in January 1936, when George V died (apparently by the hand of his doctor).

Britannia tolling a bell from a medieval bell-tower, with a fog-laden London skyline in the background. Clear the fog, add a Gherkin and a Shard, and the effect would be much the same.

While David Low struggled against the Victorian style of memorial cartoon, it is still very much with us. As so often, cartoons can encapsulate a whole host of feelings that mere words can’t express.

Richard Scully receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is affiliated with the Political Cartoon Society, the Cartoon Museum (London), and the Australian Cartoonists’ Association.

– ref. Solemnity and celebration: how political cartoonists have handled the death of a monarch, from Victoria to Elizabeth II – https://theconversation.com/solemnity-and-celebration-how-political-cartoonists-have-handled-the-death-of-a-monarch-from-victoria-to-elizabeth-ii-190338

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jordan Peter Anthony Pitt, Post-Doctoral Researcher, University of Adelaide

One of the harshest and most dynamic regions on Earth is the marginal ice zone – the place where ocean waves meet sea ice, which is formed by freezing of the ocean’s surface.

Published today, a themed issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A reviews the rapid progress researchers have made over the past decade in understanding and modelling this challenging environment.

This research is vital for us to better understand the complex interactions of Earth’s climate systems. That’s because the marginal ice zone plays a role in the seasonal freezing and thawing of the oceans.

A harsh place to study

In the Arctic and Antarctic, surface ocean temperatures are persistently below -2℃ – cold enough to freeze, forming a layer of sea ice.

At the highest latitudes closer to the poles, sea ice forms a solid, several-metre-thick lid on the ocean that reflects the Sun’s rays, cooling the region and driving cool water around the oceans. This makes sea ice a key component of the climate system.

Read more:
The Southern Ocean absorbs more heat than any other ocean on Earth, and the impacts will be felt for generations

But at lower latitudes, as the ice-covered ocean transitions to the open ocean, sea ice forms into smaller, much more mobile chunks called “floes” that are separated by water or a slurry of ice crystals.

This marginal ice zone interacts with the atmosphere above and ocean below in a very different way to ice cover closer to the poles.

It’s a challenging environment for scientists to work in, with a voyage into the marginal ice zone around Antarctica in 2017 experiencing winds over 90km/h and waves over 6.5m high.
It is also difficult to observe remotely because the floes are smaller than what most satellites can see.

Crushed by waves

The marginal ice zone also interacts with the open ocean via surface waves, which travel from the open waters into the zone, impacting the ice. The waves can have a destructive effect on the ice cover, by breaking up large floes and leaving them more susceptible to melt during summer.

By contrast, during winter, waves can promote the formation of “pancake” floes, so called because they are thin disks of sea ice (you can see them in the image above).

But wave energy itself is lost during interactions with floes, so that waves gradually become weaker as they travel deeper into the marginal ice zone. This produces wave–ice feedback mechanisms driving sea ice evolution in a changing climate.

For example, a trend for warmer temperatures will weaken the ice cover, allowing waves to travel deeper into ice-covered oceans and cause more breakup, which further weakens the ice cover – and so on.

Scientists studying marginal ice zone dynamics aim to improve our understanding of the zone’s role in the dramatic and often perplexing changes the world’s sea ice is undergoing in response to climate change.

For instance, in the Arctic Ocean, sea ice cover has “has dropped by roughly half since the 1980s”. In the Antarctic, the sea ice cover has recently had both one of its largest and smallest recorded extents, with the marginal ice zone being one source of year-to-year variability.

Our progress in better understanding these harsh regions has revolved around large international research programs, run by the United States’ Office of Naval Research and others. These programs involve earth scientists, geophysicists, oceanographers, engineers and even applied mathematicians (like us).

Recent efforts have produced innovative observation techniques, such as a method to 3D-image wave and floe dynamics in the marginal ice zone from onboard an icebreaker and capture waves-in-ice from satellite images.

They have also resulted in new models capable of simulating the interaction of waves and ice from the level of individual floes to the overall behaviour of entire oceans. The advances have motivated an Australian led multi-month experiment in the Antarctic marginal ice zone, on the new $500M icebreaker RSV Nuyina, which is expected next year.

The marginal ice zone will be an increasingly important component of the world’s sea ice cover in the future, as temperatures rise and waves become more extreme.

Despite the rapid progress, there is still some way to go before the understanding of feedback processes in the marginal ice zone translates into improved climate predictions used by, for example, the International Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports.

Including the marginal ice zone in climate models has been described as the “holy grail” for the field by one of its leading figures, and the theme issue points to closer ties with the broader climate community as the next major direction for the field.

Read more:
Ice shelves hold back Antarctica’s glaciers from adding to sea levels – but they’re crumbling

Jordan Peter Anthony Pitt receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Luke Bennetts receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Antarctic Science Program.

– ref. Scientists are divining the future of Earth’s ice-covered oceans at their harsh fringes – https://theconversation.com/scientists-are-divining-the-future-of-earths-ice-covered-oceans-at-their-harsh-fringes-189393

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Oliver Eklund, PhD Candidate in Media and Communication, Queensland University of Technology

Ads are coming to Netflix, perhaps even sooner than anticipated.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Netflix has moved up the launch of their ad-supported subscription tier to November. The Sydney Morning Herald, meanwhile, is reporting that Australia is amongst the first countries likely to experience ads on Netflix later this year.

Netflix first announced they would introduce a new, lower-priced, subscription tier to be supported by advertising in April. This was an about-face from a company that had built an advertising free, on-demand television empire. Indeed, it was only in 2020 that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings ruled out advertising on the platform, saying “you know, advertising looks easy until you get in it.”

The change of heart followed Netflix’s 2022 first quarter earnings report which saw a subscriber loss for the first time in over a decade. The addition of ads to the platform is a clear sign of the emerging period of experimentation across the streaming landscape.

Read more:
In a market swamped with streaming services, Netflix’s massive loss of subscribers is a big deal

How will it work?

It’s important to note that not every Netflix subscription tier will carry advertising. The current plan is there will be one newly introduced and cheaper subscription tier supported by advertising, targeting in the US market around USD $7-9 a month as the price point. This will represent a discount from the current cheapest plan of US $9.99 (AUD $10.99) a month. These prices will be adapted to the different currency markets Netflix operate across and the existing price points in those markets.

By bringing a hybrid advertising/subscription tier, Netflix is adopting a business model already present on other streamers like Hulu. Netflix is keeping this a hybrid tier, meaning while the new tier will be cheaper, it will not be free, like ad-supported streaming available on Peacock.

Advertising presents complex new technological and business challenges for Netflix, which has not worked in this market before. To enter this new market, Netflix announced advertising would be delivered through a partnership with Microsoft.

Partnering with Microsoft allayed some fears around Netflix entering a new media market and gives Netflix access to Microsoft’s extensive advertising delivery infrastructure.

Netflix has announced that original movie programming may stay free of ads for a limited period upon release, and that both original and some licensed childrens’ content will remain free of ads.

As well as staying away from children’s advertising, which in Australia is highly regulated by government and industry codes, Netflix is also avoiding any advertising buyers in cryptocurrency, political advertising, and gambling.

Advertising will run around 4 minutes per hour of content – for context Australian commercial free-to-air TV networks are limited on their primary channels to 13 minutes per hour and 15 minutes per hour on multi-channels between 6am and midnight.

Netflix will also have limits on the number of times a single ad can appear for a user and there is expectation that ads for movie content will be delivered in a pre-roll format, not interrupting the feature.

Read more:
Levelling up: why Netflix and TikTok are turning to gaming to secure their future

Advertising in the streaming sector

Netflix is not the only subscription service to announce advertising as part of new pricing strategies. Earlier this year Disney announced a highly successful quarter from a subscriber uptake perspective, growing by 15 million subscribers, however streaming-induced losses were $300 million greater than estimated.

Disney also announced that an ad-supported Disney+ subscription option will become available in December. The Wall Street Journal reported that the December timeline given by Disney is what drove Netflix to bring forward their ad plans.

TV consumers are historically well accustomed to advertising in television – in Australia, commercial free-to-air networks Seven, Nine, and Ten carry advertising, public broadcaster SBS carries a limited amount of advertising, and even pay-TV provider Foxtel is supported by both subscription fees and advertising. Advertising itself is not new to audiences, but it has not been present on a number of premium streaming platforms like Netflix before.

Streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+ are seeking ways to both reach new audiences and to maximise their revenues from each user. There is a belief amongst top executives that providing a cheaper ad-supported tier will tap into the market of audiences who both do not mind advertising and see current subscription prices as too high.

There is also evidence from other streaming platforms, such as Hulu and Discovery+, that have offered ad-supported subscription tiers, that these tiers can generate greater average revenue per user (ARPU) than higher priced subscription-only tiers.

The ARPU is a metric used in the streaming industry that looks at how much money a company makes from each subscriber after deducting business costs. Having higher revenues from a subscriber can be driven by increasing subscription prices, driving subscribers to more expensive subscription tiers, reducing business costs, or by adding additional revenue streams like advertising.

In 2021, Discovery CEO David Zaslav noted that Discovery+ was generating more revenue per subscriber from their cheaper ad-supported tier than their more expensive subscription-only tier thanks to the advertising revenue. Zaslav commented that advertisers were keen to reach an audience that was largely not accessible through other television means.

With this in mind, Netflix and Disney are betting that their ad-supported tiers can perform similarly and increase the revenue they can generate per subscriber.

Experimentation across the streaming sector

Experimentation around established business strategies is ruling the current streaming landscape.

HBO Max, under newly merged corporate parent Warner Bros. Discovery, is now switching to licensing content in select markets rather than streaming on its own platform. With the airing of The Lord of the Rings prequel The Rings of Power, Amazon Prime Video is discovering whether its experiment with the most expensive television production ever at US $715 million (AUD $1.05 billion) will pay off with audiences.

Read more:
The new Lord of the Rings prequel, The Rings of Power, is set in the Second Age of Middle-Earth – here’s what that means

There is experimentation across the streaming industry in licensing strategies, spectacle television, pricing models and beyond. The results of this experimentation will take time. But what the arrival of advertising on Netflix signals is that established strategy no longer rules the streaming landscape.

Oliver Eklund owns shares in Apple, Disney, and Netflix.

– ref. Ads are coming to Netflix soon – here’s what we can expect and what that means for the streaming industry – https://theconversation.com/ads-are-coming-to-netflix-soon-heres-what-we-can-expect-and-what-that-means-for-the-streaming-industry-190236

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Scott Hardman, Professional Researcher, Electric Vehicle Research Center, University of California, Davis

Among the many similarities between California and Australia, both are impacted by bushfires and climate change, and both are home to larger cars and trucks than is the norm in developed countries. They are dissimilar, though, when it comes to electric vehicles and vehicle regulations. While California has been pursuing low-carbon and electric vehicles for decades, Australia has trailed most developed nations.

Plug-in electric vehicles accounted for 16% of new light-duty vehicle sales in California in the first half of 2022. In Australia, electric vehicle sales are only 2% of the market, and mostly from one carmaker, Tesla.

Australia, a country with no vehicle fuel economy or CO₂ emissions regulations, is debating how to move forward. The local auto industry suggests Australia needs a slow transition to electric vehicles and should lag the United States, Europe, China and neighbouring New Zealand. Compared to proposed European vehicle emission standards of 43 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre in 2030, the local industry proposes 98-143g CO₂/km (for light cars and SUVs).

Read more:
The road to new fuel efficiency rules is filled with potholes. Here’s how Australia can avoid them

The proposed Australian target would result in a slow transition, which new research suggests will have little or no effect on the transport sector’s CO₂ emissions.

The rationale for a slow transition is the same as was heard for decades in California: electric vehicle prices are too high, there isn’t enough infrastructure to support these vehicles, their driving ranges are too short, and certain models aren’t available (electric utes, for example).

Read more:
The surprising history of how electric vehicles have played the long game and won

These concerns have some validity, but are largely out of date. Australia in 2022 faces a very different situation from California when it started down the electric vehicle path.

Let’s deal with why each of these four concerns might now be overstated.

1. Limited range

Drivers in both Australia and California travel similar distances per year. In both regions, most trips are well within electric vehicle range.

Further, in both regions most households own two vehicles. This means buyers can, if needed, use another vehicle for longer trips.

Electric vehicle range has also improved: the average range of available electric vehicles in 2013 when electric vehicle sales in California reached Australia’s current level of 2% was 179 kilometres (111 miles). Now, it’s 443 kilometres.

2. Lack of charging infrastructure

In California and other markets like Norway, most early electric vehicle buyers charge at home on their driveway or in a garage. In Australia even more people live in a detached house than in California. Drivers in these households could charge their vehicle at home, which reduces the need for public charging stations.

Public charging may be needed to support occasional charging, to enable longer journeys and to support the smaller proportion of households without home charging. But public infrastructure is not a prerequisite for early market growth.

Australia already has as many charging stations per person as California had in 2016. In fact, Australia might be only a few years behind.

3. High prices

In Australia the average new car is AU$40,729 (US$28,000). Electric vehicles with ranges of around 400km could be made available at that price.

For example, the 2023 Chevrolet Bolt starts at US$25,600 (AU$37,000) in the US. And until 2020 the Renault ZOE was sold in Australia for AU$37,400. Both models have a range of about 400km.

Consumers have also been shown to be willing to pay more for an electric vehicle compared to a conventional vehicle. This might be partly due to the savings on fuel and maintenance costs.

Read more:
Why Labor’s new tax cut on electric vehicles won’t help you buy one anytime soon

4. Lack of models

In 2022, 316 electric and 162 plug-in hybrid models are on sale globally. These models include SUVs, utes and pick-up trucks.

The lack of choice and of lower-cost electric vehicles in Australia is because carmakers prefer to send these models to markets with supportive electric vehicle policies . Making these models available in Australia may be as simple as giving carmakers the motivation to sell them there.

Australia may be well positioned for a rapid transition to electric vehicles if it adopts more supportive policies. If Australia brings in policies such as ambitious fuel-economy standards or a zero-emission-vehicle sales mandate, the country could benefit in the same ways as California did.

Read more:
Making EVs without China’s supply chain is hard, but not impossible – 3 supply chain experts outline a strategy

All that’s needed now is supportive policy

Supportive policies like these help set the stage for the early electric vehicle market to grow. They do this by:

• giving carmakers the confidence to develop and supply electric vehicles at multiple price points, in multiple body styles and with long driving ranges

• giving providers confidence to roll out charging infrastructure

• giving consumers the supply of electric vehicles they are waiting for.

An electric vehicle mandate can also protect consumers from supply ebbs and flows that are common in import-only markets.

Read more:
Who’s holding back electric cars in Australia? We’ve long known the answer – and it’s time to clear the road

Other nations have been down this road

Australia is not the first nation to grapple with these challenges. South Korea, despite being a global producer of electric vehicles, was experiencing slow domestic market growth. Many Korean electric vehicles were exported to regions with policies more friendly to the technology.

The government responded with policies to support electric vehicles. Since then, domestic sales have tripled. South Korea is now the seventh-largest electric vehicle market in the world, up from 11th in 2019.

And as federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen noted at the EV Summit last month, with the right policy settings, Sweden increased its proportion of electric vehicle sales from 18% to 62% in just two years.

Similar approaches could yield similar results for Australia. While some nations may need a slower transition for a variety of reasons, Australia need not be one of them. Concerns about range, infrastructure and model availability can be readily overcome.

The country is well placed for early market growth. All states already offer incentives for electric vehicle buyers, including rebates, registration discounts and road tax exemptions.

All that may be needed is for the federal government to adopt policies that support electric vehicles. Based on the remarkable improvements in the technology and what has been learned in California and elsewhere, Australia is well placed for rapid market growth.

Scott Hardman receives funding from the California Air Resources Board, the California Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and CliamteWorks Foundation.

Daniel Sperling has a seat on the California Air Resources Board. The institutes he directs receive funding from foundations, automotive and energy companies, and local, state and national governments.

Gil Tal directs the Electric Vehicle Research Center, which receives funding from foundations, automakers, energy companies, and state and national policymakers.

– ref. Australia is failing on electric vehicles. California shows it’s possible to pick up the pace – https://theconversation.com/australia-is-failing-on-electric-vehicles-california-shows-its-possible-to-pick-up-the-pace-189871

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jess Carniel, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Southern Queensland

On September 8 2022, King Charles III ascended to the throne. Like his mother Queen Elizabeth II before him, he has opted to keep his own name as his regnal name.

Traditionally, monarchs may choose their own regnal name, which can be different to the name they otherwise use. For example, Charles’s grandfather Albert became George VI (who reigned from 1936 to 1952). This strengthened the connection of his reign to that of his father George V (1910-36) after the abdication of his older brother, Edward VIII (Jan-Dec 1936). Although Edward was his first name, his family called him by the last of his given names, David.

King Charles III could have chosen one of his other names – Philip, Arthur or George – but has decided to remain Charles. Some have lauded this decision for keeping it simple, although given the history of the two previous King Charleses, one might have forgiven him if he had decided to sidestep it.

Read more:
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Charles I: the king who lost the monarchy

Charles I, born in 1600, was the second son of King James VI. He became heir apparent (first in line to the throne) after the death of his older brother, Henry. He ascended to the throne in 1625.

Charles I’s policies were frequently unpopular with both his subjects and the parliament. His religious policies were considered too sympathetic to Roman Catholicism, and he levied taxes without parliamentary consent.

Tensions between his supporters, known as Cavaliers, and parliamentary supporters, known as Roundheads, led to the English Civil War. He was defeated in 1645, imprisoned, convicted of high treason, and executed by beheading in 1649.

The Commonwealth of England was established as a republic, and the monarchy was abolished, albeit only for 11 years.

Charles II: the king without a parliament

Although initially proclaimed as king by the Scottish parliament after his father’s execution, Charles II (born in 1630) did not reign until 1660. He lived in exile in Europe until the monarchy was restored and he was invited to return to England.

Relations between the new monarch and the parliament were not smooth. Charles II dissolved parliament four times, and ruled without it altogether for the final four years of his reign before his death in 1685.

Political tensions notwithstanding, Charles II was a more popular king than his father. He was known as the “merry monarch” and presided over a lively and hedonistic court. He had at least 12 illegitimate children by mistresses, but left no legitimate heir. He was succeeded by his brother, James II of England (James VII of Scotland).

In recent days many people have remarked how it’s difficult to hear the phrase “King Charles” without wanting to add the word “spaniel”. So how did this breed of dog get its name?

Spaniels were as ubiquitous in King Charles II’s court as corgis in Queen Elizabeth II’s. The Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, to give it its full name, was bred in the 20th century to resemble his favoured dogs, and named after his political supporters, the Cavaliers. The dogs’ ears also bear an uncanny resemblance to Charles II’s famous long wig.

What lies ahead for King Charles III?

Royal beheadings and exiles may be much rarer these days, but King Charles III faces his own more modern set of challenges. He became king just two days after a new British prime minister was sworn into office.

Conservative Liz Truss may have left her anti-monarchist days behind her, but the United Kingdom is facing a cost of living crisis that could potentially stoke public resentment about royal family expenses.

While the first two Charleses stood and fought for particular political ideologies, the contemporary British monarch is expected to be apolitical. Indeed, while still Prince of Wales, Charles had previously stated he wouldn’t “meddle” as king.

This was reaffirmed in his first public speech, in which he said, “It will no longer be possible for me to give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I care so deeply.” His challenge here will be remaining silent on politicised issues that are known to be close to his heart, such as climate change.

Read more:
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King Charles III starts his reign less popular than both his predecessor and his heir, Prince William. Affection for Queen Elizabeth II is not the sole reason republican debates have faltered in the past, but an unpopular monarch could be leveraged to raise questions about the institution as a whole.

In a political and economic climate where the meaning and expense of the monarchy is subject to debate, taking on a regnal name with a legacy of abolished (and restored) monarchy might be tempting fate.

Read more:
What the Queen’s death means for an Australian republic

Jess Carniel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Beheaded and exiled: the two previous King Charleses bookended the abolition of the monarchy – https://theconversation.com/beheaded-and-exiled-the-two-previous-king-charleses-bookended-the-abolition-of-the-monarchy-190410

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jennifer Browne, Research Fellow, Deakin University

First Nations children represent the future of the world’s oldest continuing culture. Of the 66,000 Victorians who identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander in the 2021 Census, one-third were aged under 15 years.

First Nations children in Victoria are doing well in several health outcomes, our recent report has found. This report provides valuable insight into nutrition, physical activity and wellbeing among First Nations children living in regional Victoria.

Our survey found more than 300 First Nations primary school children were meeting guidelines for physical activity, healthy eating and screen time. Those who met these guidelines also had higher health-related quality of life.

However, our study is rare. Before our report, there was no information available about nutrition and physical activity among primary school-aged First Nations children in Victoria.

More evidence is needed about First Nations children’s health in Victoria. And it needs to be strengths-based, as opposed to highlighting deficits.

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A strengths-based approach

To examine First Nations childrens’ health, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers from Deakin University partnered with the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO). This organisation is the peak body representing Victoria’s Aboriginal community-controlled health sector.

VACCHO’s nutrition team works to improve food security and nutrition outcomes among Aboriginal communities across Victoria. Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations such as these provide culturally safe care, and support self-determination.

In our research, we found there is potential for health data to stigmatise First Nations peoples by focusing on negative outcomes instead of progress. To avoid this, when collating data, we focused on measuring positive health outcomes (such as healthy weight) rather than measuring “problems” (like obesity).

We were interested in identifying factors that contribute to positive wellbeing. This strengths-based approach acknowledges and celebrates the strength of First Nations children.

Read more:
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population has increased, but the census lacks detail in other facets of Indigenous lives

Many First Nations children are meeting the health guidelines

Our findings indicate that many of the children surveyed were meeting nutrition and physical activity guidelines.

For most of these measures, there was no significant difference between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children in the survey.

Read more:
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population has increased, but the census lacks detail in other facets of Indigenous lives

There’s still work to do

Our survey found Aboriginal children were more likely to report meeting vegetable consumption guidelines than their non-Aboriginal classmates. However, only 21% of Aboriginal children who participated reported eating the recommended number of vegetables each day.

While 53% of Aboriginal children had a healthy body weight, just under half did not. Non-Aboriginal children were more likely to have a healthy weight and on average had a lower body mass index than Aboriginal children.

This could be addressed through the development of a national First Nations food and nutrition plan. This plan would need to address issues such as food security and workforce capacity while directing funding to First Nations community-controlled nutrition programs.

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Connecting physical health with social and emotional wellbeing

Our survey also evaluated perceived physical, social, emotional and school-related wellbeing. This was measured using the Paediatric Quality of Life Inventory.

We found non-Aboriginal children in our survey had significantly higher average health-related quality of life scores compared to Aboriginal children. This highlights this importance of promoting children’s mental health and social and emotional wellbeing alongside healthy eating and physical activity.

It’s important to recognise the connection between physical health (such as body weight) and health behaviours (diet, physical activity, screen time and sleep) with social and emotional wellbeing.

This view of health is defined by the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation as “not just the physical wellbeing of an individual but the social, emotional and cultural wellbeing of the whole Community”. This is why culturally appropriate research undertaken in partnership with Aboriginal organisations is so important, and something we prioritised in our work.

It is our hope our findings can be used by health services to plan culturally appropriate health promotion programs for First Nations children in Victoria. Ideally governments can use these findings to better support Victorian Aboriginal community controlled health organisations to implement these programs.

Our strengths-based approach should be replicated in future surveys of First Nations childrens’ health. Importantly, Aboriginal health must be in Aboriginal hands.

Jennifer Browne receives funding from the Heart Foundation and VicHealth

Jill Gallagher, Joleen Ryan, Mark Lock (Ngiyampaa), and Troy Walker do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Rather than focusing on the negative, we need a strength-based way to approach First Nations childrens’ health – https://theconversation.com/rather-than-focusing-on-the-negative-we-need-a-strength-based-way-to-approach-first-nations-childrens-health-187986

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lixin Jiang, Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland

Former General Electric chief executive Jack Welch famously promoted the “20-70-10” system to increase labour productivity. Managers were asked to rank employees on a bell curve; the top 20% received rewards, while the bottom 10% were fired.

Yahoo, Amazon and IBM, among many others, later adopted this performance review approach, termed stack ranking, forced ranking or “rank-and-yank”. Similar practices – termed “up or out” – dominate law firms, accounting firms, the military and professional sports teams.

The goal of “rank-and-yank” is to stimulate subordinates’ work performance by creating the constant threat of job insecurity. It’s a fairly ruthless way to improve the bottom line, but some employers might find it justifiable if it worked. So does it?

Our research reveals the answer depends on the level of job insecurity and the performance criteria in question. But the overall answer might not please fans of the late Jack Welch.

Insecurity and performance outcomes

Researchers disagree about the effects of job insecurity on work performance. Some focus on the adverse consequences of job insecurity, while others spotlight its potential motivating function.

Researchers at the University of Auckland and the University of Texas at San Antonio theorised that the impacts of job insecurity depended on its level of severity and the specific types of work performance that were considered.

Given no single empirical study can adequately address this question, the best way to understand it is to conduct a meta-analysis.

Based on data from over a hundred studies into “rank-and-yank” we concluded that Welch was both right and wrong.

Insecurity as motivation?

We observed that when job insecurity is extremely high, employees do increase their performance and the types of behaviours that are explicitly recognised by the formal reward system.

Similarly, employees also take on tasks that are beyond their formal duties but are beneficial to organisational productivity and visible to mangers. Such tasks may include attending non-required meetings, sharing informed opinions to solve work problems, and volunteering for overtime work when needed.

This appears to be good news. But such “motivating” effects of job insecurity are very weak (albeit statistically significant), with very few practical implications in the real world.

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Thus, the job insecurity associated with a “20-70-10” approach is less of a motivating factor for workers than Welch might have hoped for. Additionally, as job insecurity increases, employee creativity declines – and then flattens out.

Employees’ creativity, or their ability to generate innovative and practical ideas or solutions, can contribute to an organisation’s success and is therefore highly valued by organisations.

Moreover, employees facing low to moderate levels of job insecurity decrease behaviours that may benefit their colleagues, such as lending a hand when needed.

Taken together, extremely high job insecurity does not contribute to employee creative performance or “good citizenship” in the workplace.

An unsafe work environment

The data also revealed a link between job insecurity and a decline in employee safety performance.

Safety performance includes wearing safety gear, following safety protocols and communicating safety concerns to managers. These measures are critical to prevent employee injuries and on-site accidents.

Job insecurity also consistently increases the likelihood that employees engage in destructive behaviours that harm the organisation, including calling in sick when not ill and destroying or stealing company property.

Overall, considering the overwhelmingly negative effects of job insecurity on employee attitudes, organisational commitment, health and wellbeing, the small, positive, motivating effect of increasing job insecurity may not be worth it.

Uncertainty and productivity

Considering New Zealand’s poor productivity output, it is worth managers considering how they can effectively motivate workers.

According to the Productivity Commission, New Zealanders worked 34.2 hours per week and produced NZ$68 of output per hour. Yet in other OECD countries, employees worked 31.9 hours per week and produced $85 of output per hour.

So, finding ways to increase employee performance is important. But, considering the data, using a “stick” of job insecurity is unlikely to achieve it.

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With the threat of job loss, employees are likely to engage in “quiet quitting”. Employees will also refuse to go the extra mile and instead are more likely to only do the minimum required.

Considering the current low unemployment rate (below 5%) and the “great resignation” trend that emerged after COVID-19, employers need to think twice before using job insecurity as a motivator. People may simply find an alternative employer that treats them with a “carrot”.

Retaining talent and increasing productivity requires offering employees better wages, opportunities for training and career advancement, greater control over their work, and more decision-making opportunities.

Essentially, employers should treat employees the way they want to be treated themselves. After all, as studies have shown, a happy employee is a productive employee.

Lixin Jiang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Is job insecurity really the great motivator some managers believe it is? We crunched the numbers to find out – https://theconversation.com/is-job-insecurity-really-the-great-motivator-some-managers-believe-it-is-we-crunched-the-numbers-to-find-out-189972

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zoe Doubleday, Marine Ecologist and ARC Future Fellow, University of South Australia

Fake foods are invading our supermarkets, as foods we love are substituted or adulterated with lower value or unethical goods.

Food fraud threatens human health but is also bad news for industry and sustainable food production. Seafood is one of most traded food products in the world and reliant on convoluted supply chains that leave the the door wide open for seafood fraud.

Our new study, published in the journal Fish and Fisheries, showcases a new approach for determining the provenance or “origin” of many seafood species.

By identifying provenance, we can detect fraud and empower authorities and businesses to stop it. This makes it more likely that the food you buy is, in fact, the food you truly want to eat.

Read more:
How technology will help fight food fraud

Illegal fishing and seafood fraud

Wild-caught seafood is vulnerable to illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing.

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing can have a devastating impact on the marine environment because:

• it is a major cause of overfishing, constituting an estimated one-fifth of seafood

• it can destroy marine habitats, such coral reefs, through destructive fishing methods such as blast bombing and cyanide fishing

• it can significantly harm wildlife, such as albatross and turtles, which are caught as by-catch.

So how is illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing connected to seafood fraud?

Seafood fraud allows this kind of fishing to flourish as illegal products are laundered through legitimate supply chains.

A recent study in the United States found when seafood is mislabelled, it is more likely to be substituted for a product from less healthy fisheries with management policies that are less likely to reduce the environmental impacts of fishing.

One review of mislabelled seafood in the US found that out of 180 substituted species, 25 were considered threatened, endangered, or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN).

Illegal fishing and seafood fraud also has a human cost. It can:

• adversely affect the livelihoods of law-abiding fishers and seafood businesses

• threaten food security

• facilitate human rights abuses such as forced labour and piracy

• increase risk of exposure to pathogens, drugs, and other banned substances in seafood.

The chemical fingerprints in shells and bones

A vast range of marine animals are harvested for food every year, including fish, molluscs, crustaceans, and echinoderms.

However, traditional food provenance methods are typically designed to identify one species at a time.

That might benefit the species and industry in question, but it is expensive and time consuming. As such, current methods are restricted to a relatively small number of species.

In our study, we described a broader, universal method to identify provenance and detect fraud.

How? We harnessed natural chemical markers imprinted in the shells and bones of marine animals. These markers reflect an animal’s environment and can identify where they are from.

We focused on a chemical marker that is similar across many different marine animals. This specific chemical marker, known as “oxygen isotopes”, is determined by ocean composition and temperature rather than an animal’s biology.

Exploiting this commonality and how it relates to the local environment, we constructed a global ocean map of oxygen isotopes that helps researchers understand where a marine animal may be from (by matching the oxygen isotope value in shells and bones to the oxygen isotope value in the map).

After rigorous testing, we demonstrated this global map (or “isoscape”) can be used to correctly identify the origins of a wide range of marine animals living in different latitudes.

For example, we saw up to 90% success in classifying fish, cephalopods, and shellfish between the tropical waters of Southeast Asia and the cooler waters of southern Australia.

What next?

Oxygen isotopes, as a universal marker, worked well on a range of animals collected from different latitudes and across broad geographic areas.

Our next step is to integrate oxygen isotopes with other universal chemical markers to gives clues on longitude and refine our approach.

Working out the provenance of seafood is a large and complex challenge. No single approach is a silver bullet for all species, fisheries or industries.

But our approach represents a step towards a more inclusive, global system for validating seafood provenance and fighting seafood fraud.

Hopefully, this will mean ensure fewer marine species are left behind and more consumer confidence in the products we buy.

Dr Jasmin Martino, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, contributed to this research and article.

Zoe Doubleday receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, and the Australian Academy of Science.

– ref. Where is your seafood really from? We’re using ‘chemical fingerprinting’ to fight seafood fraud and illegal fishing – https://theconversation.com/where-is-your-seafood-really-from-were-using-chemical-fingerprinting-to-fight-seafood-fraud-and-illegal-fishing-189471

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Henderson, PhD Candidate in Literary Studies and Creative Writing, University of Canberra

Few settings invite drama, messy emotions and chaos like a high school.

The original 1990s Heartbreak High ran for seven seasons and was broadcast in over 70 countries including the UK, US, Germany, Argentina, Mexico, India and Indonesia. The show followed a cast of students at a multicultural Sydney high school and became an icon of Aussie TV. It stood out as an honest and gritty depiction of teen life, especially compared against the “squeaky clean” visions in other dramas of the time.

Now, a new reboot under showrunner Hannah Carroll Chapman revisits the fictional Hartley High in 2022, dealing with issues and themes relevant to a contemporary audience.

Heartbreak High will find its place alongside series like Netflix’s Sex Education and HBO’s Euphoria exploring the often grimy realities of modern adolescence with style and humour.

But here we have a uniquely Australian take on the current wave of teen dramas.

A new class

Amerie (Ayesha Madon) and Harper (Asher Yasbincek) have been ride-or-die best friends since childhood. Their greatest project is a map of all the hook-ups and romantic entanglements at Hartley High, drawn in a secret, out-of-bounds stairwell.

When the map is discovered, Amerie gets blamed, and an unlikely group of students find themselves stuck together in “Sexual Literacy Tutorials”.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Harper turns up to school with a shaved head and a mysterious vendetta against Amerie.

With her social life turned upside down, Amerie falls in with class misfits Darren (James Majoos) and Quinni (Chloe Hayden). From here, she must repair her reputation, figure out what’s wrong with Harper, and navigate the rocky terrain of romance, sexuality and heartbreak.

The series is an echo of contemporary teen culture. Pop culture references and slang like “unalive” and “flop era” will date the episodes, but for now Heartbreak High is an effective mirror of modern life.

Much like the original series gave us a diverse set of characters, this series refreshingly reflects the diversity of today’s high schools.

Our heroine Amerie and her two love interests, long-time crush Dusty (Josh Heuston) and sweet new boy in town Malakai (Thomas Weatherall), are all characters of colour.

Darren is non-binary, out and proud but dealing with parents who complain Darren’s gender identity and singular they/them pronouns are “too confusing”.

Quinni is queer and autistic, with one episode sympathetically exploring her difficulties with dating and trying to mask and appear “normal”.

These teenagers all face their own unique issues, but also find themselves dealing with universal ups and downs every viewer will be able to relate to.

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Let’s talk about sex

As the Hartley High hook-up map would imply, teen sexuality is at the core of the story.

Heartbreak High uses this plot device not just for love triangles and drama, but as a chance to interrogate how we talk to teenagers about sex.

The Sexual Literacy Tutorials – or “SLTs”, which the students point out ironically sounds like “sluts” – provide some wonderfully awkward scenes.

The school’s sex education curriculum is full of outdated language and knowledge gaps, leaving the staff woefully (but amusingly) unprepared for nuanced discussions about sex with their students.

Long-suffering teacher Jojo (Chika Ikogwe) tries to mix up the curriculum by injecting some sex positivity, inclusive language and nuanced discussion of consent – to mixed results.

As the bright pink dildo stuck to the school’s basketball court proves, sex is very much present and unavoidable in the high school environment, whether the scandalised school board likes it or not.

The question is how to broach the topic in a nuanced way that keeps those vulnerable students safe.

Heartbreak High’s writing follows from Jojo’s example. When sex is depicted between the characters, the dialogue emphasises the importance (and joy) of consent. The framing makes the scenes intimate without sexualising the teenagers themselves.

The frank depiction of female sexuality and queer sexuality is also refreshing, whether it’s comedic scenes of Amerie being too horny to concentrate, or a matter-of-fact discussion of the average labia size.

Read more:
Netflix’s Sex Education is doing sex education better than most schools

Complicated, messy lives

This reboot is a bright new piece of Australian television, running on an engaging blend of comedy and drama.

It doesn’t shy away from serious topics such as drug use, youth crime or discrimination. But it also provides plenty of moments of levity, letting its characters joke around about everything from astrology, to erections, to bad haircuts.

Heartbreak High avoids cliche and shows its teen heroes as complicated, messy people the audience can root for – even when they make mistakes.

Heartbreak High is streaming on Netflix from September 14.

Alex Henderson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Teenage misfits, messy emotions and joyous discussions on consent: Heartbreak High is a bright new piece of television – https://theconversation.com/teenage-misfits-messy-emotions-and-joyous-discussions-on-consent-heartbreak-high-is-a-bright-new-piece-of-television-188733

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Haskell-Dowland, Professor of Cyber Security Practice, Edith Cowan University

Sometimes it seems like passwords have been with us forever, and yet every year we’re reminded how we still don’t use them properly!

The annual publication of the “worst passwords” list shows we haven’t become much more password savvy over the decade. And while several replacements for the humble password have been proposed, none have come close to the ease of using the traditional method.

But this changes today with the introduction of Passkeys – an update in Apple’s latest iOS 16 operating system. Passkeys could be the long-awaited solution to password malpractice, and the near-constant problem of compromised credentials.

Read more:
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What’s wrong with passwords?

The problem with passwords has been well documented. We choose weak ones, write them down (for others to see), share them, and re-use them on multiple websites.

The last of these is particularly problematic. Once your details are breached (and subsequently leaked), they’re vulnerable to “credential stuffing” – where cybercriminals take a set of login credentials and try them on multiple websites.

“But I use a password manager,” you might say.

Well, that’s good. The standard advice for years has been to use password managers such as 1Password or LastPass. These let you create unique passwords for each website or service you use. So even if a website is compromised, only one password is revealed.

But this approach requires the ability to synchronise across all your devices – a feature not all password managers provide.

And even with a password manager, our passwords are still stored on the remote website we’re accessing. Although most websites store passwords in a secure (hashed) format, they are still routinely compromised. It’s estimated more than two billion sets of credentials (including passwords) were leaked online in 2021.

Along come Passkeys

Apple devices using the newest operating system release (iOS 16 or MacOS Ventura) will integrate a new password mechanism called Passkeys. Unfortunately iPad users will need to wait a little longer for the feature.

It’s worth noting you won’t be forced to use Passkeys, but your Apple device will prompt you with the opportunity to do so. Also, most websites will continue to support password access for people without the latest devices.

You’ll also have the option to use Apple’s secure cloud storage, iCloud, to back up your keys and share them across your Apple devices.

How do they work?

The concept behind Passkeys is relatively simple. Every website you elect to use Passkeys on will securely generate a unique pair of secret codes (referred to as “keys”).

One of these is a public key, stored on the website you’re registered on. The other is a private key stored on your device. Both keys are related, but one can’t be used to get the other.

When you attempt to log in to the website, instead of entering a password, your device will ask you to verify your login using your device’s biometric unlocking mechanism. So you’ll either scan your face or your finger.

This deliberately limits Passkeys’ functionality to devices with biometric support (iPhones have offered Touch ID since 2013 and Face ID since 2017).

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Once your biometrics are verified, your device will use your private key to prove your identity to the website by tackling a complex mathematical “challenge” issued by the site. At no point is your private key sent across the internet to the website.

The response from your device can only be verified by the website, using the public key generated when you registered. And nobody can pretend to be you without your private key, which is safely stored on your device.

If a website is compromised, the public key alone is useless to cybercriminals.

Moreover, while biometric technology can be compromised, this is relatively difficult. To exploit a biometrics/PassKeys combination, a criminal would first need to obtain your device and then do a great job faking your face or fingerprint (or force one from you) – unlikely circumstances for most users.

Usability barriers

Passkeys will initially launch on Apple, but others are close behind. Microsoft will likely launch its own equivalent soon, although it may not initially be compatible with Apple’s implementation. This could be an issue for people wanting to use both an iPhone and Windows laptop.

Moving forward, it’s important Apple, Google and Microsoft work together to ensure maximum compatibility across devices.

Until then, there are some workarounds. If you need to access an Apple Passkeys-protected service on your Windows laptop (or any other device), you can scan a QR code with your iPhone and provide your biometric login verification that way.

This means users will always need to have their phone on them when they want to authenticate to a remote service – whereas currently they can just type out their password, or use a password manager synced across their devices.

For some users, needing to have their phone all the time could be enough to give Passkeys a pass altogether.

The long tail of adoption

The Passkeys approach has the potential to make passwords obsolete, but this will require organisations around the world to invest time, effort and money into it.

Big players like social media companies are well positioned to adopt Passkeys early on, but there will be millions of websites that may take years to do so – or may never.

Indeed, looking at the state of play today, many leading sites still fall short of applying existing good practice around passwords. So it’s hard to say exactly how quickly, and how widely, Passkeys will be implemented.

Read more:
Four ways to make sure your passwords are safe and easy to remember

Steven Furnell is affiliated with the Chartered Institute of Information Security.

Paul Haskell-Dowland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Apple’s PassKeys update could make traditional passwords obsolete – https://theconversation.com/apples-passkeys-update-could-make-traditional-passwords-obsolete-188300

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Warhurst, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Australian National University

The passing of Queen Elizabeth II has the potential to transform Australia’s republic debate.

While the debate should not be about personalities, the monarch’s identity clearly makes a difference. Former prime minister and republican Malcolm Turnbull once famously said many Australians were “Elizabethans” rather than monarchists.

However, as we mark the transition from one monarch to another, republic supporters still need to be patient, for a number of reasons.

Speaking on talk radio on Friday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declined to address the republic question, saying: “Today is a day for one issue, and one issue only, which is to pay tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and to give our thanks for her service to our country.”

But what can we expect in the longer term?

The Charles factor

With the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles has become King Charles III, not just of the United Kingdom, but of Australia and other dominions too. Camilla has become Queen Consort with Elizabeth’s blessing.

Read more:
There’s a strong case to be made for constitutional monarchies. But there’s no case for one in Australia

Opinion surveys have regularly shown the idea of Charles becoming king raises support for a republic. I believed in 1999, at the time of the constitutional referendum, the figure was about 5%. It was widely recognised Charles was not as popular among Australians as his mother. That is still the case.

After the first, failed referendum, influential republicans, like Turnbull, believed Australia should not consider a second referendum until the queen had passed away. The Australian Republic Movement disagreed – but that view became widespread.

This has prevented any official preparatory initiatives prior to the end of her time on the throne.

Back to the start

Much has changed over the past 23 years since we last seriously considered a republic. This means the public discussion must begin again almost from scratch and under new circumstances. For one thing, any Australian currently under 40 years of age did not vote in 1999.

Some lessons have also been learned from 1999, including problems with divisions between republicans about what model to adopt, but many issues remain unresolved. The central arguments for a republic have not changed markedly, but the situation is different.

One important development has been the increased urgency for constitution recognition of Indigenous rights. The republic movement and most republicans recognise the latter now has precedence over a second republic referendum.

Preferred models and public support

Experience and common sense dictate the move towards a republican constitution should not be rushed anyway. There needs to be time put aside for considered community discussion. While the initial discussion can be led by civil society groups, like the republic movement, ultimately the discussion must be led by the federal parliament and government if we are going to make genuine progress.

Read more:
The republic debate is back (again) but we need more than a model to capture Australians’ imagination

The republic movement has recently launched its preferred model for a republic, which is a starting point for public discussion. This follows years of stating the model should be decided by the community at a plebiscite prior to a referendum.

The new model proposes Australian parliaments nominate candidates for president before a popular vote to decide between them. It has been derided in some quarters for its complexity, but it is a creative attempt to resolve differences between direct election and parliamentary republicans. The model also reflects the realities of a federal system.

What are the mechanics?

The method of constitutional reform remains unchanged from 1999 (there has not been a referendum question put since then and the last successful referendum occurred in 1977). This recent history of our failure weighs heavily on any new referendum proposal.

Such proposals must effectively first win the support of the both houses of federal parliament. Then the specific proposal must be put to a yes/no referendum.

There is no other legitimate constitutional way, even though some people would prefer an “in principle” referendum to test the waters first. Realistically, the support of the federal government and opposition is also a necessary condition for a successful referendum.

Another decade away?

At any rate, any radical transformation of the republic/monarchy debate will not happen straight away. There needs to be time for the public to mourn the loss of Elizabeth.

That means a timetable for a second republican referendum, given King Charles has come to the throne in 2022, is at best five to ten years away (after the 2025 federal election at the earliest). By that stage Charles himself will be close to 80 years of age or even older.

John Warhurst is a former chair of The Australian Republican Movement.

– ref. What the Queen’s death means for an Australian republic – https://theconversation.com/what-the-queens-death-means-for-an-australian-republic-181610

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Ball, Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow, Menzies Health Institute, Griffith University

The cost of groceries in Australia has sky-rocketed this year. So people may be tempted to switch to home-brand foods to save on their weekly food bill.

Home-brand foods are certainly cheaper. But are they healthy?

Here’s what we know about the nutrients they contain compared with the more expensive named brands.

Read more:
How to save $50 off your food bill and still eat tasty, nutritious meals

What are home-brand foods?

Home-brand foods have various names. You might hear them called supermarket own-brand foods, private label, in-house brands, store brands, or retailer brands.

These are foods made specifically for a supermarket (you cannot buy them at a competing store). They are advertised as low-priced alternatives to more expensive items.

Home-brand foods are widely available in Australia and other countries, making up to 30% of what you can buy at a supermarket.

Some people once viewed these as inferior products. But their nutrient content, and wide availability in supermarkets, may play a role in boosting population health. Some evidence shows home-brand foods increase availability and accessibility to more affordable food options, and contribute to improving food safety standards.

Read more:
Frozen, canned or fermented: when you can’t shop often for fresh vegetables, what are the best alternatives?

Why are they cheaper?

Cheaper prices associated with home-brand products are possible due to lower costs associated with research and development, marketing and packaging. This means we cannot assume lower prices mean cheaper or inferior ingredients.

In fact, supermarkets can influence the ingredients and processing of home-brand foods by benchmarking against named brands.

Before a home-brand product is made, stores will also specify to manufacturers what it should cost to consumers. Manufacturers often choose to use the same ingredients and processes as name-brand products to reduce costs through economies of scale.

This means not having to clean or reprogram equipment between making the different products. It also means most home-brand products are very similar to branded products, aside from the packaging.

However, for mixed foods, such as breakfast cereals and pre-made sauces, the manufacturer may change the ingredients, such as using cheaper or fewer ingredients, to help reduce costs.

Read more:
How Australians talk about tucker is a story that’ll make you want to eat the bum out of an elephant

How much can I save?

Home-brand products can be up to 40% cheaper than named brands. So yes, home-brand products can make a real difference to the total cost of groceries.

However, some products have bigger cost savings than others, as we show below.

Most labels on supermarket shelves show the cost per 100g (or equivalent) for an item, which can help shoppers choose the most cost-effective option, especially useful when items are on sale.

But are they healthy?

For simple, unprocessed products such as milk, eggs and pasta there is virtually no difference in nutritional quality between home-brand and named brand foods. There is very little the manufacturers can do to modify ingredients to reduce costs.

But sometimes cheaper ingredients are used in higher concentrations in home-brand products. For example, home-brand pre-made pasta sauces may have less of the vegetable ingredients, and greater amounts of sugar, sodium (salt), and additives (such as stabilisers, colours and flavours). This may change the quality and taste.

Very few studies have explored how home-brand products may differ in nutritional profile.

Overall, serving size, sodium and other nutrients appear similar across home-brand and named brand food. But there are some differences with certain food types.

Serving sizes

For instance, serving sizes are generally smaller in home-brand pizza, canned legumes, grains, biscuits and ready meals. In fact, edible oil is the only type of food where serving size is greater for home-brand foods.

Salt

Sodium levels of home-brand breakfast cereals, cheese and bread are higher than branded products. But sodium levels of cooking sauces, frozen potato products (such as oven-baked fries) and biscuits are lower in home-brand foods.

Other nutrients

For energy and fat intake, again it seems there are inconsistent differences between home-brand foods compared to branded foods.

How about sugar? Unfortunately, the studies didn’t look at this.

In fact, overall, Australian home-brand products are not consistently nutritionally different to branded products.

Health star ratings

On a related note, unhealthy home-brand products – such as juices, meat pies and muesli bars – are more likely to include a health star rating, compared to nutritious foods. This may incorrectly imply they are a healthy choice.

This means no matter which brand you choose, remember to check the food label to make sure you are getting the quality of food you like for the price you are comfortable with.

Lauren Ball receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, RACGP Foundation, VicHealth and Queensland Health. She is a Director of Dietitians Australia.

Katelyn Barnes is an executive member of the Australasian Association of Academic Primary Care.

– ref. Are home-brand foods healthy? If you read the label, you may be pleasantly surprised – https://theconversation.com/are-home-brand-foods-healthy-if-you-read-the-label-you-may-be-pleasantly-surprised-189445