Source: Council on Hemispheric Affairs – Analysis-Reportage
John Perry Masaya, Nicaragua
July 19th is a day of celebration in Nicaragua: the anniversary of the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. But the international media will have it penciled in their diaries for another reason: it’s yet another opportunity to pour scorn on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. We’ll hear again about how the government “clamps down on dissent,”[1] about its “political prisoners,”[2] its recent “pantomime election,”[3] its “damaging crackdown on civil society”[4] and much more. All of these accusations have been answered but the media will continue to shut out any evidence that conflicts with the consensus narrative about Nicaragua, that its president, Daniel Ortega, has “crushed the Nicaraguan dream.”[5]
Mainstream media tells its own story
Since the violent, U.S.-directed coup attempt in 2018, in which more than 200 people died, it has been very difficult to find objective analysis of the political situation in Nicaragua in mainstream media, much less any examination of the revolution’s achievements. In disregarding what is actually happening in the country, the media is ignoring and excluding the lived experience of ordinary Nicaraguans, as if their daily lives are irrelevant to any judgment about the direction the country is taking. Most notably, instead of recognizing that 75% of Nicaraguan voters supported the government in last November’s election, in which two-thirds of the electorate participated, the result is seen as “a turn toward an openly dictatorial model.”[6] This judgment is backed by confected claims of electoral fraud from “secret poll watchers,”[7] which ignore COHA’s strong evidence that no fraud took place.[8]
Streets show the political reality
In the run-up to the anniversary of the revolution on July 19th, Sandinista supporters have been filling the streets of every main city with celebratory marches. In Masaya, where I live, I took part in a procession with around 3,000 people and discovered afterwards that three other marches took place at the same time in different parts of Masaya, with even more people participating in each of those. People have much to celebrate: the city was one of those most damaged by the violent coup attempt in Nicaragua four years ago, but has since lived in peace.
During the attempted coup, for three months the city of Masaya was controlled by armed thugs (still regularly described in the media as “peaceful” protesters). Five police officers and several civilians were killed. The town hall, the main secondary school, the old tourist market and other government buildings were set on fire. Houses of Sandinista supporters were ransacked. Shops were looted and the economic life of one of Nicaragua’s most important commercial centers was suspended. My own doctor’s house went up in flames and a friend who was defending the municipal depot when it was ransacked was kidnapped, tortured and later had to have an arm amputated as a result.
So one strong motive for the marches is to reaffirm most people’s wishes that this should never happen again: 43 years ago a revolutionary war ended in the Sandinistas’ triumph over Somoza, but this was quickly followed by the U.S.-sponsored Contra attacks that cost thousands more lives. For anyone over 35, the violence in 2018 was a sickening reminder of these wars. Since then, not the least of the government’s achievements is that Nicaragua has returned to having the lowest homicide level in Central America,[9] and people want it to stay that way.
Progress under Sandinistas is not recognized internationally
But this is far from the government’s only success since it returned to power in 2007. It inherited a country broken by 17 years of neoliberal governments by and for the rich (after the Sandinistas lost power in the 1990 election). Nothing worked during those years: there were daily power cuts, roads were in shocking disrepair, some 100,000s of children didn’t go to school and poverty was rampant. When the Sandinistas regained the presidency in 2007, and helped by the alliance with Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela and a boom in commodities prices, the government began a massive investment program. For the second poorest country in Latin America, the transformation was remarkable.
Take the practical issues that affect everyone. Power cuts stopped because the new government quickly built small new power stations and then encouraged massive investment in renewable energy. Electricity coverage now reaches over 99% of households, up from just 50% in 2016, with three-quarters now generated from renewables. Piped water reaches 93% of city dwellers compared with 65% in 2007. In 2007, Nicaragua had 2,044 km of paved roads, mostly in bad condition. Now it has 4,300 km, half of them built in the last 15 years, giving it the best roads in Central America.[10]
Its remarkable advances in health care were evidenced by how Nicaragua handled the COVID-19 pandemic, with (according to the World Health Organization[11]) a level of excess mortality far lower than that of many wealthier countries in Latin America, including neighboring Costa Rica. It now has one of the world’s highest levels of completed vaccinations against the virus (83%),[12] exceeding levels in the U.S. and many European countries. There has been massive investment in the public health service: Nicaragua has built 23 new hospitals in the past 15 years and now has more hospital beds (1.8 per 1,000population)[13] than richer countries such as Mexico (1.5) and Colombia (1.7).[14] The country has one of the highest regional levels of public health spending, relative to GDP (“PIB” in Spanish – see chart), and its service is completely free.
Nicaragua is 6th out of 17 Latin American countries in public health investment
Source: Centre for Economic and Social Rights, p.58. https://www.amnesty.org/es/documents/amr01/5483/2022/es/
Look at education. School attendance increased from 79% to 91% when charges imposed by previous governments were abolished; now pupils get help with uniforms and books and all receive free school lunches. Free education now extends into adulthood, so out of a population of 6.6 million, some 1.7 million are currently receiving public education in some form. Under neoliberal governments illiteracy rose to 22% of the population, and now it’s down to 4-6%.
Strides in gender parity: another victory
Nicaraguan women have been integral to the revolution. More than half of ministerial posts are held by women, an achievement for which Nicaragua is ranked seventh in the world in gender equality in 2022.[15] Only two countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have a smaller gender pay gap than Nicaragua. More than a third of police officers are female and there are special women’s centers in 119 police stations. Maternal health has been significantly improved, with maternal mortality falling from 92.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2006, to 31.6 in 2021, a reduction of 66%.[16] This is partly due to the 180 casas maternas where women stay close to a hospital or health center for the weeks before giving birth. The state also provides family planning free of charge in all health centers, including tubal ligations for women who do not wish to have more children. It is also true, of course, that abortion is illegal, but (unlike in other Latin American countries) no woman or doctor has ever been prosecuted under this law.
At the moment, people’s biggest concern is the state of the economy and the cost-of-living crisis. Nicaragua has advantages here, too: it is more than 80% self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs and prices have been controlled because the government is capping the cost of fuel (both for vehicles and for cooking). Nicaragua’s economy grew by more than 10% in 2021, returning to 2019, pre-pandemic economic levels, although growth was still not sufficient for the country to recover from the economic damage caused by the 2018 coup attempt. Government debt (forecast to be 46% of GDP in 2022) is lower than its neighbors, especially that of Costa Rica (70%), where poverty now extends to 30% of the population. However, Nicaragua and Costa Rica are economically interdependent, and the latter’s economic problems are a large part of the explanation for the growth in migration by Nicaraguans to the United States.[17]
Daniel Ortega enjoys high approval ratings
These are only a few of the factors that underlie people’s support for Daniel Ortega’s government. And this support continues: according to polling by CID Gallup,[18] in early January President Ortega was more popular than the then presidents of Honduras, Costa Rica or Guatemala. M&R Consultants, in a more recent poll,[19] found that Ortega has a 70% approval rating and ranks second among Latin American presidents. This was obvious when huge numbers of Nicaraguans celebrated November’s election result and it is still obvious as they go out onto the streets during “victorious July”.
At a meeting with Central American foreign ministers in June 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Blinken urged governments “to work to improve the lives of people in our countries in real, concrete ways.”[20] Blinken deliberately ignores the ample proof that Daniel Ortega’s government is not only doing that but has been more successful in this respect than any other Central American government. Yet the more that the international media parrot Washington’s criticisms of Daniel Ortega, the more that people here will reaffirm their support for his government.
John Perry is a COHA Senior Research Fellow and writer living in Masaya, Nicaragua.
[Main photo: Sandinista supporters in Masaya, July 2022. Credit: John Perry]
An international expert on monetary policy, Carolyn Wilkins, is one of a three-member panel that will conduct a broad review of the Reserve Bank, including its objectives and the interaction of monetary and fiscal policy.
Professor Wilkins is an external member of the financial policy committee of the Bank of England and former senior deputy governor to the Bank of Canada.
The other panelists are professor Renee Fry-McKibbin, interim director of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, and Gordon de Brouwer, recently appointed by the Albanese government as Secretary for Public Sector Reform.
The terms of reference and the panelists will be announced formally by Treasurer Jim Chalmers at a news conference on Wednesday.
Chalmers said in a statement: “Australia is facing a complex and rapidly changing economic environment, as well as a range of long-term economic challenges.
“This is an important opportunity to ensure that our monetary policy framework is the best it can be, to make the right calls in the interests of the Australian people and their economy.
“The Review will consider the RBA’s objectives, mandate, the interaction between monetary, fiscal and macroprudential policy, its governance, culture, operations, and more,” Chalmers said.
Households in good position
Meanwhile in a Tuesday speech Michele Bullock, a deputy governor of the bank, said that on balance “as a whole households are in a fairly good position” to cope with interest rate rises.
“The sector as a whole has large liquidity buffers, most households have substantial equity in their housing assets, and lending standards in recent years have been more prudent and have built in larger buffers for interest rate increases,” Bullock said.
“Much of the debt is held by high-income households that have the ability to service their debt and many borrowers are already making repayments well above what is required.
“Furthermore, those on very low fixed-rate loans have some time to prepare themselves for higher interest rates.”
But although this was the overall situation, Bullock said some households would be in a more difficult position.
“While in aggregate it seems unlikely that there will be substantial financial stability risks arising from the household sector, risks are a little elevated. Some households will find interest rate rises impacting their debt servicing burden and cash flow.
“While the current strong growth in employment means that people will have jobs to service their mortgages, the way the risks play out will be influenced by the future path of employment growth.
“This, along with the board’s assessment of the outlook for inflation, will be important considerations in deciding the size and timing of future interest rate increases.”
Bullock’s comments come as another rate rise looms early next month.
Bipartisan review
The review of the bank has been supported by both sides of politics.
Chalmers said it is the first wide-ranging inquiry into the bank since the current monetary policy arrangements started in the 1990s.
Critics have recently targeted the bank’s forecasting and setting of monetary policy. In particular, it flagged it would not be raising interest rates before 2024, only to then have to resort to doing so to address ballooning inflation.
An open letter from 12 leading economists, published in The Conversation in May, called for a review that was completely independent of both the government and the bank, ideally headed by an internationally recognised foreign expert.
“No institution can be expected to independently or credibly review itself,” the letter said. “A foreign perspective would bring valuable external scrutiny to the process and enable a benchmarking of the RBA against its overseas counterparts.”
Lowe had appeared to resist the idea of an open review in March when he said he hoped that one of the things that would come out of it would be a Canadian-style bureaucratic review every five years.
“It is depoliticised, it is kind of technical, and the government, through the Canadian Treasury, and the central bank work on a re-commitment,” he said.
Among the signatories to the letter were economists Saul Eslake, Chris Richardson, Peter Tulip, Danielle Wood, Richard Holden, Steven Hamilton and former RBA board member Warwick McKibbin, who is married to Renee Fry-McKibbin who will be on the review panel.
Composition of board in the mix
The inquiry will consult experts and the public and report in March.
Centrally the inquiry will examine the bank’s objectives, including the “continued appropriateness of the inflation targeting framework”.
It will look at “the interaction of monetary policy with fiscal and macroprudential policy, including during crises and when monetary policy space is limited”.
While this will cover macroprudential governance arrangements, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s statutory role and functions are excluded.
The inquiry will assess how the bank is meeting its objectives, “including its choice of policy tools, policy implementation, policy communication, and how trade-offs between different objectives have been managed”.
It will scrutinise the bank’s governance and accountability. This will take in the structure and composition of the board – opening up the debate about the balance between expertise and other factors in appointments – and the appointments process.
While the terms of reference also cover the bank’s management and recruitment, some areas including banknote production will be excluded from the review.
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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Schuijers, Deputy Director, Australian Centre for Climate and Environmental Law and Lecturer in Law, University of Sydney
Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek acknowledges “it’s time to change” after the State of the Environment report revealed a bleak picture of Australia’s natural places.
In a speech on Tuesday, Plibersek foreshadowed a suite of reforms to Australia’s environment policies, including new legislation to go before parliament next year. Plibersek told reporters:
Australia’s environment is bad and getting worse, as this report shows, and much of the destruction outlined in the State of the Environment Report will take years to turn around. Nevertheless, I am optimistic about the steps that we can take over the next three years.
The changes will be informed by the government’s response to Professor Graeme Samuel’s independent review of federal environment law. That review found the law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, has failed to safeguard Australia’s vulnerable plants, animals, and ecological communities.
Having been in the minister’s chair for only six weeks, Plibersek was hesitant to outline major policy initiatives and said the government would consult widely before making changes. She says overhauling Australia’s environmental protections will be “challenging” and public views on the right policy response will differ wildly.
Our collective expertise spans environmental law and ecosystem processes. Here, we consider whether today’s announcements go far enough to restore and protect Australia’s precious natural assets.
Plibersek’s speech contained a couple of new announcements, and a reiteration of previous policy pledges. As well as committing to a response to the Samuel review by the end of the year, these include:
setting clear environmental standards with explicit targets
fundamental reform of national environmental laws and a new national level Environmental Protection Agency to enforce them
expanding Australia’s national estate to protect 30% of land and 30% of oceans by 2030
producing better and more shareable environmental data to better track progress and decline
including environmental indicators in the government’s new “wellbeing budget”
supporting investment into blue carbon projects, such as restoring mangroves and seagrasses
doubling the number of Indigenous rangers to 3,800 this decade and increasing funding for Indigenous protected areas.
enshrining a higher national emissions reduction target into law.
These important changes are likely to lead to environmental gains. But the key will be ensuring progress is independently monitored, and that new laws and targets can be amended as needed.
Changes urgently needed
The commitment to expand Australia’s national estate may be comforting, but it misses crucial context. As the report notes, the overall level of protection within reserves has fallen.
In fact, in some of our most prized protected areas, threatened species are declining. These include northern quolls, northern brown bandicoots and pale field-rats in Kakadu National Park.
Researchers estimated in 2019 that we spend only 15% of what’s needed to avoid extinctions and recover threatened species. Expanding protected areas means little unless accompanied by adequate funding for species recovery.
The report also recognises invasive species as one of the biggest threats to native biodiversity. In particular, feral and domestic cats have played a leading role in most of Australia’s mammal extinctions since colonisation.
Controlling invasive species such as feral cats will be difficult without developing new management strategies that can be applied at scale. This will require more investment in research and adequate resources to trial, test and monitor approaches.
Cats have been a leading cause of mammal extinctions in Australia since colonisation. Shutterstock
Rates of land clearing also continue to soar, as Plibersek noted. But we’re yet to see details of how the federal government plans to address this crucial issue.
Nonetheless, Plibersek spoke optimistically about cooperating with state and territory governments, who are primarily responsible for forests in their jurisdictions.
The next five-yearly review of the Regional Forest Agreements – made between federal and state governments – offer an important opportunity. These agreements broadly exempt logging operations from federal environmental law.
Cooperating with the states will be important in addressing the environmental challenges posed by, for instance, native forest logging in Victoria, which has contributed to the greater glider being recently listed as endangered.
New environmental law for 2023
Plibersek noted the importance of climate change as a cumulative threat to the pressures already affecting the environment.
While she reinforced her election promise to legislate emissions cuts, she skirted around how climate change’s harms to biodiversity could be incorporated into environmental law. A fundamental issue with the EPBC Act is that there’s no explicit mention of climate change.
This could be a problem if federal support continues to be given to new projects that could also undermine emissions targets. For example, the federal government recently approved Western Australia’s Scarborough-Pluto gas project. It is set to be one of Australia’s most emissions-intensive developments.
Another crucial problem with the EPBC Act, as Professor Graeme Samuel recognised is his review, is that it operates in a piecemeal way.
Instead of protecting the environment holistically, it’s triggered when individual projects are likely to affect specific aspects of the environment, such as a threatened species.
When triggered, the act requires an assessment of a project’s potential impact, but doesn’t require any specific measurable outcomes once the project has gone ahead.
It also focuses on lists of species and places, rather than the interactions within and between environmental systems. It will be impossible for the new government to adequately respond to the Samuel review without acknowledging this major flaw.
The proposal to introduce national environment standards next year will make a positive difference. It needs to operate not as a vague reference point, but as a ceiling.
We can’t afford to fail
Continuing to ignore the damning evidence revealed in the report today will worsen Australia’s biodiversity crisis. Not only will further losses lead to more extinctions, they will also compromise our ecosystems’ ability to support us.
Biodiversity loss has been heralded as one of the top threats to the global economy, ranking third behind climate change and extreme weather events.
Australia’s extinction track record is among the world’s worst. Failing to make the necessary legal and policy reforms could not only represent a missed opportunity to restore past losses, but also lock in further decline for decades.
The report shows the best time to take action has passed. The second best time is now.
Laura Schuijers is a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Commission on Environmental Law and has previously received funding for her research from the Australian federal government.
Thomas Newsome is a member of the Australian Mammal Society and Ecological Society of Australia, is on the Council of the Royal Zoological Society of NSW, and is President of the Australasian Wildlife Management Society. No funding beyond support from The University of Sydney (employer) was provided specifically for this work.
Last week, two influential environmental groups warned the Greens not to stymie progress on Australia’s climate policy. In an unusual intervention, Greenpeace and the Australian Conservation Foundation urged the Greens to “play a constructive role” with Labor or risk being blamed for holding climate policy back.
The groups want the Greens to back Labor’s policy for a 43% cut in emissions by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050 – then to push for more ambitious targets later. But Greens leader Adam Bandt has described Labor’s policy as “weak” and the party has the numbers to block Labor’s bill in the Senate.
Tensions over strategy in and beyond parliament are a normal part of social movements and the policy process. Plus, it’s just plain hard to broker agreements for ambitious and effective climate policy.
But as my research has shown, Australia’s long-lasting climate wars offer three painful lessons we shouldn’t ignore this time around.
1. We need to find common ground between idealists and realists
It’s easy to dismiss the Greens and their allies in the environment movement as naive idealists. But at this historic moment, what constitutes realism is a matter of both political strategy and science.
The last time the green movement intensely debated carbon targets was in 2008. Then, the Rudd Labor government proposed a carbon pollution reduction scheme with a goal of a 5-15% emissions cut by 2020. The Greens argued it was inadequate and compensated polluters too generously.
In response, established green groups like the ACF and World Wildlife Fund for Nature and union peak bodies formed a coalition that backed Labor’s scheme and publicly disagreed with the stance of the Greens and most smaller green groups (including Greenpeace). By the end of 2009 the environment movement was split.
The big green groups identified as realists. They saw the scheme as imperfect, but were optimistic they could influence and improve it over time.
The grassroots wing of the environment movement, including new groups like Rising Tide and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and GetUp!, was not convinced. They felt the big green groups were closing the window of opportunity too soon by agreeing to Labor’s scheme ahead of parliamentary debate. Given the grave climate threat, they wanted more and faster progress on emissions reduction.
Both the Greens and these newer groups believed Labor’s scheme was, as Greens leader Bob Brown put it at the time, “worse than doing nothing”. In particular, they objected to the weak emissions target, corporate windfalls and loose carbon offset rules.
Newer environment groups pushed for faster and greater action. Shutterstock
After Rudd was replaced as party leader, Labor shelved the scheme, drawing criticism from the Greens and green groups of all stripes.
So what’s changed 14 years later? Labor wants the Greens and independent senators to support a bill legislating a symbolic goal (the 2030 target) without much detail about how it will achieve this.
For now, most green groups appear willing to support Labor’s carbon target legislation as long as the target is a genuine “floor” on ambition and there is an effective policy “ratchet” that can be used later. This is a Greens strategy straight from the 2008–09 period. But they are even clearer now that the ratchet should address coal and gas expansions.
The legacy of the Rudd government’s weak carbon trading scheme lived on in the Gillard government’s 2011 carbon farming laws and the Abbott government’s Direct Action Plan. It left our main federal climate policy as a deeply flawed carbon offset scheme tied to incredibly loose caps on Australia’s heavy emitters.
Carbon trading and offsets are a remarkably indirect way to deal with the climate problem. Emissions trading regulates emissions at the end of the pipe and tend to be designed in way that provide far too much flexibility about where and when emissions are cut.
Existing evidence suggests carbon prices have not caused actual emissions reduction. Now it seems that Labor may end up using the existing safeguard mechanism and carbon offset scheme to reach its 2030 target.
Market mechanisms, particularly emissions trading and offsetting, emerged as a political solution to industry resistance to climate policy.
In 2009, former CSIRO economist Clive Spash published compelling criticism of carbon trading schemes. He outlined the gap between textbook theory of emissions trading and the realpolitik of industry influence over price design – and rubbished the idea you fossil fuel emissions can be offset by land carbon emissions.
Creating “credits” from land ecosystems should not be used to compensate for fossil fuel emissions. In terms of regulatory practice, land offsets are broken by design.
This week Labor will introduce a second piece of legislation to renew the Climate Change Authority’s role in measuring progress. This has green group support. But it’s doubtful expert advice alone will ramp up ambition.
No single piece of legislation will fully tackle this crisis. We urgently need strategies investing in new industries and transition arrangements in the communities most affected by the turbulence of economic transition.
3. Energy industry policy could be effective climate policy
Politically, carbon markets have not helped broker consensus between political parties and with industry.
Tightening the loose baselines of industrial facilities and removing the link to offsets would make the safeguard mechanism more effective. Direct industry regulation like this sends a very efficient and clear market signal.
At present, environment groups are supporting the case for direct energy industry policy. In the decade since the climate wars began, most of Australia’s green groups have split off to work on electricity market reform and local campaigns to stop coal and gas expansion.
Expanding renewables and transitioning away from coal and gas require planned industrial restructuring at state and federal levels and careful diplomacy with our trading partners. These issues were never going to be addressed with a carbon price alone.
Every green group will need to push Labor to keep coal and gas in the ground. And hold Labor to account on the policy mechanisms it will have to ramp up if the government is serious about climate mitigation.
Most members of environment groups would identify as political realists. They know perfect policies are impossible. Here’s hoping they can pressure our reluctant government to get on with things.
Rebecca Pearse receives funding from the Australian Research Council. In 2007-2014 she was a volunteer for Friends of the Earth. During this time she was a volunteer with its national climate justice campaign (2010-2013), and a member of its management committee (2013-2014).
In June, 22-year-old Harrison Pawluk filmed himself staging a “random act of kindness”, giving a bunch of flowers to an older woman sitting alone in a Melbourne food court.
His video went viral on TikTok, attracting 57 million views within a week.
Comments on the post included, “when she started crying, I couldn’t hold it back” and “wow that was so beautiful I swear I would cry”.
Acts of kindness can boost wellbeing for the giver, the recipient, and even the viewers of selfless acts. Social media influencers have found ways to commodify this by presenting them as random and unexpected.
But this gesture was interpreted by Maree, the woman targeted for the video, as an artificially staged production that left her feeling “dehumanised” and like “clickbait” for tabloid fodder.
In the media, individuals aged over 60 are often depicted as a homogeneous group of elderly people who lack personality, social identity or individuality.
It’s not just a “random act of kindness”. Pawluk’s actions – and some of the media coverage – unearths a much bigger problem of “benevolent ageism”.
When we talk about ageism, people often think of overt acts such as older people being explicitly told they are dressed “inappropriately” for their age, or an employer refusing to hire someone for a job because of their age.
But not all ageism is overt. “Everyday ageism” is a more subtle yet pervasive component that informs our impressions of older people. This could be assumptions about what older people’s preferences are because of their age group, or that by a certain age most people should be “slowing down”.
Benevolent ageism is where these every day biases manifest in the belief that older people need special “help” or “support”.
Everyday ageism might manifest in assuming someone’s politics because of their age. Rene Böhmer/Unsplash
Benevolent ageism manifests in the way people sometimes use pet names or baby talk to address older people; an emphasis on pitying people above a certain age; or the importance placed on “protecting” older people during the COVID pandemic.
Commenters on Pawluk’s video said “[the flowers] made her feel so good and it looks like she might have needed it”, “she is so cute” and “I miss my grandma!”.
Benevolent ageism leads to false assumptions or inaccurate and limiting stereotypes about older people being “warm but not competent” and lacking individuality.
In Pawluk’s video, Maree is framed as being sad and alone. Speaking to ABC Radio, Maree expressed frustration at being presented as “the elderly woman who drank a takeaway cup of coffee”.
“It’s the patronising assumption that women, especially older women, will be thrilled by some random stranger giving them flowers,” she told the ABC.
Our implicit biases
Benevolent ageism is hiding in plain sight.
Our own ageist biases can show up in everyday judgements we make about people’s capacity to work, how they dress or whether they are in need of assistance or attention because of their age.
Ageist characterisations are culturally reinforced by media portrayals, and have the effect of categorising “older people” – particularly women – as being lonely and in need of pity.
Just because an older person is alone, this doesn’t mean they are lonely. Mark Hang Fung So/Unsplash
A recent report from the World Health Organization shows one in every two people shows moderate to high levels of ageist attitudes, with their definition of ageism encompassing stereotypes (how we think), prejudice (how we feel) and discrimination (how we act) towards others or oneself based on age.
The Australian Human Rights Commission found that 90% of Australians agree that ageism exists in Australia.
Age discrimination commissioner Kay Patterson calls ageism “the least understood form of discriminatory prejudice” and “more pervasive and socially accepted than sexism and racism”.
Internalised ageism, in which we unconsciously hold these own ageist attitudes against ourselves, negatively impacts our functional health as we age and can even shorten our own lifespan.
These TikTok random acts of kindness can have the unfortunate overtone of the twin prejudices of ageism and sexism. Older women targeted in this way can be left feeling like their identity is reduced to being just an older lady in need of pity.
When interviewed by The Project, Pawluk apologised to Maree. He claims he does not target people based on their age.
But the assumptions made about Maree – and other women to whom he has offered flowers – are embedded in age-old stereotypes about older women: that they are sad or lonely, and in need of support.
90% of Australians believe ageism exists in Australia. Paris Lopez/Unsplash
There is nothing wrong with greeting another person regardless of their age. But the framing of this TikTok video is a clear example of ageist stereotypes manifesting as a show of concern.
Much of the news reporting and comments surrounding the event were also examples of everyday ageism. The Daily Mail described the video as a “heartwarming moment [where] a total stranger gives an elderly woman a bunch of flowers before she bursts into tears”.
Although likely not the initial intention of the gesture, this social media craze of capturing supposed “random acts of kindness” can have the undesired effect of diminishing the perceived social value of the target to whom the protagonist is trying to show kindness.
We should take this as a moment to pause and address our own unconscious biases and our subtle forms of everyday ageism of the benevolent kind.
Natasha Ginnivan works for the University of New South Wales, School of Psychology. She receives funding for her projects from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research and the UNSW Ageing Futures Institute. She is also a volunteer contributor to MEAx Australia, is a member of the Australian Association of Gerontology, the NSW Older Women’s Network and is an associate of the UNSW Human Rights Institute.
Kaarin Anstey receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. She is Director of the UNSW Ageing Futures Institute, and affiliated with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing and Neuroscience Research Australia.
What if the most important thing in Jim Chalmers’ first budget is the thing his critics are writing off as a gimmick?
Australia’s new treasurer has a lot on his plate. He has commissioned a complete review of the way the Reserve Bank works, he is drawing up a statement to parliament he says people will find “confronting” and he is preparing the second of two budgets in one year; in October, updating the Coalition’s budget in March.
In what some see as a gimmick, it will be Australia’s first budget to benchmark its measures against their impact on the wellbeing of the Australian people: Australia’s first “wellbeing budget”.
When Chalmers proposed the idea in opposition, the treasurer at the time, Josh Frydenberg, described it as “laughable”.
Wellbeing was “doublespeak for higher taxes and more debt”.
Frydenberg asked parliament to imagine Chalmers delivering his first budget, the one he will deliver on October 25, “fresh from his ashram deep in the Himalayas, barefoot, robes flowing, incense burning, beads in one hand, wellbeing budget in the other”.
But here’s the thing. In an important way, Chalmers first “wellbeing budget” will have more rigour than any of the budgets prepared by Frydenberg or any of his predecessors.
It’ll be the first to have a stab at cost-benefit analysis.
Budgets are usually three things: a statement of accounts, with measures that will have an impact on the accounts (and sometimes measures that won’t), as well as the legislation needed to authorise another year’s worth of expenditure.
What they don’t do, as a rule, is assess the impact of those measures, even the impact on the economy.
The budget papers described what the measure would do and its impact on the budget, but not its impact on the economy.
The calculations may well have been carried out, but they weren’t included in the budget, as was typical. The budget papers told us what was being done, but not what it would do.
Then Treasurer Joe Hockey removed the table of winners and losers. Mick Tsikas/AAP
Until 2014 the budget papers at least told us who the budget would make better off and worse off. The standard table identified the impact of the budget as a whole on 17 different types of households at different types of incomes.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Treasurer Joe Hockey removed it in their first budget, perhaps because they didn’t want the winners and losers to become apparent, and it hasn’t returned.
The budget papers neither tell us what the budget will do to economic growth, nor what it will do to incomes, nor what it will do to the environment or anything else other than the budget’s bottom line.
Which is a pity, because the budget is massive.
The government takes in just short of one quarter of all the dollars spent in Australia and pays out slightly more than one quarter of the dollars earned.
The balance between that income and spending is called the budget deficit or surplus. It matters, but so too does what that income and spending does.
Encompassing rather than replacing GDP
What Chalmers is proposing, and what New Zealand and Scotland are doing, and what Canada is working towards, is a scorecard of how budget measures affect the things that matter, including how much we produce: gross domestic product.
During the first Rudd government, Angela Jackson was deputy chief of staff to Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner. Reflecting on that time at last week’s Australian Conference of Economists, she said it was astounding that the expected effects of budget measures weren’t made explicit.
It meant what happened couldn’t be assessed against expectations.
Introducing measurables wouldn’t be about supplanting GDP, but about including it along with other measures of prosperity as outcomes against which the budget could be assessed, along with measures of health, the environment, gender, children’s welfare, and the welfare of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
It would let us see whether we are making progress or going backwards on the environment (where we seem to be going backwards) and on living standards, inequality, health and other things, and what the budget is doing about it.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics was on to this back in 2008 when it introduced a short-lived publication called Measures of Australia’s Progress that reported on whether what came to be 26 key indicators were going forwards or backwards.
Australia’s Treasury was on to it earlier, in 2004, introducing its own wellbeing framework for internal use. It understands the concept.
Taking that concept public will improve or weed out budget measures before they are announced. They will need to demonstrate that they can improve wellbeing, or at least not make it worse.
After it is established, it will require future treasurers to level with the public about the impact of what they are proposing in the same way as Coalition treasurer Peter Costello’s Charter of Budget Honesty required future treasurers to level with the public about the cost of what they were proposing.
It’s already shaping up as Chalmers’ most important legacy.
Peter Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Hickson, Economics Lecturer and Director Business Taught Masters Programme, University of Canterbury
Getty Images
An entire generation has never experienced life with high inflation. But that is set to change. Countries like Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and others are reporting rising inflation. In New Zealand, inflation has climbed to its highest rate in 32 years. Our collective inexperience with the scourge of inflation, and how to solve it, could be a real problem.
For those experiencing high inflation for the first time, it is helpful to understand just what economists and politicians are talking about.
Inflation is a sustained increase in overall prices. Not everything goes up by the same amount but when people are having to pay more each week, month or year for the same basket of goods and services then that’s inflation.
Inflation is harmful in many ways. It works like rust – slowly eating away at the value of your money. Inflation affects all of us. It doesn’t matter what the face value of your money is – what matters is the quantity of goods and services you can buy with it.
The real value of money
One easy way to understand inflation is to look at what you can buy for the money you have.
Suppose at the start of the year your $100 note bought you 20 cups of coffee. However, inflation pushes coffee from $5 to $6 a cup. By the end of the year, your same $100 only buys you 16 cups of coffee. The face value of your money is the same but its real value (in terms of the number of coffees you can buy) has gone down. Your money is worth less now than a year ago.
This rise in costs hurts wage earners who have limited opportunity to renegotiate their wages.
Inflation also hurts those on fixed incomes such as beneficiaries and superannuitants who only receive periodic adjustments.
Rising inflation hurts savers who find the real value of their savings going down if returns on savings don’t keep up with inflation – which they currently aren’t.
Inflation can benefit borrowers who have the same debt at the end of the year but the value of that debt is lower in real terms. Providing there is at least some inflation adjustment to their income, borrowers have to sacrifice less to repay their debt.
While this sounds good, it’s not. It encourages poor borrowing decisions and discourages savings.
Inflation has risen to levels not seen for three decades. Consumers will feel the squeeze as their purchasing power drops. Getty Images
The all-encompassing impact of inflation
In a progressive tax system, inflation hurts salary and wage earners who get pushed into higher tax brackets as they receive inflation adjustments to their pay.
Inflation can also cause issues at a national level.
If one country’s inflation rate is higher than their trading partners then its currency falls in value. In the early 1970s, the NZ dollar was worth almost US$1.50. Our higher inflation rates of the 70s and 80s saw it fall to around US$0.50 by the mid 80s.
This drop in value limits what we can buy from overseas – things like life-saving drugs will become more expensive for us if we don’t get inflation down and others do.
The causes of inflation can come from good intentions
Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods.
If central banks push more money into circulation, there is a real risk of inflation. A big increase in demand for goods from, for example, an increase in government spending can also trigger inflation. So can supply chain disruptions that reduce the goods available (meaning the same amount of money chasing fewer goods).
Unfortunately, all these triggers are currently in play as countries respond to a series of global crises.
The invasion of Ukraine and ongoing COVID-19 supply chain disruptions have reduced the goods available. Governments globally have boosted spending to support their economies. But this latter factor has been put on steroids by central banks being willing to purchase government debt.
Russia’s war in Ukraine and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused a cost-of-living crisis. Getty Images
In New Zealand, the average money growth between 1995 and 2019 was about 8% per year. This accommodates a growing population, a growing economy and a little bit of inflation (a little bit is OK). In the last two years money supply has grown by around 30% per year.
Of course it’s easy to look back with the benefit of hindsight. Those who made the decisions at the time don’t have that luxury.
Whether that criticism is justified or not, the RBNZ will now have to act decisively to reduce inflation. But getting inflation down is never painless.
Households with mortgages will find their weekly budgets squeezed as interest rates rise. Firms will face falling demand from consumers with less to spend. Job growth will dry up – though New Zealand is in the fortunate position of starting with very low unemployment.
Regardless, the RBNZ must do the job they got back in 1989 with the passing of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act. New Zealand’s central bank is the only one that can control monetary conditions; it’s the only one that can get inflation under control.
The same could be said for many of the countries facing growing inflation.
If central banks don’t take decisive action, we could get a sharp reminder of just how bad inflation can be.
Stephen Hickson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daryl Cheng, Consultant Paediatrician & Medical Lead, Melbourne Vaccine Education Centre, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute
COVID vaccines for children as young as six months look set to be available in the coming months, now the Therapeutic Goods Administration has approved the Moderna vaccine for babies and young children.
The vaccine has been approved for children aged six months to five years. However, we need to wait for advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) to provide further scientific advice and recommendations around an immunisation program. Given no vaccines are currently manufactured in Australia, we will also need to wait for availability of supply before the program can commence.
Australia’s approval of the Moderna vaccine for this age group follows a similar move in the United States in June.
Here’s what parents need to know ahead of Australia’s rollout of the Moderna vaccine to these younger children, the last remaining age group to receive COVID vaccines.
COVID case numbers are still high. So with the threat of Omicron sub-variants and other potential variants, expansion of COVID vaccines to young children will be a welcome relief for many concerned parents and families.
Children are less likely to have severe outcomes or complications from COVID compared with adults. However, they continue to experience high levels of infection. This disrupts their schooling, childcare and other activities. When they are sick, their parents need to take time off work to care for them.
Severe disease can also happen in previously healthy children, and not just in children at higher risk because of underlying medical conditions.
While the total number of admissions to hospital from COVID infection in children is small, a large proportion of these have been children under five years.
That’s because they are more likely to need supportive care, such as observation and hydration, than older children.
When preschoolers are sick, they lose opportunities to learn and play with their friends. Shutterstock
Children are also at risk of a severe COVID complication known as multi-system inflammatory syndrome. This requires admission to hospital and possibly the intensive care unit. We know vaccination protects children from this life-threatening condition.
The long-term effects and implications of COVID in children are also still not fully understood. Long COVID appears to be much less common in children than in adults, occurring in less than 2–3% of children. So, prevention of infection in children is still a priority.
Many parents may be unsure of the benefit of vaccines if their child has already had COVID, especially if they weren’t that unwell.
However, the World Health Organization says protection from vaccinating someone who has already caught COVID (known as providing hybrid immunity) is stronger than that provided by either vaccination or infection alone.
Importantly, hybrid immunity offers superior protection against severe COVID compared with infection-induced or vaccine-induced immunity alone. However, it is unclear whether this hybrid immunity will persist with new variants.
The benefits of vaccination extend beyond direct protection. The mRNA vaccines (Moderna, Pfizer) reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, although less so with the Omicron variant.
Nevertheless, the vaccines remain an important way to protect both young children and those around them.
They can help to ensure young kids can still go to kindergarten, play with their friends, travel and visit their grandparents.
Vaccinated young children protects vulnerable people around them. Shutterstock
The Moderna vaccine is available for children from six months to five years, with two doses needed to complete the course.
The dose is one-quarter of the adult dose (25 micrograms instead of 100 micrograms), and should be given at least four weeks apart.
The Moderna clinical trials demonstrated adequate vaccine effectiveness in younger infants and children. It showed a 51% effectiveness against COVID infection in children between six months to two years, and 37% effectiveness in children between two and five years.
It’s too soon to say how much protection vaccination will protect preschoolers against multi-system inflammatory syndrome, but we do expect some protection.
The most common side effects include a painful arm, mild fever, headache and tiredness. Shutterstock
Of course, we need to balance the benefits with any risks, and all vaccines have side effects.
In both real-world data and clinical trials, the number and rate of reports of side effects from COVID vaccines in young children are lower than for adults.
Most of the common and expected side effects in young children occur in the first 24–48 hours and include a fever, painful arm, headache and tiredness.
There were no serious adverse events such as myocarditis (heart inflammation), anaphylaxis (life-threatening immune reaction) or multi-system inflammatory syndrome detected during the clinical trials for this age group for either vaccine.
There are also no currently detected longer-term safety concerns with mRNA vaccines in the paediatric age group.
Once the COVID vaccines are available for this age group, side effects will be monitored and documented through AusVaxSafety and other surveillance systems, as they have been for other age groups, and other childhood vaccines.
Margie Danchin receives funding from Commonwealth and State Governments, NHMRC, DFAT and WHO. She is chair, Collaboration in Social Science and Immunisation (COSSI).
Daryl Cheng 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Oliver Frank, Senior Research Fellow, Discipline of General Practice, and Specialist General Practitioner, University of Adelaide
With COVID cases, hospital admissions and deaths resurging, every Australian needs to know what they can do to reduce their risk of becoming seriously unwell.
Last week, Minister for Health and Aged Care Mark Butler advised Australians who are at higher risk of becoming seriously unwell with COVID to consult their GPs and make a plan for what they will do if they are infected.
But what should you ask your GP? And what information can you provide them with to ensure you have a COVID plan in place and can access the right treatment when you need it?
Two oral COVID treatments are available on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme for use at home by people who have been diagnosed with mild COVID illness and who are at elevated risk of becoming seriously ill: Lagevrio and Paxlovid.
To reduce the risk of progression to severe disease and hospitalisation, these treatments must be started as soon as possible, within five days of when symptoms start.
Nirmatrelvir plus ritonavir (Paxlovid) is the more effective of these two treatments but it can have complex interactions with many common medicines.
Working out whether a person qualifies for these treatments, whether the treatments are safe for them and giving appropriate advice often takes more than 20 minutes in a consultation with your GP.
You can reduce the stress on yourself and on your GP and their practice by discussing these questions while you are well and before any COVID infection is suspected or detected.
If you have a regular GP, go see them and check your eligibility for COVID antivirals. Shutterstock
A 6-step plan to stay as well as possible
1. Find a GP
If you don’t yet have a usual GP or general practice, choose one now and ask for an appointment of at least 30 minutes. The purpose of this consultation is for the GP to gain an understanding of your state of health, and so you can make a plan together for what you and the GP will do if you are infected with COVID.
Medicare benefits are payable in these circumstances only for in-person consultations – but you should attend the general practice only if you are well and not a close contact of someone with COVID.
If you already have a usual GP or practice, make an appointment with them and check whether you are eligible for PBS-subsidised oral antiviral treatment. Should you be diagnosed with COVID infection, it is important to be prepared as treatment must start as soon as possible.
The eligibility criteria for subsidised antiviral COVID treatments have recently been expanded. Now people aged 70 years and older can access the treatments, as can people over 50 with two or more risk factors, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people over 30 with two or more risk factors, and people with compromised immunity who are over 18.
If you meet the criteria, or you are not sure whether you are in a higher risk group, ask for an appointment with your GP to check eligibility and to make a plan.
Have all doses of COVID vaccine recommended for your age and health status, as soon as you are eligible for each dose. The currently recommended numbers of doses are: two doses for children aged 5 to 15 years; three doses for adolescents and adults aged 16 to 29 (additional doses are recommended for children and adolescents with disabilities or chronic conditions); three doses for adults aged 30 to 49 with an optional fourth dose; and four doses for adults over 50.
ATAGI recommends vaccination to prevent serious illness and death from COVID.
Have this year’s influenza vaccine now if you have not already received it. The influenza vaccine is recommended for everybody over six months old and is available from GPs and pharmacies.
The influenza vaccine can be given at the same time as a COVID vaccine. Some GPs and pharmacies charge a consultation or service fee for administering the vaccine.
If you aren’t sure how many doses of COVID vaccine you have had or when you received them, or whether you have had this year’s influenza vaccine, you can check in your My Health Record or you can view your COVID vaccinations though your MyGov account that you have linked to Medicare. Your GP can also check for you during a consultation.
Wear an effective mask (preferably not a cloth one) everywhere you can’t physically distance yourself from other people. This is especially important in indoor crowded places, as well as in places where masks are required such as health and aged care facilities. Continue with hand hygiene too.
Make a list of the medicines (including supplements and over the counter drugs) that you’re taking and how often you take them.
If you are able to, check online whether you are using any medicines that are known to interact with COVID drugs. Some people prescribed Paxlovid will have to stop or reduce the dose of one or more of their usual medicines while using it. Others might not be able to use Paxlovid safely, in which case one of the other treatment options can be considered.
The online tool can generate and save a report with any known interactions between Paxlovid and your usual medicines. Then you can email or show that list to your GP once you have made an appointment for a consultation. Your GP will also be able to check potential drug interactions for you during your pre-COVID appointment.
Oliver Frank 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.
Source: Council on Hemispheric Affairs – Analysis-Reportage
By Arturo López Levy Oakland, California.
I don’t remember when I started listening to Silvio Rodríguez’ songs. It must have been during college prep, once I was grown up and wanted to be able to express things better so that the ones that I loved would be more receptive to what I had to say. Since then, I have followed Silvio as a friend that he never knew he had. Sometimes I agreed with him, sometimes I disagreed, but I always admired his art and the way he used his own voice without echoing others. In the United States, at my universities, Silvio helped open doors for me with other Latin Americans who knew his songs.
Silvio performing at the Zócalo in Mexico, June 10th, 2022 (Photo credit: Kaloian Santos)
When I met him in person in Washington, DC, as the Cuban embassy re-opened in 2015 after the reinstatement of diplomatic relations, he honored me with an embrace and a finger to my chest, saying that he had read my writing. Today I had the opportunity to interview him and discuss his talent without false equivalencies (to remind us of Jorge Mañach), but also without feigned formalities. For some inexplicable reason, the refrain “guajirito soy” kept running through my head. Following are the questions posed by an admirer and the responses of an artist and follower of Martí who was kind enough to answer them.
Silvio, you have sung about love in its most sublime and all-encompassing forms—love of a woman, nature, the family, one’s mother, wife, children, your town, San Antonio de los Baños, our heroes, Martí, Agramonte, and Cuba, the homeland. You have sung of love for Latin America, an identity, and humanity “homeland is humanity.” How do you mix all of those loves? Is it just a matter of feeling, or—in the style of your blog Segunda cita—as an intellectual public figure who rationalizes his passions?
I once heard Alfredo Guevara say that nations of people, out of their need for an identity, start by taking an inventory of themselves: their geography, their flora and fauna, the physical and spiritual characteristics of their people, etc. Over the years I came to realize that even more happens to those of us with a vocation to sing, because we begin by describing what surrounds us—both objectively and subjectively. Both reactions are a self-recognition of what makes consciousness: a sort of totemic act that consists of naming things. We all know that the world exists, because we see it, we feel it. But some of us need to sing about it so that reality can take on a life of its own and perhaps become complete.
Also, although like everyone else I was born with intellect, I have never seen myself as an intellectual. I have always had a sort of vocation to be a communicator. Segunda cita was an accident, one finding that led to others. Its highest form of expression was when it became a community, with all the complexities that involves. That, in a way, was its purpose, because during the first months I did not put any limits on it and there were all kinds of comments, some of them vulgar and offensive. That led me to moderate the blog, although internally I regretted some of the openness that was lost. Then I began to insist on candor combined with respect for others. And little by little, that spirit impregnated the space. Obviously, I was the first one who had to learn. It may be that I’ve tried to rationalize some passion (that is human), although I also try to explain why.
What does it mean to love Cuba in the 21st century, the supposed time of globalization and internationalization? How important is it for your children, grandchildren, and those who may follow to know that “In Tampa your grandfather spoke with Martí,” the Apostle of Cuban independence?
Cubans celebrating May 1st, Labor Day, in Habana (Photo credit: Nath Zamorano).
I have that privilege because my grandfather Félix’s father, Pancho Domínquez, was one of the Cuban cigar rollers who worked in the harvest in Tampa every year at the end of the 19th century, a time when a million cigars were manufactured in that Floridian city every year.
My grandfather never told me why he was in Tampa; I learned many years later from Dr. Beatriz Marcheco and her DNA studies. My grandfather only told me that while he was at a warehouse in Tampa as a child, a gentleman had asked him why he was in the country, and he answered that his father worked in a certain cigar factory. The gentleman smiled and told him that this was a coincidence, because a few days later he was going to visit his dad’s workplace to speak to the workers.
My grandfather always ended the story by saying, “And that kind man was José Martí.”
It is true that the times, periods of history, can color our loves and perceptions of things. This is much more so today, given the quantity and quality of so much content. But in addition to the overwhelming variety that technology offers us, the fact is that no one can be born today and say that their grandfather met Martí in Tampa. Surely that is why I sang about it, slightly envious of my Grandpa Félix.
You once said that you did not see Cuba “as an altar or a cathedral that one goes to.” Does being Cuban imply some responsibility? Do we Cubans have some defect that you feel you share? What do you think of the position in Cuba establishing an equivalency between being a patriot and being a revolutionary?
I have never understood such sanctification. It may be because of my way of seeing what is essential, in addition to the blindness implied in the concept of “sacred,” something untouchable. Everything that is respected, even that which is venerated, is so for more or less profound reasons which certainly can be explained.
Obviously, there is diversity in being Cuban, and I imagine this is more or less the same for any nationality. The intensity, I believe, depends on each person’s background. There are lives and circumstances that obviously determine one’s supreme adherence to oneself, to oneself above all else. There are others who do not so much feel that way, or who relegate this to another plane because they see themselves as part of a collective whole, as if the common fate were real life. The latter is something like a honeybee with a hive mentality. As for myself, I feel good when I see myself as part of a whole—a people and their history. In this I find an explanation that partially helps to explain the great mystery of life. I believe that this greatly helped my family with its modest mark on our national history. It also helps that when I was ten years old I read Emilio Roig’s Introduction (published 1953) to “La Edad de Oro” by Martí called “Martí y los niños. Martí niño.” (Marti and the children. Marti, the child.)
Finally, I believe there can be patriotic sentiments that do not agree with aspects of the Revolution or the Cuban government. But I do not believe that those who ask for blockades or interventions against their own country can be patriots.
Several academics have written that New Latin American song, of which Nueva Trova was an essential part, was an important source of an alternative culture—not only alternative to oligarchic power and right-wing military dictatorships, but also to a more traditional left. What did it mean for you to be part of that movement? What did you experience when singing in those countries after the openings at the end of the 1980s, as a result of pacts and political compromises?
Fortunately, from a very young age I liked to read history, literature, and scientific texts. Having participated in the Literacy Campaign** helped me understand that the country was expanding intellectually. This awareness helped me a few years later when I began to write songs. I prepared my first themes during my years of military service, without having debated anyone about such a job. That is why it was so gratifying when I left the army and began to discover young people who had done the same as I. Little by little, we created an esprit de corps, a sense of ourselves as a generation, which the press also began to perceive and to write about.
Casa de las Américas contributed greatly to our consolidation and the continuation of our generation of troubadours. Not only did it allow us a space in which to perform our songs, but we also furthered our knowledge of Latin America. For example, the first time I heard a Violeta Parra record was in Haydeé Santamaria’s house. Thanks to that connection, we were able to share with intellectuals such as Mario Benedetti, Roque Dalton, Julio Cortázar, and many others, without mentioning the privilege of listening to conversations with Lezama or José Zacaría Tallet, whom I even visited.
Miguel Ángel Revilla, President of México Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Silvio at Palenque, México, November 28, 2015. (Photo credit: Niurka González, Silvio’s wife).
Later, Alfredo Guevara invited us to found the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora (Musical Experimentation Group) and work for the Cuban Cinematography Institute. By this time, Pino Solanas included my song “La Era Está Pariendo un Corazón” in his documentary “La Hora de los Hornos.” One day Isabel Parra visited me and we began to sing together. Daniel Viglieti arrived and recorded his record “Trópicos” with our group. We provided accompaniment for Soledad Bravo on the song “Santiago de Chile,” for a documentary by Juan Carlos Tabío. And at the Cuban Cinematography Institute we did a two-week-long identity concert which we called Cuba-Brazil.
In September of 1972 Noel Nicola, Pablo Milanés, and I were invited by Gladys Marín to the IV Congress of Young Communists of Chile. There we sang every night at the club belonging to the Parra family, along with the most well-known singers and bands, including, of course, Víctor Jara. That was a tremendous experience, not only professionally, but also in terms of commitment. The coup occurred one year later and we experienced a very tense moment in that revolution, which was painful in many ways because the left was criticizing Allende as much as the right. We were also tested personally, because more than once we were surprised by street demonstrations that were disbursed with clubs and tear gas.
In 1974 Noel and I were invited to 7 Días con el Pueblo, a new song festival put on by a trade union in the Dominican Republic. There we met Mercedes Sosa, whom we had seen in Havana, and we met Catalonian Francesc Pi de la Sierra and Spaniards Ana Belén and Víctor Manuel. The brothers and sisters who hosted us were Sonia Silvestre and Víctor Víctor, and we were fortunate to hear the very young Luís Díaz. Los Guaraguao of Venezuela were there. And the stadiums, that were always full, roared, “Joaquín Balaguer, a murderer in power!” while the police stood by powerlessly. When it all ended a colonel correctly told us we had 24 hours to leave the country.
Starting in 1975 we began to visit Mexico more than once a year. We participated in almost all the events organized by Uruguayan exiles. The first to play was always Alfredo Zitarrosa, and the band Sanampay was always there, comprised primarily of exiled Argentinians and some former members of Herque Mapu (Hebe Rosell and Naldo Labrín). That is where we were when Tania Libertad arrived from Peru. We were friends of the extraordinary Amparo Ochoa, Oscar Chávez, Marcial Alejandro, and Gabino Palomares. And we saw people come to interpret the transcendence of Eugenia León and Guadalupe Pineda.
I never managed to meet Violeta Parra personally, but I was able to approach Yupanqui in Berlin in February of 1985 when we both played at the Festival of Political Song sponsored by Free German Youth in what was still the GDR. I saw him in a concert he gave at a theater along with my friend Ángel Parra, who accompanied him on some pieces because arthritis kept Yupanqui from moving his fingers. Later we saw each other a few times in Buenos Aires and on one of those occasions Eduardo Aute accompanied me. A few months before his death, Don Ata honored me by attending one of my concerts at the Gran Rex, which I of course dedicated to him.
It is quite true that we did all of that very pleased to be part of anti-imperialist Latin America, with a very strong cultural and historical identity. I still carry that satisfaction with me. I can say that it is one of the experiences I am most grateful to have had.
You were just in Mexico where, for several nights, you filled the National Auditorium singing “El Necio” (the Fool), once dedicated “to Fidel, now to Andrés Manuel [López Obrador].” What did Fidel Castro, and the opportunity to speak to him, mean for your personal story as a Cuban? How do you view the New Left in the hemisphere, often called the pink tide, for whom AMLO of Mexico is a central figure?
In the late 1950s, the people were very much against the dictatorship. Imagine, the revolution triumphed one month after I turned 12. We learned about Fidel from Radio Rebelde, which we listened to very softly some nights. Fidel was a great symbol. For some reason, I never saw him as a god; I always understood him to be a special man, but a man just the same.
The first time I was close to him was in 1961, when he came to send off those of us working in the Literacy Campaign who were leaving from Varadero to the far reaches of Cuba the next day. I was directly below the podium; little by little I made my way up. I recall my astonishment upon seeing that his beard was reddish brown and not black, as it looked in photographs. There I heard everything he told us about the importance of our mission and for the first time, I felt like part of something big, something more than just myself.
I exchanged a few words with him in 1984 when Pablo and I returned from our first trip to Argentina, which received a lot of coverage in the Argentine press and other places. Casa de las Américas gave us a reception upon our return, and all of a sudden, he showed up. He stayed for a long time, engaging in a fraternal exchange with everyone. At the end, they took a few photos and the next day we were on the front page of Granma.
I learned from my friend Julio Le Riverend that in 1968 Fidel had asked what happened to me at the so-called “little Congress” prior to a Congress on Education and Culture that was held that year. Alfredo Guevara later corroborated that Fidel had said that taking an artist’s job away was not right (I had been kicked out of a cultural agency), and that if there was some kind of problem, it should be discussed.
Later I had other opportunities to talk to him, particularly towards the end of the 1980s when I prepared a plan to build better recording studios in Cuba. One day I was surprised to receive an invitation to a lunch Fidel was giving for Rafael Alberti. In the middle of the lunch Fidel asked me if I could stay a bit afterwards, and I said yes. It was to ask me about the studios I said I wanted to have built. That was the beginning of all that was done afterwards.
“El necio,” to some degree, is a song about Fidel. He is a man who at times seems to act illogically, whose arm could not be twisted, whose moral clarity could confront any adversity. I say “to some degree” because El necio also includes a lot about my own journey and how I see certain things. And in what many people see as strength and determination, I describe as someone who simply accepts his destiny, the factors from within and without that converged to write one’s story. I believe that I express this quite clearly when I say,
I do not know what destiny is, As I went along, I was what I was. God over there, may be divine, I will die as I lived.
One topic that is quite present in your blog Segunda cita is the economic, trade, and financial blockade that successive U.S. governments have maintained against the Cuban people. I admire your clear position that it is a fundamental cause of the problems in Cuba. This matters, because today the regime change strategy imposed from outside, which is upheld by some supposedly moderate sectors, is to minimize its relevance and advocate for alleged flexibility on issues of sovereignty. How important do you think AMLO is—who has a flexible relationship and even integration with the United States—to the issue of Latin American dignity when he demands total opposition to the blockade with no concessions?
There are many interpretations around the blockade and why Cuba has so many problems. There are the extremes: those who blame everything on the blockade, and then those who blame the Cuban government. But when those who maintain the blockade discover any measure the provides breathing room to Cuba, they say it is providing oxygen to the regime so they eliminate it. This leaves no doubt that they know Cuba would be better off without the blockade. It exposes the depth of malice in their intentions and the monstruous scope of their practice. Gabo [García Márquez] was right when he called the blockade against Cuba genocide.
I dedicated “El necio” to Andrés Manuel because he has dared to defend Cuba like few others. And because defending us is to defend the right of any nation to be as it wishes to be and to resolve its internal problems without interference or harassment from anyone. AMLO is a living example of the spirit of Juárez, who said that “respect for the rights of others is peace.” Bolívar, Martí can be found in him, as they were in Fidel.
And it would not surprise me if the ultra-left were to call Andrés Manuel pseudo left. The troubadours of my generation were called the same by extreme leftist Cubans when we defended the Revolution with rock rhythms, such as in “Cuba va.”
During the Obama years you gave memorable concerts all over the United States. I saw you live at the mythical Paramount Theatre in Oakland and later at Carnegie Hall in New York, that paragon of U.S culture, where you played to packed auditoriums. What was typical of your notable presence there were the Latinos and Cubans who sang along with your songs. What do you think of the proposition that the United States is now a Latin American country, too?
Pete Seeger attended the second concert we gave in Carnegie Hall. He had turned 90 a year earlier and I was not able to attend his tribute because my visa did not arrive on time. We had a very special exchange later on that night, which was the last time I saw him. He told me that he knew that Latin America and Cuba could not make progress because of the interventionist policy of his country’s government. He was very ashamed of this and visibly moved. I know that many other U.S. citizens feel this way, although one does not need to be so lucid to have feelings of equity and respect for one’s neighbor.
I do not doubt that the United States, to some degree, is also a Latin American country today. It is likely that some day this ingredient may come to have a positive influence on its policies. But it is obvious that many Latinx people that go there do so because there are not enough opportunities in our countries. That is why, the more opportunities we have at home, the less people need to migrate and the fewer tensions there are with the United States over migration. That was the approach Andrés Manuel had with Trump when he talked about building his border wall. I have more faith in that approach, at least for now, than any positive influence that may stem from having a large number of our people over there.
Silvio and Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall, June 2010 (Photo credit: Miriam Berkley).Silvio and Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall, June 2010 (Photo credit: Miriam Berkley).
You were present during the ceremony when the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, DC turned into an embassy, where we met for the first time. What vision do you have about the role of patriotic emigration on the future of Cuba and its relationship with the United States? Would you give a concert in Miami some day?
I believe that the future of Cuba includes the responsibility to help of all those who love her. This happens in any family. Those who make a commitment, those who express solidarity, are those who respond to problems constructively. I am capable of respecting and working with those who do not think like me. I hope that this grows.
As for a concert in Miami, are there poor neighborhoods there? I would like to have a concert there, in a neighborhood
On at least one occasion, in 1986, Carlos Alberto Montaner tried to incite Pablo Milanés and you to change sides and place your artistic success at the service of the regime change strategy imposed from the outside. You answered, “No one pays us to defend what we believe in. Every day we do a rigorous but necessary examination of our own consciences, and if we disagree with something, just as when we agree, we sing and assume the task in Cuba and wherever necessary.” Has it been hard, this “need to live without a price,” at the same time that you conduct “a rigorous but necessary examination” of your conscience? Have you ever thought of alternatives?
Living in Cuba, materially speaking, can be tough for anyone, Arturo. Even for those who have enjoyed some success and have some money. If you live in Miami or Madrid, no one questions your good fortune.
Back in 1961 (when I was 14 years old) we began to experience shortages, particularly of medicines. We got momentary relief when members of Brigade 2506 [Cuban Exiles caught at the Bay of Pigs] were exchanged for supplies. But the material limitations the Cuban people have suffered, all kinds of inconveniences, shortages in daily life, would suffice to write a series a thousand times juicier than The Sopranos, or even the Bible; the crucified one would not be one man but a whole population.
As for the circulation of ideas, this has also been complicated. The ultra-defensive mentality brought on by so many acts of aggression and some formulaic interpretations of what a socialist society should be, creates conflict. There have been compulsive periods, times which mark the lives of many people and which bring us down.
The truth is that throughout time, in all countries and systems there have been good people and less good people. There are intelligent beings and non-intelligent ones everywhere. In all settings there are honest, altruistic people who are in solidarity with others; there are also mediocre, opportunistic and corrupt people. It never occurred to me to blame the Revolution for a bad time I may have experienced. Ever since I was young, I have realized that these are matters of human beings, circumstances. One day you get kicked, but the next day someone kisses you.
Starting with oneself, there is nothing perfect in this world, sometimes not even the ideas that seemed best at a previous time. Factors that raise questions always arise, sowing doubt, expanding our perspective. This occurs naturally, without outside intervention. But just imagine what is provoked by a project for the emancipation of a small country that is challenging the most powerful and vicious interests on the planet.
We were recently talking about such issues on Otra cita (https://otracitasc.blogspot.com), the blog that continues where mine, Segunda cita, left off. We came to the conclusion that thinking is very important, but what we do after we think is even more important.
In the US, without excluding Miami, there are Cuban emigrants who hold patriotic values. The right wing has tried to construct an identity that requires taking on their bitterness and hatred, but many, including those who were born there, feel a dual identity because they are from there but also from Cuba to multiple degrees. Being a North American does not invalidate their being Cuban, and vice-versa. I have cousins in Miami who left Cuba in the 1950s and 1960s who had to listen to your songs with their car windows closed during times of intolerance. Is that no longer necessary? How important is the cultural exchange between the United States and Cuba, as well as between Cubans in Cuba and those in the United States in terms of a rapprochement?
I do not have the slightest doubt, and I said this several times when there was distrust over Obama’s openness, that with this exchange Cuba’s interests would win out. What I am saying is that in the United States they have a distorted image of what Cuba is, even more distorted than what Cubans may think of the US. And I think that is why most of the US administrations do not allow their citizens to go to Cuba. They don’t like what might result from that exchange because the Americans could arrive and meet people who are fun, friendly, well-educated, and appealing. In addition to any economic benefits we might get from such an exchange, how could they continue to justify their policy of suffocating a population like that?
In “Llegué por San Antonio de los Baños” you sing of Martí’s vision that “homeland is humanity” that starts where we are born. One area in which we Cubans could cooperate despite our differences is by improving our towns and cities, countryside, rivers, dams, and beaches. For example, in China and Vietnam many emigres contribute a lot and even invest in and collaborate with their hometowns and the land of their ancestors. How important is what you call “the universal detail of my native region” to be “a little bit better and much less selfish?”
“… But the universal detail of my native region was a man opening a trail on the clock.”
This means that everywhere we have something basic in common: we are born as human beings and the succession of generations gives us the opportunity to learn and improve.
I have lived my 75 years in Cuba and can affirm responsibly that here we are more than ready to share with any nation, of course including with the United States of America.
It is impossible to compare us with China or Vietnam. No bank in the world will give a loan to Cuba because the United States, thanks to its extraterritorial laws, would impose millions of dollars in fines. There are very few shipping companies that dare to send ships with supplies to Cuba, because the US would then prohibit those ships from entering its ports. China is a very wealthy country with many natural resources. Vietnam is smaller but also rich. It endured plunder, indignities, and wars, but it is not currently blockaded and trades freely with the world, even the United States. We Cubans have been denied that for over 60 years, and when we have been allowed to trade, we are forced to pay in cash with suitcases full of dollars.
We distribute our doctors and vaccines around the world. Thousands of professionals from the third world have been educated at our universities. For decades Cuba has been showing that it is a civilized country, that it works on the basis of peaceful coexistence—we promoted and hosted the Colombian peace talks. However, Cuba has been stigmatized by an imperial government with a long history of abuse in many places.
I am quite aware that we need to be a little bit better (and sometimes more than a little bit) in some ways. But it is up to us to fix our shortcomings and it is inadmissible that we be blackmailed for that, as if we were a stain. For this reason, out of basic decency, I will first of all close ranks with my people who have been subjected to systematic torture for six decades. Some US leaders are lacking not a little bit, but a large dose of humanity. I hope that our descendants over there will understand this and decide to act accordingly.
Arturo López-Levy is a Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA). He is a professor of international relations and politics at Holy Names University in Oakland, California, and author of “Raúl Castro and the New Cuba: A Close-up of Change.” Twitter, @turylevy.
This interview was translated from the original Spanish by Jill Clark-Gollub, COHA’s Assistant Editor/Translator.
Cubans celebrating May 1st, Labor Day, in Habana (Photo credit: Nath Zamorano).
What do electoral laws, social media, climate change and secure work have in common?
All have been prioritised for reform by the Labor government – and all are areas where democratic reform is essential. In fact, the links between these four priorities provide a unique opportunity for change.
Disinformation and manipulation
The age-old problem of political falsehoods has been given steroids by the speed, targeting and anonymity of digital media. Disinformation is besieging democracies across the world – and Australia is not immune.
To tackle the “deceit [that is] degrading our democracy” Labor’s national platform commits the government to introducing truth in political advertising laws. Recently reiterated by Special Minister of State Don Farrell, this pledge should be welcomed. While truth in political advertising laws must be carefully designed, measures are undoubtedly needed to protect the information environment in which Australian democracy operates.
Indeed, the reform focus should broaden to other forms of political manipulation enabled by “big data”. It should grapple with the threats to democracy and political autonomy posed by “surveillance capitalism”, including micro-targeting and the “choice architecture” created by big tech companies. These tools have fuelled (echo chamber polarisation and put a premium on emotional appeals.
A key priority here, which dovetails with the government’s data transparency initiatives, is “radical transparency”. The other is coverage of digital campaigning under political finance laws, to which we’ll return.
Money in politics
Labor’s national platform commits the government to
minimise the disproportionate influence of vested interests in the democratic process [including] through the introduction of spending caps.
Laissez-faire regulation has not only resulted in the federal government becoming a laggard domestically and internationally. It has also allowed excessive campaign spending, notably by Clive Palmer and his United Australia Party, which undermines the fairness of elections. Farrell has confirmed Labor’s commitment to “overdue campaign finance reform”.
To be effective, spending caps should cover all digital campaigning (including “cyber armies” and the gathering and use of data. They should be accompanied by other measures, particularly:
Democracy and the climate crisis are linked by money. As David Attenborough has pointed out, powerful vested interests are “the most formidable obstacle” to switching to clean energy. Australia bears out the truth of this observation: our fossil fuel industries have blocked climate action for decades. And political donations and lobbying are a key part of their arsenal.
Effective political finance regulation has multiple dividends: it promotes political equality, curbs corruption and enables climate action.
But there is a deeper connection between democracy and the climate crisis. The very same features lauded as democracy’s defining virtues – popular sovereignty, the accountability and responsiveness of elected officials, public debate and deliberation – can hinder climate action.
Democracy at its worst – dominated by inexpert and ineffectual judgements, short-termism, and slow, cumbersome policy processes – can seem like a fair-weather regime unable to navigate crises, and particularly existential crises such as climate change. For some, “democracy is the planet’s biggest enemy”.
The climate crisis will require significant democratic innovation to deal with shortcomings in the way our democracy operates. Four pillars of reform are central: a democratic planning state; an ethos of solidarity; invigorated multilateralism; fair and inclusive politics.
But the conversation has barely begun; progressing it should be one of the reform priorities of the Labor government.
The world of work
The final priority for electoral reform puts democracy to work – literally.
The climate crisis highlights the importance of democratising work. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate has stressed that a climate-safe future requires “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. The International Labour Organization has said the impact of the climate crisis on the world of work will be “akin to an industrial revolution”.
Critical here are “a just transition of the [fossil fuel] workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs”, as emphasised by the Paris Agreement.
The International Labour Organization has identified workers’ voices (including through trade unions) as an essential element of a just transition. Labor’s policy platform affirms the Paris Agreement’s “requirement for just transition planning involving local communities, unions, and industry”.
A manifesto signed by more than 6,000 leading scholars proposes similar action, issuing a call to “[d]emocratise firms; decommodify work; stop treating human beings as resources so that we can focus together on sustaining life on this planet”.
A just transition connects the Labor government’s climate action with its secure work agenda. Voice security is a key part of labour security.
Democracy should extend to workplaces. After all, our working lives are a key part of our lives.
Labor’s constitution recognises this fact by calling for
the application of democracy in industry to increase the opportunities for people to work in satisfying, healthy and humane conditions; and to participate in and to increase their control over the decision making processes affecting them.
Joo-Cheong Tham has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, European Trade Union Institute and International IDEA. He is a Director of the Centre for Public Integrity; a National Councillor and Victorian Division Assistant Secretary (Academic Staff)-elect of the National Tertiary Education Union.
The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are astounding. With its deep infrared eyes, the telescope is illuminating regions of the Universe with never-before-possible clarity.
The telescope is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. More than 300 universities, companies, space agencies and organisations are involved.
In the excitement, it’s easy to forget the Webb telescope has been the subject of controversy. It’s named after a NASA administrator who has been associated with the persecution of queer people in the “Lavender Scare” of the 1950s and ‘60s.
James Edwin Webb was born in 1906 in North Carolina. He gained degrees in education and law, and spent time in the US Marine Corps.
He held a senior position in the State Department from 1949 until the early 1950s.
In 1961, US President John F. Kennedy appointed Webb to the position of NASA administrator, the second since the agency was established in 1958.
In this role, he was responsible for the Apollo program to land humans on the Moon. He was very successful in lobbying for support from Congress, and also navigated NASA through the difficult aftermath of an incident in which three Apollo 1 astronauts lost their lives in a capsule fire on the ground.
From L to R: James Webb, Wernher von Braun, and Kurt Debus at a Kennedy Space Centre award ceremony in 1964. NASA
Webb pushed for science to be prioritised in the Cold War environment, where every space mission was a political tool. He also promoted “psychological warfare” (or propaganda).
Webb left NASA in 1968, before Apollo 11 flew to the Moon. In later life, he served on various advisory boards and was involved with the Smithsonian Institution, the US flagship cluster of museums, education and research centres. He died in 1992.
What was the ‘Lavender Scare’?
During the Cold War, Western capitalist democracies feared communist infiltration. This became known as the “Red Scare”. The “Lavender Scare” was entwined with this paranoia.
Proponents of these ideas argued that because of the social stigma attached to their sexuality, LGBTQ+ people were at risk of being blackmailed into becoming Soviet spies. From the late 1940s, under the influence of Republican politician Joseph McCarthy, LGBTQ+ people were purged from US government employment.
Webb’s exact role in the Lavender Scare is hotly debated. Several astronomers petitioning to have the telescope renamed have noted Webb (while at the State Department) was involved in high-level meetings about Lavender Scare policies.
The records clearly show that Webb planned and participated in meetings during which he handed over homophobic material. There is no record of him choosing to stand up for the humanity of those being persecuted.
David Johnson, a historian at the University of South Florida in Tampa who wrote the 2004 book The Lavender Scare, says he knows of no evidence that Webb led or instigated persecution. Webb did attend a White House meeting on the threat allegedly posed by gay people, but the context of the meeting was to contain the hysteria that members of Congress were stirring up. ‘I don’t see him as having any sort of leadership role in the Lavender Scare,’ says Johnson.
Is it any better if Webb was passively enacting the policies rather than leading the persecution? Other government departments did actively oppose the investigation and sacking of LGBTQ+ employees.
Echoes of controversy
Space instruments are usually named via a consultation process, often with the public invited to contribute their ideas. It’s also not unusual for spacecraft names to be changed. For example, the 1991 Gamma Ray Observatory was renamed after physicist Arthur Holly Compton after its launch.
The Webb telescope’s name was reportedly chosen by NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe in 2002.
NASA’s official response to the controversy is that there is “no evidence at this point that warrants changing the name of the telescope”.
Whatever Webb’s role in the Lavender Scare, the question for some observers seems to come down to whether he was personally homophobic.
Framing the issue like this has echoes of another controversy: the complicity of German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun in the Third Reich.
Today, NASA mentions von Braun’s Nazi past on its website. But space historian Michael J. Neufeld says “his Nazi record was not widely known until after his death”.
Many excuse von Braun’s political allegiance by arguing he just wanted to launch rockets into space.
The James Webb Space Telescope is a touchstone for issues that have come to the fore in recent times.
For example, there has been a backlash against the memorialisation of colonial “heroes” who perpetrated violence against Indigenous and enslaved people, leading to statues all over the world being toppled.
Some decry the idea of inclusivity as the ultimate in “wokeness”. Others argue maintaining historical barriers to participation in science – based on race, class, gender and disability – means we lose potential talent.
Science is meant to be objective and have no prejudice. In reality, scientists and science administrators are people like any others, with their own ideologies and flaws.
The question is whether we judge them by the standards of their time, or by those we hold today.
In the end, perhaps we should remember that the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 proclaims that space belongs to all humanity.
Alice Gorman is a member of the Advisory Council of the Space Industry Association of Australia, and Vice-President of the Adelaide Chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are astounding. With its deep infrared eyes, the telescope is illuminating regions of the Universe with never-before-possible clarity.
The telescope is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. More than 300 universities, companies, space agencies and organisations are involved.
In the excitement, it’s easy to forget the Webb telescope has been the subject of controversy. It’s named after a NASA administrator who has been associated with the persecution of queer people in the “Lavender Scare” of the 1950s and ‘60s.
James Edwin Webb was born in 1906 in North Carolina. He gained degrees in education and law, and spent time in the US Marine Corps.
He held a senior position in the State Department from 1949 until the early 1950s.
In 1961, US President John F. Kennedy appointed Webb to the position of NASA administrator, the second since the agency was established in 1958.
In this role, he was responsible for the Apollo program to land humans on the Moon. He was very successful in lobbying for support from Congress, and also navigated NASA through the difficult aftermath of an incident in which three Apollo 1 astronauts lost their lives in a capsule fire on the ground.
From L to R: James Webb, Wernher von Braun, and Kurt Debus at a Kennedy Space Centre award ceremony in 1964. NASA
Webb pushed for science to be prioritised in the Cold War environment, where every space mission was a political tool. He also promoted “psychological warfare” (or propaganda).
Webb left NASA in 1968, before Apollo 11 flew to the Moon. In later life, he served on various advisory boards and was involved with the Smithsonian Institution, the US flagship cluster of museums, education and research centres. He died in 1992.
What was the ‘Lavender Scare’?
During the Cold War, Western capitalist democracies feared communist infiltration. This became known as the “Red Scare”. The “Lavender Scare” was entwined with this paranoia.
Proponents of these ideas argued that because of the social stigma attached to their sexuality, LGBTQ+ people were at risk of being blackmailed into becoming Soviet spies. From the late 1940s, under the influence of Republican politician Joseph McCarthy, LGBTQ+ people were purged from US government employment.
Webb’s exact role in the Lavender Scare is hotly debated. Several astronomers petitioning to have the telescope renamed have noted Webb (while at the State Department) was involved in high-level meetings about Lavender Scare policies.
The records clearly show that Webb planned and participated in meetings during which he handed over homophobic material. There is no record of him choosing to stand up for the humanity of those being persecuted.
David Johnson, a historian at the University of South Florida in Tampa who wrote the 2004 book The Lavender Scare, says he knows of no evidence that Webb led or instigated persecution. Webb did attend a White House meeting on the threat allegedly posed by gay people, but the context of the meeting was to contain the hysteria that members of Congress were stirring up. ‘I don’t see him as having any sort of leadership role in the Lavender Scare,’ says Johnson.
Is it any better if Webb was passively enacting the policies rather than leading the persecution? Other government departments did actively oppose the investigation and sacking of LGBTQ+ employees.
Echoes of controversy
Space instruments are usually named via a consultation process, often with the public invited to contribute their ideas. It’s also not unusual for spacecraft names to be changed. For example, the 1991 Gamma Ray Observatory was renamed after physicist Arthur Holly Compton after its launch.
The Webb telescope’s name was reportedly chosen by NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe in 2002.
NASA’s official response to the controversy is that there is “no evidence at this point that warrants changing the name of the telescope”.
Whatever Webb’s role in the Lavender Scare, the question for some observers seems to come down to whether he was personally homophobic.
Framing the issue like this has echoes of another controversy: the complicity of German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun in the Third Reich.
Today, NASA mentions von Braun’s Nazi past on its website. But space historian Michael J. Neufeld says “his Nazi record was not widely known until after his death”.
Many excuse von Braun’s political allegiance by arguing he just wanted to launch rockets into space.
The James Webb Space Telescope is a touchstone for issues that have come to the fore in recent times.
For example, there has been a backlash against the memorialisation of colonial “heroes” who perpetrated violence against Indigenous and enslaved people, leading to statues all over the world being toppled.
Some decry the idea of inclusivity as the ultimate in “wokeness”. Others argue maintaining historical barriers to participation in science – based on race, class, gender and disability – means we lose potential talent.
Science is meant to be objective and have no prejudice. In reality, scientists and science administrators are people like any others, with their own ideologies and flaws.
The question is whether we judge them by the standards of their time, or by those we hold today.
In the end, perhaps we should remember that the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 proclaims that space belongs to all humanity.
Alice Gorman is a member of the Advisory Council of the Space Industry Association of Australia, and Vice-President of the Adelaide Chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
One of the world’s most popular social media platforms, TikTok, is now host to a steady stream of deepfake videos.
Deepfakes are videos in which a subject’s face or body has been digitally altered to make them look like someone else – usually a famous person.
One notable example is the @deeptomcriuse TikTok account, which has posted dozens of deepfake videos impersonating Tom Cruise, and attracted some 3.6 million followers.
Deepfakes gained a lot of media attention last year, with videos impersonating Hollywood actor Tom Cruise going viral.
In another example, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems to be confessing to conspiratorial data sharing. More recently there have been a number of silly videos featuring actors such as Robert Pattinson and Keanu Reeves.
Although deepfakes are often used creatively or for fun, they’re increasingly being deployed in disinformation campaigns, for identity fraud and to discredit public figures and celebrities.
And while the technology needed to make them is sophisticated, it’s becoming increasingly accessible, leaving detection software and regulation lagging behind.
One thing is for sure – deepfakes are here to stay. So what can we do about them?
Varying roles
The manipulation of text, images and footage has long been a bedrock of interactivity. And deepfakes are no exception; they’re the outcome of a deep-seated desire to participate in culture, storytelling, art and remixing.
The technology is used extensively in the digital arts and satire. It provides more refined (and cheaper) techniques for visual insertions, compared to green screens and computer-generated imagery.
Comedian Jordan Peele provides a voiceover of a deepfake with former US President Barack Obama.
But they’re also available for misuse
At the same time, deepfake technology is thought to present several social problems such as:
deepfakes being used as “proof” for other fake news and disinformation
deepfakes being used to discredit celebrities and others whose livelihood depends on sharing content while maintaining a reputation
difficulties providing verifiable footage for political communication, health messaging and electoral campaigns
people’s faces being used in deepfake pornography.
The last point is of particular concern. In 2019, deepfake detection software firm Deeptrace found 96% of 14,000 deepfakes were pornographic in nature. Free apps such as the now-defunct DeepNude 2.0 have been used to make clothed women appear nude in footage, often for revenge porn and blackmail.
In Australia, deepfake apps have even allowed perpetrators to circumvent “revenge porn” laws – an issue expected to soon become more severe.
Beyond this, deepfakes are also used in identity fraud and scams, particularly in the form of video messages from a trusted “colleague” or “relative” requesting a money transfer. One study found identity fraud using digital manipulation cost US financial institutions US$20 billion in 2020].
A growing concern
The creators of deepfakes stress the amount of time and effort it takes to make these video look realistic. Take Chris Ume, the visual effects and AI artist behind the @deeptomcruise TikTok account. When this account madeheadlines last year, Ume told The Verge “you can’t do it by just pressing a button”.
But there’s good evidence deepfakes are becoming easier to make. Researchers at the United Nation Global Pulse initiative have demonstrated how speeches can be realistically faked in just 13 minutes.
As more deepfake apps are developed, we can expect lesser-skilled people to increasingly produce authentic-looking deepfakes. Just think about how much photo editing has boomed in the past decade.
Legislation, regulation and detection software are struggling to keep up with advances in deepfake technology.
In 2019, Facebook came in for criticism for failing to remove a doctored video of American politician Nancy Pelosi, after it fell short of its definition of a deepfake.
In 2020, Twitter banned the sharing of synthetic media that may deceive, confuse or harm people (except where a label is applied). TikTok did the same. And YouTube banned deepfakes related to the 2020 US federal election.
But even if these are well-meaning policies, it’s unlikely platform moderators will be able to react to reports and remove deepfakes fast enough.
In Australia, lawyers at the NSW firm Ashurst have said existing copyright and defamation laws could fall short of protecting Australians against deepfakes.
And while attempts to develop laws have begun overseas, these are focused on political communication. For example, California has made it illegal to post or distribute digitally manipulated content of a candidate during an election – but has no protections for non-politicians or celebrities.
How to detect a deepfake
One of the best remedies against harmful deepfakes is for users to equip themselves with as many detection skills as they can.
Usually, the first sign of a deepfake is that something will feel “off”. If so, look more closely at the subject’s face and ask yourself:
is the face too smooth, or are there unusual cheekbone shadows?
do the eyelid and mouth movements seem disjointed, forced or otherwise unnatural?
does the hair look fake? Current deepfake technology struggles to maintain the original look of hair (especially facial hair).
Context is also important:
ask yourself what the figure is saying or doing. Are they disavowing vaccines, or performing in a porn clip? Anything that seems out of character or contrary to public knowledge will be relevant here
search online for keywords about the video, or the person in it, as many suspicious deepfakes will have already been debunked
try to judge the reliability of the source – does it seem genuine? If you’re on a social media platform, is the poster’s account verified?
A lot of the above is basic digital literacy and requires exercising good judgment. Where common sense fails, there are some more in-depth ways to try to spot deepfakes. You can:
search for keywords used in the video to see if there’s a public transcript of what’s being said – outlets often cover quotes by high-profile politicians and celebrities within 72 hours
take a screenshot of the video playing and do a Google reverse image search. This can reveal whether an original version of the video exists, which you may then compare to the dubious one
run any suspicious videos featuring a “colleague” or “relative” by that individual directly.
Finally, if you do manage to spot a deepfake, don’t keep it to yourself. Always hit the report button.
Rob Cover ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
Last week it was reported an Australian warship had, in early July, been closely followed by a Chinese guided-missile destroyer, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, and multiple military aircraft as it travelled through the East China Sea.
This incident followed a confrontation on May 26, when an Australian maritime surveillance plane was dangerously intercepted by a Chinese fighter over the South China Sea.
Reportedly, the Chinese fighter flew treacherously close to the Australian plane, releasing flares, before cutting across its path and dropping chaff (a cloud of aluminium fibre used as a decoy against radar).
While there are good reasons not to exaggerate these events, the bad news is these incidents are almost certain to continue. When they do occur, it’s important to place them within their broader historical and geopolitical context and not sensationalise them – we must not frame them as if we’re on the brink of war.
The good news: 3 reasons not to panic
There are three reasons why the significance of these events shouldn’t be exaggerated.
First, Asia’s seas are among the world’s busiest. The warships of different navies are constantly operating in close proximity with each other and most of these interactions are professional and even courteous. This includes most encounters with the Chinese navy.
A second, and related, point is that both the Chinese and Australian navies have grown significantly in size over the past decade. More ships means more total days at sea, which means more opportunities for the navies to come into contact.
Most of these encounters are innocuous. In our research on Australia’s naval diplomacy, for instance, the team at Macquarie University investigated reports a Chinese ship had spied on HMAS Adelaide visiting Fiji.
The reality, however, was the Chinese ship was deployed semi-permanently to the South Pacific as a satellite relay and regularly came in-and-out of Suva (Fiji’s capital) for supplies. It was nothing more than a chance run-in.
Third, although confrontations aren’t common, they are also far from unprecedented. During the Cold War, the warships of the United States and the Soviet Union frequently sparred. Few forward deployments occurred without some contact with the opposing forces that may have included overflights, shadowing or dangerous manoeuvring.
Indeed, potentially dangerous interactions were common enough that in 1972 the Americans and Soviets signed the Incidents at Sea (INCSEA) agreement. The agreement spelt out the “rules of the road”. The superpowers also committed to an annual meeting between their senior naval officers, with the hosting responsibility alternating between them.
The agreement didn’t eliminate incidents at sea, but it did create a mechanism for the two parties to vent their frustrations, voice their protests and work constructively on solutions. As the meetings were between the two nations’ top professional naval officers, there was a high degree of mutual respect and a genuine attempt to make the seas a safer place for their sailors.
The US attempted to replicate their Soviet agreement with China. In 1998, the US and China agreed to the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, which copied many of the successful parts of the Soviet agreement, including the annual meeting between their admirals to discuss concerning incidents.
The challenge, however, is that the geopolitical backdrop to the US-China agreement is significantly different from its Cold War antecedent. During the Cold War, tensions at sea rose and fell just as they did on land. However, the areas where the Soviet Union attempted to assert its claims (such as the Sea of Okhotsk and the Barents Sea) were isolated and icy and generally unimportant to everyone except the Soviets. The Americans would prod there occasionally on intelligence gathering, freedom of navigation operations, or simply to rile up their rivals – but on the whole both sides understood the game.
In contrast, China has claimed exclusive coastal territorial sovereignty over the majority of the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and large parts of the East China Sea. These are among the most geopolitically important and busiest waterways in the world.
Beijing’s options for convincing regional states to recognise its claims are limited, especially when foreign navies continue to traverse these waters, dismissively ignoring China’s sovereignty declarations.
Politically, China could attempt to horse trade, such as we’ll treat you as the custodians of the South Pacific if you accept our claims to the South China Sea. Or use economic and diplomatic coercion.
In Australia’s case, neither of these strategies are likely to be successful as they would undermine our relationship with the US, and there’s the fear China will renege in the future.
This leaves tactical deterrence. Describing how deterrence works, American economist Thomas Schelling used the analogy of two people in a row boat where one starts “rocking the boat” dangerously, threatening to tip it over unless the other one does all the rowing. The threat is shared equally between them, but the boat rocker is counting on the other to back down because their appetite for risk is lower.
Confrontations in the air and sea are risky for both the perpetrator and the target. On 1 April 2001, for instance, a Chinese fighter collided with an American signals intelligence aircraft. The American plane was forced to make an emergency landing on Hainan Island, while the Chinese plane crashed and the pilot died.
What China is counting on is Australia not being as risk tolerant as they are. They hope Australia will blink first. But, Australia has shown no indication it will stop deploying to the region. Indeed, the aircraft that was threatened and damaged by chaff on May 26 was one of two Australian aircraft flying out of the Philippines at the time. The Australians were not deterred and the second aircraft appears to have flown missions on May 27, May 30 and June 2 through the same airspace as the incident occurred.
As China and Australia have few other options than to continue doing what they’re doing, these incidents look likely to continue.
When they occur, however, it’s important they’re not taken out of their historical and operational contexts.
Adam Lockyer receives funding from the Department of Defence through its Strategic Policy Grant Program. The funding supports his ongoing research on conventional maritime deterrence.
With COVID case numbers expected to rise in Australia over the coming weeks and months there is significant concern the numbers of severely sick patients may overwhelm hospitals.
Thankfully, over time we are learning more about COVID and now have a range of medicines that are effective in treating it, including antivirals.
Which medicine a patient receives, if they even need one at all, will depend on the severity of their symptoms and whether they have any underlying health problems.
When the COVID pandemic began, we didn’t have any drugs to treat the virus. Instead, we had to rely on drugs that could treat COVID symptoms while the body healed itself.
In Australia, there are other antibody drugs available but they are not currently widely used. This includes ronapreve, which is less effective against the omicron strain of the virus, and regkirona which is still being explored in clinical trials.
Other drugs are also used for COVID but, again, they don’t treat the virus. Instead they are mostly used to reduce inflammation in the lungs.
These medicines have all been shown to work in human clinical trials and are either fully or provisionally approved by the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration for the treatment of COVID.
Each COVID medicine works in a different way. Evusheld and sotrovimab comprise antibody molecules that neutralise the virus and block its entry into human cells, whereas paxlovid works by stopping a key enzyme the virus needs to replicate. Both lagevrio and remdesivir work by getting incorporated into the virus’ genetic material and causing mutations to stop the virus from replicating.
Paxlovid and lagevrio come in tablet form while remdesivir, sotrovimab, and evusheld come as injections that need to be administered by a doctor.
Who you are and whether you are at home or in hospital will determine your treatment. Shutterstock
Clinical guidelines direct health staff as to which drug they need to administer to each patient.
Most people who test positive for COVID will not need treatment with an antiviral drug, as current COVID variants tend to induce mild symptoms that can be managed with rest and isolation at home.
For some patients managing COVID at home, certain health factors mean their doctor will prescribe a COVID drug. This includes people who have a poor functioning immune system, those who are not vaccinated or are not up-to-date with vaccinations, and those who are at a high risk of severe disease.
These risk factors include respiratory conditions such as asthma, cardiovascular diseases including high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes and kidney failure.
Where you’re treated
If a patient is sick enough to need hospitalisation, specialist doctors will decide if and what COVID drug to prescribe.
Immunocompromised people over the age of 18, and people who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander origin who are over 30 and at high risk, are also eligible for PBS-subsidised lagevrio or paxlovid.
These drugs can be prescribed by a general practitioner (GP) and accessed through a local community pharmacy. If a patient is not able to see their GP in person, a COVID drug can be prescribed by booking a telehealth appointment with a doctor. The drug can then be delivered to their home from their local pharmacy. Importantly, these drugs must be started within five days of symptom onset.
In some instances an at-home COVID patient may require an injection-only drug such as remdesivir or evusheld, which are only available through the patient’s local hospital network. Sotrovimab is another COVID drug that is only administered in healthcare facilities. This is because patients need to be monitored after they receive the infusion. General practitioners will refer their patients to a local hospital for these treatments.
All medicines have side effects, even common medications like paracetamol and aspirin.
If patients do experience side effects, these are likely to be specific to the drug being taken. Some of the possible side effects of lagevrio include mild to moderate diarrhoea, nausea and dizziness in less than 2% of those trialled.
For paxlovid, side effects can include changes in taste, diarrhoea, headache, and vomiting. Serious side effects, which affect fewer than 2% of patients, include liver problems which can cause prolonged nausea or vomiting, loss of appetite, stomach pain, yellowing eyes or skin, and dark urine.
Some of the side effects of remdesivir include rash, sweating, fever, shortness of breath, swelling, changes in blood pressure or heart rate, nausea, and shivering.
Patients who experience side effects while taking a COVID drug should see their doctor if they are concerned. If a patient experiences any severe side effects, such as signs of liver problems, then they should call their doctor immediately or go straight to their local hospital.
Associate Professor Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, a member of the Australasian Pharmaceutical Science Association, and member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Nial is the science director of Canngea Pty Ltd, chief scientific officer of Vairea Skincare LLC, and a Standards Australia panel member for sunscreen agents.
Elise Schubert is a registered pharmacist and a PhD Candidate receiving scholarship from the University of Sydney and Canngea Pty Ltd.
Dr Pegah Varamini has received funding from the National Breast Cancer Foundation, Therapeutic Innovation Australia (TIA), Pipeline Accelerator Grant, SPARK Oceania, Tour de Cure, Sydney Catalyst, Controlled Release Society, and Australian Pain Society. She is a lecturer and the head of Breast Cancer Targeting & Drug Delivery laboratory at the University of Sydney Pharmacy School. Pegah is affiliated with the World Health Organisation as a scientific advisor within the Global Breast Cancer Initiative and is the Co-Chair of NanoPharma cluster within NanoHealth Initiative at the Sydney Nano Institute.
Climate change is exacerbating pressures on every Australian ecosystem and Australia now has more foreign plant species than native, according to the highly anticipated State of the Environment Report released today.
The report also found the number of listed threatened species rose 8% since 2016 and more extinctions are expected in the next decades.
The document represents thousands of hours of work over two years by more than 30 experts. It’s a sobering read, but there are some bright spots.
Australia has produced a national state of environment report every five years since 1995. They assess every aspect of Australia’s environment and heritage, covering rivers, oceans, air, ice, land and urban areas. The last report was released in 2017.
This report goes further than its predecessors, by describing how our environment is affecting the health and well-being of Australians. It is also the first to include Indigenous co-authors.
As chief authors of the report, we present its key findings here. They include new chapters dedicated to extreme events and Indigenous voices.
The Great Barrier Reef suffered four mass bleaching events since 2016. Shutterstock
1. Australia’s environment is generally deteriorating
There have been continued declines in the amount and condition of our natural capital – native vegetation, soil, wetlands, reefs, rivers and biodiversity. Such resources benefit Australians by providing food, clean water, cultural connections and more.
The number of plant and animal species listed as threatened in June 2021 was 1,918, up from 1,774 in 2016. Gang-gang cockatoos and the Woorrentinta (northern hopping-mouse) are among those recently listed as endangered.
Australia’s coasts are also under threat from, for instance, extreme weather events and land-based invasive species.
Our nearshore reefs are in overall poor condition due to poor water quality, invasive species and marine heatwaves. Inland water systems, including in the Murray Darling Basin, are under increasing pressure.
Nationally, land clearing remains high. Extensive areas were cleared in Queensland and New South Wales over the last five years. Clearing native vegetation is a major cause of habitat loss and fragmentation, and has been implicated in the national listing of most Australia’s threatened species.
2. Climate change threatens every ecosystem
Climate change is compounding ongoing and past damage from land clearing, invasive species, pollution and urban expansion.
The intensity and frequency of extreme weather events are changing. Over the last five years, extreme events such as floods, droughts, wildfires, storms, and heatwaves have affected every part of Australia.
Seasonal fire periods are becoming longer. In NSW, for example, the bushfire season now extends to almost eight months. Extreme events are also affecting ecosystems in ways never before documented.
For example, the downstream effects of the 2019-2020 bushfires introduced a range of contaminants to coastal estuaries, in the first global record of bushfires impacting estuarine habitat quality.
3. Indigenous knowledge and management are helping deliver on-ground change
This includes traditional fire management, which is being recognised as vital knowledge by land management organisations and government departments.
For example, Indigenous rangers manage 44% of the national protected area estate, and more than 2,000 rangers are funded under the federal government’s Indigenous rangers program.
Work must still be done to empower Indigenous communities and enable Indigenous knowledge systems to improve environmental and social outcomes.
4. Environmental management isn’t well coordinated
Australia’s investment is not proportional to the grave environmental challenge. The area of land and sea under some form of conservation protection has increased, but the overall level of protection is declining within reserves.
We’re reducing the quantity and quality of native habitat outside protected areas through, for instance, urban expansion on land and over-harvesting in the sea.
The five urban areas with the most significant forest and woodland habitat loss were Brisbane, Gold Coast to Tweed Heads, Townsville, Sunshine Coast and Sydney. Between 2000 and 2017, at least 20,212 hectares were destroyed in these five areas combined, with 12,923 hectares destroyed in Queensland alone.
Australia is also increasingly relying on costly ways to conserve biodiversity. This includes restoration of habitat, reintroducing threatened species, translocation (moving a species from a threatened habitat to a safer one), and ex situ conservation (protecting species in a zoo, botanical garden or by preserving genetic material).
5. Environmental decline and destruction is harming our well-being
In this report we document the direct effects of environmental damage on human health, for example from bushfire smoke.
The indirect benefits of a healthy environment to mental health and well-being are harder to quantify. But emerging evidence suggests people who manage their environment according to their values and culture have improved well-being, such as for Indigenous rangers and communities.
Environmental destruction also costs our economy billions of dollars, with climate change and biodiversity loss representing both national and global financial risks.
Climate change is hitting ecosystems hard
Previous reports mostly spoke of climate change impacts as happening in future. In this report, we document significant climate harms already evident from the tropics to the poles.
As Australia’s east coast emerges from another “unusual” flood, this report introduces a new chapter dedicated to extreme events. Many have been made more intense, widespread and likely due to climate change.
We document the national impacts of extreme floods, droughts, heatwaves, storms and wildfires over the past five years. And while we’ve reported on immediate impacts – millions of animals killed and habitats burnt, enormous areas of reef bleached, and people’s livelihoods and homes lost – many longer-term effects are still to play out.
Extreme conditions put immense stress on species already threatened by habitat loss and invasive species. We expect more species extinctions over the next decades.
Some 23,000 spectacled flying foxes were killed in a 2018 heatwave. Shutterstock
An extreme heatwave in 2018, for example, killed some 23,000 spectacled flying foxes. In 2019, the species was uplisted from vulnerable to endangered.
Many Australian ecosystems have evolved to rebound from extreme “natural” events such as bushfires. But the frequency, intensity, and compounding nature of recent events are greater than they’ve experienced throughout their recent evolutionary history.
For example, marine heatwaves caused mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef in 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2022. Such frequent disturbances leave little time for recovery.
Indeed, ecological theory suggests frequently disturbed ecosystems will shift to a “weedy” state, where only the species that live fast and reproduce quickly will thrive.
This trend will bring profound shifts in ecosystem structure and function. It also means we’ll have to shift how we manage and rely on ecosystems – including how we harvest, hunt and otherwise benefit from them.
Including Indigenous voices
Indigenous people of Australia have cared for the lands and seas over countless generations and continue to do so today.
In Australia, a complex web of government laws and agreements relate to Indigenous people and the environment. Overall, they are not adequate to deliver the rights Indigenous people seek: responsibility for and stewardship of their Country including lands and seas, plants and animals, and heritage.
For the first time, this report has a separate Indigenous chapter, informed by Indigenous consultation meetings, which highlights the importance of caring for Country.
Including an Indigenous voice has required us to change the previous approach of reporting on the environment separately from people. Instead, we’ve emphasised how Country is connected to people’s well-being, and the interconnectedness of environment and culture.
Failures of environmental management
Australia needs better and entirely new approaches to environmental management. For example, the inclusion of climate change in environmental management and resilience strategies is increasing, but it’s not universal.
As well as climate stresses, habitat loss and degradation remain the main threats to land-based species in Australia, impacting nearly 70% of threatened species.
More than a third of Australia’s eucalypt woodlands have been extensively cleared, and the situation is worse for some other major vegetation groups.
Experts say within 20 years, another seven Australian mammals and ten Australian birds – such as the King Island brown thornbill and the orange-bellied parrot – will be extinct unless management is greatly improved.
Threatened Species Recovery Hub identified the 50 Australian species at greatest risk of extinction.
Of the 7.7 million hectares of land habitat cleared between 2000 and 2017, 7.1 million hectares (93%) was not referred to the federal government for assessment under the national environment law.
Only 16% (13 of 84) of Australia’s nationally listed threatened ecological communities meet a 30% minimum protection standard in the national reserve system.
Three critically endangered communities, all in NSW, have no habitat protection at all. These are the Hunter Valley weeping myall woodland, the Elderslie banksia scrub forest, and Warkworth sands woodland.
The bright spots
The report also highlights where investments and the hard work of many Australians made a difference.
Individuals, non-government organisations and businesses are increasingly purchasing and managing significant tracts of land for conservation. The Australian Wildlife Conservancy, for example, jointly manages some 6.5 million hectares actively conserving many threatened species.
By building on achievements such as these, we can encourage new partnerships and innovations, supported with crucial funding and commitment from government and industry.
We also need more collaboration across governments and non-government sectors, underpinned by greater national leadership. This includes listening and co-developing solutions with Indigenous and local communities, building on and learning from Indigenous and Western scientific knowledge.
And we need more effort and resources to measure progress. This includes consistent monitoring and reporting across all states and territories on the pressures, and the health of our natural and cultural assets.
Such efforts are crucial if we’re to reverse declines and forge a stronger, more resilient country.
Emma Johnston is contracted by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water as an independent Chief author of the 2021 Australian State of Environment Report. She is a Director on the board of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.
Ian Cresswell is contracted by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water as an independent Chief author of the 2021 Australian State of Environment Report, and is a co-author on several chapters. He is affiliated with the Atlas of Living Australia, the Resilient Landscapes Hub of the National Environmental Science Program, the Western Australian Biodiversity Science Institute, the Tasmanian Land Conservancy, and the Western Australian Marine Science Institution.
Terri Janke is the sole director/shareholder of a multi-disciplinary law firm, Terri Janke and Company, who does work for clients in the environment and Indigenous sector, including Indigenous corporations, NGOs, Universities, Government Departments including the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.
Her company is contracted by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water as an independent author of the State of the Environment 2021.
Australia’s State of the Environment Report was finally released today – and its findings are a staggering picture of loss and devastation.
As a conservation scientist, I’ve spent the last decade helping governments, community groups and individuals better manage our environment. But the report reveals things are getting worse.
I’m disappointed, but not surprised. I’ve seen firsthand the devastation wrought by threats such as bushfires and land clearing.
I remain hopeful we can turn the crisis around. But it will take money, government commitment and public support to protect and recover our precious natural places.
Crest-tailed mulgara captured on property where cattle have been excluded to enable biodiversity to recover. Lachlan Hall
New Year’s Day, 2020
Since the last State of the Environment Report report was released in 2016, Australia has experienced record-breaking floods and fires. In fact, my New Year’s Day of 2020 was spent frantically packing precious family items at my mum’s home in rural New South Wales, as smoke from nearby megafires blanketed our property.
We evacuated, nervously watching a fire tracking app, while neighbours’ properties were progressively swallowed by a fire that eventually burned for 74 days, razing half a million hectares.
Thankfully, the fire stopped at a creek down the road. This creek and its adjoining forest is where my family have spent decades hiking, birding and exploring nature.
We’ve watched rare rock warblers dabbling in streams that trickle down sheer sandstone gorges and male lyrebirds singing their hearts out. Multitudes of king parrots, yellow-tail cockatoos and gang-gang cockatoos would visit to gnaw on gum nuts and, to my mum’s eternal anguish, her prize geraniums.
I can’t imagine visiting the bush without hearing their creaking call, or peering into the branches to spot their telltale flash of red through the leaves.
Gang gang cockatoos recently joined Australia’s list of threatened species. Shutterstock
Australia’s abysmal record
As the State of Environment report explains, the 2019-2020 bushfires razed more than eight million hectares of native vegetation. Up to three billion animals were either killed or displaced.
Last year, I contributed to the first global United Nations assessment of wildfire. We found the worldwide risk of devastating fires could increase by up to 57% by the end of the century, primarily because of climate change.
Most of Australia is likely to burn even more. That’s bad news for places such as Australia’s ancient Gondwana rainforests. Historically, these have rarely, if ever, burned. Yet more than 50% was impacted in the 2019-2020 fires.
These rainforests harbour the highest concentrations of threatened species in subtropical southeast Queensland and northern NSW. To recover, they need hundreds of years without fire.
Unfortunately for Australia’s ravaged species and ecosystems, more frequent and intense fires are not the only pressures they face. Australia’s history of managing native vegetation is abysmal.
My research requires driving across large swathes of eastern and central Australia. I’ve watched patches of bush across rural and urban areas thin and, in many places, completely disappear.
One patch I grew to love was home to a very friendly, very noisy family of grey-crowned babblers. It wasn’t a particularly pretty patch of bush, but it was perfectly placed for a night’s rest on the three-day drive to my field sites.
At dawn I would lie in my swag, listening to them chattering away, giving me energy for the day. Now, that patch of bush is gone, and so are the birds.
They may be small, but these patches of bushland are vital for the persistence of already heavily fragmented, degraded ecosystems.
The clearing and thinning of vegetation makes it harder for remaining plants and animals to recover from extreme events such as drought. It also puts native wildlife at greater risk from introduced predators such as cats, and aggressive native birds such as noisy miners.
Most importantly, the cumulative loss of these seemingly insignificant little patches of woodland is a death by a thousand cuts, putting many ecosystems at greater risk of extinction.
Woodland recovering after the 2019/2020 megafires. Ayesha Tulloch
Extinctions aren’t inevitable
I’m writing this because, despite the dire situation, it’s not too late to do something about it. Here are three ways to start.
First, we need immediate action on climate change. All levels of government must commit to urgently transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Investments and action must be proactive: planning for, preventing and responding to environmental threats. This would help avoid massive costs incurred after a disaster hits.
And crucially, management and conservation actions must respectfully draw from Indigenous knowledge.
Releasing an endangered Black-flanked Rock-wallaby at an Australian Wildlife Conservancy reserve in Western Australia, where invasive predators are intensively controlled. Ayesha Tulloch
Second, vegetation should be restored, not removed, on private land. This requires overhauling vegetation clearing codes and taking action against those who flout the rules.
Finally, the federal government should acknowledge that a substantial increase in funding could, in fact, recover all disappearing species and ecosystems. Extinctions are a choice, not an inevitability.
Australia ranks among the world’s worst when it comes to funding biodiversity conservation. At least six times the current funding is needed to save our threatened species.
Research shows when adequate investment is made in management, threatened populations do recover.
The story of the yellow-footed rock wallaby in South Australia shows what’s possible.
Intensive goat and fox control reversed the species’ population decline. It was made possible through long-term state government investment and efforts by non-government conservation organisations and land managers.
Not only did rock-wallaby populations increase, but the pest control meant the western quoll and the common brushtail possum – both historically extinct in the area – could be reintroduced.
But sadly, such success stories are the exception. Today’s report clearly shows that unless we radically change course, we’re heading towards species extinctions, degraded landscapes and a less resilient nation.
All Australians – governments, business, individuals and communities – must commit to restoring our natural environment. Only then will we withstand whatever the future throws at us.
Ayesha Tulloch receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is the Vice President of Public Policy and Outreach and co-convenes the Science Communication Chapter for the Ecological Society of Australia, and sits on Birdlife Australia’s Research and Conservation Committee. She is a member of eBird Australia, the Society for Conservation Biology and the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre Citizen Science Node.
Holland Taylor as Professor Joan Hambling in The Chair.Elize Morse/Netflix
This week, many Australian universities will be sending academics the results of the first semester student evaluation surveys.
For some this will be a worrying and unpleasant time. The comments university students make anonymously in their teaching evaluations can leave academics feeling fearful, distressed and demoralised.
And with good reason. As a 2021 survey of Australian academics and their experiences of student feedback found:
Personally destructive, defamatory, abusive and hurtful comments were commonly reported.
Hurtful or abusive comments can remain permanently on record as a measure of performance. These records can affect applications for promotion or for secure continued employment.
The authors of the 2021 survey, led by Richard Lakeman at Southern Cross University have been among those calling for anonymous online surveys to be scrapped. Some academics, burned by their experience of student feedback, say they no longer open or engage with student evaluation reports. They said the risk of harm outweighed any benefits.
In the Netflix show, The Chair, a memorable scene sees the character Professor Joan Hambling burn her student evaluations. Clearly, a different solution is needed.
Feedback from students can still be valuable for lifting teaching standards and it’s important students have their say.
We have developed a screening system using machine learning (where software changes its behaviour by “learning” from user input) that allows students to talk about their experiences while protecting academics from unacceptable comments.
Why a new approach is needed
University codes of conduct remind students of their general obligation to refrain from abusive or discriminatory behaviour, but not specifically in regard to student evaluations.
Instead, universities rely on self-regulation or on others to report incidents. Some institutions use profanity blockers to screen comments. Even then, these often fail to detect emerging terms of abuse in online speech.
So, in setting up our screening system, we wanted to:
promote staff and student well-being
enhance the reliability and validity of student feedback
improve confidence in the integrity of survey results.
We developed a method using machine learning and a dictionary of terms to screen for unacceptable student comments. The dictionary was created by QUT drawing on historically identified unacceptable comments and incorporating prior research into abusive and discriminatory terms.
Our ‘Screenomatic’ solution
There is not a lot of published work on the detection of unacceptable or abusive comments in student evaluation surveys. So our team adapted earlier research on detecting misogynistic tweets. This worked because often the student comments we looked at were similar in length to a tweet’s 280-character limit.
Our approach, which we call “Screenomatic”, automatically reviewed more than 100,000 student comments during 2021 and identified those that appeared to be abuse. Trained evaluation staff members manually reviewed about 7,000 flagged comments, updating the machine-learning model after each semester. Each update improves the accuracy of auto-detection.
Ultimately, 100 comments were removed before the results were released to educators and supervisors. University policy enables comments to be re-identified in cases of potential misconduct. The central evaluations team contacted these students and reminded them of their obligations under the code of conduct.
The Screenomatic model can help protect both educators and students. Staff are safeguarded from abuse, and students at risk – who make comments that indicate they need mental health help, include allegations of bullying or harassment, or that threaten staff or other students – can be offered support. Universities can share data to train the model and maintain currency.
Importantly, the process enables universities to act morally to harness student voices while protecting people’s well-being.
Useful feedback, not abuse
The number of educators who receive abusive feedback may be relatively small. However, it’s still unacceptable for universities to continue to expose their staff to offensive comments in the full knowledge of their potential impact.
With last year’s High Court ruling on liability for defamatory posts, and attempts to improve online safety, there is a growing acknowledgement that people should not be able to post anonymous, harmful messages.
After all, the cost of screening responses is nothing compared to the cost to individuals (including mental health or career consequences). And that’s ignoring the potential costs of litigation and legal damages.
At the end of the day, the anonymous comments are read by real people. As a tweet in response to the Lakeman findings noted:
The Screenomatic model goes a long way towards enabling the “tons of useful feedback” to serve its intended purpose while ensuring people aren’t harmed in the process.
Abby Cathcart leads the QUT Evaluation Strategy
Melinda Laundon and Sam Cunningham 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.
In a recent episode of Bluey, Onesies, six-year-old Bluey asks her mum Chilli what’s wrong with Auntie Brandy, who has come to visit for the first time in four years.
“Is she sad?” Bluey asks. “And why have we only seen her once in our lives?”
It is hinted by the show Brandy is unable to have children.
“I’m sorry it’s been so long,” Brandy later says to her sister. “It’s just hard seeing you all, you know?”
“I know,” Chilli replies, reaching for her sister’s hand.
It is another example of the hit program’s gentle and insightful exploration of complex issues, sparking a flood of positive responses from viewers. As one person commented on the show’s Facebook page, “thank you Bluey, for showing the infertility and childless not by choice community”.
Close to one in six couples have experienced infertility. Those who haven’t usually know someone – a family member, colleague or friend – who has.
Shining a light on these experiences can help many who are going through it to feel less alone and lessen the sense of shame and stigma that unfortunately so often attends a diagnosis of infertility.
Much media coverage tends to focus only on IVF. But Bluey highlights another important aspect of infertility: the emotional and social toll of involuntary childlessness continues well past the period of actively trying to conceive.
As part of my research into experiences of infertility, I have interviewed older generations of women living with involuntary childlessness. For these women, now in their 60s and 70s, the invisibility of their experiences in public discussion of infertility has had a lasting impact on their mental health and sense of community inclusion.
Some of the women who shared their stories experienced multiple miscarriages; some never found a reason for their infertility; some eventually had a child, while others did not.
For the women who were unable to have a child, the impact of infertility on their identity and relationships is long-lasting, reverberating through their lives well past the months or years they spent trying for a baby.
Heather* and her husband are in their 60s. At 36, after having tried to conceive for three years, Heather had a miscarriage at eight weeks. They then underwent eight IVF cycles without becoming pregnant, and eventually decided to stop treatment.
Her miscarriage, which happened after she had seen her baby’s heartbeat and experienced bad morning sickness, was deeply traumatic for Heather. Her pregnancy remains special and meaningful to her.
Nearly 30 years later, there are situations she still avoids because of the emotions they trigger. Since retiring she has become active in University of the Third Age but avoids some classes because of the constant conversation about grandchildren:
And then they ask me about my children and my grandchildren and I’ve got to tell them no, we don’t have any. And it’s almost like an apology […] an apology and a failure.
For Mary*, in her 70s at the time of our interview, getting older has meant reliving the trauma of friends’ young children’s birthday parties.
She recalled in her 30s having to leave parties because they were “just too hard”, and those feelings are returning as her friends become caught up in being grandparents. She reflected, “I’m losing my friends again.”
Renee*, 59 at the time of our interview, told me she no longer has people ask if she has children. “Now, it’s grandchildren,” she says.
The ongoing repercussions of childlessness are felt within families, too.
Greta* is 54, and has no children while her sister does. Her mother had moved interstate to live with her other daughter and grandchildren in her final months.
I’m so pleased, now, that she had that time with them, but at the time, it was quite wrenching.
She reflected how many people without children miss the connection to a multi-generational family. “That’s the longer-term impact. When I’m old, who’s going to care?”, she said.
Rich and full lives
Despite their ongoing grief, the women I spoke to who were unable to have a child emphasised their lives were rich and full. This included successful international careers, further study and career changes, running own businesses, becoming step-parents and step-grandparents.
But people who are childless not by choice continue to live with this reality long after their years of trying to conceive.
We all need to hear stories that reflect our own life experiences, to feel seen, to feel we belong. Bringing a more inclusive approach and a longer perspective to public discussions about infertility helps to undo the isolation and invisibility so often felt by older women who are childless not by choice.
It is perhaps ironic, and a little bittersweet, it has taken a children’s program to remind us of this.
Sianan Healy 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.
The first week of the new parliament will contain some depressing news, with Treasurer Jim Chalmers on Monday softening up the community to expect a “confronting” statement on the economy.
Chalmers said he would deliver his statement on Thursday July 28. It will contain updated forecasts, and bad news on real wages.
While argy bargy over the government’s climate legislation will provide much of the colour and movement of the first parliamentary fortnight, the Chalmers statement will go to the nitty gritty of how difficult the economic outlook – and therefore many people’s financial juggling – will be over the months ahead.
A day before the statement, the inflation figures for the June quarter will be released, revealing a further spike. The most recent inflation number, for the March quarter, was 5.1%.
The Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe and The Conversation’s poll of economic forecasters predict 7% by year’s end.
On Monday New Zealanders learnt that their inflation rate had climbed to 7.3%
The Reserve Bank is also expected to raise interest rates again the week after Chalmers’ statement.
Chalmers told a Monday news conference: “When it comes to our expectations of inflation, when it comes to the impact of interest rate rises on growth, when it comes to what this spike in inflation means for real wages, there will be aspects of this ministerial statement that people will find confronting”.
Pressed on real wages, he said: “It will be confronting in terms of real wages because there is no credible economic forecaster in Australia right now who thinks that wages growth is going to keep up with inflation.
“And we will be revising up our expectations for inflation. And so that will make the real wages situation worse before it gets better.”
He said rising interest rates would have an impact on growth “and I’ll talk about that in the update”.
“I will be providing a suite of economic forecasts and an indication of what that means for the budget position as well. My inclination is to be as broad as I can and as full as I can when it comes to the update.” But he said it would not announce new policy.
As the government searches for savings to make in the October budget, Chalmers stressed the increasing burden rising interest rates would have on servicing government debt.
“Every additional dollar in the budget is a borrowed dollar and that now costs us more to pay back because of rising interest rates.
“And if you think about the consequences of those rising interest rates on the Budget – more than a billion dollars this year, more than $5 billion in the last year of the forwards, $13 billion accumulated over the forwards, $18 billion in 2032-33. So these are not small amounts of money.”
The government added to the budget burden at the weekend when it decided to reinstate the COVID pandemic leave payment for workers forced to isolate without sick leave. This measure, running to the end of September, will cost an estimated total of about $780 million, although the states have agreed to pay half.
Chalmers said that in speeches this week he would be talking about supply side issues. “We need to recognise that the reason we’ve got high and rising inflation is not just a story about too much demand in the economy – it’s also a story about choked-off supply.
“And that’s why almost every element of our economic plan is about making our supply chains more resilient.
“Making sure that we can get the workers that we need, making sure we can get the goods to market, making sure that we can lift the speed limit on the economy.”
Chalmers said the world economy was “a difficult, if not dangerous place right now. That combination of inflation and rising interest rates and slowing growth and food and energy insecurity, combined with the amount of debt that countries have racked up is a cause for concern in the global community”.
Also on the economic front, Chalmers is set to announce imminently the panel and terms of reference for a far-reaching inquiry into the Reserve Bank.
The Treasurer said he would consult the shadow treasurer Angus Taylor on the inquiry’s terms of reference, but said he expected him to have no problem with them. They would be broad enough to encompass any concerns anyone could reasonably have about conduct of the bank and the arrangements governing the bank.
Of interest in Thursday week’s economic statement will be the Treasury’s forecasts on the unemployment rate, which, at 3.5%, has already fallen below the forecast in the Coalition’s March budget of 3.75%, and the forecast for inflation, which in the March budget was forecast to hit only 4.25% in the year to June 2022.
The latest monthly update from the Finance Department, for May, shows the budget deficit far smaller than forecast in March, showing a deficit for the 2021-22 financial year to May 2022 of $33.4 billion against the budget profile deficit of $60.5 billion.
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.
Two and a half years into the pandemic, more than 12 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, and more than 5 million are being administered each day. People in many high-income countries, including Australia, are now receiving their third or fourth dose. But the distribution of vaccines globally is still vastly unequal. More than 80% of people in low-income countries have not yet received a single dose.
In January 2021, the Director-General of the World Health Organization warned bluntly:
the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure – and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.
Unfortunately, this dire prediction has come to pass, and there are no signs the situation is going to turn around any time soon.
How did things go so wrong, and is there anything Australians can do about it?
Similar to many high-income countries, more than 80% of Australians have completed an initial COVID vaccination protocol (two doses for most vaccines) and many have progressed to third and fourth doses.
In contrast, only 15.8% of the population in low-income countries has completed an initial vaccination protocol. And the situation in some countries is very dire – only 1.4% of Haiti’s population and 6.3% of Mali’s population, for example, can be considered “fully vaccinated”.
Needless to say, booster doses are also very inequitably distributed.
While vaccine hesitancy and slow uptake of vaccines by weak health systems are contributing factors, lack of access to vaccines at the time they are needed remains the biggest problem.
What went wrong with plans to vaccinate the world?
COVAX was set up in 2020 as a global mechanism for equitably sharing COVID vaccine doses. Some 92 countries relied on it as their main, or only, strategy for accessing vaccines.
Developing countries have suffered disproportionately from the pandemic. In the early stages of the pandemic, death rates for people with COVID, adjusted for age and other factors, were around twice as high in developing countries as in high-income countries.
Recent modelling has shown that while vaccination saved an estimated 7.4 million lives in low-income countries in 2021, if COVAX had met its 20% target, an additional 156,900 deaths would have been avoided. If the World Health Organization’s goal of 40% vaccine coverage had been reached, almost 600,000 more lives would have been saved.
If COVAX had met its 20% target of people in low income countries vaccinated, 156,900 deaths would have been avoided. Shutterstock
COVAX struggled from the start. It relied heavily on donations of funds and doses from rich countries, many of which never materialised, or were too ill-timed or too close to expiry to be able to be absorbed by recipient countries.
Rich countries also undermined COVAX by negotiating directly with pharmaceutical companies to pre-purchase large quantities of vaccines, essentially starving COVAX of supplies. By November 2020, more than half of the global supply had been pre-purchased by high-income countries representing just 14% of the world’s population.
Australia was no exception to this trend. Despite Australia’s slow domestic COVID vaccine rollout, by August 2021 the Morrison government had entered agreements to secure more than 280 million doses. That’s more than ten doses per person.
Some countries that engaged in this sort of over-purchasing are now having to throw away doses they don’t need, and can’t use.
Australia has also promised A$215 million to COVAX, and made a belated pledge in April this year to donate 10 million doses to COVAX – none of which have yet been delivered. Doses donated so far have been given to Indo-Pacific countries, arguably in line with Australia’s national interests given China’s growing influence in the region, rather than being funnelled through COVAX to countries that most need them.
Underlying problems haven’t been fixed
A strategy based on donations, underpinned by a charitable model, can only go so far in addressing inequities. We still have a situation where a small number of companies control the global supply of COVID vaccines.
Recently, wealthy countries blocked and then watered down a proposal at the World Trade Organization to relax intellectual property rules for COVID vaccines, which in its originally proposed form was set to support more widespread manufacturing in low- and middle-income countries. While an agreement of sorts was reached in June, it was so compromised it might not enable a single additional vaccine to be made.
The lack of attention to solving the underlying problem means we’re at risk of making the same mistakes again. We are likely to see the same patterns of hoarding and inequity when it comes to the newer vaccines being produced and developed, such as those targeting the Omicron variant, and future generations of vaccines, which may include breakthroughs in vaccines that prevent the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
What can be done to fix the inequities, and how can Australia help?
It’s important for Australians to get the booster doses available to them. It won’t help other countries if we decline them, in the same way that skipping your dinner wouldn’t help solve global hunger.
But Australia needs a better and more sustainable plan to help other countries.
Our recent paper set out four actions Australia should take to help fix the inequities in global access to COVID-19 vaccines.
First, Australia needs to produce, donate, redistribute and fund more COVID vaccines for low-income countries. Doses the Morrison government ordered which are not needed in Australia should be relinquished. These should be channelled through COVAX to ensure they get where they are most needed, and can be effectively used in a timely way.
Second, Australia should support global initiatives to waive intellectual property rights in meaningful ways that enable low- and middle-income countries to manufacture COVID products.
Third, it can provide funds and practical help to build production capacity in low-income countries.
Finally, the Australian government should ensure companies developing vaccines in Australia share their intellectual property and know-how to enable more widespread manufacturing. This can be achieved by placing conditions on public funding invested in research and development.
The upcoming review into Australia’s COVID vaccine and treatment purchases announced by the Albanese government provides an opportunity to reset Australia’s approach, so we can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Deborah Gleeson has received funding in the past from the Australian Research Council. She has received funding from various national and international non-government organisations to attend speaking engagements related to trade agreements and health. She has represented the Public Health Association of Australia on matters related to trade agreements and public health
Brigitte Tenni receives a PhD scholarship funded by the Australian government. She is affiliated with the People’s Health Movement and the Public Health Association of Australia.
The fate of Labor’s 2030 climate policy hangs in the balance as the Greens and other climate-conscious crossbenchers this week consider pushing the government harder on emissions reduction.
But trying to force Labor to go beyond its election commitment is a high-risk strategy that threatens to ignite a new round of Australia’s climate wars. The key question on the minds of progressive MPs and senators should be: how do we get the best climate outcome from this government’s term in office?
Labor has pledged to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030, based on 2005 levels. But there’s been very little media or political discussion of what Australia should be aiming for in 2035. This is baffling.
Pressuring Labor to adopt a higher 2035 target could have the same effect as increasing the 2030 target, without engaging in the frustrating wedge politics that has bedevilled climate action in Australia.
Labor has pledged to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030. Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Avoiding another decade of disappointment
The teal independents, Greens and other crossbenchers are this week examining a draft of the climate legislation Labor will introduce when parliament resumes.
The Coalition looks set to oppose the climate bill. So Labor needs the Greens and another independent, probably the progressive senator David Pocock, to ease the policy through the Senate.
The Greens have called for emissions reductions of 75% by 2030 and many teal candidates want at least a 60% cut. In recent days, Greens leader Adam Bandt declared the Greens would push Labor to improve the bill, saying it:
allows future climate-wrecking governments to announce lower targets, doesn’t seem to require the government to actually do anything to cut pollution and allows more coal and gas projects, which will put even this weak target out of reach.
But Bowen says Labor “will not be walking away” from the 43% pledge it took to the election. High in Bowen’s mind, no doubt, is the Gillard Labor government’s experience in minority government in 2010.
As part of negotiations with the Greens to form government, Labor agreed to introduce a carbon price – a move some interpreted as a broken election promise.
The Abbott Coalition relentlessly pursued Labor over the policy all the way to the 2013 election, when it knocked Labor out of office.
Tony Abbott, second from right, led a relentless Opposition attack on Labor over the carbon price. Ellen Smith/AAP
Now back in power, Labor wants only to deliver on its climate pledge, and no more. The party must also appease its traditional voter base in coal-reliant seats in New South Wales and Queensland.
Similarly, the Greens were painted as wreckers on climate action after the party blocked the Rudd government’s proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme in 2009, saying it lacked ambition.
The Greens are presumably keen to avoid the label again. But they also have to deliver for their voters, as do the teals.
The Greens say they’re willing to negotiate with Labor over the bill, although the Greens’ call for a ban on new coal projects is a likely sticking point.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the 43% emission target is “a floor, not a ceiling”.
Pocock has indicated he may support Labor’s proposal if that’s the case.
Adding the words “at least” to the figure of 43%, which is currently missing, would ensure the target was indeed a floor, not a ceiling. It would also mean any government of the day would not have to return to parliament to increase the target at a later date.
After this should come a second step. The Greens and teals should demand that the legislation includes a strong interim target: at least 60% emissions reduction by 2035.
The Greens and teals should demand at least 60% emissions reduction by 2035. Mark Baker/AAP
Filling the policy gap
Australia is scheduled to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. But as it stands, Labor’s bill provides very little indication of the path to get there.
This leaves a policy gap the progressives should seek to fill. Australia needs an ambitious target for 2030, but we shouldn’t fixate on this date alone.
Interim emissions reduction targets are key to nations meeting their obligations under the Paris Agreement – and Australia needs such targets at regular intervals between now and 2050 to ensure long term and sustainable climate action.
One of Europe’s most progressive pieces of climate legislation, in Denmark, requires interim targets be set every five years, a decade in advance, to drive change.
Similarly in Australia at the state level, Victoria has a legislated requirement to set new interim targets every five years and has asked an expert panel to advise on an interim 2035 goal.
Think tanks in Australia have also been active on the target. Both the Climate Council and the Climateworks Centre have called on Australia to achieve net-zero by 2035.
And last year, a report by the expert Climate Targets Panel found Australia should reduce emissions by 67% by 2035, to do its fair share of limiting global warming below 2℃.
However, 2035 targets have been largely absent from national political discussion. The Greens want Australia to reach net-zero in that timeframe, but haven’t advertised it widely.
A strong 2035 emissions target would enable Labor to deliver on its election promise. The teals and Greens could also argue they’d significantly improved Labor’s climate policy.
And the target would would shift the dial on political discourse over emissions reduction. In turn, corporate strategies, state government plans and investment momentum would shift to reflect the new ambition.
The target would would shift the dial on political discourse over emissions reduction. Supplied – Granville Harbour Wind Farm
Seizing the moment
With a new Labor government, the crossbench must use this pivotal moment to shift the goalposts towards stronger climate action.
The teals and the Greens should accept Labor’s proposed 43% emission reduction target for 2030, while ensuring that the legislation includes a target of at least 60% in 2035.
The next political fight will be how Australia reaches the new target – and how fast we move away from coal and gas.
But as the new Labor government finds its feet, it’s crucial the crossbench seizes this opportunity to enshrine more ambitious emissions targets in law, to address the threats of a warming planet.
Adam Simpson 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Grimmer, Senior Lecturer in Retail Marketing and Associate Head Research Performance, University of Tasmania
shutterstock
From gym memberships to music and movies, to razors, toilet paper, meal kits and clothes, there’s seemingly no place the subscription economy can’t go.
Having conquered the software market – where it gets its own acronym, SaaS (Software as a Service) – the subscription model is now moving into hardware.
Car makers are among the first cabs off the rank, using software to turn on and off optional extras.
German auto maker BMW is offering “in-car microtransactions” to access options for car buyers in Britain, Korea, Germany, New Zealand and South Africa. A heated steering wheel, for example, has a monthly cost of NZ$20 in New Zealand, and £10 in the UK.
In the UK, seven of 13 “digital services” – from heated seats to automatic high beam and driving assistance – are now available in subscription form.
“Welcome to microtransaction hell” is how one headline put it.
But that’s probably overselling the onset of a corporate dystopia where “you will own nothing”. BMW’s motives are pretty straightforward – as is most of what’s driving the subscription economy.
What is the subscription model?
The subscription model means paying a fee for periodical access to a service or product. Until a decade or so ago, it was largely confined to a few select industries, such as the delivery of milk, newspapers and magazines.
From milk and magazines, subscription services have proliferated with digital technology. Shutterstock
Other business models had similarities – such as rental businesses – but the point of the subscription model was different.
It was not about meeting a demand for a service someone only wanted to use temporarily or could not afford to own outright. It was about locking in a continuing relationship, to maximise “customer lifetime value”.
As Investopedia puts it, the subscription model’s focus is on customer retention over customer acquisition:
In essence, subscription business models focus on the way revenue is made so that a single customer pays multiple payments for prolonged access to a good or service instead of a large upfront one-time price.
This in large part explains why subscription services are now being adopted in markets outside their more obvious fit for things such as streaming news and entertainment.
In a broad sense, consumers can now be divided into two groups. One group comprises the “transactional shopper”, who interacts with the vendor once or twice, then disappears.
The other group comprises customers whose connection and “investment” in the brand is maintained through their subscriptions.
The subscriptions model emphasises customer retention over customer acquisition. Shutterstock
E-commerce and access
Part of the growth in the subscription economy has come from companies riding the e-commerce wave, delivering goods such as meal kits, wine, coffee, baby supplies, pet food, cleaning products, razors and toilet paper.
Consultant firm McKinsey has estimated the subscription e-commerce market is doubling in value every year – though that was before the pandemic. It could be well be more now.
The other part of the market is represented by BMW’s approach, offering extra features to customers that can only be accessed for a fee.
In some cases this may involve standard “upsell” techniques. For example, when you buy a new Peloton exercise bike you’ll be enticed with subscription offers, such as virtual classes and “customised” training programs, to “reach your goals”.
Or increasingly, as with BMW’s heated seats and steering wheels, it can be done with software turning actual bits of hardware on or off.
What is BMW’s game?
Is BMW’s purpose to gouge its customers for more money through getting them to pay an ongoing fee for something instead of owning it outright?
This is not what its subscription structure indicates. The opposite, in fact.
Customers can still buy these options outright. A heated steering wheel in the UK, for example, costs £200, and in New Zealand NZ$350. But now they can also pay a subscription – for three years (£150, NZ$250), annually (£100, NZ$250) or monthly (£10, NZ$20).
These prices represent a strong signal – that the cost of outright ownership is the most economical. It’s unlikely BMW expects anyone to sign up for the annual or three-yearly options. These are probably just to make the outright cost look more attractive.
The monthly offering, on the other hand, may lure owners to try out a feature they would otherwise have rejected buying outright at the time of purchase.
Indeed, car makers argue the reason they offer so many options as extras is because most owners don’t want them. So this mostly looks like BMW offering a “try before you buy” option.
The pitfalls of over-subscribing
That said, companies don’t need to have sinister motives for us to have concerns about the spread of the subscription model.
The more things we pay for with “micro-payments”, the harder it becomes to keep track of payments.
Many of us continue to pay for products and services we don’t use. A survey of 1,000 Australian adults in 2021, for example, found about a third wasted money on unused subscriptions or memberships – losing an average of about A$200 a year.
Deep psychological associations can influence these decisions. Experiments by US marketing professors Jennifer Savary and Ravi Dhar suggests people with lower “self-concept” are less likely to sign up for subscriptions – but also less likely to cancel subscriptions they are not using.
We may see the subscription model increasingly used in other sectors – including the health and justice systems.
For example, a subscription payment may provide a better level of nutritious food for a resident in an aged care facility, or a hospital or even a prison. This is not dissimilar to the way private health insurance premiums are managed, but still presents important justice and equity concerns.
So while there’s no reason to exaggerate the dangers of the subscription economy, it’s also prudent for consumers, advocacy groups and governments to ask “What next?”.
Louise Grimmer 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.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Analysis by Keith Rankin.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
This morning, on Morning Report (RNZ) Monash University epidemiologist Tony Blakely noted that Covid19 death rates in New Zealand are 20% higher in New Zealand than in Victoria, Australia. He also noted that facemask use is significantly more widespread in New Zealand.
When comparing New Zealand with the whole of Australia, the situation is worse. Based on data published by Worldometer, New Zealand was running at 50% more deaths than Australia in the beginning of July. Yesterday New Zealand was showing double. In today’s update, New Zealand’s weekly deaths per million people are shown as 30, literally worst in the world, now ahead of Malta, San Marino and Taiwan. Australia is showing as 14 weekly deaths per million in the last seven days.
Tony Blakely speculates that New Zealand’s higher death rates may be due to socioeconomic reasons, with Māori and Pacific ethnicities as indicators of disadvantage and of health comorbidity. The recent data – easily available to any researcher who keeps daily snapshots of Ministry of Health data – suggests otherwise. The real story in New Zealand is about the large numbers of unprotected elderly; that’s most likely why New Zealand’s published deaths are now the worst in the world.
The Ministry of Health does not publicise current data on Covid19; most of its statistics are of cumulative data, covering the whole of the pandemic without showing recent trends. But check out the following that covers the previous four days.
73 of 87 who died with covid are Pakeha (84%)
73 of 87 who died with covid have had 3 vaccine shots (84%)
64 of 87 who died with covid are aged over 80 (74%)
28 of 31 who died because of covid are Pakeha (90%)
28 of 31 who died because of covid are aged over 80 (90%)
26 of 31 who died because of covid are aged over 80 and Pakeha (84%)
Note that the ‘because of covid’ data is less up-to-date, and was not updated today; so it only covers two days worth of data, and it takes a while to verify Covid19 as the principal cause of death.
Re active cases, in today’s update we get the following:
13.3% of active cases are Māori/Pacific
14.5% of active cases are under 20 years old
61.2% of active cases are aged 20-59
just 4.2% of active cases are aged over 80
Re ethnicity, we should note that prioritisation-rules mean that anyone with any Māori of Pacific ancestry is categorised as Māori or Pacific. So, given mixed ethnicities being common, this data effectively understates Pakeha rates, and overstates Māori/Pacific. The data above indicate that recent Covid19 is substantially a Pakeha problem. And not a problem of school children.
We are seeing the vast majority of recent deaths due to Covid as being to elderly Pakeha. Yet this demographic represents just four percent of active cases. (I would regard ‘elderly’ as ‘all over 80’, and older as ‘all over 60’.)
And we see that a substantial majority of deaths are people who have had three Covid19 vaccination shots. This latter point is not an argument against vaccination. It is a recognition that there is a significant group of older people with unusually depleted immunity to respiratory infections; infections that include Covid19. These are people who avoided getting Covid19 until recently, and who had their third shot just under six months before catching Covid19. Current government policy completely neglects these people.
And the analyses by Tony Blakely and Michael Baker also largely ignore them. The article in The Conversation by these two has only this to say: “Second booster (that is, the fourth dose) available to all 50+ year olds (but targeted more to 65+ year olds, unless Māori or Pasifika, in which case all 50+ year olds prioritised). Free.” That is simply not true. It’s only available today to these people if they had their previous booster on or before 18 January 2022. Most people had their first booster after that date.
The deaths from this neglect of the elderly accumulate as I write.
*******
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Kate Kelly, PhD Candidate, ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, RMIT University
Woolworths
Online grocery shopping has boomed since the pandemic began in 2020, with Woolworths and Coles steadily expanding their home-delivery offerings. Rapid delivery is the latest frontier.
Woolworths and Coles Express have been offering on-demand deliveries through UberEats and Doordash since last year. Woolworths recently launched the Metro60 app which promises home delivery within an hour to select suburbs.
These arrangements have received little fanfare, yet they signal a significant shift for supermarket workers.
As part of ongoing research, I study how the gig economy is transforming conditions of work within traditional employment. To find out how interacting with delivery platforms affects supermarket employees, I interviewed 16 experienced “personal shoppers” at Woolworths and Coles who fill delivery orders from supermarket shelves.
The labour of on-demand grocery
In supermarkets that offer on-demand home delivery, the work of the personal shopper takes on a faster pace. For Woolworths employees, for instance, an UberEats order can drop in at any time, setting off an alarm until the order is accepted and picking begins. As one personal shopper explains:
We get this weird dinging sound that everyone dreads. You have to pick that order within the half hour or within the hour … it can drop in at any time. So if you’re sitting there having lunch for an hour, you still have to go do it because you’ve got that KPI to hit.
All the (scanner) guns in the store drop that sound. So it reverberates through the store. The customers can’t hear it because they don’t know what it is. But all of us know what it is.
Serving up urgent orders to couriers from gig economy platforms like DoorDash and UberEats has a significant impact on supermarket workers. DoorDash
The on-demand orders must be prioritised alongside existing orders, requiring the personal shopper to juggle competing time crunches simultaneously.
It’s urgent, and they just pop out of nowhere. So you don’t really know when they’re coming until they’re there. It’s super stressful. I dislike them immensely.
Enter the gig worker
Once the order is picked from the supermarket aisles, the employee hands it over to a gig worker for home delivery. Supermarket staff say their interactions are brief and often impersonal.
It’s a complete mess. You have no idea who’s coming to pick up these things. And it’s just people showing up with their headphones in showing you that they’ve got this order on their phone. There’s no real rhyme or reason to any of it.
For supermarket workers, gig workers are neither colleagues nor customers, yet they play an essential role in home delivery and customer service.
When things go awry, however – such as a missing bag or broken eggs – it’s the supermarket staff who field those complaints. Similarly, when personal shoppers run behind schedule it has punitive flow-on effects for gig workers.
The on-demand model may, by design or otherwise, pit two groups of workers against each other, fostering frustrations at both ends.
Most of the time they’re pretty good. They deal with it. It’s just those bad times where we might be behind and then they don’t deal with it very well.
A new labour regime
At first glance the partnerships between supermarkets and gig economy platforms look like the supermarket is outsourcing the work of delivery.
But this is a simplification: in fact, the traditional companies are bringing the precarious and on-demand labour of the gig workers inside their own firm, and making it legitimate through formal partnerships.
The ‘dedicated team’ behind Woolworth’s Metro60 app includes traditionally employed staff and gig workers. Woolworths
How do supermarket employees view on-demand grocery?
Most personal shoppers I spoke with are ambivalent or wary of the expanding on-demand services.
The people that I work with either love it or hate it. They like it because it’s different, you never get bored, and you’ve always got something to do. But that’s why other people hate it. Because you don’t get a chance to just stand for a second, you always have to be doing something.
Some enjoy the fast pace and express satisfaction in meeting targets and making the customer happy.
We’ve all gotten to the point now where we’re attuned, we hear the chime, we know what actions we need to take. So it almost happens autonomously. And before you know it, here comes another one and you just keep going.
Others expressed concerns about burnout, unpredictable workloads and an increasing pace of work.
It’s obviously a very high-demand, high-speed job. That’s probably the biggest frustration. We also have pick rates, essentially like Amazon, where we get told this is how many items we should average an hour … and a lot of the time people can’t meet the average.
Staff who have been in the role more than a decade have seen the pace of work speed up significantly during their tenure, and are more critical.
You’re not a person when you walk in the door, you’re a machine.
Some expressed broader concerns about the possibility of their role being taken over entirely by the gig economy. In the words of one shopper:
I was a little dismayed when the whole DoorDashing started because it’s like, oh no, the gig economy is getting closer and closer. Gig stuff always … makes me uncomfortable … It’s all this whole long-term ploy to destroy some existing industry or place, or eliminate worker protections.
Another expressed a similar sentiment:
My biggest worry is that they start outsourcing the actual shopping procedure. I think that would be the next logical step similar to what America has with Instacart.
Supermarket jobs of the future
All the personal shoppers I spoke with shared a pride in their work and their deep knowledge of the supermarket and its local community. How the role continues to evolve through partnerships with the gig economy is not inevitable but a matter of choice.
Lauren Kelly receives funding from the Australian Research Council for PhD research on which this article is based. Lauren Kelly works with United Workers Union which has members in the supermarket supply chain.
But the woes of the major parties extend beyond election day; they’re also reflected in the terminal trajectory of party membership.
In 2020, the Guardian reported the Australian Labor Party has around 60,000 members. The Liberal Party is currently estimated to have around 40,000 members, down from 197,000 during the halcyon days of the 1950s.
By comparison, there were eight AFL clubs in 2021 with more members than each of the two major parties. Two have more members than both parties combined.
When factoring in population growth, the rate of Liberal Party membership has plummeted since the 1950s, while AFL club membership has grown roughly eightfold since the 1980s.
So, what can the major parties learn from footy clubs about how to grow community support?
Political parties and sport teams are in fact quite conceptually similar.
Both represent a tribe of people who share a common identity, competing against other such tribes in contests bound by formal rules – whether they are elections or matches.
Political parties and sport teams aren’t just about winning (or at least, they shouldn’t be). At their best, they nurture a wide and passionate base of supporters through collective identity.
Despite a common purpose, they diverge fundamentally in their approaches to attracting support.
Major political parties engage in what marketers call “transactional marketing”; they largely concentrate on obtaining a sale (a vote) at a single moment in time (an election).
Such transactional approaches foster weak attachment to the major political parties outside election times, leaving them vulnerable to shifts in voter preferences.
Sport teams strive for what’s known as “relational marketing”; they concentrate on building relationships with fans that nurture attachment and longer-term loyalty.
The value of a relational approach is particularly evident in periods of crisis.
Despite the Essendon Bombers’ drug scandal being dubbed the “blackest day in Australian sport”, the club’s membership tally actually increased in the immediate aftermath, as supporters galvanised behind the club.
Of course, treating political parties like sports teams – which fans tend to support through thick and thin – risks encouraging bad policy; a rusted-on Liberal or Labor supporter may find themselves supporting the party even when it releases terrible policies.
There is a similar problem in sport; footy clubs accused of systematic cheating or even institutional racism, tend to retain supporters.
I’m not arguing blind support is ideal – but rather that the success footy clubs have found in growing membership and connecting with communities could offer some lessons for the major political parties.
3 tenets of sports marketing
Here are three key lessons the major parties could take from footy clubs.
1. Authentically connect with target communities
Brand authenticity means developing a genuine, natural, honest and real relationship with your constituencies.
The NRL’s South Sydney Rabbitohs launched Souths Cares in 2006 as a community arm with a charter to support disadvantaged and marginalised youth and families, particularly Aboriginal people in the local area.
The AFL’s North Melbourne similarly launched The Huddle in 2010, recognising how the region’s particular cultural diversity underpinned its goal of driving social inclusion.
Such initiatives are authentic because they are grounded in real communities, genuinely address local issues, and extend from a natural alignment between club and community.
This allows football clubs, which have evolved from kitchen table organisations to A$50 million-plus commercial operations, to remain authentically embedded within community.
2. Engage current and prospective supporters 365 days a year
Sport marketers retain a necessary focus on game day. But this is nestled in broader communication and community strategies that aim to achieve year-round engagement.
Non-game days typically represent 95% of the calendar year, so sport clubs employ communications specialists to produce media content beyond the match itself.
This includes player-focused interviews and biographies, match previews and debriefs, coach insights and community visits.
Such content helps fill the vacuum between individual matches or during the off-season, keeping supporters connected to their club.
And while sport clubs retain a focus upon their home games as major commercial events, professional sport clubs also have a broader calendar of less overt community events.
While a typical AFL or NRL club hosts about 12 home games a season, they run at least triple as many community-orientated events – such as school visits or fan days – to foster community engagement.
3. Defining and living an organisational identity
Sport teams are best known by their mascots and colours, but they’re also defined by the values they seek to associate the brand with – for example, family-orientated, pioneering, working-class.
All these elements combine to form a club’s identity.
Melbourne Football Club’s core values of “trust, respect, unity and excellence” informs their off-field staff recruitment. Club identity also helps fans make sense of why they support a particular team over another.
Where football clubs protect and cultivate their identity, major parties battle a perception they’re all “just as bad as each other” – there’s a perceived interchangeability.
By better defining their desired identities with communities outside of elections, major parties would become less reliant on election campaign advertising spending wars to educate voters.
While Australia’s professional sports teams continue to illustrate their success in engaging communities, our major political parties are struggling to build and retain memberships.
Given the underwhelming performance of major political parties last match day, it is perhaps time they rewrite their game plans with the help of sport marketers.
Hunter Fujak 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.
What we eat and how we produce food matters. Food systems are responsible for more than a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
We cannot fully tackle the climate crisis without reducing the greenhouse footprint of our food. The issue is only becoming more urgent, as world population climbs alongside hunger stemming from war disruption of food exports. As people get richer and more urbanised, global consumption of meat and dairy products also grows.
Livestock are the main source of our food emissions and the third highest global source of emissions at 14.5%, after energy (35%) and transport (23%).
To cut these emissions, many advocate switching to plant-rich or plant-only diets. But will people who have a longstanding attachment to meat actually choose to switch? Our new research suggests the sweet spot is the Mediterranean diet, which includes some meat while remaining plant rich and healthy.
What’s the problem?
Rearing livestock requires large areas of land, as well as inputs of water and feed. More intensive livestock production is linked to biodiversity loss, land degradation, pollution of waterways, increased risk of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19, and antibiotic resistance.
Intensive livestock production often entails worse animal welfare. Shutterstock
Without reducing the overall demand for meat and dairy, it’s unlikely livestock emissions will fall fast enough and far enough. In wealthy countries like Australia, we consume meat and dairy at high rates. Reducing these consumption rates could cut greenhouse emissions and reduce other environmental damage.
So which diet should we eat? Clearly, any acceptable diet needs to be nutritionally adequate. While meat provides essential nutrients, too much of it is linked to diseases like cancer. It’s important to consider both environmental and health credentials of a diet. We can add animal welfare to this as well, which tends to be worse in intensive livestock production.
We hope by identifying healthy, environmentally sustainable diets with better animal welfare, we can help people make sustainable dietary choices.
What did we find?
We looked at five common plant-rich diets and assessed their impacts on the environment (carbon footprint, land, and water use), human health, and animal welfare. We focused on food production in high-income countries.
The diets we examined were:
Mediterranean (plant-heavy with small amounts of red meat, moderate amounts of poultry and fish)
Flexitarian/semi-vegetarian (meat reduction)
Pescatarian (fish, no other meat)
Vegetarian (no meat but dairy and eggs OK)
Vegan (no animal products)
All five of these plant-rich diets had less environmental impact than the omnivore diet, with no-meat diets (vegan and vegetarian) having the least impact.
We have to add the caveat, however, that environmental footprint measures used to compare diets are simplistic and overlook important indirect effects of shifting diets.
Overall, the Mediterranean diet was deemed the healthiest for humans, while the vegan and vegetarian diets had the best outcomes for animal welfare. When we combined all three measures, vegan and vegetarian diets were found to be the most ‘sustainable’ diets based on reducing our food footprint, staying healthy, and reducing negative impacts on farm animals.
Vegetarian diets are better for the planet but are less popular. Shutterstock
We know which diets are best. But what diet will people actually choose?
There is often a gulf between what we should do in an ideal world and what we actually do. To tackle this, we examined what people are actually willing to eat. Is promoting a vegan or vegetarian diet the most effective way to reduce demand for meat and dairy?
To find out, we asked 253 Australians what they currently eat and which of the five plant-rich diets they were willing to eat.
Australia is a high meat-eating country, so it’s not surprising that most of our respondents (71%) identified as omnivores.
It’s also no surprise that the diets least likely to be adopted were the vegan and vegetarian diets, as these diets represented a major shift in most people’s eating habits.
As a result, it was the Mediterranean diet – which entails a small reduction in meat consumption – which had the highest likelihood of adoption. Combined with its high health benefits and moderate environmental and animal welfare impacts, we identified it as the best diet to promote.
While some of these results may seem intuitive, we believe by combining social, environmental, human health, and animal welfare elements of food consumption, we gain a more complete picture to spot pitfalls as well as realistic solutions.
For instance, it’s likely a waste of precious time and resources to promote diets like the vegan diet which, realistically, most people are not willing to eat. Yet despite the evident lack of enthusiasm from people, most research assessing the environmental impact of different diets has favoured vegan and vegetarian diets.
That’s why taking a wider view is important. If we actually want to reduce meat and dairy consumption, we must use approaches that have the best chance of working.
In high-income countries like Australia, that means we should promote the Mediterranean diet as the best diet to begin to tackle the demand for emissions-intensive meat and dairy. We need to start at a realistic point to begin to create a more sustainable global food system.
Annette Cowie is a Senior Principal Research Scientist in the Climate Branch at the NSW Department of Primary Industries, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Environmental and Rural Science at the University of New England. She receives research funding from NSW and Commonwealth government programs and rural research and development corporations. She is a member of Soil Science Australia and an adviser to the Australia New Zealand Biochar Industry Group and the Land Degradation Neutrality Fund.
Amy Lykins and Nicole Allenden 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.
To seek “respite” is to look for a break from strenuous effort to recharge and regroup. In the context of aged care, subsidised respite care provides temporary support to older people, which gives their carers a brief relief or “respite” from their caring responsibilities.
Carers look after a family member or friend who is frail or has a disability, mental illness, substance dependency, chronic condition, dementia,
terminal or serious illness. Having access to respite services is crucial, as only one in five carers of an older person reports they can easily organise a friend or family member to help them out.
Access to respite can also improve a carer’s well-being, enable them to continue in their caring role, and postpone the need for an older person to move into permanent residential care.
However, in a recent survey, only 30.6% of carers reported accessing respite in the previous year, and just over half of those who did were satisfied with it.
Respite care is a support service for older people designed to give their carers a short-term break from their caring responsibilities. It can be planned or used in an emergency, such as when a carer falls ill.
In Australia, respite occurs in a variety of settings. The more formal residential respite occurs when an older person stays temporarily in an aged-care home. However, there is also a range of community-based respite services. These include “day stays” in local community clubs, overnight stays in dedicated “respite cottages”, as well as options for care workers to provide support in people’s own homes.
In 2020–21, 67,775 people received residential respite care, and 46,527 received community-based respite care.
While this may seem like a lot, it is small compared with the 428,500 people who are the primary carer for a person aged 65 years or older. And formal respite services accounted for just 3.2% of all government expenditure on aged care.
residential aged care facilities that do not routinely offer respite care
respite providers that can’t support people with dementia and high care needs
respite care that is not close to home
assessment delays that mean carers can’t access respite when they need it.
The royal commission heard evidence respite care can be risky for the care recipient due to poor communication in the transition process. For example, health and medical information about care recipients tends to be stored across multiple systems, some of them paper-based. This leaves scope for errors when care recipients move into a new care system.
Potential providers of respite care also face financial disincentives to offer short stays. The cost of the admission process is relatively high, so providing residential respite care for less than two weeks may not be financially viable.
A lack of appropriate respite care has significant consequences for both carers and the family or friends they look after. As one carer told the royal commission:
I have asked whether or not Betty can get respite care in Broome but I’m told that it is full. One time I had to go for a funeral out in the desert and I had to take Betty with me because I could not get her into respite care and I couldn’t leave her with other family. We drove over 1,000km to the funeral. Betty got sick and needed antibiotics. Having more access to respite care would make a difference, a big difference to me.
Respite care can range from ‘day stays’ to overnight stays in residential aged care to home-based visits to give carers a break. Shutterstock
From October 1, funding for residential respite care will change to better align with the funding provided for permanent residents. This aims to remove the financial disincentives for providers and improve respite availability in existing aged care homes.
But given the strong preference for respite in smaller cottage settings, further resources could be directed to expanding the availability of community respite. The royal commission noted that, while these services exist, they are limited, particularly in regional areas.
The previous government committed extra funding for the Carer Gateway program to streamline access to respite care and provide more face-to-face support for people looking for local services.
Perhaps most importantly, respite care needs to be understood as a service for the carer as much as for the older person they care for. We need to understand carers’ needs so we can design and match services for them.
Nicole Sutton is the current Treasurer of the Palliative Care Association of N.S.W.
Deborah Parker receives funding from a range of research grants including the Department of Health and Ageing, the Australian Research Council, SPHERE and integratedliving. She is a member of the executive committee of Palliative Care NSW, is on the Editorial Board of the Aged Care Sector Report and Board Director of Carrington Care.
Gillian McAllister 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.
This year’s Pacific Islands Forum marked the beginning of a more dangerous era as Pacific leaders tried to find common responses to both the climate crisis and sharpening geostrategic competition.
There was unprecedented interest in this year’s forum, held in Fiji’s capital Suva. I should know. I lived in Suva for much of my adult life, which included several years teaching at the University of the South Pacific. I was also in town for last week’s summit.
The annual gathering of island leaders and their counterparts from Australia and New Zealand is typically the one time of year when there’s international focus on the region. But this year’s forum was something else. A huge media pack descended, to the bemusement of many Fijians who felt the meeting was divorced from their daily challenges.
Many journalists were there to cover the growing competition between China and the United States, and attempts by Australia’s new government to shore up its influence. Pacific leaders tried to highlight their own priorities, especially climate change.
After the summit, it’s clear these things are connected. Pacific countries know they’re in a fight for survival, and any country that wants their support must show it’s serious about tackling climate change.
When the Cold War ended, Pacific island countries “fell off the map” of global geopolitics. Concerns the Soviet Union might establish a naval base in the Pacific had prompted the US and its allies to step up aid to the region in the 1980s. Once the Soviet threat receded, the US reduced its presence by closing embassies in the region.
This year, Pacific nations are back on the map. A security deal signed in April between China and Solomon Islands – which could allow for a Chinese military presence and ship resupply – has alarmed security planners in Washington and Canberra.
Island nations nonetheless tried to keep geostrategic competition off the agenda at this year’s forum. They tried to exclude both China and the US by deferring a dialogue with partner countries that would usually be held the day after the forum leaders’ summit.
Undeterred, Chinese officials pressed to meet with island nations on the day of the leaders’ meeting. Washington trumped Beijing, however, as US Vice President Kamala Harris beamed in via video link to tell Pacific leaders the US would increase aid to the region and step up its diplomatic presence. The US has plans for two new embassies (in Kiribati and Tonga) and a new US envoy to the Pacific Islands Forum.
As forum chair, Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama had invited Harris. A week earlier, he had met with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. After the meeting, Bainimarama said:
“Now that we are on the same page on climate action, the potential of our Pacific partnership is limitless!”
Declaring a Pacific climate emergency
Pacific island countries have been crystal clear for decades that climate change is their greatest security threat. Compared with geostrategic competition, the impacts of a warming planet – stronger cyclones, devastating floods, rising seas and dying reefs – are more immediate threats.
“I believe there are three major powers in competition in our region. There is the US […] there is China (and) the third competitor is climate change. Of the three, climate change is winning, and climate change exerts the most influence on countries in our part of the world. If there is any competition, it is with climate change.”
In recent years failure to do anything meaningful about climate change undermined Australian strategy in the Pacific. At the last in-person Pacific Islands Forum in 2019, the then prime minister, Scott Morrison, blocked the words “climate crisis” from appearing in the final communique. This move led to island leaders saying they would prefer to work with China.
So it was that new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hoped to reset Pacific relations with strengthened climate targets – by promising to cut Australia’s emissions by 43% this decade.
In Suva, he joined island leaders in officially declaring a Pacific climate emergency. The contrast with Morrison could not have been greater. Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare warmly embraced Albanese and told him Australia remains his country’s security partner of choice.
Working together to tackle the region’s key threat?
Pacific leaders formally welcomed Australia’s new climate targets. But they also told Albanese they expect to see more. Bainimarama pointedly urged him “to go further for our family’s shared future by aligning Australia’s commitment to the 1.5-degree target”.
Island nations see limiting global warming to 1.5℃ as key to their survival – “1.5 to stay alive” is their slogan. The science is clear: if we are to have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to 1.5℃, global emissions must halve by 2030.
Pacific leaders also welcomed Australia’s proposal to co-host a United Nations climate summit, possibly as soon as 2024.
This could be a way for Australia to work with Pacific countries to shape global efforts to cut emissions. It would require significant diplomatic investment from Canberra. Planning to co-host a major climate summit also means we can expect an ongoing conversation with other nations about Australia’s own climate ambition.
No doubt island leaders will press the Australian government to do more. As the region hots up, we will find out just how serious Australia is about helping Pacific countries to counter their key security threat.
Wesley Morgan is a Senior Researcher with the Climate Council
Papua New Guinea’s Police Commissioner David Manning has fired the first warning shot in the hunt for candidates who were involved in disrupting the national elections in Enga province.
He is deploying a multipolice and army taskforce to hunt down 15 suspected candidates to bring them to justice in violence-torn Enga.
He said Enga police have identified the 15 candidates who are alleged to have instigated criminal acts that impacted on the election.
“This will allow for search warrants to be applied for on their persons, known associates, financial assets, and material property and if need be arrest warrants,” Commissioner Manning said.
“We are not time bound by the elections. If these candidates think that we are, then they are sadly misinformed.
“We plan to have this taskforce deployed in stages over the coming days.
“In the last 72 hours there has seen an upsurge in the rate of lawlessness in parts of Enga.
‘Situation is serious’ “The situation is very serious and I have grave concerns for the lives of many innocent people there who have become victims of barbaric and animalistic attacks,” he said.
Manning has been up in the restive Highlands of PNG since day one of polling.
“I have always maintained that the electoral process must be jointly delivered in partnership with the people, unfortunately certain candidates do not think this the way the elections should be delivered.
“Reading through the reports on the situation on the ground it is frustrating and sickening to note that known candidates and their supporters have deliberately attacked opposing candidates and their supporters to influence a favorable outcome he said.
How the PNG Post-Courier weekend edition reported the Enga election crisis. Image: PNG Post-Courier screenshot
“To think that these candidates are considered to be highly educated and have successful careers, married and have children of their own, for them to condone such violent acts by their tribesman and supporters is sickening.
“These so-called elites of the province despite their degrees are nothing but highly educated people with questionable morals.
“We have a saying in many parts of the country with different versions depending where you are ‘mango diwai save karim mango, kapiak diwai save karim kapiak’, a law abiding upstanding citizen would not allow criminals to act on his/her behalf to better their chances of winning elections,” he said.
Concerns given to PM “Similarly a citizen who resorts and supports illegal means of getting what he/she wants will never solicit the support of law abiding citizens to carry out their criminal activities.
“I have conveyed my concerns to the Prime Minister as well as the Commander of the PNGDF, and we have resolved to establish a separate multiforce taskforce to enforce the rule of law in Enga immediately and also secure the Porgera mine.
“The situation in Enga is no ordinary law and order situation, while many of the violent incidents are attributed to the elections there are sectors of the local communities in Enga that continue to engage in violent criminal activities pre-dating the elections and will continue throughout the election period.
“It will be the joint taskforce’s primary objective to enforce the rule of law and respond appropriately where necessary to these individuals and/or groups.”
“Candidates who have employed the services of these criminals or have supported these activities will be apprehended and face the criminal justice system.”
Reports of violence in the last 72 hours include:
Kompium- Ambum – Destruction of four bridges on the Wabag-Kompiam road. – Destruction of government Installations schools – Unconfirmed reports of widespread killings – Confirmed destruction of village homes and livestock – Continuous tribal fighting between rival candidates
Lagaip – Destruction of culverts and the digging of a three-meter wide and six meter deep trench on the Sirunki section of the Wabag–Porgera Road. – Sporadic attacks on government security forces throughout the polling period. – Continuous tribal fighting between rival candidates. – Unconfirmed reports of killings. – Access by road to Porgera via Wabag continues to be cut off.
Porgera-Paiela – Destruction of schools and teachers homes. – Destruction of shops and various other buildings in and around Paiam Station. – Tribal clashes continue between rival candidates. – Unconfirmed reports on unknown number of killings. – Manning said that so far boxes had been airlifted from Enga.
Kompiam–Ambum – Despite efforts of the joint security task force, only a limited number of boxes were able to be located from Kompiam and extracted to Hagen. – All other boxes for the electorate that were extracted by road are currently being stored at the main storage containers in Wabag. – The Kompiam returning officer and his officials were on hand and were involved in assisting the extraction of the boxes from Kompiam and delivered to Mt Hagen. – All other remaining boxes not extracted will be left to the Returning Officer and Electoral Manager to decide as to what options to take.
Wabag – All boxes that were in Maramuni were safely extracted and are securely stored in Mt Hagen after the use of Wampenamanda airport was discontinued. – Issues relating to the threat and risk assessment of counting has been assessed and recommendations for the counting of votes of specific electorates from Enga has been relayed to the Enga PESC and the PNGEC Commissioner. The key recommendation is to count these electorates outside of Enga province.
Porgera-Paiela – PPC Enga had led a team by road through Southern Highlands to Porgera to extract the polled ballot boxes. The ballot boxes for Paiela were unpolled and were also retrieved and brought back to Wabag.
Lagaip – Certain boxes were unable to be inserted into designated polling areas during the polling period due to rival candidates clashing in those areas. – The Returning Officer and the PEM will make representation to the PNGEC as to what can be done. – All remaining polled ballot boxes were retrieved and have been securely stored in Wabag.
Miriam Zarrigais a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.
Universities throughout the country have obligations to ensure their graduates leave with the knowledge and skills necessary to interact in a culturally safe way with Indigenous people.T.J. Thomson, Author provided
Content warning: this article contains mentions of racial discrimination against First Nations people.
The ABC recently apologised to staff for racism and cultural insensitivity in its newsrooms. This came after Indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse ABC staff told an internal group they felt unwelcome in their workplace, their ideas were not being listened to and they received online abuse from the public.
Unfortunately these issues are not unique to the ABC and exist at other media outlets and newsrooms.
We also know media organisations can produce content that is racist or hostile towards First Nations people. Decades of research show, with few exceptions, many mainstream Australian media organisations have unfairly reported on First Nations Peoples over the years, and continue to do so.
Racist and inappropriate portrayals of First Nations people can also make newsrooms and other media outlets unsafe places to work for Indigenous journalists, as well as influencing how First Nations issues are covered and thought about.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Australians working in media can improve their cultural competency during their university education. This way, they can enter and contribute to workplaces prepared to ethically and respectfully interact with and report on stories outside their own cultures.
However, our new study shows many Australian universities with journalism programs have significant work to do in including cultural safety in their curricula.
Journalists can help shape national conversations and can influence audiences’ attitudes through how they choose to report. That’s why it’s critical for these journalists to be culturally safe in how they communicate about communities and individuals outside their own culture.
Cultural safety aims to create a space where “there is no assault, challenge or denial of” Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s identities and experiences.
It is built through non-Indigenous people deeply listening to First Nations perspectives. It means sharing power and resources in a way that supports Indigenous self determination and empowerment. It also requires non-Indigenous people address unconscious biases, racism and discrimination in and outside the workplace.
First Nations groups and high-level institutions have been calling for more expertise and training in this area for decades.
The 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody report called for journalism education to consider
in consultation with media industry and media unions, the creation of specific units of study dedicated to Aboriginal affairs and the reporting thereof.
The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples notes Australian news outlets too often spread “myths and ill-informed or false stereotypes about Australia’s First Peoples, which in turn influence public opinion in unfavourable ways.”
a debilitating individual impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, devaluing their cultural pride and identity and having adverse impacts on their physical and mental health.
In 2009 The National Indigenous Higher Education Network recommended universities “systematically embed Indigenous perspectives in curriculum”.
In 2011, Universities Australia issued an expectation that “all graduates of Australian universities will have the knowledge and skills necessary to interact in a culturally competent way with Indigenous communities”.
In our study, we reviewed in 2021 more than 100 media/journalism assessments from a sample of more than 10% of Australian universities with journalism programs. We found only one had an explicit focus on an Indigenous topic. Our interviews with 17 journalism students revealed how absent or minimal their education on Indigenous affairs has been.
In the words of a second-year university student:
There is definitely more that should be done because stories and issues concerning Indigenous people is, like, such a big topic. And it would be very useful for people becoming journalists to understand their role in communication and storytelling and the influence their words have on the public perception of Indigenous peoples as well.
The students we interviewed largely expressed desire for more training on Indigenous affairs in Australia. They stated this would help them achieve confidence in reporting on First Nations Peoples in respectful and culturally safe ways.
The students also thought their universities could integrate Indigenous content and perspectives in a more sustained and concentrated way. “It can’t just be that one week we talk about racism,” according to a third-year university student. More education on Indigenous affairs would also benefit First Nations students. One Indigenous participant from our study stated:
Even just having some more Indigenous journalists come through, you can talk to them, find out what it’s really like for them being like a black sheep, essentially, from a very white-dominated industry. I think that there’s a need to be able to put more perspectives and Indigenous knowledges in education in there.
Journalism training needs to include cultural safety
A possible solution could be increasing First Nations journalists in Australian newsrooms. However, the burnout rate for these journalists is high due to toxic workplace conditions. This contributes to the low proportion of Indigenous journalists in Australia.
Universities need to provide their staff and students with time and resources to thoughtfully consider how to work with and report on First Nations Peoples. This would allow for a more culturally safe way of working. This could also provide a safer space for Indigenous people wanting to pursue a role in journalism. It could hopefully address the burnout of these journalists when they join the media workforce.
The integrity of our media system and the way our nation engages with Indigenous affairs depend on it.
T.J. Thomson receives funding from the Australian Research Council through DP210100859. He and his team have also received research assistant funding that supported the study referenced in this article.
Julie McLaughlin and Leah King-Smith 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Angsana A. Techatassanasoontorn, Associate Professor of Information Systems, Auckland University of Technology
Getty Images
We hear the phrase “digital transformation” a lot these days. It’s often used to describe the process of replacing functions and services that were once done face-to-face by human beings with online interactions that are faster, more convenient and “empower” the user.
But does digital transformation really deliver on those promises? Or does the seemingly relentless digitalisation of life actually reinforce existing social divides and inequities?
Take banking, for example. Where customers once made transactions with tellers at local branches, now they’re encouraged to do it all online. As branches close it leaves many, especially older people, struggling with what was once an easy, everyday task.
Or consider the now common call centre experience involving an electronic voice, menu options, chatbots and a “user journey” aimed at pushing customers online.
As organisations and government agencies in Aotearoa New Zealand and elsewhere grapple with the call to become more “digital”, we have been examining the consequences for those who find the process difficult or marginalising.
Since 2021 we’ve been working with the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) and talking with public and private sector organisations that use digital channels to deliver services. Our findings suggest there is much still to be done to find the right balance between the digital and non-digital.
The ‘problematic’ non-user
The dominant view now suggests the pursuit of a digitally enabled society will allow everyone to lead a “frictionless” life. As the government’s own policy document, Towards a Digital Strategy for Aotearoa, states:
Digital tools and services can enable us to learn new skills, transact with ease, and to receive health and well-being support at a time that suits us and without the need to travel from our homes.
Of course, we’re already experiencing this new world. Many public and private services increasingly are available digitally by default. Non-digital alternatives are becoming restricted or even disappearing.
There are two underlying assumptions to the view that everyone can or should interact digitally.
First, it implies that those who can’t access digital services (or prefer non-digital options) are problematic or deficient in some way – and that this can be overcome simply through greater provision of technology, training or “nudging” non-users to get on board.
Second, it assumes digital inclusion – through increasing the provision of digital services – will automatically increase social inclusion.
Neither assumption is necessarily true.
‘Digital enforcement’
The CAB (which has mainly face-to-face branches throughout New Zealand) has documented a significant increase in the number of people who struggle to access government services because the digital channel was the default or only option.
The bureau argues that access to public services is a human right and, by implication, the move to digital public services that aren’t universally accessible deprives some people of that right.
In earlier research, we refer to this form of deprivation as “digital enforcement” – defined as a process of dispossession that reduces choices for individuals.
Through our current research we find the reality of a digitally enabled society is, in fact, far from perfect and frictionless. Our preliminary findings point to the need to better understand the outcomes of digital transformation at a more nuanced, individual level.
Reasons vary as to why a significant number of people find accessing and navigating online services difficult. And it’s often an intersection of multiple causes related to finance, education, culture, language, trust or well-being.
Even when given access to digital technology and skills, the complexity of many online requirements and the chaotic life situations some people experience limit their ability to engage with digital services in a productive and meaningful way.
The human factor
The resulting sense of disenfranchisement and loss of control is regrettable, but it isn’t inevitable. Some organisations are now looking for alternatives to a single-minded focus on transferring services online.
They’re not completely removing call centre or client support staff, but instead using digital technology to improve human-centred service delivery.
Other organisations are considering partnerships with intermediaries who can work with individuals who find engaging with digital services difficult. The Ministry of Health, for example, is supporting a community-based Māori health and social services provider to establish a digital health hub to improve local access to health care.
Our research is continuing, but we can already see evidence – from the CAB itself and other large organisations – of the benefits of moving away from an uncritical focus on digital transformation.
By doing so, the goal is to move beyond a divide between those who are digitally included and excluded, and instead to encourage social inclusion in the digital age. That way, organisations can still move forward technologically – but not at the expense of the humans they serve.
Angsana A. Techatassanasoontorn has received funding from Internet NZ, Auckland Council and MBIE for the 2017 World Internet Project New Zealand Survey.
Antonio Diaz Andrade is affiliated with the Digital Inclusion Alliance Aotearoa and has received funding from InternetNZ, MBIE and Auckland Council for the 2017 World Internet Project New Zealand Survey.
Bill Doolin and Harminder Singh 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.
Climate change remains the single greatest existential threat facing the Blue Pacific, as leaders concluded the biggest diplomatic regional meeting in Suva last week with a plea for the world to take urgent action to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.
While renewed commitments by Australia to reduce its carbon footprint by 43 percent come 2030 and a legislated net zero emission by 2050 were welcomed initiatives, Pacific leaders reiterated calls for rapid, deep and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, adding the region was facing a climate emergency that threatened the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of its people and ecosystems, backed by the latest science and the daily lived realities in Pacific communities.
PIF chairman and Fiji Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama said the need was for “more ambitious climate commitments” — actions that would require the world to align its efforts to achieving the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree temperature threshold.
Fiji Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama … “That is our ask of Australia. That is our ask of New Zealand, the USA, India, the European Union, China and every other high-emitting country.” Image: Wansolwara
“We simply cannot settle for anything less than the survival of every Pacific Island country –– and that requires that all high emitting economies implement science-based plans to decisively reduce emissions in line with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree temperature threshold,” he told journalists at the PIF Secretariat.
“That requires that we halve global emissions by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by no later than 2050. Most urgently, it requires that we end our fossil fuel addiction, including coal,” he said.
“That is our ask of Australia. That is our ask of New Zealand, the USA, India, the European Union, China and every other high-emitting country.
“It is also what Fiji asks of ourselves, though our emissions are negligible.”
Crisis felt in Fiji, Pacific Bainimarama said the world faced a global energy crisis that was felt in the Pacific and Fiji.
While he understood the political realities that existed, planetary realities must take precedence.
“It will take courage and surely extract some political capital. But if Pacific Island countries can respond to and rebuild after some of the worst storms to ever make landfall in history, advanced economies can surely make the transition to renewables.
“The benefits will be remarkable. Our region has the potential to become a clean energy superpower if we summon the will to make it happen. That path is no doubt the surest way to an open, resilient, independent, and prosperous Blue Pacific.”
Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Henry Puna told Wansolwara ahead of PIF51 that issues such as climate change, oceans, economic development, technology and connectivity as well as people-centered development were key priorities on the talanoa agenda for leaders from PIF’s 18-member countries, including Australia and New Zealand.
These priorities and the way forward to achieving it are incorporated in the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent, a collective ambitious long-term plan to address global and regional geopolitical and development challenges in light of existing and emerging vulnerabilities and constraints.
Cook Islands is expected to host the next PIF Leaders and related meetings in 2023, the Kingdom of Tonga in 2024 and Solomon Islands in 2025.
Geraldine Panapasais editor-in-chief of the University of the South Pacific journalism programme newspaper and website Wansolwara. The USP team is a partner of Asia Pacific Report.
Covid has now killed around 1700 people in New Zealand, but much of our news reporting and commentary has focused on how we’re moving on from the pandemic. Why is there such a mismatch between that media coverage, and the reality of a virus that’s inflicting more suffering and death than ever before?
On her show last week, Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan made a momentous announcement in an almost blithe, off-hand manner.
“The pandemic’s over for all intents and purposes but we’re still having to deal with this nonsense. Isn’t that ultimately why we’re feeling miserable because we all want a break? If I was in government what I’d do right now is ‘green setting guys, go for your life, party party, whatever’. Just for the mental break of it.”
The announcement that the pandemic is over would have been news to the families of the eight people reported to have died with covid-19 in New Zealand that day.
But du Plessis-Allan is far from an outlier in wanting to place a still raging pandemic in the rearview mirror.
Recently a senior Stuff executive sent staff a memo telling them their audience is “over covid” and has “actively moved on from covid content”.
It implored them to find cracker non-covid stories on topics including cons, crime, and safety, the cost of living, NZ culture, and stuff everyone is talking about.
Much wider group Stuff’s audience is part of a much wider group that’s actively moving on from covid.
National leader Christopher Luxon just returned from a whirlwind overseas tour with the news that most people he met were no longer even talking about covid.
“It’s interesting to me I’ve just come back from Singapore, Ireland, and the UK. In most of those places we didn’t have a single covid conversation. In places like Ireland there’s no mask wearing at all.”
Luxon is right. Many places around the world have dropped their covid restrictions.
But even if we’re determined to ignore it, covid has remained stubbornly real, and is continuing to cause equally real harm.
In the United States, hospitalisations and reinfections are rising with the increasing prevalence of the BA.5 strain of omicron.
Same story as here If that all sounds familiar, it’s because pretty much the exact same story is playing out here.
Association of General Surgeons president Rowan French delivered some dire news to RNZ’s Morning Report about hospitals’ current troubles with scheduling elective surgeries.
“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen it,” he said. “We don’t say that lightly but I think it is the worst we’ve ever seen it, particularly with respect to our ability to treat our patients’ elective conditions.”
French said those issues were exacerbated by a wave of covid-19 and winter flu.
Covid patients were taking up a lot of the beds that would normally be used by people recovering from surgery, and he couldn’t see an end in sight to the crisis.
There’s a jarring mismatch between that kind of interview and the concurrent harping about the need to move on from covid.
That’s producing cognitive dissonance, not just in the public, but among media commentators, some of whom are now bobbling between berating our minimal remaining efforts to mitigate covid-19 and lamenting the damage being caused by the uncontrolled spread of the virus.
Mental oscillations In some cases, these mental oscillations can take place in mere hours.
On the morning of July 6, Newstalk ZB Wellington host Nick Mills had harsh words for the epidemiologists urging caution over covid.
“Michael Baker, let us get on with our lives. You go back to your lab. Do some intelligent work. Get paid truckloads of money doing it, and live in an extremely flash house. But for me, I don’t want to hear from you anymore. I want to get on with my life and our life.”
On du Plessis-Allan’s panel show The Huddle later that day, he had a different message about the severity of the latest wave.
“I’m absolutely terrified because it could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” he said. “If we have to go back [to a red setting] – and it will all be based on hospitals gonna have to be overcrowded — these numbers are terrifying.”
Maybe if Nick Mills had listened more closely to Professor Michael Baker, his research on BA.5 wouldn’t have come as such a nasty surprise.
To be fair to these hosts, their contradictory approaches to covid are pretty relatable.
Sick of the sickness Even without any hard data to hand, it’s safe to say many people are sick of the sickness, and some are prepared to live in a state of suspended disbelief to act like that’s the case.
But covid isn’t over, and now many leading experts are saying it may never be.
Last week The Project commissioned a poll which showed 38 percent of people agree with those experts. They believe covid is here for good.
Afterward presenter Kanoa Lloyd quizzed epidemiologist Dr Tony Blakely about whether those respondents were right.
“It’s possible,” he said. “It’s rolling on. Remember influenza in 1918, we still get influenza every year. This is a coronavirus. It could keep coming up every year.”
Dr Blakely is among a number of epidemiologists and healthcare workers who have gone to the media lately to deliver the message that there is still a pandemic on.
On last weekend’s episode of Newshub Nation, the aforementioned Professor Michael Baker compared covid to the “inconvenient truth” of climate change — a global threat that demands real change and ongoing action to mitigate.
Common sense safety He went on to link covid precautions to another common sense safety measure.
“If you go out when you have this infection and infect your friends and family, you are going to be killing some people — just like drinking and driving,” he said.
At The Spinoff, microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles stuck with the driving metaphor, imploring people to make popping on a mask as natural as clicking in your seatbelt.
This recent flurry of cautious messaging stands in stark contrast to much of the media coverage over the last few months.
Despite the fact 10 to 20 people per day have been dying of covid-19, that is had a muted response outside of the pro-forma coverage of the Ministry of Health’s 1pm press releases.
Maybe that’s not such a surprise. News organisations have a powerful commercial incentive to give their customers what they want, and as Stuff’s executive said, audiences have moved on.
Like drunk party guest But, like a drunk party guest at 3am, coronavirus does not care that you’re tired of it and you want it to leave.
He said the media needed to adjust from covering covid as a crisis to seeing it as an ongoing concern like the road toll or crime.
“It’s no longer temporary. It’s here to stay with us. And I don’t think that journalists have really figured out how to cover it as a daily issue, just like we cover all of the other daily issues that are really problematic,” he said.
“In some respects, it’s a bit bigger because it has a much more serious burden in terms of deaths and hospitalisations and long covid than something like the road toll, but just because it’s not a temporary crisis anymore, doesn’t mean that we should be ignoring it.”
Daalder said reporters could reorientate their coverage, writing more human interest stories on issues like the impact of long covid, and looking forward at how the virus and the fight against it will evolve.
“I think we are poorly served by media coverage, after the peak of the first omicron wave, in which there was no looking forward to what’s going to be happening in the short term or the long term.
Omicron peaked … and then? “There was just this all this focus on what would happen when omicron peaked, and then it did, and, and nothing filled the void after that. And so I think it’s quite natural for people to assume that covid is over.”
Journalists could also apply more pressure to the government over the continuing levels of preventable suffering and death being caused by cmicron’s spread, Daalder said.
He has advocated for the return of the alert level system, which he believes was much more simple and comprehensible than the traffic light system implemented late last year.
“There’s not really very much accountability journalism that looks at holding the government accountable for essentially abandoning vulnerable people to the whims of the virus,” he said.
“You have this sort of very strange juxtaposition in the [parliamentary] press gallery where the covid minister will be asked by one person: ‘Are you concerned about BA.5? It’s starting to spread in New Zealand. Should we be increasing our restrictions?’
“And then in the next breath, the question is ‘Why aren’t we in green? When will we ever get to green?’.
Better balancing “I’m not sure that either of those get to the heart of the present issue, which is that the current settings aren’t aren’t even aligned with a non-BA.5 world.”
Daalder said news organisations should find ways to balance their commercial incentives and the public interest role of journalism when it comes to important, but not always clickable, stories like covid or climate change.
“There’s an extent to which you should follow what audiences want. And you shouldn’t necessarily be trying to force something down their throats that they don’t want.
“But with something like covid, where it’s such a huge, important thing that’s happening, and that’s going to keep happening, regardless of whether you write about it or not.
“I think that’s where you know that that mission of journalism to tell the truth really comes in and overrides maybe some of the audience imperatives.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Analysis by Geoffrey Miller
Joe Biden’s controversial fist-bump with Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the Saudi crown prince, may help New Zealand to forge its own new direction in the Middle East.
The US president’s trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia showed that despite real concerns over human rights, the Middle East’s strategic importance in the current global geopolitical jigsaw puzzle cannot be ignored.
Biden’s meeting with MBS in the Saudi port city of Jeddah – four years after the horrific killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi – was a triumph of realism over idealism.
In essence, Biden’s trip was all about convincing Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to try to bring down the global fuel prices that have risen sharply since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
Biden might have called Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’ for the Khashoggi killing during the 2020 presidential election campaign – but Vladimir Putin is now Washington’s main adversary.
And in the Middle East itself, the threat of Iran – which the US claims is about to supply military drones to Russia for use against Ukraine – is also a higher priority for Biden.
New Zealand policymakers will be watching Biden’s moves in the Middle East.
After all, New Zealand has also been trying to rekindle its own relationship with the Gulf. Foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta visited New Zealand’s lavish, $NZ60m pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on her inaugural overseas trip in November last year – and she also managed to fit in a side-trip to influential Qatar while she was in the region.
Mahuta pointedly avoided a trip to Riyadh, but Biden’s meeting with MBS will be a signal to New Zealand and other Western countries that the time is right to bring Saudi Arabia in from the cold.
The wealthy Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – a six-country grouping made up of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – is already New Zealand’s eighth-biggest trading partner.
It holds the potential to become an even more significant market for New Zealand exports, especially in the key areas of meat and dairy.
Indeed, the very modest gains achieved by New Zealand for meat and dairy in its recent free trade agreement (FTA) with the European Union mean that improving trade with other key markets – such as the Middle East – is more important than ever.
As Western attitudes towards China have soured, New Zealand ministers have been keen to make trade diversification a major priority.
To that end, trade minister Damien O’Connor embarked on a major mission to the Gulf in March to try and restart New Zealand’s troubled free trade negotiations with the GCC.
A deal with the bloc was signed in 2009 but remains unratified from the Gulf side.
The last big push to try and get the deal over the line was in 2015, under the previous National-led government, when Prime Minister John Key toured Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Around the same time, the ill-fated ‘Saudi sheep deal’ was devised by Key’s foreign minister, Murray McCully, in an unsuccessful bid to appease a prominent Saudi investor who was upset by New Zealand’s ban on exporting live sheep by sea. The deal involved New Zealand sending significant amounts of cash and air-freighted sheep, but it largely ended in embarrassment – and did not deliver the FTA that New Zealand sought.
An acrimonious intra-Gulf split in the years that followed – which saw Qatar isolated by several GCC members – subsequently ruled out any further progress on the deal from the Gulf side. But those divisions were largely resolved last year.
Fast forward to New Zealand’s Labour government in 2022, and O’Connor’s trip was surprisingly successful. It resulted in FTA negotiations between New Zealand and the GCC being restarted.
But despite this success, New Zealand made surprisingly little fanfare of O’Connor’s successful foray into the Gulf. While the trip was announced as part of wider international travel plans, no press release on the outcome was issued after the minister’s trip. O’Connor’s report to Cabinet on the travel is also yet to be publicly released.
To be fair, O’Connor did tweet about his visit to Riyadh – calling it ‘productive’ – and he also announced the ‘reengagement with the Gulf Cooperation Council on an FTA’ in another tweet in April.
The minister also touched on the talks with the GCC in a speech to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs (NZIIA) in May. In that address, O’Connor said New Zealand would focus on ‘goods market access’ in the negotiations, but would also be seeking ‘to update and modernise the agreement’ in other areas such as labour and environmental standards.
Arab media provide some further detail about O’Connor’s movements on his March trip.
A report by the Bahrain News Agency from March 8 said a meeting between O’Connor and GCC Secretary General Dr. Nayef Falah Al Hajraf ‘discussed the means to enhance economic and investment relations between the GCC countries and New Zealand’. A few days later, the same outlet reported that New Zealand had signed a ‘strategic food security partnership’ with the UAE.
The Arabic-language Al-Ain news website even produced an elaborate infographic about the food security deal and O’Connor’s visit.
Of course, the Government may have decided that a low-key approach to the talks with the GCC best serves New Zealand’s interests, especially given the difficulties faced in the past.
But another reason for keeping a low profile domestically almost certainly relates to the sensitivities over the involvement of Saudi Arabia, the most populous country in the GCC by far and its driving force.
In addition to New Zealand’s own concerns over the Khashoggi killing in 2018, a political firestorm erupted in early 2021 when it was revealed that Air New Zealand – of which the NZ Government owns 51 per cent – had been repairing engines for the Saudi military, despite Riyadh playing a leading role in the war in Yemen.
At the time, Jacinda Ardern called the arrangement ‘completely wrong’ and said it did not ‘pass New Zealand’s sniff test’. Air New Zealand summarily terminated the arrangement and returned the remaining parts with the repairs incomplete.
Eighteen months later, the GCC seems willing to turn the page and reconsider a trade deal with New Zealand.
But just as MBS expected Joe Biden to meet him in exchange for Saudi Arabia pumping more oil, he will probably expect Jacinda Ardern to personally visit the Middle East to seal any free trade deal with the GCC.
Of course, New Zealand has considerable experience in balancing human rights and trade issues from its careful handling of the China relationship.
And while Joe Biden has received heavy criticism for his trip, the visit also gave the US president an opportunity to raise the killing of Jamal Khashoggi directly with MBS – and to call the murder ‘outrageous’ while Biden was on Saudi soil.
Will Jacinda Ardern now follow Joe Biden’s lead – and give MBS a fist-bump of her own?
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sara Webb, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology
NASA/JWST
It has been an exciting week with the release of breathtaking photos of our Universe by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Images such as the one below give us a chance to see faint distant galaxies as they were more than 13 billion years ago.
The SMACS 0723 deep field image was taken with only a 12.5-hour exposure. Faint galaxies in this image emitted this light more than 13 billion years ago. NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
It’s the perfect time to step back and appreciate our first-class ticket to the depths of the Universe and how these images allow us to look back in time.
These images also raise interesting points about how the expansion of the Universe factors into the way we calculate distances at a cosmological scale.
Modern time travel
Looking back in time might sound like a strange concept, but it’s what space researchers do every single day.
Our Universe is bound by the rules of physics, with one of the best-known “rules” being the speed of light. And when we talk about “light”, we’re actually referring to all the wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum, which travel at around a whooping 300,000 kilometres per second.
Light travels so fast that in our everyday lives it appears to be instantaneous. Even at these break-neck speeds, it still takes some time to travel anywhere across the cosmos.
When you look at the Moon, you actually see it as it was 1.3 seconds ago. It’s only a tiny peek back in time, but it’s still the past. It’s the same with sunlight, except the photons (light particles) emitted from the Sun’s surface travel just over eight minutes before they finally reach Earth.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, spans 100,000+ light-years. And the beautiful newborn stars seen in JWST’s Carina Nebula image are 7,500 light-years away. In other words, this nebula as pictured is from a time roughly 2,000 years earlier than when the first ever writing is thought to have been invented in ancient Mesopotamia.
The Carina Nebula is a birthplace for stars. NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
Anytime we look away from the Earth, we’re looking back in time to how things once were. This is a superpower for astronomers because we can use light, as observed throughout time, to try to puzzle together the mystery of our universe.
What makes JWST spectacular
Space-based telescopes let us see certain ranges of light that are unable to pass through Earth’s dense atmosphere. The Hubble space telescope was designed and optimised to use both ultraviolet (UV) and visible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The JWST was designed to use a broad range of infrared light. And this is a key reason the JWST can see further back in time than Hubble.
The electromagnetic spectrum with Hubble and JWST’s ranges. Hubble is optimised to see shorter wavelengths. These two telescopes complement each other, giving us a fuller picture of the universe. NASA, J. Olmsted (STScI)
Galaxies emit a range of wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays to radio waves, and everything in between. All of these give us important information about the different physics occurring in a galaxy.
When galaxies are near us, their light hasn’t changed that much since being emitted, and we can probe a vast range of these wavelengths to understand what’s happening inside them.
But when galaxies are extremely far away, we no longer have that luxury. The light from the most distant galaxies, as we see it now, has been stretched to longer and redder wavelengths due to the expansion of the universe.
This means some of the light that would have been visible to our eyes when it was first emitted has since lost energy as the universe expanded. It’s now in a completely different region of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is a phenomenon called “cosmological redshift”.
And this is where the JWST really shines. The broad range of infrared wavelengths detectable by JWST allow it to see galaxies Hubble never could. Combine this capability with the JWST’s enormous mirror and superb pixel resolution, and you have the most powerful time machine in the known universe.
Using the JWST, we will be able to capture extremely distant galaxies as they were only 100 million years after the Big Bang – which happened around 13.8 billion years ago.
So we will be able to see light from 13.7 billion years ago. What’s about to hurt your brain, however, is that those galaxies are not 13.7 billion light-years away. The actual distance to those galaxies today would be ~46 billion light-years.
This discrepancy is all thanks to the expanding universe, and makes working on a very large scale tricky.
The universe is expending due to something called “dark energy”. It’s thought to be a universal constant, acting equally in all areas of space-time (the fabric of our universe).
And the more the universe expands, the greater the effect dark energy has on its expansion. This is why even though the universe is 13.8 billion years old, it’s actually about 93 billion light-years across.
We can’t see the effect of dark energy on a galactic scale (within the Milky Way) but we can see it over much greater cosmological distances.
Sit back and enjoy
We live in a remarkable time of technology. Just 100 years ago, we didn’t know there were galaxies outside our own. Now we estimate there are trillions, and we are spoilt for choice.
For the foreseeable future, the JWST will be taking us on a journey through space and time each and every week. You can stay up to date with the latest news as NASA releases it.
Sara Webb 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.
As part of a series on cycles of disadvantage, supported by a philanthropic grant from the Paul Ramsay Foundation, we’re publishing three articles on the social determinants of health. They look at how factors like income, where you live and your background affect your risk for cancer, dementia and heart disease.
By the year 2050, the World Health Organization estimates one in five people will be aged 60 years and above. In Australia, our rapidly ageing population means that without a substantial medical breakthrough, the number of people living with dementia is expected to double from 487,600 in 2022 to 1.1 million by 2058.
Significant effort has gone into understanding what increases the risk of dementia. Here, we consider research into three factors – your socioeconomic status, where you live, and your background – and how they may influence dementia risk.
How your socioeconomic status affects your dementia risk
When assessing socioeconomic status, researchers typically look at a combination of your income, years of education and occupation. Socioeconomic status refers to your ability to access resources such as health, information and services.
Socioeconomic status has been closely linked to a range of health disorders, and dementia is no exception. Studies across multiple countries have shown people with higher socioeconomic status are less likely to develop dementia.
This is unsurprising. People with high socioeconomic status are more likely to have the financial resources to access better healthcare, better education and better nutrition. They are also more likely to live in areas with more services that enable a healthy lifestyle.
My research team and others have shown neighbourhood socioeconomic status – an index that integrates a neighbourhood’s average household income, unemployment rates, occupational skills and housing arrangements, among others, is associated with poorer memory and higher dementia risk.
Understanding this is complex. A wide range of economic, social and environmental factors can influence the way we behave, which can influence our health. Studies suggest communities can support dementia risk reduction in three main ways.
The first is through encouraging social participation and inclusion. This can be achieved through programs that increase digital and technological literacy, social housing (which offers greater opportunity for socialisation) and neighbourhood assistance.
Neighbourhood socioeconomic status affects dementia risk. Shutterstock
The second is through increasing proximity and access, particularly to health care, and social and cultural events.
The third is through improving recreational and well-being facilities, including emphasising traffic safety and increasing walkability and access to urban green spaces to encourage outdoor physical activity.
Your background
Several studies suggest parental education is related to an individual’s dementia risk. Specifically, low maternal education is associated with poorer memory performance, and higher dementia risk. However, these effects are small, and adult education and socioeconomic status may overcome these disadvantages.
Current evidence also suggests migrants from Africa and Asia (into Europe) have higher dementia risk compared with native Europeans. However, the prevalence of dementia in African and Asian countries is not higher than in European countries. Rather, we do see similarly elevated risk of dementia in culturally and linguistically diverse groups of people who are non-migrants.
Part of this is due to the reduced access to high-quality education, healthcare, and health information in these groups. For migrants, there is the additional challenge of navigating health systems in their non-native language.
Another important part to consider is the potential bias in the tools we have to assess memory and thinking abilities. These tests have been developed primarily in English, for use in European countries. Being tested in a second language may lead to poorer performance that is not a reflection of true cognitive ability, but rather a reflection of a reduced mastery of English.
It’s not clear whether migrants have a worse dementia risk because they have less access to health care, or because testing tools are in English. Shutterstock
This is why it is so important we conduct more research to understand dementia and its risk factors in culturally and linguistically diverse populations, using tools that are appropriate and validated for these groups.
Addressing dementia needs a life-long approach
Undoubtedly, your pay, postcode and parents are highly interrelated. Your future income is highly related to your parents’ level of income. Your postcode can be determined by your pay. The cyclical nature of wealth – or rather, inequality – is part of the reason why addressing health disparities is so challenging.
Studies on social mobility – the ability of individuals to move from one socioeconomic class to another – have shown that upward mobility may only partially compensate for disadvantage earlier in life. This really brings home the message that addressing dementia risk requires a lifelong approach. And that intervention is needed at an individual and a broader societal level.
If you are interested in learning how to reduce your dementia risk by changing health behaviours, please join us at the BetterBrains Trial. We are actively recruiting Australians aged 40-70 years old with a family history of dementia.
Yen Ying Lim receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the Australian Research Council (ARC), Dementia Australia, and the Alzheimer’s Association (USA).
Apple products are already a central part of our lives in so many ways. We use them to work, socialise, monitor our heart rates, pay for things and watch TV.
But did you know they are also involved in teaching school teachers?
The shift to online learning following COVID-19 is not only for students. Teachers now also do a lot of professional development online, often via global technology companies or “EdTechs”.
One familiar sounding example of this is Apple Teacher. This is a free professional learning program developed by Apple for school teachers. Offered in 36 countries including Australia, Apple Teacher claims to “support and celebrate teachers using Apple products for teaching and learning”.
In my new research, I argue Apple Teacher is helping Apple position itself as a global education expert. This move is largely flying under the radar.
What is Apple Teacher?
Apple has sold technology to schools since the early 1980s, especially in the United States. It has also had programs geared at teachers using Apple technology since the mid-1990s. But the tech giant now provides teacher professional learning via Apple Teacher, which launched in 2016.
As of 2022, there are more than 100 lessons and tutorials freely available on the Apple Teacher Learning Centre. The site promotes a “self-paced journey” and a “great way for schools to offer free professional learning”. There are “skill-building tutorials, lesson ideas and inspiration to deepen student learning”.
This could be something as simple as how to take a selfie on an excursion. Or it could be how to use coding or augmented reality in a lesson. There are also specific supports for COVID-19 remote learning, with time-saving tips and lesson ideas.
Teachers can complete interactive quizzes on how to use Apple software to earn “badges”. If they collect six badges, they are recognised as “Apple Teachers”.
Another key feature is the Apple Teacher Portfolio. Here, teachers develop and share lesson plans that intentionally use Apple products in the classroom. These include Keynote (which creates presentations) and GarageBand (which creates music or podcasts). Completing all nine lesson plans rewards teachers with more badges and gives them additional recognition.
Festivals, badges, followers
Beyond rewarding individual teachers, Apple Teacher also offers learning on a larger scale. Apple is in the middle of its third annual “Festival of Learning”. Between July 11 and 21, this global virtual conference is running 90 sessions on topics such as “creating your first app” and theatre design, all using Apple products.
As of July 2022, the Apple Education Twitter account (@AppleEDU) has more than one million followers. While not restricted to Apple Teacher participants, it clearly demonstrates its significant reach and appeal.
Apple Teacher is usually completed by individual teachers on their own initiative. However, schools with more than 75% of their staff as Apple Teachers can also seek recognition as an Apple Distinguished School. While the number of Apple Teachers is not publicly available, there are currently 47 Apple Distinguished Schools in Australia out of 689 around the world.
A rebranding for Apple
While it is perhaps unsurprising that Apple promotes the use of its products in schools, COVID-19 has clearly introduced a new sense of urgency and market opportunity in terms of the teaching and professional development side of the equation.
In comments made in 2021, one of Apple’s vice-presidents, Susan Prescott, said the company wanted to help “build educators’ confidence in reimagining their lessons and [recognise] them for the great work they do every day”.
In my research, I argue Apple Teacher positions Apple as a global expert in education. Apple has much to gain financially from this development. In 2021, the global EdTech industry was valued at US$85 billion (A$125.4 billion). By 2028, this is expected to explode to US$230 billion (A$339.4 billion).
By offering teacher learning and credentials and classroom curriculum guides, Apple is directly challenging more conventional sources of schooling expertise built over decades of experience and research. This includes the significant knowledge that teachers already possess, as well as universities, professional bodies and departments of education.
It is unclear what knowledge or expertise Apple uses to inform Apple Teacher. The company usually cites no research in its publicly available materials. But as the world’s largest information technology company, Apple can use its brand recognition to promote its own version of schooling knowledge and teaching qualification.
Apple’s reputation for tech products will also likely help attract prospective users to Apple Teacher, regardless of the learning provided. Given a significant focus of Apple Teacher is encouraging teachers to adopt Apple products for classroom use, there are clear financial motivations here as well.
What next
Before COVID-19, teachers were already under extraordinary pressure. In this context, it is understandable that Apple Teacher – free, recognisable and internationally available – might be attractive to overworked, under-appreciated teachers in search of support.
But, as teachers themselves know, not all learning opportunities are equal.
We already have decades of research that can support quality teacher learning and classroom practice. We should not accept a global EdTech as the preferred source of solutions, especially when these solutions involve promoting their own products.
Education policymakers and school leaders need to make sure programs like Apple Teacher are not the only opportunity for professional development. They can do this by providing additional time for teacher professional learning, or funding greater access to quality research behind paywalls.
Fostering close ongoing connections between teachers, professional organisations and academic researchers will also allow for conversations between experts without the risk of product placement and promotion.
We cannot continue to expect so much of teachers if we do not support the vital work they do. Ceding this space to profit-motivated EdTechs will only make the problem worse.
Steven Lewis receives funding from the Australian Research Council
When 13 Ukrainian soldiers were defending Snake Island in March, Russian forces told them to lay down their weapons. In response, the Ukrainians said “Russian warship, go fuck yourself!”.
This maritime call sign has its precursor in the naval drama U311 Cherkasy (2019), directed by Tymur Yashchenko.
U311 Cherkasy was the first Ukrainian film about the annexation of Crimea, and the film has been important in shaping the national identity.
It is a film about a little minesweeper: the U311 that took on the might of the Russian navy and gave them the proverbial finger.
Ukrainian film industry
After the heady days of Alexander Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov in the 1920s, the Ukrainian film industry subsumed into the overwhelming Soviet Cinema machine.
From 2014, Ukrainian cinema has been in an active process of recovery, with increased financial support from the government since 2017.
It is a modest film industry, with considerable documentary production. But there has been a steady increase in the number of quality mainstream feature films released theatrically. More than 24 films were released in 2020.
It is worth noting President Volodomyr Zelenskyy features in three of Ukraine’s top ten box office hits.
U311 is based on real events during the annexation of Crimea and the capture of the Ukrainian navy in March 2014.
In the siege of Ukraine’s Southern Naval Base, all Ukrainian naval vessels were blocked from entering the Black Sea at the narrow entrance of Lake Donuzlav. The blockade was initiated by the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the missile cruiser Moskva.
This would be the same warship told where to go by the Ukraine defenders of Snake Island.
In 2014, the Ukrainian navy was terribly outnumbered. They surrendered one by one to the Russians. There was no other way. Only the U311 Cherkasy refused to surrender and continued its courageous – though hopeless – struggle for more than three weeks.
The ship’s resistance became a national touchstone.
The film creates the context to this foolhardy, opening with the ship’s commander defying the Russian ultimatum. The action then winds back to 2012, following Lev (Dmitry Sova) and Mishko (Yevhen Lamakh) and their senseless, drunken antics in their village. The only meaningful escape from their small town is joining the navy with all its beatings, rotten food, cramped conditions and hazing rituals.
Early in the film there are scenes of “friendly” rivalry between the Ukrainian sailors and Russian soldiers based in Crimea: they play off against each other at tug-of-war and arm wrestling. While the Russian soldiers make slurs against the Ukrainians, this is nothing compared to the institutionalised hazing rituals the young recruits experience at the hands of the older sailors and officers.
The young Ukrainian men are forced to eat rotten food and live in substandard conditions. They don’t respect the system as they don’t understand their mission. They seem unprepared for any conflict.
But when the defining moment arrives, the least likely stepped up.
The friendly relations between the Russians and the Ukrainians don’t last, as the Russians become increasingly violent in the act of annexing Crimea. Russia asserts the Ukrainians must surrender, but the Ukrainian officers announce to the sailors the minesweeper is not going to surrender. Those who disagree should leave immediately.
The film is not a documentary, and it does take some liberties with the truth, but the actual commander of the minesweeper, Yuriy Fedash, was also the main consultant for the film.
I don’t really think that me and my crew are heroes. We just tried to do what every member of the Defence Forces is tasked to do. We tried to escape the situation, while remaining human.
The only thing Fedash regrets is that he did not give the order to sink the Cherkasy. At the time, he hoped the Russians would return the seized ships to Ukraine. He didn’t want his ship to end up rusting in Russia.
In one of the strongest scenes of the film, when the Ukrainian sailors realise their time is up, they lock themselves in the hull and start singing – keeping their morale high even when the ship is overrun by heavily armed Russian special forces.
In March 2014, the actual Ukrainian sailors released a YouTube video singing Warriors of Light, a Belarusian punk song that became one of the anthems of the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv. This video became a viral sensation and the stimulus for Yashchenko to write the script of U311 Cherkasy.
In the film, the soldiers make a similar YouTube video and then watch it on TV in their mess hall when it goes viral. They ask “will we just hand over our ship to them?”.
They know it is just a matter of time before they are overwhelmed by the Russian forces.
There are differing opinions, there is internal conflict and some fantastic combat scenes.
And then there are poetic moments of a drone shot over the dark blue water with seagulls flying in different directions and the sad promise this battle is just the beginning.
First time director Yashchenko told The Hindu “it is not an easy film to watch; it’s not for everyone.”
I was trying to show the collective image of the Ukrainian Navy, but I went much deeper and tried to show a portrait of Ukraine. It is just a lot of my love, a lot of my support and a lot of me as a Ukrainian.
U311 Cherkasy is available with English subtitles on Amazon Prime.
Greg Dolgopolov 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.
