Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paulomi (Polly) Burey, Associate Professor (Food Science), University of Southern Queensland

It’s an all too common situation – you’re busy cooking or baking to a recipe when you open the cupboard and suddenly realise you are missing an ingredient.

Unless you can immediately run to the shops, this can leave you scrambling for a substitute that can perform a similar function. Thankfully, such substitutes can be more successful than you’d expect.

There are a few reasons why certain ingredient substitutions work so well. This is usually to do with the chemistry and the physical features having enough similarity to the original ingredient to still do the job appropriately.

Let’s delve into some common ingredient substitutions and why they work – or need to be tweaked.

Oils versus butter

Both butter and oils belong to a chemical class called lipids. It encompasses solid, semi-solid and liquid fats.

In a baked product the “job” of these ingredients is to provide flavour and influence the structure and texture of the finished item. In cake batters, lipids contribute to creating an emulsion structure – this means combining two liquids that wouldn’t usually mix. In the baking process, this helps to create a light, fluffy crumb.

One of the primary differences between butter and oil is that butter is only about 80% lipid (the rest being water), while oil is almost 100% lipid. Oil creates a softer crumb but is still a great fat to bake with.

You can use a wide range of oils from different sources, such as olive oil, rice bran, avocado, peanut, coconut, macadamia and many more. Each of these may impart different flavours.

Other “butters”, such as peanut and cashew butter, aren’t strictly butters but pastes. They impart different characteristics and can’t easily replace dairy butter, unless you also add extra oil.

Aquafaba or flaxseed versus eggs

Aquafaba is the liquid you drain from a can of legumes – such as chickpeas or lentils. It contains proteins, kind of how egg white also contains proteins.

The proteins in egg white include albumins, and aquafaba also contains albumins. This is why it is possible to make meringue from egg whites, or from aquafaba if you’re after a vegan version.

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The proteins act as a foam stabiliser – they hold the light, airy texture in the product. The concentration of protein in egg white is a bit higher, so it doesn’t take long to create a stable foam. Aquafaba requires more whipping to create a meringue-like foam, but it will bake in a similar way.

Another albumin-containing alternative for eggs is flaxseed. These seeds form a thick gel texture when mixed with a little water. The texture is similar to raw egg and can provide structure and emulsification in baked recipes that call for a small amount of egg white.

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Lemon plus dairy versus buttermilk

Buttermilk is the liquid left over after churning butter – it can be made from sweet cream, cultured/sour cream or whey-based cream. Buttermilk mostly contains proteins and fats.

Cultured buttermilk has a somewhat tangy flavour. Slightly soured milk can be a good substitute as it contains similar components and isn’t too different from “real” buttermilk, chemically speaking.

One way to achieve slightly soured milk is by adding some lemon juice or cream of tartar to milk. Buttermilk is used in pancakes and baked goods to give extra height or volume. This is because the acidic (sour) components of buttermilk interact with baking soda, producing a light and airy texture.

Buttermilk can also influence flavour, imparting a slightly tangy taste to pancakes and baked goods. It can also be used in sauces and dressings if you’re looking for a lightly acidic touch.

Honey versus sugar

Honey is a complex sugar-based syrup that includes floral or botanical flavours and aromas. Honey can be used in cooking and baking, adding both flavour and texture (viscosity, softness) to a wide range of products.

If you add honey instead of regular sugar in baked goods, keep in mind that honey imparts a softer, moister texture. This is because it contains more moisture and is a humectant (that is, it likes to hold on to water). It is also less crystalline than sugar, unless you leave it to crystallise.

The intensity of sweetness can also be different – some people find honey is sweeter than its granular counterpart, so you will want to adjust your recipes accordingly.

Gluten-free versus regular flour

Sometimes you need to make substitutions to avoid allergens, such as gluten – the protein found in cereal grains such as wheat, rye, barley and others.

Unfortunately, gluten is also the component that gives a nice, stretchy, squishy quality to bread.

To build this characteristic in a gluten-free product, it’s necessary to have a mixture of ingredients that work together to mimic this texture. Common ingredients used are corn or rice flour, xanthan gum, which acts as a binder and moisture holder, and tapioca starch, which is a good water absorbent and can aid with binding the dough.

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Thank gluten’s complex chemistry for your light, fluffy baked goods

Paulomi (Polly) Burey 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. Run out of butter or eggs? Here’s the science behind substitute ingredients – https://theconversation.com/run-out-of-butter-or-eggs-heres-the-science-behind-substitute-ingredients-202036

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wes Hill, Associate Professor, art history and visual culture, Southern Cross University

Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016) is, essentially, a music video. Currently on show at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane, it is also one of only a handful of video works in the world that could be called a masterpiece with a straight face.

Set to the booming rhythms of Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam (2016), Jafa’s work is seven-and-a-half-minutes of impeccably edited montages, most appropriated from the internet.

Black bodies in the turmoils and exultations of American life are shown striving, shuddering, dancing, fleeing, falling and in moments of reclaimed grace. Subtle repetitions – such as alien movie excerpts, police officers abusing their authority, the blistering surface of the sun – function as through-lines, grounding it in unconventional thematic registers.

Jafa elevates the music video while emulating the tenor of sports brand advertising. Sequences alternate between the prosaic and the universal; political reality and spirituality.

The majority of Jafa’s scenes are taken from amateur posts on YouTube, but others bear the watermarks of their IP owners (such as Getty Images, Amazing Space and Movieclips.com), as if in homage to the videos of Elaine Sturtevant, a pioneer of appropriation art.

The depths and virtuosity of Black identity

Love Is the Message begins with footage of a Black man, Charles Ramsey, who gained prominence for helping a white woman escape her kidnapper after being held captive for over a decade. He tells a reporter:

I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl runs into a Black man’s arms.

Scenes like this are imbued with racial division, which Jafa compiles like notes in a gospel score. They run adjacent to footage of some unequivocal geniuses of American culture: Nina Simone, Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jordan, Aretha Franklin, Serena Williams, Martin Luther King, Miles Davis and more.

These Black stars are shown in all their glory, but their presences are also tinged with melancholy; the shadow of great achievements born from social hardships, or of arrested potentiality.

Days after the presidential victory of Donald Trump, Jafa, at the ripe age of 56, first exhibited Love Is the Message in his New York solo debut. There it embodied public outrage over the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner at the hands of white police officers, anticipating the then incoming government’s indifference to matters of racial injustice.

Described by critic Roberta Smith as “unbearably pertinent to our times”, Love Is the Message effectively relaunched Jafa’s artistic career.

Before then, he had spent years working as a cinematographer for Spike Lee, Julie Dash and John Akomfrah, amongst others (including second-unit work with Stanley Kubrick).

In recent years Jafa has expanded his practice beyond the realms of live-shot film and appropriated video. He now pursues his unique visual language through a variety of media, including oversized tyre sculptures and CGI projections, looking increasingly like a cultural archivist-turned-artist.

In all of this, Jafa examines the depths and virtuosity of Black identity, which, he asserts, is “an open ending”.

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A time capsule

Eight years after its premiere, in the exhibition signage IMA director Robert Leonard situates Love Is the Message as a “time capsule”.

In 2024, we engage with the work very differently now that Kanye West, whose music is integral to its emotional core, is a controversial antisemitic symbol. Few saw this turn coming in 2016.

That said, even before the Kanye controversies, Jafa’s work was, in part, already dealing with the theme of greatness marred. Its closing scene is James Brown in concert – the soul singer who was arrested in 2004 on charges of domestic violence. In addition to this, Picasso, an artist central to debates about how we should discuss great art made by bad people, is specifically referenced by the album, The Life of Pablo, that Kanye’s song was taken from.

In this sense, Love Is the Message asks us to think about how we might separate our love for the art (the message) from any misgivings we may have about the artist (the messenger).

As time marches on and the work’s meanings shift, to my mind what resonates most today is its craft and conviction. There is its peculiar imagery and abstruse juxtapositions, the deathly gloom that hangs over its comical and ecstatic sequences, the surprising inferences of alien ontology.

Jafa has long been fascinated with the links between Black identity and alien symbolism. “Have you noticed that 2001’s monolith, Darth Vader’s uniform/flesh, and H. R. Giger’s alien are all composed of the same black substance?” he asks rhetorically in a 2015 essay.

Regardless of where we draw our moral lines, Love Is the Message is undeniably rousing; a love song to identity as an unrestricted thing, capable of being motivated by awe and rebellion.

While not particularly religious himself, Jafa “believes in Black people believing”.

His work presents spirituality as a counterpunch to anyone who wants to put people of colour in their place.

Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death is at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, until 7 April.

Read more:
Kanye West and Wyndham Lewis: how ‘cancellation’ affected two artists, a century apart

Wes Hill 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 video art of Arthur Jafa: a counterpunch to anyone who wants to put people of colour in their place – https://theconversation.com/the-video-art-of-arthur-jafa-a-counterpunch-to-anyone-who-wants-to-put-people-of-colour-in-their-place-222510

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Breen, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

Aotearoa New Zealand ranks among the highest in youth suicide rates among OECD countries – and it is Māori youth at the forefront of this national crisis.

Recent statistics show the number of suspected self-inflicted deaths for Māori males is nearly double the rate for non-Māori males. The rate for Māori females is around 1.8 times higher than the rate for non-Māori females.

The alarming discrepancy is most notable in the 15-24 age group, where the rate for Māori is about 2.6 times higher than for non-Māori.

Despite these concerning figures, there is no express right to health in New Zealand law, creating a gap in accountability. And by failing to ensure the health and wellbeing of young Māori, Aotearoa New Zealand is falling short of its international obligations.

Progress and retreat

Over the past five years, the government has taken some steps to tackle the country’s mental health crisis. But the priorities of the new government could threaten this already limited progress.

In 2019, NZ$2 billion was injected into the mental health system by the then Labour government. And the Mental Health Commission was established in 2021 with the aim of contributing to better and equitable mental health and wellbeing outcomes for all people.

Te Aka Whai Ora, the Māori Health Authority, was established under the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Act 2022. But while the new coalition government has announced the country’s first ever minister for mental health, it has also announced plans to scrap the authority.

Read more:
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Te Aka Whai Ora’s 2023 report, Under One Umbrella, presents a comprehensive, integrated approach to mental health, alcohol and addiction for young people. Significantly, it advocates for a holistic “all-of-government” approach.

Submissions from a recent review of the Mental Health Act show strong support for the new legislation to uphold rights in alignment with international conventions, with more focus on tangata whaiora (someone seeking health) and whānau (extended family).

Although these initiatives and pending legislative reform represent a step in the right direction, the statistics related to youth mental health are still cause for concern.

International responsibilities to ensure health

One strategy to address the national mental health crisis for Māori youth would be to embed the human right to health in local policy and law. This would also bring Aotearoa New Zealand’s legislation into line with its international obligations.

In 1946, the World Health Organization adopted a broad definition of health:

Health is a state of complete physical, mental, cultural and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

Over the course of the next two decades, health was conceived as a human right (in the Universal Deceleration of Human Rights and later in the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights).

The International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination also obliged countries to eliminate race discrimination in public health and medical care.

For children, the right to health is further recognised in the Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989. And, specifically for Indigenous communities, in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007.

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It is well established within international law that the right to health for Indigenous children and youth is linked to their distinct cultural, social and customary practices.

And various UN groups have repeatedly emphasised that Indigenous people have the right to receive culturally appropriate healthcare services that respect their traditional practices and medicines.

These groups have also urged countries to provide Indigenous communities with the necessary resources to design, deliver and control their own healthcare services.

The need for a legal framework

Aotearoa New Zealand is bound by these international agreements, and the rights and obligations that flow from them. Yet the right to health does not appear in our laws, which leaves a void in accountability and enforcement.

This hinders the implementation of effective health policies for tamariki and rangatahi Māori (children and young people), particularly as it limits the legal avenues available for recourse when the system fails.

Read more:
It’s despair, not depression, that’s responsible for Indigenous suicide

The disparities in mental health outcomes point to an immediate national challenge facing Aotearoa New Zealand, which is to formulate an effective mental healthcare framework.

The most appropriate starting point is to include the right to health in national policy and legislation. This would align New Zealand’s national policies and laws with international norms.

It would also mandate the government to take active steps to ensure that the highest attainable standards of mental health and wellbeing for tamariki and rangtahi Māori are met.

The authors 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. NZ is bound by international mental health agreements – statistics for Māori show we’re failing to uphold them – https://theconversation.com/nz-is-bound-by-international-mental-health-agreements-statistics-for-maori-show-were-failing-to-uphold-them-219613

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matt Williams, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Massey University

Many people believe at least one conspiracy theory. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – conspiracies do happen.

To take just one example, the CIA really did engage in illegal experiments in the 1950s to identify drugs and procedures that might produce confessions from captured spies.

However, many conspiracy theories are not supported by evidence, yet still attract believers.

For example, in a previous study, we found about 7% of New Zealanders and Australians agreed with the theory that visible trails behind aircraft are “chemtrails” of chemical agents sprayed as part of a secret government program. That’s despite the theory being roundly rejected by the scientific community.

The fact that conspiracy theories attract believers despite a lack of credible evidence remains a puzzle for researchers in psychology and other academic disciplines.

Indeed, there has been a great deal of research on conspiracy theories published in the past few years. We now know more about how many people believe them, as well as the psychological and political factors that correlate with that belief.

But we know much less about how often people change their minds. Do they do so frequently, or do they to stick tenaciously to their beliefs, regardless of what evidence they come across?

From 9/11 to COVID

We set out to answer this question using a longitudinal survey. We recruited 498 Australians and New Zealanders (using the Prolific website, which recruits people to take part in paid research).

Each month from March to September 2021, we presented our sample group with a survey, including ten conspiracy theories, and asked them how much they agreed with each one.

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All of these theories related to claims about events that are either ongoing, or occurred this millennium: the September 11 attacks, the rollout of 5G telecommunications technology, and COVID-19, among others.

While there were definitely some believers in our sample, most participants disagreed with each of the theories.

The most popular theory was that “pharmaceutical companies (‘Big Pharma’) have suppressed a cure for cancer to protect their profits”. Some 18% of the sample group agreed when first asked.

The least popular was the theory that “COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ contain microchips to monitor and control people”. Only 2% agreed.

Read more:
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Conspiracy beliefs probably aren’t increasing

Despite contemporary concerns about a “pandemic of misinformation” or “infodemic”, we found no evidence that individual beliefs in conspiracy theories increased on average over time.

This was despite our data collection happening during the tumultuous second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns were still happening occasionally in both Australia and New Zealand, and anti-government sentiment was building.

While we only tracked participants for six months, other studies over much longer time frames have also found little evidence that beliefs in conspiracy theories are increasing over time.

Finally, we found that beliefs (or non-beliefs) in conspiracy theories were stable – but not completely fixed. For any given theory, the vast majority of participants were “consistent sceptics” – not agreeing with the theory at any point.

There were also some “consistent believers” who agreed at every point in the survey they responded to. For most theories, this was the second-largest group.

Yet for every conspiracy theory, there was also a small proportion of converts. They disagreed with the theory at the start of the study, but agreed with it by the end. There was also a small proportion of “apostates” who agreed with the theory at the start, but disagreed by the end.

Nevertheless, the percentages of converts and apostates tended to balance each other pretty closely, leaving the percentage of believers fairly stable over time.

Read more:
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Inside the ‘rabbit hole’

This relative stability is interesting, because one criticism of conspiracy theories is that they may not be “falsifiable”: what seems like evidence against a conspiracy theory can just be written off by believers as part of the cover up.

Yet people clearly do sometimes decide to reject conspiracy theories they previously believed.

Our findings bring into question the popular notion of the “rabbit hole” – that people rapidly develop beliefs in a succession of conspiracy theories, much as Alice tumbles down into Wonderland in Lewis Carroll’s famous story.

While it’s possible this does happen for a small number of people, our results suggest it isn’t a typical experience.

For most, the journey into conspiracy theory belief might involve a more gradual slope – a bit like a real rabbit burrow, from which one can also emerge.

Mathew Ling (Neami National), Stephen Hill (Massey University) and Edward Clarke (Philipps-Universität Marburg) contributed to the research referred to in this article.

Data collection for this study was supported by the Massey University Strategic Research Excellence Fund. Matt Williams also receives funding from the Marsden Fund Council, managed by the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

John Kerr works for the Public Health Communication Centre, which is funded by a philanthropic endowment from the Gama Foundation.

Mathew Marques 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. Out of the rabbit hole: new research shows people can change their minds about conspiracy theories – https://theconversation.com/out-of-the-rabbit-hole-new-research-shows-people-can-change-their-minds-about-conspiracy-theories-222507

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jacinta L. Johnson, Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice, University of South Australia

The cost-of-living crisis may be driving some Australians to look for cheaper medicines, especially if those medicines are not subsidised or people don’t have a Medicare card. Options can include buying their medicines from overseas, in a process called
“personal importation”.

Others also use this option to import medicine that is not available in Australia.

Here’s what’s involved and what you need to know about the health and legal risks.

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Cost-of-living crisis bites

Many Australians, particularly those with long-term illnesses, are finding it increasingly hard to afford health care.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports the proportion of people who delayed or did not see a GP due to cost doubled in 2022-23 (7%) compared with 2021-22 (3.5%).

A survey published in 2022 of over 11,000 people found more than one in five went without a prescription medicine due to the cost.

For those with a Medicare card it’s usually best (and cheapest) to get medicines locally, especially if you also have a concession card. However, for some high-cost medicines, personal importation may be cheaper. That’s when an individual arranges for medicine to be sent to them directly from an overseas supplier.

A 2023 study found 1.8% of Australians aged 45 or older had imported prescription medicines in the past 12 months. That indicates potentially hundreds of thousands of Australians are importing prescription medicines each year.

Almost half of the survey respondents indicated they would consider importing medicines to save money.

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What’s involved?

Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), allows individuals to import up to three months’ supply of medicines for their own personal use (or use by a close family member) under the personal importation scheme.

This often involves ordering a medicine through an overseas website.

If the medicine would require a prescription in Australia, you must also have a legally valid prescription to import it.

Selling or supplying these medicines to others outside your immediate family is strictly prohibited.

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How could this help?

For some high-cost medicines, personal importation may be cheaper than having the medicine dispensed in Australia. This is most likely for medicines not subsidised by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (the PBS). People who do not hold a Medicare card may also find it cheaper to import certain medicines as they do not have access to PBS-subsidised medicines.

For example, for people with a specific type of leukaemia, treatment with sorafenib is not covered by the PBS. For these patients it could be up to about ten times more expensive to have their treatment dispensed in Australia as it is to import. That’s because there is a cheaper generic version available overseas.

Personal importation may also allow you to access medicines that are available overseas but are not marketed in Australia.

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What are the risks?

All medicines carry risks, and medicine sold online can pose additional dangers. The TGA does not regulate medicines sold overseas, so the safety and quality of such medicines can be uncertain; they may not be produced to Australian standards.

While similar regulatory agencies exist in other countries, when ordering medicines from overseas websites it can be difficult to determine if the product you are buying has been assessed to ensure it is safe and will do what it says it will do.

The medicines purchased could be counterfeit or “fake”. Products bought through unverified or overseas websites may have undisclosed ingredients, contain a dose that differs from that on the label, or lack the active ingredient entirely.

Not all medicines can be legally imported through the personal importation scheme. Certain medicines are never allowed to be imported into Australia, and others can only be imported by a medical professional on behalf of a patient.

So if you attempt to import a restricted medicine, the Australian Border Force may seize it. Not only would you lose your medicine, but you could also receive a fine or face jail time.

As with any purchase from an overseas business, there is also a risk you may lose your money and you might not be protected by Australian consumer laws.

If you do choose to import medicines by buying them from an overseas website, you should also consider what could happen if delivery is delayed and you don’t get your medicine in time.

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Where can I get more advice?

If you are thinking about importing medicines you should first discuss this with a health professional, such as your GP or pharmacist.

They can help you determine if personal importation is permitted for the medicine you need. You can also discuss if this is the best option for you.

If you are having difficulty covering the cost of your medicines your doctor or pharmacist can also explore other potential alternatives to ensure you are receiving the most cost-effective treatment available in Australia.

Where do I go online?

If you then decide to import, here are some reputable sites to help navigate the global online medicines market:

• everyone.org helps people everywhere in the world access the latest medicines not available in their own countries

• Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies is a not-for-profit organisation that collates information on how to find safe online pharmacies based in different regions of the world

• PharmacyChecker has also collated a list of trusted online pharmacies that ship medicines internationally.

Australian government websites about importing medicines include those from the TGA and on what to consider when buying medicines online from overseas.

Jacinta Lee Johnson is employed as the Senior Pharmacist for Research within SA Pharmacy and is a Board Director for the Society of Hospital Pharmacists of Australia. In the last five years, she has received research funding or consultancy funds (for development and delivery of educational materials) from SA Health, the Medical Research Future Fund, the Hospital Research Foundation – Parkinson’s, the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, the Society of Hospital Pharmacists of Australia, the Australian College of Pharmacy, Mundipharma Pty Ltd, Aspen Pharmacare Australia Pty Ltd, Reckitt Benckiser (Australia) Pty Ltd and Viatris Pty Ltd.

Kirsten Staff 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. Taking expensive medicines or ones unavailable in Australia? Importing may be the answer – https://theconversation.com/taking-expensive-medicines-or-ones-unavailable-in-australia-importing-may-be-the-answer-219394

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Coates, Program Director, Economic Policy, Grattan Institute

Another year, another round of tax cuts. Australian governments have made an art of announcing new income tax cuts as elections draw near. But while such cuts are always popular with the public, they should not be confused with tax reform.

Labor’s redesign of the Coalition’s Stage 3 offers larger tax cuts for low and middle earners, and smaller (but still substantial) cuts for higher earners.

The real loser will be the budget. Both the original Stage 3 and the redesign will return more than A$20 billion a year in accumulated bracket creep to taxpayers without doing anything much to boost economic growth.

The cost to the budget means these tax cuts will make it harder for this government – and for future governments – to raise the money they will need to meet demands for more spending in areas such as healthcare, aged care, disability care and defence.

While high commodity prices are boosting the budget at the moment, the deficit we would have if it weren’t for that good fortune (the so-called structural deficit) is close to 2% of GDP, which is about $50 billion a year in today’s dollars.

We can try to close that deficit by making budget cuts, but spending cuts alone are unlikely to be enough.

Economic growth would help, but it’s been sluggish for more than a decade.

So what would genuine reform look like?

Genuine tax reform requires a “tax mix switch” – moving from taxes that do a lot of economic damage to taxes that are more efficient.

Such a switch would allow the government to raise as much or more money, while delivering an economic dividend at the same time.

Part of the switch would be a move away from income taxes towards taxes that would encourage us to use resources more efficiently, including taxes on wealth, land and the exploitation of natural resources.

And income taxes should be broadened by abolishing the labyrinth of concessions, deductions and deferral options available to the well-advised.

Super tax breaks cost $45 billion

Superannuation tax breaks are the biggest hole in the income tax base.

They cost the budget $45 billion a year – about 2% of GDP – and will soon cost more than the age pension.

They are also poorly targeted: half the super tax benefits flow to the wealthiest one-fifth of households – the ones who already have enough to fund their retirement.

Tighter limits on annual pre-tax contributions and lifetime post-tax contributions, and raising the tax rate on some pre-tax contributions, would reduce the use of super as a tax-minimisation tool.

And taxing super earnings in retirement (they are currently untaxed for people with superannuation balances below $1.9 million) would get comfortably off older Australians to make the same sort of contribution to the cost of government services as the rest of us.

Those changes could save the budget more than $10 billion a year.

Capital gains tax breaks encourage speculation

Similarly, the 50% capital gains tax discount means income from capital gains is taxed at a much lower rate than income from working.

When paired with negative gearing, the 50% discount encourages speculation on property in place of other more useful uses of funds.

Halving the capital gains tax discount – as Labor promised to do in 2016 and again in 2019 – would save the federal budget about $5 billion a year.

If combined with curbs to negative gearing, it’d save a further $2 billion a year at least.

Some of these savings could be used to reduce overall income tax rates. The rest could be used to repair the budget’s structural deficit.

Other ways of funding lower income tax rates and boosting government revenue include winding back fuel tax credits ($4 billion per year), boosting the taxes paid by companies that make their profits from exploiting Australia’s natural resources (at least $4 billion per year), and setting a minimum tax on trust distributions ($2.3 billion per year).

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The goods and services tax is getting weaker

A bold government would revamp the goods and services tax (GST) too, either by increasing the rate or by reducing exemptions. As each year goes by we are spending more and more of our income on exempt services, including health and education.

A 15 per cent GST could raise about $12 billion a year after accounting for the cost of cushioning the impact on the poorest 40 per cent of households.

Federal and state governments would each be $6 billion a year better off if they shared that remaining revenue 50:50.

We would not expect any government to pursue all of these major changes at once. Tax reform is a marathon rather than a sprint.

But tax cuts without reform leave less money to buy genuine tax reform, reducing the government’s room to respond to future economic shocks, and pushing the cost of today’s spending onto future generations.

Real tax reform isn’t easy, but neither is good government.

The Grattan Institute began with contributions to its endowment of $15 million from each of the Federal and Victorian Governments, $4 million from BHP Billiton, and $1 million from NAB. In order to safeguard its independence, Grattan Institute’s board controls this endowment. The funds are invested and contribute to funding Grattan Institute’s activities. Grattan Institute also receives funding from corporates, foundations, and individuals to support its general activities as disclosed on its website.

Brendan Coates 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. Labor’s Stage 3 changes aren’t genuine tax reform – here’s what would be – https://theconversation.com/labors-stage-3-changes-arent-genuine-tax-reform-heres-what-would-be-223547

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emily Baulch, PhD Candidate in Publishing Studies, The University of Queensland

With Taylor Swift pulling in over half-a-million audience members on her Australian tour, we’ve been thinking a lot about fans. In this series, our academics dive into fan cultures: how they developed, how they operate, and how they shape the world today.

With the record-breaking success of Barbie and Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, the economic power of women as fans is being stamped on the global entertainment industries.

Leading these events are millennial women. While women of all ages turned out to see Barbie, women aged 25 and older made up 38% of the audience by the second week of its release. Likewise, a significant chunk of Swifties belong to the millennial age group, much like 34-year-old Taylor Swift herself.

Female fans followed Swift to the 2024 Super Bowl, and many advertisers targeted this female Gen Z and millennial audience. The challenge to gender stereotypes around sport and fandom echoes the support for the Matildas during the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia, which opened up a new space of representation.

Women’s fandom is increasingly a visible and powerful force in many spaces of pop culture, media and entertainment.

Training fandoms

Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, were taught to buy into their passions thanks to growing up in the golden age of franchises, from Harry Potter to Twilight to the Hunger Games. As these fandoms grew, millennial women increasingly found themselves playing a major role as audiences and consumers.

The first Harry Potter book was released in 1997, and the first film in 2001.

Today, there is no shortage of ways to buy into the Harry Potter world. From mugs to broomsticks, from clothes to limited-edition books, there is a constant range of objects to buy. Potter merchandise has existed since the early 2000s, with early merchandise including items like “secret boxes” containing mystery trinkets. The Wizarding World brand launched in 2018. Encompassing things like bags, jewellery and cosmetics, the brand saw demand and merchandising formalised.

Specialised Harry Potter stores are still popping up around the globe, offering keen fans branded merchandise on just about every product imaginable.

Hannah Worthy is the business manager at Brisbane’s The Store of Requirement (a play on “The Room of Requirement” at Hogwarts, which provided anything a witch or wizard needed). The store opened in 2017 and is exclusively dedicated to stocking officially licensed Harry Potter merchandise.

Their biggest demographic, Worthy told me in an interview, is “women aged between 25 and 45”.

The first Twilight book was released in 2005, and the first film was released in 2008. Michael Inturrisi, the business development manager at Ikon Collectibles, tells me Twilight changed the landscape for Funko Pop! Vinyl figures, opening doors for selling collectables into major Australian bookstores.

These collectible plastic figurines partly found success because Twilight was popularised on both screen and film. The movies meant the franchise was a “big deal” with a large consumer base, Inturrisi says.

Ikon’s consumer base has since shifted over the years, moving away from its original male-dominated demographic. The company now caters more to women, with about 60% of its consumers being female.

The Hunger Games also contributed to franchise fever, teaching fans that they could buy into their passions. Where Harry Potter featured a male lead character, The Hunger Games was led by a strong female protagonist.

These franchises changed the fandom landscape by building fans’ voracious appetites for all things franchised, leading to the fandom we see today.

Online communities

Female fans have built complex communities in digital places, empowered by social media to connect and to share their fandom. The power of these communities is becoming increasingly visible.

“BookTok” is a growing TikTok community where book lovers discuss and share their opinions on their reads. The platform has the power to make and break books and helps to catapult niche genres or self-published releases to the forefront of popular culture. It has driven the growth behind emerging genres, like “cosy fantasy” and “romantasy” – niche genres that focus on characters and their relationships, and romance in fantasy worlds respectively.

Read more:
What is BookTok, and how is it influencing what Australian teenagers read?

BookTok fans aren’t just market followers; they are also market-makers. Romantasy (a portmanteau of “romance” and “fantasy”) authors like Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros have outsourced their merchandising to fans, taking a cut of the royalties. In my research I’ve found these authors have leveraged the popularity of unofficial merchandise on social media platforms to increase their official merchandise catalogues and revenue.

Fan cultures have a range of influences on everyday life, from swapping friendship bracelets at Taylor Swift concerts to attending romantasy-inspired balls.

Fandom might be shared online, but its effects are felt in person.

The influence of millennial women in fandom

Fans who were girls in the era of Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and Twilight are now the women who have powered the success of Barbie and the Eras Tour. The shift in fandom has been led by adult women who have been honing their fan skills since girlhood.

They, in turn, stand on the shoulders of the early female fans who read romance fiction back when it was even more stigmatised and wrote the earliest fan-fiction. Now they buy their daughters tickets to Taylor Swift and cheer them on as their own girls take on new fan roles.

Read more:
From Deadheads on bulletin boards to Taylor Swift ‘stans’: a short history of how fandoms shaped the internet

Emily Baulch is an Assistant Producer – Publishing at Ludo Studio.

– ref. From Harry Potter to Taylor Swift: how millennial women grew up with fandoms, and became a force – https://theconversation.com/from-harry-potter-to-taylor-swift-how-millennial-women-grew-up-with-fandoms-and-became-a-force-211890

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mitchell Scovell, Research Scientist, CSIRO

Hydrogen can play a key role in Australia’s energy transition by giving us additional ways of storing and moving energy around. As the world shifts towards cleaner energy production, there’s a push to make hydrogen production cleaner as well. In Australia, low-emission hydrogen is produced in two main ways.

One method produces what is known as “green hydrogen”. It uses electricity produced from renewables – such as solar, wind or hydro – to “crack” water into separate streams of hydrogen and oxygen.

The other method produces “blue hydrogen”. This process separates the hydrogen from a gas mixture obtained from fossil fuels (coal or natural gas), using carbon-capture technologies to deal with the emissions.

While different colours are used to describe these methods, the resulting product is the same: colourless hydrogen. Both methods are technically viable options.

So, we wanted to know what the public thinks about these approaches. Understanding people’s attitudes in more detail will help scientists, industry and governments to develop hydrogen technologies in a way that aligns with community values and expectations.

Our survey found only a slight difference in public attitudes to the two methods when they were described without the colour “labels”. The method of production had little impact on people’s willingness to accept different uses of hydrogen.

Read more:
Hyped and expensive, hydrogen has a place in Australia’s energy transition, but only with urgent government support

Why do we need to know what people think about hydrogen?

There is a focus on scaling up the hydrogen industry for many purposes, including transport, heating and industrial uses, in Australia and overseas.

Although there are plans for many new uses, such as powering vehicles, hydrogen has had industrial uses for a long time. At present, it’s mainly used to make other chemicals, such as ammonia for nitrogen fertiliser. However, most of this hydrogen is produced globally using fossil fuels, which emits carbon.

Now attention has turned to producing low-emission hydrogen. Past research has shown Australians are “cautiously optimistic” about hydrogen’s potential as a future fuel. We wanted to explore attitudes to the two low-emission production methods more closely.

Understanding public attitudes is key to promoting responsible innovation for the benefit of all Australians.

Read more:
Why electric trucks are our best bet to cut road transport emissions

How was the survey done?

We asked a representative sample of 1,900 Australians to share their thoughts
about living near a hypothetical hydrogen hub – a site where hydrogen is stored, transported and used locally. Participants were told the hydrogen would be produced nearby (200 kilometres away).

We wanted to investigate the effect of the “green” and “blue” production methods on acceptance. To avoid introducing bias, we only explained the technical process of each production method. We did not describe them using colours. Half of the participants were told the hydrogen was produced using one method and half were told about the other method.

Because many Australians aren’t aware of hydrogen technologies, we consulted technical experts here at CSIRO so we could provide relevant information about the production methods and their potential impacts. Participants were also shown a short video introduction to hydrogen (shown below) at the start of the survey.

We then asked a serious of questions to assess beliefs, attitudes and levels of support for the production methods and various uses of hydrogen.

Read more:
Green hydrogen could be a game changer by displacing fossil fuels – we just need the price to come down

A slight preference for ‘green’

Participants who were told the hydrogen was produced using renewable energy – “green” hydrogen – had, on average, a more positive attitude to it than those presented with hydrogen made from fossil fuels with carbon-capture technology – “blue” hydrogen. However, the difference between the two groups’ overall appraisal of the production methods was quite small.

We also explored the beliefs that underpin these attitudes. Despite some differences in beliefs between the two groups, many of these differences were again quite small. And there were no differences in the perceived influence on cost of living and wealth creation.

The largest difference between the groups was the perceived replaceability of the technology. Blue hydrogen was seen as the more replaceable approach. People also reported blue hydrogen as having a worse impact on climate change and competing more with renewable electricity production.

What is the impact on acceptance of hydrogen?

The small differences of opinion about production methods had little influence on people’s willingness to accept different uses of hydrogen. For example, knowing a bus was fuelled by blue hydrogen had a relatively weak effect on how willing people said they’d be to use a hydrogen bus. For most hydrogen applications presented, support was quite neutral regardless of how it was made.

Further analysis showed that people with stronger pro-environmental attitudes were more supportive of green hydrogen. Those with weaker pro-environmental attitudes were more supportive of blue hydrogen.

These results suggest that, to some extent, people’s broader worldviews shape their evaluations of production methods. Although blue hydrogen aims to address carbon emissions, it seems those who strongly value environmental preservation see blue hydrogen as less likely than green hydrogen to achieve this goal.

Read more:
For Australia to lead the way on green hydrogen, first we must find enough water

Neither method is strongly opposed

Our research shows there is no strong opposition to either hydrogen production method at this stage.

Results suggest the hydrogen industry will need to address concerns that blue hydrogen technology might need to be replaced sooner rather than later. There is also a need to be clear about its impact on the environment and potential to compete with power from renewables.

Despite these concerns, it seems the production method is not holding back hydrogen acceptance at this stage. As the industry grows, current public beliefs suggest it will be increasingly important to demonstrate that using hydrogen is safe and effective, and won’t compete with other renewable energy technologies.

The authors 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. ‘Green’ or ‘blue’ hydrogen – what difference does it make? Not much for most Australians – https://theconversation.com/green-or-blue-hydrogen-what-difference-does-it-make-not-much-for-most-australians-223351

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

The Nationals have been again embarrassed by an incident involving one of their parliamentarians drinking.

Their deputy leader, NSW senator Perin Davey, stumbled over words while at a Senate committee hearing last Tuesday, after attending the party’s regular staff drinks function.

Davey subsequently said she had had two glasses of red wine but “I don’t think I was drunk”.

“I wouldn’t say I was under the weather. I stumbled over my words. If you want to pick on people who stumble over their words, there are plenty of Labor MPs [who do so],” she said on Sky at the weekend.

She told The Conversation on Sunday, “The Senate estimates process is long and arduous. I don’t think anyone is saying I didn’t do my job.” At the time she was asking questions of the agency Create Australia, “because I am very interested in the arts in the regions”.

The previous week former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce was videoed, after falling off a planter box in a Canberra street, lying on his back talking into his phone. He later said he had been drinking while on medication.

Last week independent Zali Steggall asked Prime Minister Anthony Albanese whether he would legislate for random drug and alcohol testing of parliamentarians and staff.

But Albanese indicated he was not in favour of that, saying members of parliament were “all responsible adults” and “should act appropriately”. They were accountable to the Australian people for what they said and did.

Perin is seen as a loyal deputy to leader David Littleproud, who had no comment to make on the matter on Sunday. She contacted Littleproud as soon as a post on X went out about the incident. She declined to comment on their conversation.

Perin is in a battle for her preselection and some Nationals sources believe the incident might be being used against her in that context. “I hope that’s not right,” Perin said.

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. Now it’s Nationals deputy leader Perin Davey who’s had a glass too many – https://theconversation.com/now-its-nationals-deputy-leader-perin-davey-whos-had-a-glass-too-many-223825

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

The 39 men who arrived illegally on the coast of north Western Australia last week were flown to Nauru on Sunday.

The men came in one boat, although they were found on Friday in two or three groups. There is no official information on where they are originally from, but reports have named Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. They travelled from Indonesia.

The boat’s arrival immediately reactivated the political debate over border security, with the opposition claiming the government has lost control of the border.

But Rear Admiral Brett Sonter, Commander of the Joint Agency Task Force Operation Sovereign Borders, had a thinly-veiled slap at the opposition, warning against statements that undermine the border policy and encourage people smugglers.

He said in a statement: “The mission of Operation Sovereign Borders remains the same today as it was when it was established in 2013: protect Australia’s borders, combat people smuggling in our region, and importantly, prevent people from risking their lives at sea.

“Any alternate narrative will be exploited by criminal people smugglers to deceive potential irregular immigrants and convince them to risk their lives and travel to Australia by boat.”

But opposition leader Peter Dutton insisted Anthony Albanese “can’t look the Australian people in the eye and honestly tell them that Operation Sovereign Borders is operating as it did under a Coalition government”.

Dutton said the Coalition would seek a briefing on the incident “in due course”.

The Prime Minister highlighted Sonter’s “very strong comments about the need for […] politicians to not politicise national security”.

Albanese accused Dutton of “showing, with his overblown rhetoric and with his overreach on this issue […] that he’s not interested in outcomes or in the Australian national interest. As usual, he’s just interested in politics.”

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. Boat arrivals sent to Nauru, and Sovereign Borders commander warns against politicising the issue – https://theconversation.com/boat-arrivals-sent-to-nauru-and-sovereign-borders-commander-warns-against-politicising-the-issue-223822

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Shortis, Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

The verdicts keep coming.

On Friday US time, the three-month hearing focused on Donald Trump’s business dealings in New York came to an end. Trump was ordered to pay back more than $US350 million (A$537 million), plus interest. He and two of his associates are banned from directing any business in New York for three years. His two sons, Donald Jr and Eric Trump, have also been handed two-year bans, and ordered to pay US$4 million (A$6.1 million) each.

In his judgement, New York Judge Arthur Engoron gave his own insight into the Trump phenomenon, describing what he saw as a “complete lack of contrition and remorse” that “borders on pathological”.

While Engoron was referring specifically to business fraud in New York, the judge’s observation might also apply to Trumpism writ large.

Coverage of the case and its stunning end has consistently focused on Trump’s celebrity – after all, he built his national profile on the back of his supposed business acumen, trading on his long stint as host of the popular television show The Apprentice.

Read more:
Should Donald Trump be disqualified from state ballots in presidential election? Here’s how the US Supreme Court might rule

The results of this civil case certainly seem to poke holes in the image of Trump as a consummate businessman. Combined with the money he owes as the result of his loss of a second civil defamation trial brought by E. Jean Carroll, Trump is now in upwards of half a billion dollars of debt. It’s not clear where this money will come from, or what will happen to Trump’s existing New York businesses.

This has led some commentators to argue this most recent case represents a “stunning”, “devastating” and “shocking blow” to the image of Trump as a successful real estate mogul better placed than anyone to run the world’s largest and most important economy.

The pathology of Trumpism

It is certainly possible to argue Trump’s reputation as the embodiment of rugged American entrepreneurship played an important role in his successful bid for the presidency in 2016. At least some of his support was drawn from the sense that a political outsider and ruthless businessman would shatter the stale consensus of establishment politics.

But if it were possible to make that argument eight years ago, it is less convincing now.

Read more:
Does Trump actually have to pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll? Not immediately, at least

Trump’s celebrity profile was, of course, critical to his campaign. His rise to political prominence, though, came not so much as a result of his reputation as a successful businessman, but on the back of his unabashed peddling of racist conspiracy theories about the first Black president.

Trump’s ability to tap into a particularly American form of racial revanchism – his political acumen in marrying conspiracy, racism, and political grievance in an increasingly unequal society – is what brought him to power. It is what sustains him still.

The pathology of Trumpism revolves around his politics, not his personal economics. It at least partly explains why this latest case, plus the 91 separate felony charges in four criminal cases, are unlikely to affect Trump’s political support, particularly with his base in the Republican Party.

That base is too far down the road Trump began mapping out when he staked his political reputation on the argument that a Black man could not possibly be qualified for the presidency of the United States. Even a half a billion-dollar hole punched through his business reputation will not change that.

Nothing, or everything, might change

That does not mean, however, that continued support for Trump is inevitable.

In another New York courtroom this week, a judge ruled that Trump’s first criminal trial will begin in just over a month. On March 25, for the first time in American history, a former president will face criminal charges in court.

In what will likely become the first of four possibly consecutive criminal trials, Trump will face a potential six-week hearing on his efforts to cover up politically damaging information about his relationships with two women in advance of the 2016 presidential election. Dubbed the “hush money” case, this trial represents more than the sordid dealings of an alleged serial adulterer; it represents, arguably, the beginning of a pattern of deliberate election interference that began even before Trump took office.

If it goes ahead as planned, a late March trial date will likely mean these hearings will barely be over before the next set begins. The classified documents case, centering on Trump’s alleged illegal removal of highly classified documents from the White House, is scheduled to begin in Florida in late May. Scheduling for the other two cases, focused on on Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection and election interference in the state of Georgia, remains unclear.

Read more:
Donald Trump’s stroll to victory in Iowa was a foregone conclusion. This doesn’t make it any less shocking

None of this has ever happened before. There is really no telling what it will mean for Trump, his campaign, or American democracy more broadly.

Polling suggests that a criminal conviction may dent Trump’s national support. It is certainly possible such a conviction (or convictions), combined with eye-watering levels of debt, and the sheer logistics of conducting a national campaign amid multiple criminal trials, will have an impact.

But the pathology of Trumpism has so far proven resistant to what should be crushing blows.

The verdicts will keep coming. Trump may well, too.

Emma Shortis is Senior Researcher in International and Security Affairs at independent think tank The Australia Institute.

– ref. Donald Trump faces half a billion dollars of debt and several court cases. But that may not stop him from becoming president again – https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-faces-half-a-billion-dollars-of-debt-and-several-court-cases-but-that-may-not-stop-him-from-becoming-president-again-223813

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Horvath, Senior lecturer, La Trobe University

Alexei Navalny was a giant figure in Russian politics. No other individual rivalled the threat he posed to the Putin regime. His death in an Arctic labour camp is a blow to all those who dreamed he might emerge as the leader of a future democratic Russia.

What made Navalny so important was his decision to become an anti-corruption crusader in 2008. Using shareholder activism and his popular blog, he shone a spotlight on the corruption schemes that enabled officials to steal billions from state-run corporations.

His breakthrough came in 2011, when he proposed the strategy of voting for any party but President Vladimir Putin’s “party of crooks and thieves” in the Duma (parliament) elections. Faced with a collapse of support, the regime resorted to widespread election fraud. The result was months of pro-democracy protests.

Putin regained control through a mix of concessions and repression, but the crisis signalled Navalny’s emergence as the dominant figure in Russia’s democratic movement.

Despite being convicted on trumped-up embezzlement charges, he was allowed to run in Moscow’s mayoral elections in 2013. In a clearly unfair contest, which included police harassment and hostile media coverage, he won 27% of the vote.

Perseverance in the face of worsening attacks

The authorities learned from this mistake. Never again would Navalny be allowed to compete in elections. What the Kremlin failed to stop was his creation of a national movement around the Foundation for the Struggle Against Corruption (FBK), which he had founded in 2011 with a team of brilliant young activists.

During the ensuing decade, FBK transformed our understanding of the nature of Putin’s kleptocracy. Its open-source investigations shattered the reputations of numerous regime officials, security functionaries and regime propagandists.

One of the most important was a 2017 exposé of the network of charities that funded the palaces and yachts of then-premier Dmitry Medvedev. Viewed 46 million times on YouTube, it triggered protests across Russia.

No less significant was Navalny’s contribution to the methods of pro-democracy activism. To exploit the regime’s dependence on heavily manipulated elections, he developed a strategy called “intelligent voting”. The basic idea was to encourage people to vote for the candidates who had the best chance of defeating Putin’s United Russia party. The result was a series of setbacks for United Russia in 2019 regional elections.

One measure of Navalny’s impact was the intensifying repression directed against him. As prosecutors tried to paralyse him with a series of implausible criminal cases, they also pursued his family. His younger brother Oleg served three and a half years in a labour camp on bogus charges.

This judicial persecution was compounded by the violence of the regime’s proxies. Two months after exposing Medvedev’s corruption, Navalny was nearly blinded by a Kremlin-backed gang of vigilantes, who sprayed his face with a noxious blend of chemicals.

More serious was the deployment of a death squad from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), which had kept Navalny under surveillance since 2017. The use of the nerve agent Novichok to poison Navalny during a trip to the Siberian city of Tomsk in August 2020 was clearly intended to end his challenge to Putin’s rule.

Instead it precipitated the “Navalny crisis”, a succession of events that shook the regime’s foundations. The story of Navalny’s survival – and confirmation that he had been poisoned with Novichok – focused international attention on the Putin regime’s criminality.

Read more:
Aleksei Navalny: new film about jailed dissident who dared to defy the power of Putin

Any lingering doubts about state involvement in his poisoning were dispelled by Navalny’s collaboration with Bellingcat, an investigative journalism organisation, to identify the suspects and deceive one of them into revealing how they poisoned him.

The damage was magnified by Navalny’s decision to confront Putin’s personal corruption. In a powerful two-hour documentary film, A Palace for Putin, Navalny chronicled the obsessive greed that had transformed an obscure KGB officer into one of the world’s most notorious kleptocrats.

With over 129 million views on YouTube alone, the film shattered the dictator’s carefully constructed image as the incarnation of traditional virtues.

‘We will fill up the jails and police vans’

It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of the “Navalny crisis” on Putin, a dictator terrified of the prospect of popular revolution. No longer was he courted by Western leaders. US President Joe Biden began his term in office in 2021 by endorsing an interviewer’s description of Putin as a “killer”.

To contain the domestic fallout, Putin unleashed a crackdown that began with Navalny’s 2021 arrest on his return to Moscow from Germany, where had been recovering from the Novichok poisoning. On the international stage, Putin secured a summit with Biden by staging a massive deployment of military force on the Ukrainian border, a rehearsal for the following year’s invasion.

The Kremlin’s trolling factories also tried to destroy Navalny’s reputation with a smear campaign. Within weeks of Navalny’s imprisonment, Amnesty International rescinded his status as a “prisoner of conscience” on the basis of allegations about hate speech. The evidence was some ugly statements made by Navalny as an inexperienced politician in the mid-2000s, when he was trying to build an anti-Putin alliance of democrats and nationalists.

What his detractors ignored was Navalny’s own evolution into a critic of ethnonationalist prejudices. In a speech to a nationalist rally in 2011, he had challenged his listeners to empathise with people in the Muslim-majority republics of Russia’s northern Caucasus region.

This divergence from the nationalist mainstream was accentuated by Putin’s conflict with Ukraine. After the invasion of Crimea in March 2014, Navalny denounced the “imperialist annexation” as a cynical effort to distract the masses from corruption.

Eight years later, while languishing in prison, he condemned Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, exhorting his compatriots to take to the streets, saying:

If, to prevent war, we need to fill up the jails and police vans, we will fill up the jails and police vans.

Later that year, he argued a post-Putin Russia needed an end to the concentration of power in the Kremlin and the creation of a parliamentary republic as “the only way to stop the endless cycle of imperial authoritarianism”.

Navalny’s tragedy is that he never had a chance to convert the moral authority he amassed during years as a dissident into political power. Like Charles de Gaulle in France and Nelson Mandela in South Africa, he might have become a redemptive leader, leading his people from war and tyranny to the promised land of a freer society.

Instead, he has left his compatriots the example of a brave, principled and thoughtful man, who sacrificed his life for the cause of democracy and peace. That is his enduring legacy.

Read more:
By jailing Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin may turn him into an even more potent opposition symbol

Robert Horvath received funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Alexei Navalny had a vision of a democratic Russia. That terrified Vladimir Putin to the core – https://theconversation.com/alexei-navalny-had-a-vision-of-a-democratic-russia-that-terrified-vladimir-putin-to-the-core-223812

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

Australian Border Force officials are investigating the arrival of a group of more than 20 men by boat near the remote community of Beagle Bay in northern Western Australia.

The ABC reported that the men, believed to be from Pakistan, had said they had travelled from Indonesia.

The ABF said in a statement it was “undertaking an operation in the northwest of Western Australia.”

But it said as the operation was “ongoing, no further information will be provided”.

Beagle Bay is an Indigenous community about 100 kilometres north of Broome with a population of about 300 people.

The ABC, who had a reporter at Beagle Bay, said one of the man said the group had arrived after a five-day voyage. They had been picked up by locals after walking for some distance. They were pictured sitting in the shade.

One man told the ABC he had previously lived in Australia, from where he had been deported. He alleged he had been tortured when he returned to Pakistan.

The Australian government’s policy is to send people who arrive by boat to Nauru, where it has maintained a facility.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he did not know of the incident, when he was asked at his news conference. “I’ve been travelling in the car, so I haven’t been advised about that.”

But he stresses that “our policies are clear, which is that boats that arrive in that fashion … we have policies in place that ensure they are dealt with.”

Opposition leader Peter Dutton jumped on the incident. “Clearly there’s been a catastrophic failure in the system here because this boat has arrived undetected,” he said. “If the Prime Minister doesn’t know anything about it and the minister doesn’t know anything about it, then it demonstrates that this government has lost control of our borders.”

“The government hasn’t taken border protection seriously. The Prime Minister never believed in border protection,” Dutton said.

Shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie said this was “second reported arrival on Australia’s coastline in less than four months”.

“The prime minister’s poor excuse for his inability to take a briefing on a serious breach of our borders, was being in a car. Did he, or his staff, not have a phone between them? He remained unaware of the illegal arrival until media reports made the news public,” Hastie said.

The Border Force statement reiterated: “Australia’s tough border protection policies means no one who travels unauthorised by boat will ever be allowed to settle permanently in Australia.

“Australia remains committed to protecting its borders, stamping out people smuggling and preventing vulnerable people from risking their lives on futile journeys.”

The boat arrival comes at the end of a difficult week for the government on the issue of illegal immigrants. Immigration Minister Andrew Giles has faced a barrage of questions in parliament over the government’s handling of the immigration detainees it released late last year after a High Court judgement that they couldn’t be held indefinitely.

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. Boat arrivals land on remote Western Australian coast – https://theconversation.com/boat-arrivals-land-on-remote-western-australian-coast-223737

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shima Ziajahromi, Advance Queensland Research Fellow, Griffith University

Australian wastewater treatment plants produce thousands of tonnes of treated sewage sludge every year. This nutrient-rich material is then dried to make “biosolids”, which are used to fertilise agricultural soil.

Unfortunately every kilogram of biosolids also contains thousands of tiny pieces of plastic. These pieces are so small they can only be seen under a microscope, so they’re called microplastics.

In our new research, we sampled biosolids from three states and calculated the average contribution of microplastics per person: 3g in New South Wales and 4.5g in Queensland. But the average in South Australia was 11.5g – that’s about the same amount of plastic as a plastic bag.

Roughly 80% of this microplastic comes from washing clothes. We need to protect agricultural soil from contamination by making simple changes at home, mandating filters on washing machines and introducing more effective wastewater treatment.

Read more:
Microplastics are common in homes across 29 countries. New research shows who’s most at risk

Biosolids as fertiliser

Most domestic wastewater comes from household kitchens, bathrooms and laundries.

Wastewater treatment separates most of the water and leaves sewage sludge behind. This mixture of water and organic material can then be sent to landfill for disposal or dried to form a material called “biosolids”.

In Australia, two-thirds of the 340,000 tonnes produced annually are used on farms to improve soil quality and stimulate plant growth. This not only boosts agricultural productivity but also allows for more sustainable disposal of treated sewage sludge. The waste becomes a resource, a useful and economically viable fertiliser, rather than ending up in landfill.

Read more:
More than 1,200 tonnes of microplastics are dumped into Aussie farmland every year from wastewater sludge

Microplastics in Australian biosolids

Wastewater treatment plants can capture anywhere from 60% to more than 90% of the microplastics in sewage before the wastewater is discharged. But plastic is durable and does not degrade during treatment. So the microplastic particles removed from the wastewater are simply transferred to the sludge.

We assessed the abundance, characteristics and size ranges of microplastics in biosolids collected from 13 wastewater treatment plants across three states.

We found every kilogram of biosolid contains between 11,000 and 150,000 microplastic particles.

Most of the microplastics found were invisible to the naked eye, ranging from 20 to 200 micrometres in size.

The most common type of microplastic was microfibres from fabric. We found more microplastic fibres during cold seasons. We suspect this corresponds to people washing more synthetic fleece clothing and blankets.

Microbeads are tiny balls of microplastic sometimes added to personal care products and detergents. We did not find any microbeads in samples from South Australia and New South Wales. These states were among the first to support a voluntary industry phase-out of plastic microbeads.

In contrast, we found a small amount of microbeads in samples from Queensland, which only banned microbeads in September last year. That was more than a year after samples were collected for this study.

We estimate Australians release between 0.7g and 21g of microplastics per person into wastewater every year. This wide range is based on our results, which varied from state to state: 0.7g to 5.9g in NSW, 1g to 7.2g in Queensland and 1.9g to 21g in SA. We don’t know why it varies so much between states.

This contributes to the amount of microplastics in biosolids. Our biosolid samples contained anywhere from 1kg to 17kg of microplastics per tonne. Remember this is being transported into our farmlands.

What’s the problem?

Microplastics are steadily accumulating in agricultural soils, where they will remain for hundreds of years. While natural weathering processes such as sunshine and rain will slowly break down microplastics into smaller and smaller particles, that only makes matters worse. Smaller particles cause more harmful effects to soil organisms.

Eating small pieces of plastic can cause internal abrasions and blockages in the digestive tract. In very small aquatic animals such as zooplankton, microplastics can reduce absorption of nutrients from food, decrease reproduction rates, and cause death.

These tiny particles also contain a cocktail of toxic chemicals, either added during manufacturing to improve the product or soaked up from the environment. This makes them even more dangerous.

Smaller microplastics (less than 100 micrometres in size) are even more harmful for soil organisms.

Microplastics in soil can be ingested by soil organisms such as earthworms and cause harmful effects on these vital organisms. Microplastic exposure has also been shown to adversely affect soil health and plant growth.

Australian regulations govern the amounts of heavy metals, nutrients, pathogens and some emerging contaminants allowed in biosolids, but there is no guideline for microplastics concentrations. We think that has to change.

Here’s what we can do

Our research shows biosolids are a significant source of microplastics in agricultural systems. More research is needed to better understand the risks.

We need to put effective control measures in place to minimise the accumulation of microplastic in productive agricultural soils.

The most effective way to do this is to reduce the level of microplastics in biosolids at the source.

We know most microplastics in biosolids come from washing clothes. While it may not be possible to eliminate the use of synthetic fabrics, there are some measures we can all take to reduce the amount of microplastic washing off our clothes into the wastewater stream. Properly installed filters in washing machines have been shown to significantly reduce microplastic levels in wastewater.

Australia’s National Plastics Plan recommends the Australian government work with industry to “phase-in” microfibre filters on all washing machines by 2030. But why wait until 2030?

Several jurisdictions, including France, Ontario and California, have already made microfibre filters on washing machines mandatory. It’s time Australia did the same.

In the meantime, there are simple things everyone can do at home. Wash clothes in cold water, avoid running the machine for light loads if you can wait to do a full load, and wash synthetic fabrics less frequently. These steps will also save energy and money.

It’s far better to stop microplastics entering the wastewater stream than trying to remove them at the wastewater treatment plant. Prevention is always better than a cure.

Read more:
‘Humanity’s signature’: study finds plastic pollution in the world’s lakes can be worse than in oceans

Shima Ziajahromi receives funding from the Queensland Government through Advance Queensland Industry Research Project. This project was co-sponsored by Urban Utilities, Sydney Water, SA Water, Water Corporation (WA) and Eurofins Environment Testing Australia.

Frederic Leusch receives funding related to this research topic from the Queensland Government through an Advance Queensland Industry Research Project, Water Research Australia, and various Australian water utilities. This project was co-sponsored by Urban Utilities, Sydney Water, SA Water, Water Corporation (WA) and Eurofins Environment Testing Australia.

– ref. Australians are washing microplastics down the drain and it’s ending up on our farms – https://theconversation.com/australians-are-washing-microplastics-down-the-drain-and-its-ending-up-on-our-farms-223079

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian A. MacKenzie, Professor of Economics, The University of Queensland

Leading Australian economists Ross Garnaut and Rod Sims this week sought to shake up the carbon policy debate in Australia, by proposing a tax on the nation’s fossil fuel production. They claim it could raise A$100 billion in its first year and position Australia at the forefront of the low-carbon revolution.

The proposal has been rejected by the federal government and the Nationals, as well as business groups and the fossil fuel industry. The Greens have thrown their support behind the idea.

Garnaut and Sims have characterised their proposal as a “levy”. But it’s essentially a tax, applied to one sector of the economy: exporters of fossil fuels such as coal and gas, as well as importers of oil and diesel.

Australia’s recent political history tells us the road to a carbon tax is not smooth. However, as other nations race to restructure their economies in line with a low-carbon future, Australia risks being left behind. Whether to introduce a major, economy-shaping tax on fossil fuels is a conversation Australia must have.

How would the tax work?

The respected economists presented the plan to the National Press Club this week. It involves a “carbon solutions levy” applied to all fossil fuel extraction sites in Australia (around 105 sites), and on all fossil fuel imports to Australia. The tax would presumably be calculated according to the emissions generated when the fuels are burned.

Garnaut and Sims say proceeds in the first year of the levy would be well over A$100 billion. They say the money should be spent on a rapid acceleration of Australia’s renewable energy expansion, as well as subsidising the development of low-carbon manufacturing for products such as steel and aluminium.

The proceeds would also be spent on cost-of-living relief for consumers, such as energy bill relief and scrapping the current excise on petrol and diesel fuel.

Garnaut told the National Press Club the global transition to net-zero represents a huge opportunity Australia must seize:

We can use it to raise productivity and living standards after the decade of stagnation. Other countries do not share our natural endowments of wind and solar energy resources, land to deploy them, as well as land to grow biomass sustainably as an alternative to petroleum and coal for chemical manufacture.

In the zero-carbon economy, Australia is the economically natural location to produce a substantial proportion of the products currently made with large carbon emissions in Northeast Asia and Europe.

And as Garnaut also outlined in his speech, climate change threatens Australia’s economy, which remains heavily dependent on exporting fossil fuels.

Is the levy a good idea?

Carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming, which damages the planet and its people. The purpose of a carbon tax, or levy, is to ensure polluting companies pay for the damage they cause. In theory, the taxes make polluting production processes more expensive than the alternatives, reducing demand for those products.

The world, including Australia, has committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. It’s a big task and we need to act fast. Economists broadly agree carbon taxes are the most efficient, lowest-cost way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So the proposal makes good policy sense.

Australia had a carbon price, or tax, from 2012 until 2014. It was introduced by Labor but repealed by the Abbott Coalition government. The policy was working: analysis showed emissions in Australia’s national electricity market would have been 11 million to 17 million tonnes higher without the measure.

Of course, sound policy ideas do not always come to fruition. After more than a decade of the so-called “climate wars” in Australia, the term “carbon tax” remains politically unpalatable.

Unsurprisingly, the plan proposed this week was immediately rejected by Labor and the Nationals. Even less surprising was the strong rebuff from business groups such as the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the fossil fuel lobby.

Read more:
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The rest of the world got the memo

Putting a price on carbon is not groundbreaking policy. Many countries do it – either as direct taxes or emissions trading schemes.

Notably, from 2026 a European Union tariff on carbon-intensive imports will come into effect. Known as the “carbon border adjustment mechanism”, it means importers will have to report on – and pay for – the emissions created when producing goods such as iron and steel.

The policy is designed to level the playing field for EU manufacturers that must pay a penalty for their own pollution. But imports from countries where a carbon price applies would be exempt from the tariff.

In coming years, we can expect other jurisdictions to implement similar policies to guard their domestic industries. Australia must protect its export revenue by expanding its production of low-carbon goods, or else find itself stuck with expensive, emissions-intensive products that no-one wants to buy.

It’s also important to remember that Australia is a relatively small economy with little clout in global trade. To remain serious trading partners, we must come to the table with adequate climate policies.

And finally, imposing a carbon levy in Australia would ensure we get to keep the revenue for ourselves. The potential proceeds are enormous, and could be spent raising the living standard for all Australians.

My only real quibble with the plan is the proposal to set the levy at the level of the EU’s five-year average carbon price, currently around $90 a tonne. This puts Australia at the mercy of economic conditions in Europe. We’d be far wiser to determine the price ourselves.

Read more:
Carbon pricing works: the largest-ever study puts it beyond doubt

Will such a levy ever happen?

Garnaut and Sims know their policy is a bold one – and will have its detractors. But as the world comes to terms with the economic reality of climate change, Australia risks being left behind.

As Garnaut told the ABC, everyone is a winner under the plan, except fossil fuel companies which, he conceded, “will hate it”. That may be true. But climate change is wreaking havoc on human communities, on natural systems, and on the global economy. It’s only fair that those responsible pay for the damage.

The political hurdles are high, but not insurmountable. Australia already penalises polluting companies via the safeguard mechanism, which imposes a hard cap on industrial emissions. Ten years ago, such a policy seemed highly unlikely, but we got there.

A carbon levy of the type proposed is an eminently sensible approach to get to net zero. This is a policy debate whose time has come. Let’s bring it on.

Read more:
Wholesale power prices are falling fast – but consumers will have to wait for relief. Here’s why

Ian A. MacKenzie 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. Ross Garnaut and Rod Sims have proposed a $100 billion-a-year fossil fuel tax – and it’s a debate Australia should embrace – https://theconversation.com/ross-garnaut-and-rod-sims-have-proposed-a-100-billion-a-year-fossil-fuel-tax-and-its-a-debate-australia-should-embrace-223722

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marian Makkar, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, RMIT University

Customised shoes, personalised drinks and specialised menu offerings. In a world where carbon copies of products are everywhere, retailers have to make their products stand out and provide customers with a unique purchasing experience.

The need to be different is even greater at a time consumers are being careful about what they spend. Businesses have to work harder as they compete for the all-important dollar so price wars between retailers are common.

Personalisation, through bespoke products and personalised services has been listed by international business magazine Forbes as one of the ten biggest business trends for 2024.

It’s clear – and has been for years – personalisation appeals to consumers who want to feel cared for and understood by their favourite brands. In fact, consumers are willing to pay more for the experience.

How businesses learn what consumers want

Companies are increasingly using what marketers call personalisation at scale by analysing large amounts of data about individuals to deliver products tailored to their specific needs, behaviours and preferences.

This historical and real-time data is gleaned from consumers’ online purchasing and browsing behaviour, use of mobile apps, internet searches, online shopping carts and brand loyalty cards.

E-commerce retailer Amazon personalises product recommendations based on consumers’ browsing and purchase history, offering them the same or variations of goods they have bought or at least looked at.

Similarly, entertainment streaming platforms Netflix and Spotify analyse their users’ viewing and listening history to understand their preferences and recommend new content.

Coffee giant Starbucks communicates with its loyal members via games in their mobile app and rewards loyalists with specialised offers and exclusive product trials. The games are personalised to each customer based on the data gathered from their past visits and interactions with the app.

Read more:
Personalised learning is billed as the ‘future’ of schooling: what is it and could it work?

Coke’s Share-a-Coke campaign, unveiled in Australia in 2011, was a successful example of the bond brands can create with consumers just by adding a person’s name to the product.

The company branded its bottles and cans with the 150 most popular names in Australia and urged consumers to share a Coke with someone whose name adorned the label. The list of names later expanded.

L’Oreal’s most recent innovation is their in-store technology that digitally scans each customer’s skin. The data obtained is used to produce a customised foundation (from 72,000 possible combinations) to match an individual’s shade, level of hydration and coverage required.

Nike produces custom shoes in thousands of styles, colours and icon combinations as they continue to acquire data integration platforms that help speed up the collection and analysis of consumer data.

Consumers want more from their shopping experience

In pre-digital times, personalisation was based on broad demographics and direct feedback from customers. It often resulted in personalised store interactions between salespeople and VIP customers, or tailoring store services. Personalisation was only affordable to high-net-worth individuals.

But the digital age has made personalisation accessible to all consumers, not just the high end. Today’s shoppers expect unique experiences and will vote with their dollar. This is backed by research showing personalised experiences drive company sales.

Read more:
We are closer than ever to being able to 3D print medicines. Here’s why that’s important

The COVID-19 pandemic only made personalisation more urgent for companies as consumers switched to new stores, products, or buying methods, proving brand loyalty was a thing of the past.

Consumers now expect more value from brands. They want to feel recognised and understood on an individual level and not part of the crowd. Personalisation at-scale allows consumers to feel empowered with their choices. This feeling of psychological ownership results from designing your “own” product and can lead to greater value and brand love.

Why personalisation works for the big brands

Personalisation at scale offers companies many advantages. It can reduce customer acquisition costs and increase revenues. Personalising experiences, when offered to millions of customers, make it difficult for competitors to imitate, especially when brands use proprietary technology.

Personalisation also means less waste as brands produce what consumers actually want rather than what they think consumers want. After all, consumers who find products unique to them are less likely to part with what they believe is their own creation.

However, using predictive algorithms to help brands analyse past behaviours (what you and others like you have bought/watched) and come up with choices (at scale) can be imperfect.

Dating app Tinder’s reliance on algorithms to decide which photos users see has been criticised as flawed with very low reciprocal interest rates between users “swiping right”. Understanding human behaviour requires intuition alongside algorithms.

If personalisation isn’t new, then why the sudden hype?

Brands are rapidly embracing digital disruption. The digital revolution brought an influx of consumer data, but despite early algorithms, it was difficult for companies to make sense of large amounts of raw data.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning have revolutionised this by enabling brands to use AI-driven methods to understand their consumers and offer tailored content. In turn, consumers get to contribute to their product’s design.

Big brands like Nike and L’Oreal have the right formula for personalisation and their customers are enjoying a unique experience. This is good news for big brands with large budgets and access to data, but less so for smaller brands with fewer resources trying to compete for the customer’s attention.

With the growth of AI technology, we will start seeing open-source software with publicly accessible data that allows even the smallest brands access and know-how to make every experience bespoke.

Marian Makkar 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. From Coke cans to shoes to menus: what’s behind the rise in personalised products? – https://theconversation.com/from-coke-cans-to-shoes-to-menus-whats-behind-the-rise-in-personalised-products-221719

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Myles Murphy, Postdoctoral research fellow, Physiotherapy, Edith Cowan University

Kids are back at school, playgrounds, sport and general mucking around. This can lead to two things: happy children and injuries.

Up to 50% of boys and 40% of girls will break a bone during childhood and adolescence. Around 50,000 children and young people are hospitalised due to fractures in Australia each year and the rates of fractures in children appear to be increasing.

But it is not just broken bones that can hamper your children’s Olympic dreams – or just disrupt their play. What are the differences between strains, sprains and fractures? And how can you identify and manage these injuries?

Read more:
What makes kids want to drop out of sport, and how should parents respond?

Different doesn’t mean better or worse

Sprains, strains and fractures are all different types of injuries – and the type doesn’t necessarily indicate the severity.

Sprains are injuries to ligaments and joints. So even a complete anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) rupture (when one of the ligaments of the knee is torn through) is technically a sprain.

Strains are injuries to the muscle. So whether you just pull the muscle (where the muscle is inflamed but not torn) or cause a bad tear, it is referred to as a muscle strain.

Finally, a fracture means any injury to bone. In children, whose bones are more bendy, this can vary from a small crack in the bone (sometimes called a buckle or Greenstick fracture) to a completely broken bone.

Kids are at increased risk

Children seem to be at a relatively high risk of breaking a bone (particularly of their forearm) as their bones are rapidly lengthening due to growth, and with that there is a reduction in the overall bone strength.

ACL ruptures are also common in children, with the highest rise in ruptures among 5–14-year-old females in Australia, increasing by 10.4% from 1998 to 2018.

Children’s formal sporting commitments may have a role to play in why injury rates are increasing. Some kids are not getting so much as a single physical recovery day per week and are training more than elite athletes while their bodies are still lanky, uncoordinated and developing. We also see fractures from trampoline play, skateboarding, and extreme sports such as BMX riding.

In addition to muscle, tendon and bone injuries, children are also at risk of concussion and clear guidelines now exist to inform management of this condition.

Read more:
Concussion in sport: why making players sit out for 21 days afterwards is a good idea

With all that energy and commitment going into sport and play, it’s not surprising some kids hurt themselves. Here’s what to do next …

5 ways to assess the severity of an injury

1. What does it look like?

Is there an obvious visual deformity or huge amount of swelling? Injuries with bigger changes in physical appearance will be much more severe.

2. Can they move it?

If they are unable to bend a joint or they are “guarding” the area and refusing to move it, it is a sign of more severe injury. Sometimes fear will prevent a child from moving the injured area – it’s important not to try to force movement in the early stages, even if you think fear is an issue.

3. Can you touch or press on the injured area?

Obviously, the more severe the injury the more likely your child will recoil with pain when being touched – or not let you anywhere near them.

4. Can your child bear weight on the injured area

For leg injuries this means can they stand or walk. For arm injuries can they use the arm to push up off the floor or out of a chair. More severe injuries prevent people from being able to bear weight. You should not try to force your child to stand or walk – but if you note them doing so, you can be more reassured the injury is less likely to be serious.

5. Is the injury improving over time?

If the injury does not seem to be changing or getting better within 24 hours it may be a more severe injury, even if the previous pointers do not suggest it is.

Read more:
Hot pack or cold pack: which one to reach for when you’re injured or in pain

Now what? Top tips to manage injury

• Do the basics well. No matter how severe an injury may be – the RICE protocol will be useful. RICE stands for rest, ice (with a pack or cold water if no ice is available), compression (with a bandage or fitted fabric) and elevation (position the body so the injury is above the level of the heart)

• if your child has an obvious deformity of the bone, joint or muscle, seek medical attention as quickly as you can. The best thing to do is take them to an emergency department for assessment. They will likely need imaging (an X-ray or CT scan) to assess the bone and joint. Treatment should happen as soon as possible as injuries are often very painful and may need relocation or splinting

• if your child is struggling to move the injured area, you are unable to touch the sore spot or they cannot tolerate taking weight on the injured area, a review with your GP or physiotherapist as soon as possible is your best course of action

• if your child is not improving within 24 hours, but pain levels are not too high, an appointment with a GP or physiotherapist can still be a good idea. The injury may not be that severe, but if your child is needing to walk in an unusual way or not using their arm we want to get them back to normal as fast as possible

• talk to your child and see what they want to do. If the problem is lingering and they are worried about getting back to sport or play, an assessment by someone qualified (usually the GP or physio) can be very reassuring.

Read more:
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Myles Murphy receives funding from the Raine Medical Research Foundation, Western Australian Department of Health, Perth Wildcats, Western Australia Police Force, Defence Science Centre of Western Australia.

– ref. Is it broken? A strain or sprain? How to spot a serious injury now school and sport are back – https://theconversation.com/is-it-broken-a-strain-or-sprain-how-to-spot-a-serious-injury-now-school-and-sport-are-back-222141

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daswin de Silva, Deputy Director of the Centre for Data Analytics and Cognition, La Trobe University

In recent days, the “right to disconnect” has entered Australia’s legislative agenda. It refers to employees’ rights to refuse unreasonable after-hours contact from their employer.

In a work landscape where employees are constantly available after hours thanks to smartphones and portable devices, and employers are competing in global markets and operating on tight deadlines, concerns about disconnecting from work are valid on both sides.

Artificial intelligence (AI) assistants in the workplace are touted as a potential solution to this “availability creep”. But they may not be the silver bullet, despite what big tech wants us to think.

Read more:
Flexibility makes us happier, with 3 clear trends emerging in post-pandemic hybrid work

A crushing digital debt

“Digital debt”, a term introduced by Microsoft in its work trend index, fittingly describes the vast volume of communication and coordination tasks that minimally contribute to workplace productivity.

The index surveyed 31,000 full-time knowledge workers – people who work with ideas, rather than goods – in 31 countries, including Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea and others.

It reveals that 57% of the average workday is spent on communications and 68% of respondents couldn’t find uninterrupted blocks of time to focus during the workday.

The origins of digital debt can be traced back to the “productivity paradox” from the late 20th century, where increasing technology investments had led to decreasing workplace productivity.

This paradox has re-emerged (and been renamed) mainly due to the abundance of data that organisations and employees have to manage in the current market.

For communication alone, most employees are having to manage one or two email addresses, calls and chats on Zoom, Slack or Teams channels, WhatsApp and LinkedIn messaging, and multiple diaries to synchronise meetings. This is easily more than 1,000 data points every day.

Left unattended, digital debt accrues “interest”, with damaging effects on both employee and employer. This is the tipping point at which the boundary between work and personal life blurs, and the after-dinner compulsion to tidy up the inbox sets in.

AI assistants to the rescue?

Microsoft – OpenAI’s partner of choice for scaling up its industry-leading AI tech – has somewhat conveniently used the same work trend report to position its AI assistant, Microsoft Copilot, as the bona fide solution to digital debt.

There are obvious financial gains for big tech providing AI tools. But the capabilities of these AI assistants are fittingly at the intersection of digital debt, the deluge of data, and the right to disconnect. So, they warrant further investigation.

In the broadest sense, generative AI (think ChatGPT) produces new and meaningful content in response to prompts from a human operator. AI assistants generalise this capability for goal-oriented complex tasks. There’s no shortage of these subscription-based services now, including Copilot, Google’s Gemini, Amazon Q, Anthropic’s Claude and others.

An AI assistant can summarise all new emails, detect and prioritise those requiring a response, draft responses and highlight gaps that require human input. Then, the assistant can send the emails off and schedule meetings for subsequent chats.

Among other knowledge work tasks, an AI assistant can also draft and revise text for various documents, generate graphs from data in spreadsheets, or generate images for text-heavy presentation slides.

A needy assistant that needs supervision

Unfortunately, early user feedback on the technical performance of AI assistants is lacklustre.

This is primarily because of how generative AI is trained. By learning from past data and not through lived experiences, it lacks factual knowledge of the world. This means it can’t validate the outcomes of the tasks completed.

Therefore, the human using the AI must “peer review” all of the assistant’s output to avoid potential errors and misrepresentations.

In most workplaces where we are expected to “do more with less”, such needy AI assistants would create an additional layer of work. It could also easily get overlooked when time pressures kick in.

Read more:
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The looming ethics problem

It is no secret AI also has an ethics problem, and this extends to AI assistants.
The mediocre attitude of big tech AI providers towards transparency and governance, as demonstrated by the sacking and rehiring of the CEO of Open AI, as well as Microsoft’s layoff of its ethics team, are further reasons to be wary of the much-hyped opportunities of generative AI.

There are efforts to regulate AI based on the risks it poses, but the challenge is that the risk itself is dynamic.

For example, menial office tasks could go horribly wrong if politically sensitive, tone deaf or workplace-inappropriate content is produced and circulated by an AI.

Given that large AI models are likely to continue training on live data, organisations must protect their confidential and sensitive information through stringent governance and classification protocols.

In summary, AI assistants can help ease our digital debt and provide after-hours business continuity. This could chart a course towards a right-to-disconnect landscape that is agreeable to everyone.

But this course is riddled with challenges. They include organisational readiness, AI literacy skills, AI governance, accountability framework, mandatory peer review and cost-effective subscriptions.

Against the mounting digital debt and deficit of work-life balance, our investment in AI must be measured and responsible, to ensure the returns are sustainable.

Daswin de Silva 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. Drowning in ‘digital debt’? AI assistants can help – but we must use them carefully – https://theconversation.com/drowning-in-digital-debt-ai-assistants-can-help-but-we-must-use-them-carefully-223436

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shukla Poddar, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Photovoltaics and Renewable Energy Engineering, UNSW Sydney

To reach the goal of 82% renewable energy in Australia’s grid by 2030, we’ll need to build a lot more solar.

But even as we accelerate the rate at which we install solar on our rooftops and in grid-scale farms, the world keeps getting hotter and extreme weather arrives more often.

Solar panels have to be outside, exposed to all weather. They’re built to endure heat, snow, rain and wind. But they have limits. Climate change will mean many panels can degrade faster.

Our new research examines which areas of Australia will have the worst conditions for solar degradation out to 2059 – and what it will do to the cost of energy. We found solar in Australia’s hot, humid north will degrade fastest, while solar in the arid interior and more moderate climates down south will fare better.

What makes solar panels degrade?

When you’re looking to install solar on your rooftop, the warranty will likely be a factor in your eventual choice. Most solar manufacturers offer a 25-30 year warranty, where they guarantee power output will drop by less than 20% over that time.

The reason the power output drops at all is that solar panels slowly degrade over time. But different climates, different materials and different manufacturing techniques can lead to faster or slower degradation.

At present, the dominant solar technology is silicon. Silicon modules degrade due to stress from the environment, voltage changes and mechanical stresses, as silicon wafers are quite stiff and brittle. Environmentally, humidity, ultraviolet radiation and temperature are the main causes of damage.

Read more:
Climate change will affect solar power and grid stability across Australia – here’s how

Hotter, more humid conditions can accelerate degradation in several ways. The map below combines four types of degradation we predict will worsen under climate change. These are:

1. delamination: heat and humidity can cause the bonds holding the different layers of the cell together to lose adhesion

2. discoloured encapsulant: intense sunlight and extra moisture can damage or discolour the encapsulant, the polymer used to adhere layers within the solar cell together

3. ribbon corrosion: if it’s more humid more often, it increases the chances moisture can accumulate and begin corroding the internal ribbon connections of the cell

4. internal circuit failure: solar cells experience regular temperature fluctuations, daily and seasonally. These temperature changes can over time cause circuits to fail. A hotter world will add extra stress to internal circuits, leading to a higher chance of failure.

What will climate change do?

Our results predict degradation rates will increase across Australia out to 2059 under both high and low emissions scenarios laid out by the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change.

Under a high emissions scenario, solar would degrade twice as fast as it would under a lower emission scenario due to the extra heat. Solar farms would be able to produce less power and might have to replace panels due to failure more often. On average, this would mean losing about 8.5% of output due solely to extra degradation by 2059. Under a high emissions scenario, this would mean energy could cost 10-12% more.

But the effects wouldn’t be felt equally. Our results show solar built across the hot and humid north of Australia will degrade at especially high rates in the future compared to the arid centre, where conditions are hot but dry.

What should we do?

Heat is the main way solar panels degrade and break in Australia. As the world heats up, it will go from annoyance to very real problem.

At present, very few solar developers are taking climate change into account when they buy their panels. They should, especially those operating in humid areas. They can be more careful while selecting a new solar farm location to ensure their modules have lower chances of failure due to degradation.

To fix the problem, we’ll need to incorporate new ways of cooling panels and improve the materials used. We also need to improve manufacturing processes and materials so we can stop moisture from accumulating inside the panels.

These issues can be fixed. The first step is to understand there is a problem.

Read more:
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Shukla Poddar 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. As the world heats up, solar panels will degrade faster – especially in hot, humid areas. What can we do? – https://theconversation.com/as-the-world-heats-up-solar-panels-will-degrade-faster-especially-in-hot-humid-areas-what-can-we-do-221990

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jacob Prehn, Associate Dean Indigenous College of Arts, Law, and Education; Senior Lecturer, Social Work, University of Tasmania

When approaching how to support the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, there is a tendency in favour of strengthening and empowering mothers, rather than fathers.

While this emphasis on maternal support is undoubtedly justified (in fact, there probably needs to be more supports that are culturally appropriate), it raises the question of why specialist assistance is not similarly prioritised for fathers.

For instance, within what is arguably the core Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy in Australia, Closing the Gap, there is no mention of initiatives specifically for Indigenous fathers or men more broadly.

We analysed data from around 150 First Nations fathers about the support they needed. Here’s what they had to say.

Read more:
‘Emu Men’: a new way to recognise and celebrate Indigenous fathers

Doing away with negative stereotypes

Western society can portray some groups of fathers in a less favourable light and offer limited support.

In Australia, there has been a particularly cruel characterisation of Indigenous fathers as deviant, distant, and/or drunkards.

These harmful characterisations were reflected in a 2016 cartoon by Bill Leak of an Aboriginal man unable to recall the name of his son.

These representations are not true of many Indigenous fathers. They are often disciplined, devoted and sober, and want to be positive role models for their children. A great example of this is in the social media movement that sprung up in the wake of the cartoon, called #IndigenousDads.

Read more:
We studied 100 years of Australian fatherhood. Here’s how today’s dads differ from their grandfathers

In light of this social climate, we wanted to know what Indigenous fathers need in order to enhance their experience of fatherhood. We drew the responses from data of 149 Indigenous fathers from the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children (LSIC), a large Australian dataset administered by the Commonwealth Department of Social Services. That study asked them “if you could have something to make it easier to raise your child, what would it be?”. We analysed the results.

More support needed

Our research found more than 60% of Indigenous dads surveyed indicated needing further support.

There were several areas that came up most frequently. These were finances, social services, housing, and the ability to spend more time with their children.

Of the ten themes we observed across the comments from Indigenous fathers in response to this question, nearly all were related to socioeconomic and cultural factors. One of the fathers expressed frustration at the lack of available social services, wanting more support in general. Another father shared how finances affected his role, saying:

I would like to have a decent paying job; I had to stop working to help and care for my children and partner.

Other fathers mentioned wanting housing that was appropriately sized to accommodate a family, and not wanting to rent. Additionally, fathers wished they had the ability to invest more time in engaging in activities with their children.

Collectively, these desires are reflective of men striving to be involved and nurturing fathers, not deviant or distant, as illustrated in harsh stereotypes. This is highlighted in their courage in openly asking for help.

What needs to be done?

Our research shows policies about and for Indigenous men and fathers need to directly address the areas in which they’ve expressed the most need. This includes looking at their social determinants of health. This means examining the social and economic circumstances that can affect a person’s life, from their housing situation through to feeling included in society.

As we mentioned earlier, the Closing the Gap strategy does not presently do this. It is important for this policy, and other relevant government strategies, to target these areas and concerns specifically.

Further, urgent attention is needed for greater research funding to support Indigenous dads and men more broadly. One study shows the minimal amount of Indigenous-specific research funding awarded by Australia’s two central funding bodies. The Australian Research Council (ARC) has provided 1.46%, and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has given a concerning 0.29%. There is a pressing need for additional investigation into how best to support Indigenous fathers and Indigenous men.

Read more:
Young dads are painted as feckless or absent – but they’re working to change perceptions

Giving Indigenous fathers the support they need is crucial in reducing the well-documented challenges experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men. There are also positive flow-on effects to others, as found by researchers Lyndon Reilly and Susan Rees:

If you have strong Indigenous fathers, you will have strong Indigenous families. By having strong Indigenous families, you will have strong Indigenous communities.

As of 2021, Indigenous children are more than ten times more likely to be on a care or protection order than non-Indigenous children. Strengthening the role of Indigenous fathers not only makes financial sense for governments, but also contributes to Indigenous family and community wellbeing, reducing care and protection orders for Indigenous children.

We need to listen to First Nations fathers. If we do, we can deliver services that play to their strengths, rather than seeking to address perceived deficiencies.

Kootsy Canuto receives funding from National Health and Medical Research Council APP1175214 & MRFF APP2006564.

Leonard Collard has previously received funding from organisations such as the Australian Research Council, state and federal as well as other funding bodies. Dr Collard is a member of the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council.

Huw Thomas Peacock, Jacob Prehn, Michael A. Guerzoni, and Mick Adams 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. Indigenous fathers help build stronger communities. Here’s how we can better support them – https://theconversation.com/indigenous-fathers-help-build-stronger-communities-heres-how-we-can-better-support-them-222389

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eyal Mayroz, Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney

Hamas’ vicious attack on southern Israel on October 7 and Israel’s ruthless response have sparked a global campaign for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to Palestine’s occupation.

Once the fighting stops, the world’s attention will shift to tough “day after” negotiations, which would necessitate, among other things, painful and risky concessions from both sides.

Given the vast deficits of trust and favour between Israelis and Palestinians, such concessions will be extremely difficult to achieve.

Decades of mutual grievances, tit-for-tat violence, daily rights violations of Palestinians and intergenerational trauma have eroded whatever goodwill may have existed once for the “other side”.

And while learning about the tragedies of others can support healing and reconciliation processes, turning victimhood into a competition has produced polarisation and distrust.

The only hope for peace now is of a plan imposed from the outside.

To encourage faith in the process, mediators will have to demonstrate both fairness and a previously missing commitment to push the parties into making such concessions – on assurances of robust and durable international support.

Even then, changes of leadership will have to take place for any meaningful breakthrough to occur.

How Israelis are viewing the war

The world has largely moved on from the October 7 attacks, with many people’s memories now obscured by the daily footage of the carnage in Gaza. More than 28,000 Palestinians have been killed so far, and many more are still under the rubble.

However, Israelis don’t see on their screens what the rest of the world sees. Rather, they continue to relive — through survivors’ testimonies and other stories — the horrors of October 7. These kinds of reports are rarely watched now by others.

Gaza’s destruction and the mass killings of Palestinians – many of them elderly, women and children – are reported by Israel’s mainstream media very selectively, as “unfortunate” but inevitable collateral damage for which Hamas alone should be held accountable.

While relentlessly thrashing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for their failures before, during and after October 7, the Israeli media continue to shield the public from the images of the unimaginable despair coming out of Gaza.

So long as the fighting continues and Israeli troops remain in harm’s way, rallying around the Star of David is considered the right thing to do.

Read more:
Reflections on hope during unprecedented violence in the Israel-Hamas war

A sense of betrayal

The widely reported displays of glee in the hours after the brutal massacres or kidnappings of over 1,400 Israelis – including women, children and elderly people – stunned Israeli society.

In their worst nightmares, Israelis could not imagine or make sense of the support for the Hamas attack, or the widespread denial that atrocities had occurred at all. That it took nearly two months for UN officials and prominent women’s rights organisations to acknowledge the systematic rape that took place during the attack dismayed and enraged the entire country.

Nowhere was the shock felt more acutely than within Israel’s small and now battered peace camp. Some of the victims on October 7 had for years been active members of the peace movement. After years of campaigning, anti-occupation activists felt suddenly betrayed by many progressives in the West who seemed uncaring or oblivious to their pain. In the days following the attack, the pages of the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper were filled with expressions of this anger and raw emotion.

By magnifying old, festering feelings of isolation and victimisation within Jewish society, the callous or insensitive reactions to the October 7 attack ended up inflicting damage on the Palestinian cause, as well.

As emotions in Israel continue to run high, more and more people have been adopting the view that if the world hates us so much (evoking the days of the Holocaust), we will forever have to live by the sword.

Inadvertently fanning the victimisation narrative, the global outrage over Gaza has hardened Israelis’ defiance, as well. Why, many of them are asking, didn’t the same rage manifest over the bloody conflicts in Sudan, Yemen, Ethiopia or Myanmar? Why is Israel being singled out?

These feelings – and the delusional thinking that Hamas could be destroyed and all hostages freed by force – have overwhelmed all other considerations for the Israelis.

For years, public opinion in Israel had significant influence over government policies on the occupied territories. The shock of October 7 may have amplified the importance of these opinions by upending many people’s long-held positions on the Palestinian “problem”. This has been more likely the case on the political left and in the centre, where many people have lost a sense of security and hope.

The arguably more logical lesson of the attack — that peace and security for Israel are inextricably linked to the self-determination of the Palestinian people — has failed to gain many new adherents, at least for now.

As a result, the death toll in Gaza has so far had little impact on the Israeli Jewish public. The only thing animating some calls for a ceasefire deal now is the ongoing risk to the hostages and the sense of national responsibility for their fate.

Read more:
Gaza war: Israelis feel angry at their government and abandoned by the international community

The international campaign for Palestine

For much of the world, the never-ending violations of Palestinians’ rights by Jewish settlers, the Israeli state and Israeli security forces have legitimised the struggle for a free Palestine, many times over.

This accumulation of past wrongs – together with the brutality of Israel’s military operation – have succeeded in placing the Palestinian agenda at the forefront of global attention and keeping it there for months.

However, anger at injustices should not lead to support – or even acquiescence – for the killing of civilians, by either side. No amount of violence will bring a resolution to this conflict. Israel has for decades tried to impose its own solutions on the Palestinians through force and failed. Why would the same means succeed now in the other direction?

The path to a Palestinian state must provide, among other things, a sense of security for the Israelis. Not because this objective is more important than others, but because without it, there will be no end to the occupation.

The ‘day after’ solution

In the days and months to come, international leaders have two major tasks to achieve. In addition to bringing an end to the bloodshed in Gaza (to which the US alone holds the key), they must strive to earn trust on both sides of the fence.

Both Palestinians and Israelis should be able to have confidence in the process and the will of the mediators to keep their concerns and interests at heart in the difficult negotiations over inevitably painful and risky solutions.

Read more:
Defending space for free discussion, empathy and tolerance on campus is a challenge during Israel-Hamas war

Since the events of October 7 have set the prospects for grassroots peace-building back years, solutions imposed from the top down will be necessary to chart a feasible path forward.

Hate comes easily in the face of injustices, as does empathy for the suffering on one own’s side. It is much harder to empathise with the misfortunes of “others” who may or may not have brought their misery upon themselves.

Selective denunciation of atrocities based on one’s support or rejection of a cause — any cause — is not only morally flawed, but counterproductive as well. Resistance to any, and all, atrocities should be proactive, decisive and resolute.

Those who have been severely aggrieved may struggle to apply the same yardstick to others, but the rest of us could and should. We can do better.

Eyal Mayroz 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. Why do Israelis and the rest of the world view the Gaza conflict so differently? And can this disconnect be overcome? – https://theconversation.com/why-do-israelis-and-the-rest-of-the-world-view-the-gaza-conflict-so-differently-and-can-this-disconnect-be-overcome-223188

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charlotte Markowitsch, PhD candidate in popular music studies, RMIT University

It has been 50 years since Rock & Roll Hall of Famers Kiss launched their thunderock-doused debut album into the pop culture stratosphere. The eponymous album, released on February 18 1974, became a platform-stacked foot in the music industry’s door.

What followed established Kiss as one of the most memorable hard-rock bands of the 1970s and ’80s, with a globally recognised legacy.

The early days

In 1972, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons shelved their first ever rock outfit following a short stint in a band called Wicked Lester. The pair then hatched a plan to form a far more aggressive and successful rock band. Drummer Peter Criss and guitarist Ace Frehley were recruited, and the new-generation Fab Four renamed themselves Kiss.

By late November of 1973, the band had developed their bombastic live performance style, perfected their makeup and signed a deal with Casablanca Records. Yet they dealt with some rocky beginnings.

Armed with reworked songs from Wicked Lester, Kiss entered New York’s Bell Sound Studios to record their debut. A mere three weeks later the album was complete – but the band quickly realised the studio recordings didn’t capture the essence of their high-energy live shows. As vocalist Paul Stanley told Loudwire:

What was put down on tape was such a timid fraction of what we were in concert. I didn’t understand it because bands who were our contemporaries had much better-sounding albums.

They took another blow while shooting the album cover with Joel Brodsky when, after a mishap with Criss’s makeup, the band were allegedly handed balloons by the photographer since he thought they were clowns.

Then, soon before the album was released, Warner Brothers pulled its financial backing and distribution deal from Casablanca Records after witnessing Kiss play a New Year’s eve show. Although it’s said the band’s makeup was the last straw for the label, the show in question also featured Simmons setting his hair alight shortly after throwing a fireball at a fan’s face.

Despite the blunders, the release of the first album set Kiss on a path to becoming immortalised. As Stanley says in his book Face The Music:

For all the minuses I felt about the sound or the cover, we now had a finished album which was the prerequisite for all the other things we wanted to do. We were in the game now.

The Kiss sound

I first heard Kiss as a teenager. I’d just thrift-scored a pair of ’80s-era roller-skates with the band’s logo scrawled on the heels in glitter glue. The salesperson, responsible for the glitter glue, enthusiastically recounted seeing Kiss play VFL Park (now Waverley Park stadium) in 1980 and made me promise I’d listen to them.

Overwhelmed by the band’s expansive discography, and the possibility that their name stood for Knights In Satan’s Service, I thought it best to begin from the start.

With their reputation of on-stage pyrotechnics and gore, I’d expected something more akin to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid than the jangly riffs of Let Me Know or Love Theme From Kiss. A 1978 review by Gordon Fletcher for the Rolling Stone also noted this rift. Despite calling the album exceptional, Fletcher described its sound as a cross between Deep Purple and the Doobie Brothers.

Stanley and Simmons have spoken freely about borrowing heavily from a number of mid-century legends, so it’s no surprise that sonically the album was nothing new. The Rolling Stones’ influence can be heard in the songs Deuce and Strutter, while Led Zeppelin and Neil Young are present in Black Diamond.

The album initially hadn’t risen higher than #87 on Billboard’s album charts. A studio cover of Bobby Rydell’s Kissin’ Time was released next as the lead single, but the track only bumped them up to #83. This commercial unviability loomed over Kiss until the release of Alive! in 1975.

Success and beyond

As the band’s first live album, Alive! bridged the gap between the audacious intensity of Kiss’s performances and the timidness of their studio recordings. Their early tracks were repurposed to let listeners remotely experience the infamous Kiss live spectacle.

As Rock and Roll All Nite claimed #12 on the Billboard charts, the platform-stacked foot burst through the door to mainstream success.

Fifty years after Kiss first stepped into Bell Sound Studios, the band played their final sold-out show at Madison Square Garden on December 2 2023. The performance served as a crowning jewel on their End of the Road world tour, a four-year effort with more than 250 live shows.

Promised to be their biggest and best shows ever, the farewell became a colossal celebration of the band’s legacy. Theatrical pyrotechnics, fake blood and Stanley’s classic opening line – “you wanted the best, you got the best” – were featured at each performance.

While both Kiss’s anthemic numbers and earlier catalogue were performed in these final shows, the music came second to the celebration of the Kiss live spectacle.

From their carefully designed makeup, to bombastic theatrics and hoards of merchandise, it was Kiss’s brand building that set them apart and embedded them in the heritage bracket of popular culture.

Despite the end of their live shows, Kiss endeavours to stay embedded in public memory. Referring to some of the band’s 2,500 licensed products, Simmons recently spoke on what’s next for Kiss:

Kiss the entity will continue; what’s happening now is a metamorphosis. The caterpillar is dying, but the butterfly will be born.

With a Netflix biopic and holographic avatars on the way, Stanley and Simmons – the band’s two remaining members – have declared Kiss immortal.

Stanley even suggests the Kiss look has become so iconic it’s now bigger than any band member. This means the torch could be passed on to new-generation Kiss members.

Kiss has (quite literally) breathed fire into live rock performance. Now, they’re breathing fire into our expectations of what rock royalty retirement looks like. I have to ask, who – or what – will wear the makeup next?

Read more:
A long-dead soprano has taken to the stage with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Are holograms the future?

Charlotte Markowitsch 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. Kiss’s debut album at 50: how the rock legends went from ‘clowns’ to becoming immortalised – https://theconversation.com/kisss-debut-album-at-50-how-the-rock-legends-went-from-clowns-to-becoming-immortalised-222284

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark John Costello, Professor, Faculty of Biosciences and Aquaculture, Nord University

Have you ever wondered about the optimal temperature for life on Earth? For humans, 20°C is comfortable. Any warmer and we work less efficiently because releasing heat requires energy.

We know many species can live at much colder or warmer temperatures than humans. But our systematic review of published research found the thermal ranges of animals, plants and microbes living in air and water overlap at 20°C. Could this be a coincidence?

For all species, the relationship with temperature is an asymmetric bell-shaped curve. This means biological processes increase in line with temperature, reach a maximum, and then rapidly decline when it gets too hot.

Recently, a New Zealand research group noticed the number of marine species did not peak at the equator, as has been commonly assumed. Rather, the number dipped, with peaks in the subtropics.

Follow-up studies showed this dip has been getting deeper since the last ice age about 20,000 years ago. And it has been deepening faster due to global ocean warming.

When the number of species was plotted against the average annual temperature, there was a decline above 20°C. A second coincidence?

Read more:
Remote Pacific coral reef shows at least some ability to cope with ocean warming – new study

Biological processes and biodiversity

Research in Tasmania modelled the growth rates of microbes and multi-cellular organisms and found the most stable temperature for their biological processes was also 20°C.

This “Corkrey model” built on other studies showing 20°C was the most stable temperature for biological molecules. A third coincidence?

We teamed up with colleagues from Canada, Scotland, Germany, Hong Kong and Taiwan to search for general patterns in how temperature affects life. To our surprise, everywhere we looked we kept finding that, indeed, 20°C is a pivotal temperature for many measures of biodiversity, and not only for marine species.

Examples show temperatures warmer than around 20°C result in decreases in various crucial measures:

• marine and freshwater species’ tolerance of low oxygen

• marine pelagic (open water living) and benthic (seabed living) algal productivity and fish predation rates on bait

• global species richness in pelagic fishes, plankton, benthic invertebrates and fossil molluscs

• and genetic diversity.

There were also increased extinctions in the fossil record when temperatures exceeded 20°C.

Increased species richness

Globally, the range of temperatures that reef fishes and invertebrates live at is narrowest among species whose geographic distributions centred on 20°C. The same effect is seen in microbes.

While many species have evolved to live at warmer and colder temperatures, most species live at 20°C. Also, extinctions in the fossil record – including sponges, lamp shells, molluscs, sea mats (bryozoans), starfish and sea urchins, worms and crustaceans – were lower at 20°C.

As species evolve to live at temperatures above and below 20°C, their thermal niche gets wider. This means most can still live at 20°C even if they inhabit hotter or colder places.

The mathematical Corkrey model predicts that thermal breadth should be minimised, and biological processes most stable and efficient, at 20°C. In turn, this should maximise species richness across all domains of life, from bacteria to the multi-cellular plants and animals. The model therefore provides a theoretical explanation for this “20°C effect”.

Read more:
Marine life is fleeing the equator to cooler waters. History tells us this could trigger a mass extinction event

Predicting the effects of climate change

That life seems centred around 20°C implies fundamental constraints that compromise the ability of tropical species to adapt to higher temperatures.

As long as species can shift their ranges to adapt to global warming, the 20°C effect means there will be local increases in species richness up to an annual average of 20°C. Above that, richness will decline.

This means the many marine species that can adapt to global warming by shifting their geographic distribution are unlikely to go extinct due to climate change.

However, land species may not be able to shift their geographic distributions so easily due to landscapes modified by cities, farming and other human infrastructures.

Read more:
Warming oceans may force New Zealand’s sperm and blue whales to shift to cooler southern waters

The 20°C effect is the simplest explanation for the above phenomena, including: trends in species richness and genetic diversity with temperature; extinction rates in the fossil record; biological productivity; optimal growth rate; and marine predation rates.

Despite the complexity of multi-cellular species, it is remarkable that the cellular-level temperature efficiencies are reflected in those other aspects of biodiversity.

Exactly why 20°C is pivotal and energy-efficient for cellular processes may be due to the molecular properties of water associated with cells. These properties may also be why ~42°C seems an absolute limit for most species.

A greater awareness of this 20°C effect may lead to new insights into how temperature controls ecosystem processes, species abundance and distribution, and the evolution of life.

Mark John Costello received funding from the Royal Society of New Zealand-Te Apārangi that contributed to this research..

Ross Corkrey 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. 20°C seems the optimal temperature for life on Earth to thrive – what does this mean in a warming world? – https://theconversation.com/20-c-seems-the-optimal-temperature-for-life-on-earth-to-thrive-what-does-this-mean-in-a-warming-world-214346

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Pattison, PhD Candidate in Music Industry, RMIT University

With Taylor Swift pulling in over half-a-million audience members on her Australian tour, we’ve been thinking a lot about fans. In this series, our academics dive into fan cultures: how they developed, how they operate, and how they shape the world today.

Fans and the internet have a symbiotic relationship. The digital era increased the productivity and visibility of fan culture, which in turn has largely influenced the ways that we all act online.

Fan communities existed long before the internet, but the proliferation of online platforms changed the ways in which they connect and participate.

Here is a brief history of how fan cultures shaped – and were shaped by – the internet.

Early adopters

As early as the 1970s, fans were participating in digital spaces. Some of the first email mailing lists and digital bulletin boards were utilised by Grateful Dead fans, or Deadheads, who came together to create an online archive of lyrics.

In the 1990s, science-fiction fans established online repositories, using Usenet groups for fannish discussion and fan-fiction distribution.

As the adoption of the internet became more widespread, so did fan culture. You could simply search for your favourite TV show or band and find a like-minded community online. This brought on an era of forums and blogs, where fans were quick to jump on sites like LiveJournal to write and build communities.

As social media platforms launched in the 2000s, fans co-opted them for their fan practices. MySpace fans helped launch many music careers; One Direction fans put Tumblr on the map.

When Twitter took off, so too did “Stan Twitter”. As a verb, to stan is to exhibit fandom to an excessive degree. The public nature of Twitter (now X) allowed fans to come together in large groups to start trends and campaign. This collective power has been both praised for digital activism efforts, and criticised for harassment.

The public and the private

Fans move between private and public spaces online, negotiating different identities.

On platforms like Tumblr and LiveJournal, fans often choose a pseudonym, whereas Facebook enforces a real-name policy.

Different platforms offer different privacy settings, which also shapes fan behaviours. Private spaces allow for personal conversations, while fans embrace public channels for sharing fan works and campaigning, for example, for voting or fundraising.

Each platform has different social norms and functionality. Fans adapt and develop their fan practices accordingly.

In doing so, they have shaped the social internet as we know it today.

Fan migrations

The launch of a new platform introduces new ways to participate. Tumblr became the place for ““fuckyeah” fansites, sharing fan works and communicating via GIFs. Fans jumped on TikTok to create video edits, sounds and mashups.

Fans may also choose to leave a platform because it no longer satisfies their needs or the platform goes through significant changes, as when Tumblr announced a ban on adult content, or when Elon Musk bought Twitter.

While the launch of Meta’s Threads provided a possible replacement for stan participation, some fans were hesitant to migrate across. Users must log in to Threads via their Instagram account, a platform many use to stay connected with friends and family.

On Twitter/X, fans expressed they were weary of the new platform, because they did not want their fan activities to be connected to their “real life”.

In cases where existing platforms haven’t met the community’s needs, fans have created their own. Archive Of Our Own (AO3) is a repository for fans to share works inspired by the objects of their fandom, created in response to design and policy changes made on other fan-fiction sites.

Transformations

Fans are known for their creative productivity, transforming and remixing their favourite cultural objects in fan-art, fan-fiction, videos, zines and music remixes.

Technological advancements made creative production easier to master, and the public and networked nature of platforms has allowed fan works to be circulated to a much wider audience. Audio from fan-edits often become trending TikTok sounds.

How fans shape brands

The mainstreaming of fandom across digital platforms has also led to changes in brand behaviour.

Some brands have started to act like fans online, learning from fans’ behaviours to form an affiliation with these engaged audiences.

On TikTok, brands are participating in fan-based trends, tapping into community-specific knowledge and jokes.

The Empire State Building has leaned into #swifttok, regularly creating content that demonstrates their love of Taylor. One of their most successful videos is a fan-edit professing their love for the Eiffel Tower, set to a sped-up version of Wildest Dreams.

Brands are also adopting fan language and tone in their captions and comments. Take a look at the comments on one of Taylor Swift’s recent TikToks and you’ll find brands like DuoLingo, Spotify, The Natural History Museum and Peter’s Pasta using words like “blondie”, “mother” and “ICON”.

On Twitter/X, cookie brand Chips Ahoy! regularly posts about trending fan-culture moments, demonstrating insider knowledge.

On Threads, the official Star Wars account is stanning favourite characters, adopting a fannish persona. And on TikTok, Penguin Books Australia is “shipping” Draco and Hermione to promote Tom Felton’s new book.

In my ongoing PhD research, I’ve found fans are working as social media managers for brands, leveraging their expertise to connect with fan audiences.

Given the widespread adoption of fan culture and practices across platforms, it makes sense that a fan’s digital literacy can be beneficial to brands.

As one Harry Styles fan that I interviewed explained:

I think if you’re a brand who wants to be tapped into culture, you need to hire people who are engaging in it. If you’re wanting to jump on trends […] talking to people in their own language, in that social first native language, you need to be hiring people who were already speaking in that way.

Kate Pattison 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. From Deadheads on bulletin boards to Taylor Swift ‘stans’: a short history of how fandoms shaped the internet – https://theconversation.com/from-deadheads-on-bulletin-boards-to-taylor-swift-stans-a-short-history-of-how-fandoms-shaped-the-internet-210970

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Laurenceson, Director and Professor, Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI), University of Technology Sydney

Australia’s research institutions are targets for nefarious actors, from China and elsewhere. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has publicly tabled an “awareness” of various attempts to compromise the sector.

What are we doing about it? Not enough, according to critics.

One recent charge is that Australia “lags behind” its allies and partners in responding to threats to “research security” such as espionage, foreign interference and theft of intellectual property, emanating overwhelmingly from China.

This is far from the case. On the contrary, Australia’s flexible and proportionate response to the threat of foreign interference manages the risks without hampering the international collaboration that is essential to research in the 21st century.

Laggards or leaders?

Do research institutions really face a unique threat of foreign interference, compared with other sectors? And has Australia’s response really lagged behind that of other countries?

In a submission to a parliamentary inquiry in late 2020, ASIO contended that the research sector does not face a unique level of risk. Rather, it is “just one of several sectors that is vulnerable”.

And far from Australia being a laggard, ASIO’s current director-general, Mike Burgess, told the same inquiry in March 2021 that, in his view,

Australia is generally ahead of the curve when it comes to identifying and managing this risk.

Similarly, the Department of Home Affairs submitted that local efforts had attracted “significant interest from international counterparts” precisely because Australia was “leading and shaping international approaches to countering foreign interference, in the education and research sectors”.

A changing landscape

Australia’s response to the risk of foreign interference has developed rapidly over the past five or six years.

In January 2018, Vicki Thomson, chief executive of the Group of Eight coalition of leading universities, insisted the group had “not been provided with any direct evidence of overt influence in our universities”.

Read more:
Universities must act to prevent espionage and foreign interference, but our national laws still threaten academic freedom

Around the same time, Michael Spence, then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, recounted an earlier meeting between a group of university leaders and ASIO. He said they had asked directly whether there was “any hard evidence” that foreign interference in universities was happening. The answer, according to Spence, was “no”.

The landscape has changed sharply since then. ASIO’s understanding of foreign interference has progressed, as have the briefings given to universities and the collective response by government and research institutions.

A collaborative taskforce

In 2019, the Universities Foreign Interference Taskforce was set up as a collaboration between government agencies and research institutions. The taskforce has crafted best-practice guidelines for managing the risks.

In Senate Estimates hearings in March 2021, Burgess was asked whether universities were now “listening” to his agency’s warnings of foreign interference risks targeting the sector. He replied, “They are, very much so.”

The same month, Burgess said he was “comfortable” that the outcomes of the taskforce were effective, and that he was “not predisposed to create some new agency or body”. Two months later, in another Estimates hearing, he commended universities for having been “very cooperative and collaborative working with government”.

A year later, Burgess judged the challenges were still being “well managed” and once again commended universities for their “excellent work”.

Senior Home Affairs officials have also noted that engaging with universities via the taskforce had increased their own understanding of the research sector, which previously was “not familiar to them as much as others are”.

A proportionate response

In August 2023, the Department of Education released a report on how universities are putting the Universities Foreign Interference Taskforce’s guidelines into practice. The report “confirmed an understanding of the threats posed by foreign interference, and progress in implementing advice in the Guidelines”.

The report also said the “extent and maturity” of implementation varied across the sector, but this was by design. The core principle behind the guidelines was to take “a sensible approach that is proportionate to risk”.

Not all universities face the same risks. Some universities have “gone beyond what is outlined in the Guidelines, understanding they may be more susceptible to certain risks”.

Essential collaborations

Taking a prescriptive and mandatory “one-size-fits-all” approach would have imposed unnecessary costs on research institutions. What’s more, it may well have stunted Australia’s capacity for innovation in the process.

This is why ASIO urges that efforts to increase research security be “well balanced”. They should not get in the way of the international collaboration that is essential for research institutions to perform their role.

Read more:
The Thousand Talents Plan is part of China’s long quest to become the global scientific leader

In 2024, China is a peer of the US in research and knowledge creation. In many sectors where Australia has grand ambitions, such as the extraction and processing of critical minerals, China is the technology leader.

We must be clear-eyed about threats to “research security”. But a one-eyed focus on China, and adopting a simplistic and heavy-handed approach to managing these threats, will only leave Australia worse off.

James Laurenceson 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. Research espionage is a real threat – but a drastic crackdown could stifle vital international collaboration – https://theconversation.com/research-espionage-is-a-real-threat-but-a-drastic-crackdown-could-stifle-vital-international-collaboration-223555

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justine Dandy, Associate Professor, Centre for People, Place & Planet, and School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University

Big environmental changes mean ever more Australians will confront the tough choice of whether to move home or risk staying put.

Communities in the tropical north are losing residents as these regions become hotter and more humid. Repeated floods have communities along the east coast questioning their future. Others face rising bushfire risks that force them to weigh up the difficult decision to move home.

However, the decision-making process and relocation opportunities are not the same for everyone. Factors such as socio-economic disadvantage and how we are attached to a place influence decisions to move or stay, where people go and how they experience their new location.

Our research, working with other researchers at Edith Cowan University’s Centre for People, Place & Planet and Curtin University, seeks to document when and why people stay or go, and what this means for places and communities. In particular, our research suggests who is more likely to go may leave those who remain even more vulnerable.

Read more:
The world’s tropical zone is expanding, and Australia should be worried

We’ve been slow to adapt to increasing impacts

Climate change is global in scale and has compounding effects. It is increasing the frequency and intensity of disasters and extreme weather events such as heatwaves, fires, storms and floods. It is also accelerating environmental changes such as soil erosion, salinisation of waterways, loss of biodiversity, and land and water degradation.

Both sudden disruptions and gradual pervasive decline have impacts on the places where we live, work and play. So far, there has been little effective government action to improve climate change adaptation in Australia.

As we have seen in recent times in Lismore, New South Wales, and northern Victoria, for example, living in some flood-prone locations will become unaffordable due to insurance costs or simply uninsurable.

In other locations, different reasons will force residents to leave. It might be because environmental change threatens their livelihoods, or they can’t tolerate new conditions such as more long heatwaves or less reliable freshwater supplies. Others might not be able to endure the threat of another disaster.

In sum, living in the place they called home will not be sustainable.

Read more:
It’s time to come clean on Lismore’s future. People and businesses have to relocate away from the floodplains

What factors affect the decision to stay or go?

Not everyone can relocate to cooler or safer places. Systemic inequalities mean some people are more at risk from environmental change and have less capacity to respond than others. These vulnerable people include children (both before and after birth), women, older people, people on low incomes and/or with disability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and other cultural and/or linguistic minorities.

In addition, housing is more affordable in areas that are hotter or flood-prone. This makes it more likely to be owned or rented by people with fewer financial resources, compounding their disadvantage.

For First Nations peoples and communities, connections to and responsibilities for places (Country) are intimately intertwined with identity. For them, the impacts of climate change, colonisation and resettlement interact, further complicating the question of relocation.

Read more:
Why Pacific Islanders are staying put even as rising seas flood their homes and crops

Place attachment – the emotional bond between people and their environment – might suppress the urge to move. But environmental change might fundamentally alter the characteristics that make a place unique. What we once loved and enjoyed has then disappeared.

This sort of change impacts human health and results in feelings of loss and grief. It can prompt people to decide to leave.

Read more:
Urban planning is now on the front line of the climate crisis. This is what it means for our cities and towns

So who stays and who leaves?

In our research, we found that when residents imagined the loss of what they valued about Perth’s environment this significantly increased their intentions to move away and significantly decreased place attachment. They nominated bushland, beaches, fauna and flora, and the climate/weather as characteristics they valued and feared changing or losing as climate change progressed. One study participant wrote:

It would be hotter and much more unpleasant in summer. I would miss the trees, plants and birds. I would hate living in a concrete jungle without the green spaces we have here. I would miss being able to cycle or walk to the local lakes to connect to nature and feel peaceful.

But social factors matter too. We found people who valued characteristics of Perth such as social relationships and lifestyle were more likely to stay as they tended to have less reduction in their place attachment.

We also found place attachment was associated with people acting to protect that place, such as protesting environmentally destructive policies. Yet people who were more likely to take such actions were also more likely to leave.

This could make the remaining community more vulnerable to further unwanted change. That’s because those who can afford to relocate are usually the ones with the resources – psychological, social, political and financial – to take action to protect their homes, neighbourhoods and cities.

Read more:
‘Climigration’: when communities must move because of climate change

Proper planning for adaptation is long overdue

Climate change impacts everyone. It causes significant economic and non-economic losses for both individuals and communities.

Many locations are becoming unliveable. A changing climate and inappropriately built or located housing interact to create conditions where some people can or should no longer stay.

Some will be prompted or forced to move, but not everyone has that capacity. Furthermore, relocation pressures have environmental, infrastructure and social consequences for the places to which they move.

The housing crisis in Australia adds to resource constraints and their impacts for individuals and communities. Relocating can also disrupt psychological, emotional, social and cultural connections that are crucial for people’s wellbeing.

We need co-ordinated, well-governed, long-term planning for people to move in the face of environmental change to ensure equitable and positive transitions for individuals and communities.

The authors wish to acknowledge the following contributors to this research: Professor Pierre Horwitz and Dr Naomi Godden (Centre for People, Place & Planet, ECU), Dr Deirdre Drake (School of Arts and Humanities, ECU) and Dr Francesca Perugia (School of Design and the Built Environment, Curtin University).

Justine Dandy received funding for this work from the Centre for People, Place and Planet, Edith Cowan University.

Zoe Leviston received funding for this work from the College of Health and Medicine, Australian National University

– ref. Climate change is forcing Australians to weigh up relocating. How do they make that difficult decision? – https://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-forcing-australians-to-weigh-up-relocating-how-do-they-make-that-difficult-decision-221971

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Tuffley, Senior Lecturer in Applied Ethics & CyberSecurity, Griffith University

The just-released report of the inquiry into price gouging and unfair pricing conducted by Allan Fels for the Australian Council of Trades Unions does more than identify the likely offenders.

It finds the biggest are supermarkets, banks, airlines and electricity companies.

It’s not enough to know their tricks. Fels wants to give the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission more power to investigate and more power to prohibit mergers.

But it helps to know how they try to trick us, and how technology has enabled them to get better at it. After reading the report, I’ve identified eight key maneuvers.

1. Asymmetric price movements

Otherwise known as Rocket and Feather, this is where businesses push up prices quickly when costs rise, but cut them slowly or late after costs fall.

It seems to happen for petrol and mortgage rates, and the Fels inquiry was presented with evidence suggesting it happens in supermarkets.

Brendan O’Keeffe from NSW Farmers told the inquiry wholesale lamb prices had been falling for six months before six Woolworths announced a cut in the prices of lamb it was selling as a “Christmas gift”.

2. Punishment for loyal customers

A loyalty tax is what happens when a business imposes higher charges on customers who have been with it for a long time, on the assumption that they won’t move.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has alleged a big insurer does it, setting premiums not only on the basis of risk, but also on the basis of what a computer model tells them about the likelihood of each customer tolerating a price hike. The insurer disputes the claim.

It’s often done by offering discounts or new products to new customers and leaving existing customers on old or discontinued products.

It happens a lot in the electricity industry. The plans look good at first, and then less good as providers bank on customers not making the effort to shop around.

Loyalty taxes appear to be less common among mobile phone providers. Australian laws make it easy to switch and keep your number.

3. Loyalty schemes that provide little value

Fels says loyalty schemes can be a “low-cost means of retaining and exploiting consumers by providing them with low-value rewards of dubious benefit”.

Their purpose is to lock in (or at least bias) customers to choices already made.

Examples include airline frequent flyer points, cafe cards that give you your tenth coffee free, and supermarket points programs. The purpose is to lock in (or at least bias) consumers to products already chosen.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has found many require users to spend a lot of money or time to earn enough points for a reward.

Others allow points to expire or rules to change without notice or offer rewards that are not worth the effort to redeem.

They also enable businesses to collect data on spending habits, preferences, locations, and personal information that can be used to construct customer profiles that allow them to target advertising and offers and high prices to some customers and not others.

4. Drip pricing that hides true costs

The Competition and Consumer Commission describes drip pricing as “when a price is advertised at the beginning of an online purchase, but then extra fees and charges (such as booking and service fees) are gradually added during the purchase process”.

The extras can add up quickly and make final bills much higher than expected.

Airlines are among the best-known users of the strategy. They often offer initially attractive base fares, but then add charges for baggage, seat selection, in-flight meals and other extras.

Read more:
Junk fees and drip pricing: underhanded tactics we hate yet still fall for

5. Confusion pricing

Related to drip pricing is confusion pricing where a provider offers a range of plans, discounts and fees so complex they are overwhelming.

Financial products like insurance have convoluted fee structures, as do electricity providers. Supermarkets do it by bombarding shoppers with “specials” and “sales”.

When prices change frequently and without notice, it adds to the confusion.

6. Algorithmic pricing

Algorithmic pricing is the practice of using algorithms to set prices automatically taking into account competitor responses, which is something akin to computers talking to each other.

When computers get together in this way they can act as it they are colluding even if the humans involved in running the businesses never talk to each other.

It can act even more this way when multiple competitors use the same third-party pricing algorithm, effectively allowing a single company to influence prices.

7. Price discrimination

Price discrimination involves charging different customers different prices
for the same product, setting each price in accordance with how much each customer is prepared to pay.

Banks do it when they offer better rates to customers likely to leave them, electricity companies do it when they offer better prices for business customers than households, and medical specialists do it when they offer vastly different prices for the same service to consumers with different incomes.

It is made easier by digital technology and data collection. While it can make prices lower for some customers, it can make prices much more expensive to customers in a hurry or in urgent need of something.

8. Excuse-flation

Excuse-flation is where general inflation provides “cover” for businesses to raise prices without
justification, blaming nothing other than general inflation.

It means that in times of general high inflation businesses can increase their prices even if their costs haven’t increased by as much.

On Thursday Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock seemed to confirm that she though some firms were doing this saying that when inflation had been brought back to the Bank’s target, it would be

much more difficult, I think, for firms to use high inflation as cover for this sort of putting up their prices

A political solution is needed

Ultimately, our own vigilance won’t be enough. We will need political help. The government’s recently announced competition review might be a step in this direction.

The legislative changes should police business practices and prioritise fairness. Only then can we create a marketplace where ethics and competition align, ensuring both business prosperity and consumer wellbeing.

This isn’t just about economics, it’s about building a fairer, more sustainable Australia.

David Tuffley is affiliated with the Australian Computer Society (Member).

– ref. Why prices are so high – 8 ways retail pricing algorithms gouge consumers – https://theconversation.com/why-prices-are-so-high-8-ways-retail-pricing-algorithms-gouge-consumers-223310

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

Scott Morrison will say his farewell to parliament the week after next. This timing happens to follow neatly Monday’s final episode in the ABC’s Nemesis series, in which some Coalition figures excoriated their former leader and Morrison defended his record.

For the Liberals, Morrison’s departure is a significant symbolic “moving on” moment. It’s not that he has had any influence, or been disruptive, since the election. But even though he’s been hardly noticed publicly, his presence in the parliamentary party has been a reminder of all that went wrong last term.

The Coalition Morrison is exiting is a mixed bunch, in terms of performance, illustrated by the first weeks of this year.

The opposition could not have avoided being outfoxed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s bold reworking of the tax cuts. But it could have prevented the Liberals’ deputy leader, Sussan Ley, impulsively suggesting a Dutton government would roll back the tax cuts, which a nanosecond of thought would have told her would never happen. It was typical of Ley, and a bone Labor hasn’t stopped chewing.

On the other hand, the row over the ex-detainees – released by the government from immigration detention after a High Court decision last year – has shown how an opposition working effectively can have a minister squirming.

The Liberals used material from this week’s Senate estimates hearing to pound Immigration Minister Andrew Giles in the House of Representatives. Although the issue probably doesn’t have its pre-Christmas resonance with the public, the operation reminded that Liberal Senator James Paterson is one of the opposition’s best-performing frontbenchers. Paterson is on top of a broad national security brief and (regardless of whether you agree with him or not) conveys his points effectively in media interviews.

In contrast, the shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor, still struggles to cut through. Despite performing better than last year, Taylor is unable to land a blow on Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Given the centrality of the economic debate, this is a serious problem for Peter Dutton.

Taylor is lucky there’s no colleague stalking for his job. Those with long memories will recall Julie Bishop’s fate as shadow treasurer under Malcolm Turnbull. When she floundered, Joe Hockey was there coveting her post and inevitably she had to agree to move.

Finance spokeswoman Jane Hume is diligent, prominent in the media and improving. She does best when she limits the gratuitous political attacks.

Michael Sukkar, shadow minister for housing, seems largely missing in action on the red-hot issue of housing, a crucial battleground for the election. The opposition shouldn’t just be more active in the day-to-day debate – it should be releasing an alternative policy sooner rather than later. A comprehensive housing policy should logically be at the core of an agenda for the “aspirationals” the Liberals like to talk about.

We don’t hear as much as we should on education from spokeswoman Sarah Henderson. While education is often considered a “Labor” issue, poor results and declining retention rates at school level and key issues facing higher education are meaty areas for debate.

Andrew Hastie is well qualified on defence but not as much to the fore as might be expected. Prominent in the conservative wing of the Liberal Party, Hastie also needs to broaden his profile for the future.

Anne Ruston could make more of her health and aged care remit. There are many questions around the post-pandemic management of COVID, and the long-term sustainability of Medicare. Ruston will soon have a ready-made issue in aged care, when the government finally releases the report it is sitting on, canvassing ways forward for the sector’s financing. The Howard, Hawke and Morrison governments all found aged care perilous.

Among the Nationals, their Senate leader, Bridget McKenzie, has proved very effective this term, notably on Qantas and Qatar Airways.

Jacinta Price was a highly successful “no” campaigner in the referendum, but the harder test will be whether she can find some credible positive answers for improving Indigenous people’s conditions. Her proposed audit of spending might have some merit, but it falls short as a policy.

Dutton needs to reshuffle his frontbench ASAP. He hasn’t even filled the vacancy left by last year’s resignation from parliament of the Robodebt-tainted Stuart Robert, who was shadow assistant treasurer. Marise Payne’s departure left vacant the spot of shadow cabinet secretary.

The frontbench certainly would benefit from some new talent. Constraints such as state representations complicate things, but if merit were the criterion, Zoe McKenzie and Keith Wolahan, both Victorians, are deserving.

Julian Leeser, who stepped down to the backbench to campaign for “yes” in the referendum, now appears to have less chance of a return in a reshuffle than was initially thought. That’s unfortunate, because restoring him as shadow attorney-general would be sensible. Having Michaelia Cash in that job as well as workplace relations is overload on steroids.

In the longer term, the Coalition needs a refresh of talent at the 2025 election. Former minister Linda Reynolds (now on the backbench) announced this week she was not recontesting. Neither is junior frontbencher Nola Marino.

One-time Morrison henchman Alex Hawke (who has preselection) would be among those who don’t have much to contribute in another term. Dutton didn’t put Hawke on his frontbench.

Which brings us to Barnaby Joyce, whose future is a talking point after he was videoed sprawled on a Canberra street following too many drinks that he said interfered with his medication.

Both Dutton and the Nationals’ leader, David Littleproud, have advised Joyce he should take personal leave, Littleproud citing he had “family circumstances”, beyond the first explanation for his behaviour. Despite the advice, Joyce remained in parliament for the rest of this week. The pertinent question, however, is whether Joyce should run for another term.

Once hailed as a great “retail” politician, Joyce at the 2022 election was considered a retail negative in many Liberal seats. Dutton’s priority mightn’t be the recapture of “teal” seats – he’s concentrating on outer suburbia – but he doesn’t want a repeat of the perceived damage Joyce did last time.

Joyce may want to run again, but surely he shouldn’t. While he is in parliament, the Nationals will remain a tinderbox (even though they manage to hold their seats). The party, once known for its unity and discipline, won’t move on until Joyce moves on.

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. Grattan on Friday: Morrison’s departure will help Liberals ‘move on’ but Nationals can’t ‘move on’ until Barnaby does – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-morrisons-departure-will-help-liberals-move-on-but-nationals-cant-move-on-until-barnaby-does-223639

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

The federal government has released its latest implementation plan for Closing the Gap on Indigenous disadvantage.

What are multiple gaps are still vast, with many areas not on track to meet their targets.

After the failed Voice referendum, the government is looking to the next steps for First Nations people. To discuss this week’s policy announcement, the centrepiece of which is a $700 million jobs program for people in remote areas, we’re joined by Malarndirri McCarthy, senator for the Northern Territory and Assistant Minister for Indigenous Australians.

McCarthy says:

As an Aboriginal woman. I find the discussion around closing the gap incredibly disheartening, but I have a lot of faith in the sense that we are in our areas trying to do what we can.

On what has to be done:

One of the critical areas that came through all responses from the Productivity Commission’s report was the fact that it needed buy-in with First Nations people, that there needed to be systemic change, that there needed to be structural change, to enable First Nations people to be very much a part of the decision making.

On why progress can be so difficult:

I also understand that the politics of Aboriginal affairs is such that it does become a political football. And a lot of the time you do spend much of it seeing it just kicked back and forwards.

On treaty and truth telling, McCarthy urges patience:

As a Yanyuwa Garrawa woman […] treaty to me is still unfinished business for First Nations people and our country, just like truth-telling is. And there’s no rush. We will get there. And, I still say to people: ‘Stay strong’.

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. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Assistant minister Malarndirri McCarthy says there’s ‘no rush’ on treaty and truth-telling – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-assistant-minister-malarndirri-mccarthy-says-theres-no-rush-on-treaty-and-truth-telling-223642

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sam Whiting, Lecturer – Creative Industries, University of South Australia

Regional touring festival Groovin’ The Moo has announced its cancellation only eight days after placing tickets on sale, citing low demand.

A mainstay of the summer festival calendar, this follows a series of similar cancellations, including the 2023 edition of Falls Festival, ValleyWays, Coastal Jam and Vintage Vibes, and the “pausing” of Hobart’s iconic Dark Mofo for 2024.

So why are we seeing so many Australian music festivals cancelled? And what will the future of festivals look like?

Growing challenges for festivals

The well-documented cost-of-living crisis is an obvious culprit when it comes to low demand for festivals, as consumers cut down on expenses.

However, other factors are at play here. They include:

1. Higher overheads

Rapidly increasing overheads, such as rocketing public liability insurance costs for both venues and festivals alike, affect the viability of such events.

This problem began with the COVID pandemic, but extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change have compounded these issues as well as affecting the viability of outdoor summer music festivals. In 2022 alone, more than 20 Australian festivals were cancelled because of extreme weather.

Read more:
Climate change is transforming Australia’s cultural life – so why isn’t it mentioned in the new national cultural policy?

2. Slower sales

Prior to the pandemic, concerns regarding the oversaturation of the Australian festival market were already starting to bite. Pre-COVID festival cancellations included the end of the Big Day Out after 20 years in 2014. The annual event began to falter in the preceding years due to issues that have compounded in the decade since.

As the pandemic eased and festival producers rushed back onsite, they have been faced with a fundamental shift in Australian cultural consumption habits, particularly among young people.

People are waiting longer to buy tickets. 2023 was the first time in over a decade that Splendour in the Grass, Australia’s biggest single-ticket festival, didn’t sell out within hours. The trend towards delayed “commitment to purchase” is cause for concern among promoters, who rely on opening-day sales for momentum and capital.

This change can be understood as a response to the rolling cancellations of the pandemic, in combination with rising ticket prices, domestic financial pressures and busy schedules. It is increasingly normal to look for second-hand tickets at reduced prices as an event approaches.

Read more:
Crowded house: how to keep festivals relevant in an oversaturated market

3. Youth avoidance

Industry observers are concerned about a drop in youth attendance. Young people who came of age during COVID missed their key festival-going years and may now have moved on to other cultural experiences – followed by younger siblings. This emphasises the long cultural tail of an event like the pandemic.

The cost-of-living crisis especially affects young people, the core audience for festivals like Groovin’ the Moo. The majority of under-35s say financial pressure is limiting their attendance at arts events.

Read more:
No festivals, no schoolies: young people are missing out on vital rites of passage during COVID

4. The consolidation of taste

While “variety” festivals such as Groovin’ the Moo and Falls Festival – which feature diverse, multi-genre lineups – are struggling, genre-specific festivals and major artist tours continue to perform well.

These include metal and hard rock festivals such as Good Things Festival and Knotfest, and major recent tours by Queens of the Stone Age, Pink, Blink-182 and, of course, Taylor Swift. The media industry and the music industry specifically are experiencing the effects of an increasing siloing and consolidation of taste within specific niches, exacerbated by the digitisation of media via highly curated streaming platforms.

Perhaps “variety” music festivals are heading the same way as the Big Day Out. The struggles of festivals historically backed by Triple J (such as Groovin’ the Moo and Falls) may reveal the national youth broadcaster’s loosening grip on relevance and its inability to appeal to a broad audience in an increasingly hyper-curated media environment.

Read more:
‘I almost feel like stuck in a rut’: how streaming services changed the way we listen to music

Is this anything new?

The factors influencing the success of a given festival are complex, as illustrated by the case of Groovin’ the Moo. The Newcastle date sold out in less than an hour, with reports of strong early sales for the Sunshine Coast edition, yet the overall tour was deemed unable to proceed.

Uncertainty is inherent in the music business, where an oversupply of product meets a market driven by the vagaries of taste.

Festival programmers must “forecast” what will draw a crowd, booking performers up to a year in advance. However, mega-crises, such as the pandemic, climate change and financial shocks, create deeper uncertainties that fundamentally challenge business as usual.

Uncertainty poses a profound threat to live music in particular, which depends on advance planning and investment, with its returns and benefits hinging on the controlled realisation of future events.

Too much uncertainty also stifles innovation and diversity, as the large multinationals that dominate the music industry are better able to withstand its effects.

Music festivals are a leading site of Australia’s engagement with the arts, with significant social and economic benefits. They have also become a focal point for a range of societal challenges, from economic to environmental crises. Sustaining a vibrant, diverse and accessible festival sector will require these challenges to be confronted.

The age of deep uncertainty isn’t going away. For Australia’s diverse festival landscape to survive we need to find new ways – such as financial buffers, government-backed insurance schemes, big ticket levies, tariffs on major international tours, and climate action and mitigation – to ride and survive this uncertainty.

Sam Whiting receives funding from Creative Australia and the Australasian Performing Right Association.

Ben Green receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australasian Performing Right Association.

– ref. Why are so many Australian music festivals being cancelled? – https://theconversation.com/why-are-so-many-australian-music-festivals-being-cancelled-223559

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vincent Ho, Associate Professor and clinical academic gastroenterologist, Western Sydney University

You might have heard of something called “cryptosporidiosis” recently, closely followed by warnings to stay away from your local swimming pool if you’ve had diarrhoea.

More than 700 cases of this gastrointestinal disease were reported in Queensland in January, which is 13 times more than in January last year. Just under 500 cases have been recorded in New South Wales this year to-date, while other states have similarly reported an increase in the number of cryptosporidiosis infections in recent months.

Cryptosporidiosis has been listed as a national notifiable disease in Australia since 2001.
But what exactly is it, and should we be worried?

Read more:
What lies beneath: the bugs lurking in your swimming pool

What causes cryptosporidiosis, and who is affected?

Cryptosporidiosis is the disease caused by the parasite Cryptosporidium, of which there are two types that can make us sick. Cryptosporidum hominis only affects humans and is the major cause of recent outbreaks in Australia, while Cryptosporidium parvum can also affect animals.

The infection is spread by spores called oocysts in the stools of humans and animals. When ingested, these oocysts migrate and mature in the small bowel. They damage the small bowel lining and can lead to diarrhoea, nausea, vomiting, fever and abdominal discomfort.

Most people develop symptoms anywhere from one to 12 days after becoming infected. Usually these symptoms resolve within two weeks, but the illness may last longer and can be severe in those with a weakened immune system.

Children and the elderly tend to be the most commonly affected. Cryptosporidiosis is more prevalent in young children, particularly those under five, but the disease can affect people of any age.

So how do we catch it?

Most major outbreaks of cryptosporidiosis have been due to people drinking contaminated water. The largest recorded outbreak occurred in Milwaukee in 1993 where 403,000 people were believed to have been infected.

Cryptosporidium oocysts are very small in size and in Milwaukee they passed through the filtration system of one of the water treatment plants undetected, infecting the city’s water supply. As few as ten oocysts can cause infection, making it possible for contaminated drinking water to affect a very large number of people.

Four days after infection a person with cryptosporidiosis can shed up to ten billion oocysts into their stool a day, with the shedding persisting for about two weeks. This is why one infected person in a swimming pool can infect the entire pool in a single visit.

Cryptosporidium oocysts excreted in the faeces of infected humans and animals can also reach natural bodies of water such as beaches, rivers and lakes directly through sewer pipes or indirectly such as in manure transported with surface runoff after heavy rain.

One study which modelled Cryptosporidium concentrations in rivers around the world estimated there are anywhere from 100 to one million oocysts in a litre of river water.

In Australia, cryptosporidiosis outbreaks tend to occur during the late spring and early summer periods when there’s an increase in recreational water activities such as swimming in natural water holes, water catchments and public pools. We don’t know exactly why cases have seen such a surge this summer compared to other years, but we know Cryptosporidium is very infectious.

Read more:
Explainer: what is gastroenteritis and why can’t I get rid of it?

Oocysts have been found in foods such as fresh vegetables and seafood but these are not common sources of infection in Australia.

What about chlorine?

Contrary to popular belief, chlorine doesn’t kill off all infectious microbes in a swimming pool. Cryptosporidium oocysts are hardy, thick-walled and resistant to chlorine and acid. They are not destroyed by chlorine at the normal concentrations found in swimming pools.

We also know oocysts can be significantly protected from the effects of chlorine in swimming pools by faecal material, so the presence of even small amounts of faecal matter contaminated with Cryptosporidium in a swimming pool would necessitate closure and a thorough decontamination.

Young children and in particular children in nappies are known to increase the potential for disease transmission in recreational water. Proper nappy changing, frequent bathroom breaks and showering before swimming to remove faecal residue are helpful ways to reduce the risk.

Some sensible precautions

Other measures you can take to reduce yours and others’ risk of cryptosporidiosis include:

• avoid swimming in natural waters such as rivers and creeks during and for at least three days after heavy rain

• avoid swimming in beaches for at least one day after heavy rain

• avoid drinking untreated water such as water from rivers or springs. If you need to drink untreated water, boiling it first will kill the Cryptosporidium

• avoid swallowing water when swimming if you can

• if you’ve had diarrhoea, avoid swimming for at least two weeks after it has resolved

• avoid sharing towels or linen for at least two weeks after diarrhoea has resolved

• avoid sharing, touching or preparing food that other people may eat for at least 48 hours after diarrhoea has resolved

• wash your hands with soap and water after going to the bathroom or before preparing food (Cryptosporidium is not killed by alcohol gels and sanitisers).

Not all cases of diarrhoea are due to cryptosporidiosis. There are many other causes of infectious gastroenteritis and because the vast majority of the time recovery is uneventful you don’t need to see a doctor unless very unwell. If you do suspect you may have cryptosporidiosis you can ask your doctor to refer you for a stool test.

Vincent Ho 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. How worried should I be about cryptosporidiosis? Am I safe at the pool? – https://theconversation.com/how-worried-should-i-be-about-cryptosporidiosis-am-i-safe-at-the-pool-223541

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Noetel, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, The University of Queensland

At least one in ten people have depression at some point in their lives, with some estimates closer to one in four. It’s one of the worst things for someone’s wellbeing – worse than debt, divorce or diabetes.

One in seven Australians take antidepressants. Psychologists are in high demand. Still, only half of people with depression in high-income countries get treatment.

Our new research shows that exercise should be considered alongside therapy and antidepressants. It can be just as impactful in treating depression as therapy, but it matters what type of exercise you do and how you do it.

Read more:
Why are so many Australians taking antidepressants?

Walk, run, lift, or dance away depression

We found 218 randomised trials on exercise for depression, with 14,170 participants. We analysed them using a method called a network meta-analysis. This allowed us to see how different types of exercise compared, instead of lumping all types together.

We found walking, running, strength training, yoga and mixed aerobic exercise were about as effective as cognitive behaviour therapy – one of the gold-standard treatments for depression. The effects of dancing were also powerful. However, this came from analysing just five studies, mostly involving young women. Other exercise types had more evidence to back them.

Walking, running, strength training, yoga and mixed aerobic exercise seemed more effective than antidepressant medication alone, and were about as effective as exercise alongside antidepressants.

But of these exercises, people were most likely to stick with strength training and yoga.

Antidepressants certainly help some people. And of course, anyone getting treatment for depression should talk to their doctor before changing what they are doing.

Still, our evidence shows that if you have depression, you should get a psychologist and an exercise plan, whether or not you’re taking antidepressants.

Join a program and go hard (with support)

Before we analysed the data, we thought people with depression might need to “ease into it” with generic advice, such as “some physical activity is better than doing none.”

But we found it was far better to have a clear program that aimed to push you, at least a little. Programs with clear structure worked better, compared with those that gave people lots of freedom. Exercising by yourself might also make it hard to set the bar at the right level, given low self-esteem is a symptom of depression.

We also found it didn’t matter how much people exercised, in terms of sessions or minutes a week. It also didn’t really matter how long the exercise program lasted. What mattered was the intensity of the exercise: the higher the intensity, the better the results.

Yes, it’s hard to keep motivated

We should exercise caution in interpreting the findings. Unlike drug trials, participants in exercise trials know which “treatment” they’ve been randomised to receive, so this may skew the results.

Many people with depression have physical, psychological or social barriers to participating in formal exercise programs. And getting support to exercise isn’t free.

We also still don’t know the best way to stay motivated to exercise, which can be even harder if you have depression.

Our study tried to find out whether things like setting exercise goals helped, but we couldn’t get a clear result.

Other reviews found it’s important to have a clear action plan (for example, putting exercise in your calendar) and to track your progress (for example, using an app or smartwatch). But predicting which of these interventions work is notoriously difficult.

A 2021 mega-study of more than 60,000 gym-goers found experts struggled to predict which strategies might get people into the gym more often. Even making workouts fun didn’t seem to motivate people. However, listening to audiobooks while exercising helped a lot, which no experts predicted.

Still, we can be confident that people benefit from personalised support and accountability. The support helps overcome the hurdles they’re sure to hit. The accountability keeps people going even when their brains are telling them to avoid it.

So, when starting out, it seems wise to avoid going it alone. Instead:

• join a fitness group or yoga studio

• get a trainer or an exercise physiologist

• ask a friend or family member to go for a walk with you.

Taking a few steps towards getting that support makes it more likely you’ll keep exercising.

Read more:
Exercise is even more effective than counselling or medication for depression. But how much do you need?

Let’s make this official

Some countries see exercise as a backup plan for treating depression. For example, the American Psychological Association only conditionally recommends exercise as a “complementary and alternative treatment” when “psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy is either ineffective or unacceptable”.

Based on our research, this recommendation is withholding a potent treatment from many people who need it.

In contrast, The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists recommends vigorous aerobic activity at least two to three times a week for all people with depression.

Given how common depression is, and the number failing to receive care, other countries should follow suit and recommend exercise alongside front-line treatments for depression.

I would like to acknowledge my colleagues Taren Sanders, Chris Lonsdale and the rest of the coauthors of the paper on which this article is based.

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

Michael Noetel receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Medical Research Future Fund, Sport Australia, and the National Health and Medical Research Council. He is a director of Effective Altruism Australia.

– ref. Running or yoga can help beat depression, research shows – even if exercise is the last thing you feel like – https://theconversation.com/running-or-yoga-can-help-beat-depression-research-shows-even-if-exercise-is-the-last-thing-you-feel-like-223441

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Copland, Honorary Fellow in Sociology, Australian National University

Debate around doxing is raging in Australia after the leak of a WhatsApp chat group called “Jewish Australian creatives and academics”. While the group was formed as a supportive space, some of its conversations focused on challenging media critiques of Israel.

The leakers have stated they acted in the public interest, because they claim the chat group was coordinating actions to target pro-Palestinian activists.

The Australian government has reacted to this episode with a move to criminalise doxing and introduce jail terms for culprits.

But was this leak actually doxing? Terms like this are always up for debate, but the government’s own definition throws up questions about this case.

Personal information

According to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, doxing is the “malicious release” of someone’s personal information without their consent.

The first question here is one of personal information. Was any personal information actually leaked?

Early media reports stated the leak contained a transcript of chat discussions, a spreadsheet of links to social media accounts and people’s photographs.

Those who released the information say they scrubbed any details that could be used to track people down, such as phone numbers and email addresses. They also say no private photographs were released, nor any photos of children.

Read more:
What is doxing, and how can you protect yourself?

This is very different to other high-profile doxing events. For example, in 2018, men’s rights activists ran a campaign called #ThotAudit in which they tried to report online sex workers to the US Internal Revenue Service.

Some participants compiled a detailed database of sex workers, containing more than 166,000 entries, which included full names, locations, links to wish lists, types of payment processors and bios. This campaign was part of a long history of sex workers being publicly exposed, and resulted in significant, personalised harassment of those on the list.

Some will say that releasing a list of names is itself doxing. But this is very murky. If participants need to be anonymous to join a cause – for example, for their own safety – there might be a case. But many of the participants in this WhatsApp chat were already high-profile people.

Therefore, this seems less like a case of doxing, and more like a leak of how groups organise around their political agendas. Similar leaks have exposed the links between Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party and the US National Rifle Association, and connections between Pentecostal Christian churches and politicians.

I would argue this action was more in line with whistleblowing, not doxing. Whistleblowing is the release of information revealing activities that are deemed to be illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe or fraudulent.

These terms are also very much up for debate, but the publishers of this list believed the activity within to be immoral, and therefore within the public interest.

Read more:
Doxing or in the public interest? Free speech, ‘cancelling’ and the ethics of the Jewish creatives’ WhatsApp group leak

Malicious intent

This leads to the second question, which is one of intent. The government claims the leak was done with malicious intent, and this claim has been backed by the opposition and organisations such as the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

Yet the malicious intent is also up for debate. The release of this chat cannot be isolated from its content. This was, by and large, not simply a group of people having friendly conversations.

Some people in the group were high-profile supporters of Israel in Australia. Members also used the chat to organise politically, with some conversations allegedly centred on ways to target pro-Palestinian activists.

This creates a clear political reason for the release of the information. There is of course a reasonable debate here as to which private discussions of political issues are fair game, and everyone will have a different view.

But the political nature of the chat moves this incident closer to being a political leak or whistleblowing rather than doxing.

This does not mean the leakers are immune to criticism, either. There were harms associated with their actions. Members of the WhatsApp chat have reported they have been subjected to harassment, including death threats. This includes some who were not actively participating in the chat, and have since disowned the group’s conversations.

This fallout can and should be pursued by authorities under current anti-harassment legislation. Yet we must be careful about blaming those who leak material for this behaviour.

Read more:
The government wants to criminalise doxing. It may not work to stamp out bad behaviour online

Other examples of politically charged doxing help to illustrate this point. In the wake of the 2017 white supremacist Charlottesville riots in the United States, many anti-fascist organisers tracked down and released the names and details of participants using photographic evidence. In some instances this included details of where participants lived or worked.

This clearly meets the first part of the government’s definition of doxing. But it is debatable whether the anti-facist campaign was malicious or not.

While there were problems with this campaign, particularly as some people were wrongly identified, there is an ethical case to be made: people participating in violent white supremacist riots should be exposed so their community is aware of their actions. This made the Charlottesville leak political, rather than personally malicious.

This is where the risk lies in banning doxing if the definition of what that means is left too broad. By the government’s current definition, the WhatsApp leak seems more like an act of whistleblowing.

A legislative ban could therefore have a much broader impact than criminalising the release of personal information. Instead, it could result in further crackdowns on political activities, and serve to weaken the accountability of people with power.

Read more:
Australia is in desperate need of a Whistleblower Protection Authority. Here’s what it should look like

Simon Copland has signed a statement of solidarity with Palestine from academics in Australian universities.

– ref. The Jewish creatives’ WhatsApp leak was more whistleblowing than doxing. Here’s why – https://theconversation.com/the-jewish-creatives-whatsapp-leak-was-more-whistleblowing-than-doxing-heres-why-223552